AUS: Calls to ban WeChat grow after Canberra clashes | Three of Vietnam's five undersea internet cables are down | ISIS created fake CNN and Al Jazeera broadcasts
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The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest focuses on the topics we work on, including cybersecurity, critical technologies, foreign interference & disinformation.
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WeChat has censored posts mentioning clashes between Chinese Australians over Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s visit to Australia, heightening calls from cybersecurity experts for the social media platform to be banned. Australian Financial Review
Three out of Vietnam's five active international undersea internet cables are down, state media said over the weekend, the second major round of outages in the country in just over a year. Reuters
The Islamic State has created fake videos mimicking the look and feel of mainstream news outlets CNN and Al Jazeera, according to a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue shared exclusively with WIRED. WIRED
Australia
Calls to ban WeChat grow after Canberra clashes
Australian Financial Review
Gus McCubbing
WeChat has censored posts mentioning clashes between Chinese Australians over Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s visit to Australia, heightening calls from cybersecurity experts for the social media platform to be banned. The calls come a day after a bizarre incident in which Chinese officials blocked cameras from getting a shot of Australian journalist Cheng Lei – who was detained in China for three years – in the press pack while Mr Li was speaking.
Byte-sized diplomacy: Should Australia ban TikTok?
The Interpreter
Miah Hammond-Errey
TikTok is different from other social media platforms in some ways but banning it (except on government devices) won’t solve structural and regulatory problems with the data economy, which leave us all vulnerable. Most social media platforms collect and monetise user data. They exploit tracking tools, such as cookies and pixels, capture user attention for extended time periods, and use algorithms for content curation and discovery. They are all part of a vast, global, complex and poorly regulated data economy.
Would face scanning technology keep Australian kids off social media? The UK regulator doubts it
The Guardian
Josh Taylor
The face scanning technology used to verify people’s ages online is fallible on young teenagers, the boss of the UK’s online safety regulator has warned, throwing doubt on a key method Australia’s opposition believes can stop children from accessing social media. Peter Dutton, the opposition leader, has said he would seek to force social media companies to ban children under 16 from their platforms in the first 100 days of coming into government, if the Coalition were elected.
OpenAI, Meta and Google’s AI chatbots repeated Australian political paedophile conspiracy theory
Crikey
Cam Wilson
Artificial intelligence chatbots from companies like OpenAI, Meta and Google are all regurgitating an Australian conspiracy theory about a legally suppressed list of Australian high-profile paedophiles, highlighting the risks of training generative AI on unverified data scraped from the open web. The world’s largest tech companies have raced to release and incorporate generative AI features into their products that have been built on large language models, a recent advance in AI technology that can analyse enormous troves of data to understand the statistical relationships between words and phrases.
China
Huawei weighs App Store fees as it surpasses iPhone in China
Bloomberg
Pei Li
Huawei Technologies Co. is considering taking a cut of in-app purchases on its Harmony mobile operating system, underscoring its growing confidence in competing with Apple Inc. in the world’s largest smartphone arena. The Shenzhen-based company is weighing a commission lower than the typical 30% cut that Apple and Alphabet Inc.’s Google take for payments made via their mobile stores for things like apps, games, movies and music subscriptions, according to people familiar with the matter. Huawei has kept Harmony OS fee-free until now, as an enticement to bring developers and publishers on board.
USA
Even with intended reforms, US defence trade rules threaten AUKUS cooperation
The Strategist
Tom Corben
Indeed, if AUKUS technologies cannot be insulated against long-standing issues associated with the reach of US defence export controls, Australian and British companies will continue to encounter longstanding disincentives to participating in advanced capability projects with the United States. Granted, Australia would certainly benefit from these harmonisation efforts. The sum of the three countries’ respective export control reforms would see approximately 70 percent of defence trade made eligible for license-free movement between the three countries.
There’s no dodge button for disinformation
Foreign Policy
Joshua Foust
Can a video game teach you to resist disinformation? The U.S. government certainly thinks so: In May, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, the government agency tasked with countering foreign disinformation, released a request for proposal offering $1 million for “an evergreen game in a sandbox platform, with an existing fan base, in which participants play a game that builds cognitive resilience to authoritarianism and promotes democratic norms and values.”
