S. Korea, Canada, New Zealand under consideration for AUKUS Pillar II | Malaysia orders Meta, TikTok to counter harmful content | EU political parties promise to steer clear of deepfakes
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The United States, Britain and Australia are considering South Korea, Canada and New Zealand as potential partners for cooperation on advanced capability projects of their AUKUS security partnership. Pillar II is for cooperation in high-tech areas, including quantum computing, artificial intelligence and hypersonics. Yonhap News Agency
Malaysia has ordered tech giants Meta and TikTok to come up with plans to counter harmful content online. The government reported nearly 52,000 cases of harmful content on various social media platforms, including Meta’s Facebook and TikTok, in the first three months of 2024, compared with 43,000 for the whole of 2023. The Straits Times
European political parties agreed Tuesday to avoid making and spreading unlabeled deepfakes ahead of the bloc's June election as part of an EU charter on fair campaigning. Videos, photos and audio generated by widely accessible artificial intelligence tools to impersonate public figures, including politicians, have started spreading in Slovakia, the United Kingdom and the United States to manipulate voters. POLITICO
ASPI
Why Haven’t India and Indonesia Signed Up For Anti-Spyware Dialogue?
RUSI
Gatra Priyandita & Arindrajit Basu
Revelations about Pegasus and other misuses of commercial spyware kicked off a frenzy of responses from government and industry, including through the Pall Mall Process. To date, the process includes representation from the African Union, Australia, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, the US and Switzerland. Despite the mixed group of countries involved, neither India nor Indonesia have joined the process or commented on its existence. Their absence speaks to some of the broader similarities in the domestic politics and global identities of both actors.
World
S. Korea, Canada, New Zealand under consideration for AUKUS Pillar II partners: U.S. official
Yonhap News Agency
Song Sang-Ho
The United States, Britain and Australia are considering South Korea, Canada and New Zealand as potential partners for cooperation on advanced capability projects of their AUKUS security partnership, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday. The remarks came a day after the defense chiefs of the three countries issued a joint statement noting their consideration of Japan as a partner for Pillar II projects of the partnership. Pillar II is for cooperation in high-tech areas, including quantum computing, artificial intelligence and hypersonics.
Australia
Australian register of stolen data blocks more than 300,000 attempts of identity fraud
ABC
Nicole Hegarty
Protections introduced in the wake of the 2022 Optus data breach have blocked more than 300,000 fraudulent attempts to use Australians' stolen data. The attempts were blocked through the use of the federal government's credential protection register, which was established in response to the telecommunication provider breach that left 10 million Australians with compromised data. Stolen data is prevented from being used to create new, fraudulent identity documents under the register.
Messages between Chinese hackers show Australian Strategic Policy Institute is a target
The Nightly
James King
Chinese spymasters have identified Australia’s top security research institute as a priority target in their cyber-attack operations, with an investigation by The Nightly for the first time able to reveal messages between hackers that refer to our nation. The group chat exchanges also offer a remarkable insight into the daily lives and frustrations of state-sponsored hackers working for China, including their dismay at being told they’re working too slowly while being tasked with disrupting “a big asset in two days”.
USA
22 ‘hunt forward’ missions deployed overseas in 2023, Cyber Command leader says
The Record by Recorded Future
Martin Matishak
U.S. Cyber Command expanded the use of its elite digital warfighting corps in 2023, deploying the team nearly two dozen times around the globe to uncover malicious software and bolster the defenses of allies, the command’s chief said on Wednesday. In all, the last year’s expeditions collected over 90 malware samples that were then publicly released and shared with the U.S. cybersecurity community. Together, the figures indicate that hunt forward operations are becoming an even more critical component of the command’s national security portfolio, including election security and ongoing battles against digital espionage and ransomware.
DOJ Is Scrutinising Rival AI Companies Sharing Board Members
Bloomberg
Leah Nylen
The Justice Department is scrutinising whether artificial intelligence companies have overlapping executives or directors, an arrangement that can violate US antitrust law, a senior agency official said Wednesday. The Justice Department is “on the lookout for AI competitors sharing board members,” Andrew Forman, deputy assistant attorney general for antitrust, said at a conference in Washington. Taking quick action to enforce rules while the industry is still developing can have competitive benefits, he said, “and that’s something that we’re particularly focused on.”
US Senator says TikTok divestiture deadline could be extended to one year
Reuters
David Shepardson
The chair of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said on Wednesday that lawmakers could extend to one year a proposed deadline to force TikTok's parent company, China's ByteDance, to divest the short video app used by 170 million Americans. The U.S. House of Representatives voted 352-65 on March 13 to give TikTok's ByteDance, about six months to divest the U.S. assets of the short-video app, or face a ban.
CISA to expand automated malware analysis system beyond government agencies
The Record by Recorded Future
Jonathan Greig
Businesses and other organisations will be able to submit samples of malware to the U.S. government for analysis under a new program run by the nation’s top cybersecurity agency. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said its Malware Next-Gen service has been available to government and military workers since November, but it is now opening it up to the private sector.
Prominent US senator sees new momentum for healthcare cybersecurity push
The Record by Recorded Future
Eric Geller
As U.S. hospitals struggle to pay their employees amid a cyberattack that knocked out a major payment vendor, a powerful Democratic senator is seizing the moment to push for better security in the sorely vulnerable healthcare sector. Sen. Mark Warner has introduced legislation that would require hospitals and their technology vendors to implement cybersecurity best practices before the government offers them any emergency payments.
How American Drones Failed to Turn the Tide in Ukraine
The Wall Street Journal
Heather Somerville & Brett Forrest
Most small drones from U.S. startups have failed to perform in combat, dashing companies’ hopes that a badge of being battle-tested would bring the startups sales and attention. It is also bad news for the Pentagon, which needs a reliable supply of thousands of small, unmanned aircraft. In the first war to feature small drones prominently, American companies still have no meaningful presence. Made-in-America drones tend to be expensive, glitchy and hard to repair, said drone company executives, Ukrainians on the front lines, Ukrainian government officials and former U.S. defense officials. Absent solutions from the West, Ukraine has turned to cheaper Chinese products to fill its drone arsenal.
North Asia
South Korea to invest $7 billion in AI in bid to retain edge in chips
Reuters
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said on Tuesday his country will invest 9.4 trillion won ($6.94 billion) in artificial intelligence by 2027 as part of efforts to retain a leading global position in cutting-edge semiconductor chips. The announcement, which also includes a separate 1.4 trillion won fund to foster AI semiconductor firms, comes as South Korea tries to keep abreast with countries like the United States, China and Japan that are also giving massive policy support to strengthen semiconductor supply chains on their own turf.
How Japan Is Trying to Rebuild Its Chip Industry
The New York Times
Meaghan Tobin, Hisako Ueno & John Liu
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is transforming the small Japanese farm town of Kikuyo into a key node in Asia’s chip supply chain. TSMC, as the company is known, dominates the global semiconductor business. At its home base in Taiwan, TSMC sits at the center of a web of factories, suppliers and engineering firms. Now that same infrastructure, backed by billions of dollars from the Japanese government, is being built about 750 miles away in the cow pastures and cabbage fields of Kikuyo in southwestern Japan.
Taiwan chip design support majors triple sales in four years
Nikkei Asia
Hideaki Ryugen
Taiwan's top three companies that support semiconductor design efforts of clients have seen combined sales more than triple in four years, bolstering the soaring U.S. tech industry and creating opportunities for homegrown foundries to produce chips. The driving force behind the rapid growth is the trend of in-house semiconductor design by tech giants in the U.S. and other countries. To improve the efficiency of artificial intelligence processing, major U.S. cloud computing companies have begun developing chips optimized for their servers and terminals.
Japan outspends U.S., Germany on chip subsidies as share of GDP
Nikkei Asia
Kazuhiro Ogawa
Japan is proportionately spending more heavily to support its semiconductor sector than the U.S. and other major Western nations are on theirs, data presented at a key government panel here Tuesday shows. In Japan, the Finance Ministry is concerned about a lack of funding sources for much of the support. TSMC is receiving about 1.2 trillion yen, while state-backed chipmaker Rapidus receives roughly 900 billion yen as it works toward domestic production of cutting-edge chips.
Microsoft to invest $2.9 bln to expand AI, cloud infra in Japan
Reuters
Microsoft said on Tuesday it would invest $2.9 billion over two years to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in Japan, the latest in a series of overseas expansions by large tech firms to support the development of artificial intelligence. The investment - the company's largest in the 46 years of its operations in the country - will also go towards skilling three million people in AI and setting up a Microsoft Research Asia lab in Tokyo.
Southeast Asia
Malaysia orders Meta, TikTok to counter harmful content amid religious controversies
The Straits Times
Hazlin Hassan
Malaysia has ordered tech giants Meta and TikTok to come up with plans to counter harmful content online, the authorities said on April 9. The move came after a spike in reports on offensive material made to social media platforms, even as the Anwar Ibrahim administration grapples with rising tensions over religious controversies in the Muslim-majority country. The government reported nearly 52,000 cases of harmful content on various social media platforms, including Meta’s Facebook and TikTok, in the first three months of 2024, compared with 43,000 for the whole of 2023.