Succor borne every minute
Federal Trade Commission
Michael Atleson
Earnest chats with objects are not so unusual. Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, the famed Detroit Tiger, used to stand on the pitching mound whispering to the baseball. Forky, the highly animate utensil from Toy Story 4, once posed deep questions about friendship to a ceramic mug. And many of us have made repeated queries of the Magic 8 Ball despite its limited set of randomly generated answers. Our talking to computers also goes way back, and that history is getting weirder. We’re seeing a wave of avatars and bots marketed to provide companionship, romance, therapy, or portals to dead loved ones, and even meet religious needs.
North Asia
Hong Kong's AI bet through Temasek-style fund signals strategic shift
Nikkei Asia
Cissy Zhou and Peggy Ye
The Hong Kong government is shifting its investment strategy as part of a comprehensive effort to transform the city into a tech hub as geopolitical pressure builds and its traditional growth drivers of finance and property face challenges. Last week, the government-owned Hong Kong Investment Corp. announced its first public investment in SmartMore, an artificial intelligence company dual-headquartered in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. SmartMore focuses on applying AI to production lines, such as machine vision that can conduct visual inspections in lieu of human labor.
Southeast Asia
Three of Vietnam's five undersea internet cables are down
Reuters
Khanh Vu
Three out of Vietnam's five active international undersea internet cables are down, state media said over the weekend, the second major round of outages in the country in just over a year. The problems with the three cables, which connect Vietnam with the United States, Europe and Asia, have "significantly affected Vietnam's internet connection with the world", reported the official Vietnam News Agency.
South & Central Asia
India pulls in tech giants for its AI ambitions
Financial Times
Benjamin Parkin and Camilla Hodgson
India is pushing ambitions to become a leading artificial intelligence hub as Big Tech groups such as Microsoft and Amazon prepare to spend billions on computing infrastructure in the country in a race to dominate the burgeoning industry. Authorities in India have offered incentives for tech companies to set up everything from electronics manufacturing to data storage.
Middle East
ISIS created fake CNN and Al Jazeera broadcasts
WIRED
David Gilbert
The Islamic State has created fake videos mimicking the look and feel of mainstream news outlets CNN and Al Jazeera, according to a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue shared exclusively with WIRED. Launched in early March, the campaign was orchestrated by War and Media, a pro–Islamic State media outlet that typically creates long-form videos pushing the group’s ideology and history.
Europe
Espionage and cyberattack threat reaches new dimension in Germany, interior minister warns
Politico
Nette Nostlinger
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser warned of growing espionage and cyber threats from foreign adversaries including Russia, China and Iran. "The threat to our democracy from espionage, sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks has reached a new dimension," Faeser told reporters in Berlin as she presented an annual report by Germany's domestic intelligence agency, which monitors threats to Germany's democracy.
EU nears consensus on child abuse draft law, new agency takes lead on privacy preservation
Euractiv
Julia Tar
A proposed centralised agency to support the detection and removal of child sexual abuse material will also be assessing how to technically preserve privacy while detecting such content in text communications included in the law’s scope, according to the latest compromise of the draft law to fight CSAM. The draft, dated 14 June and seen by Euractiv, gives examples of visual communications included in authorities’ powers to detect CSAM, as previously reported by Euractiv.
Stop playing games with online security, Signal president warns EU lawmakers
TechCrunch
Natasha Lomas
A controversial European Union legislative proposal to scan the private messages of citizens in a bid to detect child sexual abuse material is a risk to the future of web security, Meredith Whittaker warned in a public blog post Monday. She’s the president of the not-for-profit foundation behind the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal.
Big Tech
STEM students refuse to work at Google and Amazon over Project Nimbus
WIRED
Caroline Haskins
More than 1,100 self-identified STEM students and young workers from over 120 universities have signed a pledge to not take jobs or internships at Google or Amazon until the companies end their involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services and infrastructure to the Israeli government.
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites could burn up the ozone layer, scientists warn
Business Insider
Mia Jankowicz
Internet satellite networks like Elon Musk's Starlink could contribute toward the depletion of the ozone layer, a new study claims. Scientists at the University of Southern California's Department of Astronautical Engineering warned that the massive increase in low-earth orbit internet satellites could lead to damaging chemical reactions in the atmosphere.