Vietnam's Viettel to develop semiconductor industry, prime minister says
Reuters
Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has asked military-run telecom company Viettel to develop the semiconductor chip industry in a "more efficient and diverse manner", the government quoted him as saying late on Tuesday. Several global electronics and semiconductor firm including Intel, Samsung, Amkor, Qualcomm and Marvell have facilities in Vietnam, which has said it wants to set up its first fab by the end of this decade.
MAS, Mastercard ink MOU to strengthen cyber resilience in financial services sector
The Straits Times
Uma Devi
The Monetary Authority of Singapore and Mastercard on April 9 signed a MoU to enhance cooperation in cyber security, specifically with the aim of strengthening cyber resilience in Singapore’s financial services sector. In a joint media release on April 9, MAS and Mastercard said that the strategic partnership aims to further cement the collaboration between the two parties in three areas.
Singaporean writers object to IMDA using their works to train a large language model
The Straits Times
Charmaine Lim
The local writing community is objecting to the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s plans to build a South-east Asia-focused LLM. The National Multimodal LLM Programme, “a base model with regional context that can understand Singapore’s and the region’s unique linguistic characteristics and multilingual environment”, was announced in December 2023. But Singapore writers whose works would have to be used to train the LLM recently voiced their displeasure about the project.
Europe
EU political parties promise to steer clear of deepfakes ahead of election
POLITICO
Clothilde Goujard
European political parties agreed Tuesday to avoid making and spreading unlabeled deepfakes ahead of the bloc's June election as part of an EU charter on fair campaigning. The pledge comes amid concerns over foreign meddling through disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks. Videos, photos and audio generated by widely accessible artificial intelligence tools to impersonate public figures, including politicians, have started spreading in Slovakia, the United Kingdom and the United States to manipulate voters. Parties in France and Poland have also used the technology to attack other politicians.
Italy considers tougher penalties for AI-related crimes
Reuters
Elvira Pollina & Angelo Amante
Italy's government is mulling tougher penalties for crimes using AI tools including market rigging and money laundering, according to a draft law bill seen by Reuters on Tuesday. The draft beefs up penalties for market rigging through AI tools and stipulates that the use of AI for money laundering represents an aggravating element. It also sets out fines for copyright violations through AI and a jail term of up to three years for those who employ such tools to replace other persons, potentially targeting harmful deepfakes.
EU's new tech laws are working; small browsers gain market share
Reuters
Supantha Mukherjee & Foo Yun Chee
Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet's Google, Microsoft and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data provided to Reuters by six companies. The early results come after the EU's sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers from a "choice screen."
Too French to fail: Why Paris is rescuing Atos
POLITICO
Giorgio Leali, Mathieu Pollet & Océane Herrero
The IT company, vital to France's staging of this year's Summer Olympic Games, on Tuesday announced it managed to secure “interim financing of €450 million” to keep the company afloat, including a €50 million loan from the French government. Atos — helmed by European Union Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton until he joined the EU executive in 2019 — is a major strategic asset for France. It is active in tech sectors spanning from cloud services to cybersecurity and is key for France’s defense interests as the owner of the supercomputing technology used to simulate nuclear bomb tests.
Will American AI kill European culture?
POLITICO
Gian Volpicelli
Europeans are racing to create their own artificial intelligence chatbots to stop U.S.-made tech from gobbling up their economies, culture and even languages themselves. From Madrid to Sofia, European Union countries have launched and supported a flurry of initiatives aimed at creating chatbots that are truly fluent in local languages.
UK
MPs warn over lack of AI rules for UK’s creative industries
Financial Times
Daniel Thomas
A group of cross-party MPs have raised concerns that the UK’s failure to create a set of robust rules over how artificial intelligence platforms work with the creative industries was playing into the hands of large tech companies. Many professionals in the music, literary and television industries have expressed particular concern over what the arrival of AI platforms, which can plagiarise and reproduce their work without providing compensation, will mean for their future.
Big Tech
Deutsche Telekom, Airbus slam plan allowing Big Tech access to EU cloud data
Reuters
Foo Yun Chee
Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Airbus and 15 other EU companies have criticised a proposal that would allow Amazon, Alphabet's Google and Microsoft to bid for highly sensitive EU cloud computing contracts. The draft plan from Belgium, which currently holds the rotating European Union presidency, concerns a certification scheme to vouch for the cybersecurity of cloud services and help governments and companies in the bloc to pick a secure and trusted vendor for their business. The proposal scraps so-called sovereignty requirements from a previous draft which obliged U.S. tech giants to set up a joint venture or cooperate with an EU-based company to store and process customer data in the bloc in order to qualify for the highest level of the EU cybersecurity label.