Inside Snapchat’s teen opioid crisis
Rolling Stone
Paul Solotaroff
Over eight months reporting the facts of this story, a week or so working on a documentary with grieving parents that was just as quickly shelved, and five months of pressing Snapchat officials for frank answers to pointed questions, I’ve come up against two mutually exclusive accounts. There’s the heartsick version told by parents, cops, and lawyers about anxious kids without a lick of street savvy who bought pills from a stranger on Snapchat and died 20 feet away from their mother’s bedroom. And then there’s the version told by Snapchat: That it has strenuously enforced a zero-tolerance policy regarding drug dealers and their poisons.
Social-media influencers aren’t getting rich—they’re barely getting by
The Wall Street Journal
Sarah E. Needleman and Ann-Marie Alcántara
Many people dream of becoming social-media stars like YouTube’s MrBeast or TikTok’s Charli D’Amelio. But for most who pursue careers as content creators, just making ends meet is a lofty goal. Clint Brantley has been a full-time creator for three years, posting videos on TikTok, YouTube and Twitch where he comments on news and trends related to the online game “Fortnite.” Despite having more than 400,000 followers, and posts that average 100,000 views, his income last year was less than the median annual pay for full-time U.S. workers in 2023.
Artificial Intelligence
AI is coming for big tech jobs—but not in the way you think
WIRED
Amanda Hoover
Microsoft reportedly laid off some 1,000 people in early June, pulling from its mixed reality and Azure cloud departments, and also Damigos’ consumer sales division. An email to employees from Jason Zander, executive vice president of strategic missions and technologies at Microsoft, leaked to Business Insider, blamed a pivot to invest in artificial intelligence.
NATO targets AI, robots and space tech in $1.1 billion fund
Reuters
Martin Coulter
A consortium of NATO allies has confirmed the first tranche of companies awarded funding as part of the group’s one billion euro ($1.1 billion) innovation fund. The alliance unveiled the fund in the summer of 2022, months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, promising to invest in technologies that would enhance its defences. The fund is backed by 24 of NATO's 32 member states, including Finland and Sweden, which joined the alliance earlier this year.
Research
China’s military AI roadblocks: PRC perspectives on technological challenges to intelligentized warfare
Centre for Security and Emerging Technology
Sam Bresnick
China’s leadership believes that artificial intelligence will play a central role in future wars. However, the author's comprehensive review of dozens of Chinese-language journal articles about AI and warfare reveals that Chinese defense experts claim that Beijing is facing several technological challenges that may hinder its ability to capitalize on the advantages provided by military AI.
Events & Podcasts
The Sydney Dialogue
ASPI
The Sydney Dialogue was created to help bring together governments, businesses and civil society to discuss and progress policy options. We will forecast the technologies of the next decade that will change our societies, economies and national security, prioritising speakers and delegates who are willing to push the envelope. We will promote diverse views that stimulate real conversations about the best ways to seize opportunities and minimise risks.
Connecting the dots on privacy, security, & online safety for young people
Future of Privacy Forum and ASPI
Join us for the live webinar, Connecting the Dots on Privacy, Security, and Online Safety for Young People in Australia, co-hosted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the Future of Privacy Forum on June 26 at 11:00am - 1:00pm Australian Eastern Time. In our increasingly digital world, the boundaries of our expectations related to privacy, security and online safety are stretched more and more – by technology companies, criminals and harm-doers, as well as regulators. Finding a good balance that ensures appropriate protection for members of our community in their use of digital products and services is complicated.
ASPI – CNAS – RUSI | Trilateral AUKUS Dialogue
ASPI
The ASPI-CNAS-RUSI Trilateral AUKUS Dialogue is an initiative across leading Australian, American, and British think tanks to hold robust, pragmatic, and principled conversations about AUKUS and related national security and defense policies. This year’s Trilateral AUKUS Dialogue will explore the strategic landscape of the Indo-Pacific, regional perspectives on AUKUS, and critical issues regarding tech diplomacy, technology sharing, and legislative environments necessary to deliver capabilities to meet the pact’s purposes for enhancing deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. The Dialogue will be held on 17-18 June 2024 in Washington, DC.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security team at ASPI.