Artificial Intelligence
Speed of AI development stretches risk assessments to breaking point
Financial Times
George Hammond
The increasing power of the latest artificial intelligence systems is stretching traditional evaluation methods to breaking point, posing a challenge to businesses and public bodies over how best to work with the fast-evolving technology. Flaws in the evaluation criteria commonly used to gauge performance, accuracy and safety are being exposed as more models come to market, according to people who build, test and invest in AI tools. The traditional tools are easy to manipulate and too narrow for the complexity of the latest models, they said.
Microsoft’s head of Responsible AI flags cybersecurity dangers and benefits of the new tech at HSBC summit
South China Morning Post
Kelly Le
The use of generative AI, the powerful tool behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, could push the capabilities of cyberattacks to new heights while also offering new defence mechanisms, but most organisations are still learning to harness the tool, according to one of Microsoft’s leading AI experts. Amid a frenzy of AI development worldwide, international technology companies are trying to speed up research and development as they push to develop their own large models in what has become a highly competitive field.
OpenAI and Meta ready new AI models capable of ‘reasoning’
Financial Times
Madhumita Murgia & Cristina Criddle
OpenAI and Meta are on the brink of releasing new artificial intelligence models that they say will be capable of reasoning and planning, critical steps towards achieving superhuman cognition in machines. Executives at OpenAI and Meta both signalled this week that they were preparing to launch the next versions of their large language models, the systems that power generative AI applications such as ChatGPT.
Meta debuts new generation of AI chip
Reuters
Max Cherney
Meta Platforms unveiled details on Wednesday about the next generation of the company's in-house artificial intelligence accelerator chip. The chip, referred to internally as "Artemis," will help Meta reduce its reliance on Nvida's AI chips and reduce its energy costs overall. The new Meta Training and Inference Accelerator chip is part of a broad custom silicon effort at the company that includes looking at other hardware systems too. Beyond building the chips and hardware, Meta has made significant investments in developing the software necessary to harness the power of its infrastructure in the most efficient way.
Intel reveals details of new AI chip to fight Nvidia dominance
Reuters
Max Cherney
Intel detailed a new version of its artificial intelligence chip at its Vision event on Tuesday that takes aim at Nvidia's dominance in semiconductors that power AI. Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have struggled to produce a compelling bundle of chips and the software necessary to build AI applications that can become a viable alternative to Nvidia. Nvidia controlled roughly 83% of the data center chip market in 2023, with a majority of the remaining 17% share held by Google's custom tensor processing units that it does not sell directly.
Modernising defence must respect international humanitarian law
The Strategist
Lorraine Finlay & Patrick Hooton
The integration of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems is essential to ensuring that Australia is capable of defending its interests now and into the future, but we as a country must be careful not to abandon our humanity inadvertently in the race to modernise. To ensure this does not happen, Australia needs better safeguards to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law as we develop new defence capabilities through emerging technologies.
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.
Jobs
Data Scientist
ASPI
ASPI is looking for an inquisitive and problem-solving open-source data scientist who will be responsible for developing and implementing automated techniques for a variety of open-source data collection requirements. We are open to experienced data scientists and those beginning their career. Role equivalency would be between levels 3 – 7 of Data Science category of SFIA 8. The closing date for applications is 15 April 2024– an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.
Director of Cyber, Technology & Security (CTS)
ASPI
ASPI is looking for an exceptional and experienced leader to lead our largest team focused on emerging security challenges, particularly in cyberspace and the information domain. Director CTS leads ASPI’s largest team to develop and deliver a range of applied research projects on existing and emerging security challenges. CTS’ projects range across cyber and critical infrastructure security, critical and emerging technologies, national resilience and social cohesion, and hybrid threats. The closing date for applications is 22 April 2024 – an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.
China Analyst or Senior Analyst
ASPI
ASPI has an exciting opportunity for an analyst or senior analyst to explore China's evolving foreign and security policy, political economy and impact on the Indo-Pacific and the world. ASPI’s China analysts conduct rigorous data-driven research, publish impactful reports that shape the public policy discourse and contribute to the wide catalogue of influential China work published by ASPI. The difference between the analyst and senior analyst levels will depend on experience level and demonstration of past work. The closing date for applications is 10 May 2024– an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.
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