TikToks and satellite images show Russia on the brink of full invasion | China is about to regulate AI—and the world is watching | Ukraine prepares to remove data from Russia’s reach
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Dozens of satellite images and videos posted to social media show Russian troops preparing to attack. The Wall Street Journal
The regulations will extend an extraordinary crackdown on China’s most popular and most valuable tech companies, which has included big fines and sidetracked stock offerings. WIRED
Ukraine’s government is preparing to wipe its computer servers and transfer its sensitive data out of Kyiv if Russian troops move to seize the capital, a senior Ukrainian cyber official said Tuesday. POLITICO
ASPI ICPC
Increasing Resilience in a Post-Pandemic World
The Sydney Dialogue
Watch our recent Sydney Dialogue panel on Increasing Resilience in a Post Pandemic World with The Hon Mathias Cormann, Secretary-General OECD, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Executive Chairperson, Biocon and Biocon Biologics, Dr Simon Milner, Vice President Public Policy, APAC Meta and Jane Halton AO PSM, Chair of Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations
The Sydney Dialogue - Senior Events Coordinator
ASPI ICPC
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is currently recruiting for an experienced events professional to coordinate the planning and logistics of the second iteration of ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue - the world’s premier summit on emerging, critical and cyber technologies.
The Sydney Dialogue - Director
ASPI ICPC
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is currently recruiting for a Director to lead the second iteration of ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue - the world’s premier summit on emerging, critical and cyber technologies.
The World
TikToks and satellite images show Russia on the brink of full invasion
The Wall Street Journal
Dozens of satellite images and videos posted to social media show Russian troops preparing to attack.
Australia
Companies warned to boost cyber defence in wake of Ukraine crisis escalation
ZDNet
Chris Duckett
On Wednesday afternoon, the Australian government joined the governments of the United States and United Kingdom by placing sanctions on Russian banks and individuals, and at the same time issued a warning to organisations to boost their cyber defence. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the government had already privately reached out to some entities and that local organisations should read guidance issued by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC).
‘Different world’ will constrain quantum collaboration beyond close allies: Chief Defence Scientist
Joseph Brookes
Australia’s quantum academics need to accept the government will limit their international collaborations with world leading researchers because of an increasingly contested geopolitical environment, according to Chief Defence Scientist Professor Tanya Monroe. Speaking at the Quantum Australia event in Sydney on Wednesday, Professor Monroe said the potential conflict in Ukraine and growing cyber grey zone activities are evidence of the need to guard technologies like quantum, and to enhance “mutual reliance” and shared industrial bases with allies.
China
China is about to regulate AI—and the world is watching
WIRED
Jennifer Conrad & Will Knight
The regulations will extend an extraordinary crackdown on China’s most popular and most valuable tech companies, which has included big fines and sidetracked stock offerings. “Some unhealthy and disorderly signals and trends have occurred in the rapid development of our country’s digital economy,” President Xi Jinping said in a speech in October, according to a translation by the newsletter Pekingnology. Policymakers elsewhere are taking note. “I was just this morning in a meeting with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I got asked if China is doing things we are not,” says Rogier Creemers, an expert on Chinese law and governance at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “They are moving extremely fast.”
China crackdown risk roars back in probe of Jack Ma’s empire
Bloomberg
Coco Liu, Zheping Huang, and Vlad Savov
From Alibaba to Tencent, China’s largest companies are once again at the center of a market storm, spurred by speculation that Beijing is readying another assault on the world’s biggest internet arena.
Chinese cybersecurity company doxes apparent NSA hacking operation
VICE
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
A Chinese cybersecurity company accused the NSA of being behind a hacking tool used for ten years in a report published on Wednesday.
USA
Trump’s Truth Social’s disastrous launch raises doubts about its long-term viability
The Washington Post
The site had been heralded for months as the crown jewel of Trump’s post-presidential business ambitions, with allies pledging it would revolutionize social media and take down the mainstream social networks where Trump is banned. But early glimpses at Truth Social suggest its offerings are almost identical to what Twitter and other sites have offered for years — except tweets are called “truths,” and retweets “retruths.” The site’s early struggles also have fueled doubts that Trump’s company will be able to handle tougher long-term challenges, such as policing for dangerous content and guarding against cyberattacks.
Justice Department shifts approach to Chinese national-security threats
The Wall Street Journal
Aruna Viswanatha
The Justice Department is ending a Trump-era initiative to counter national-security threats from China after it led to a series of failed prosecutions of academics that sowed broad distrust in the higher-education community.
Bipartisan lawmakers want Biden to tell Europe to stop ‘unfairly’ targeting U.S. tech companies
CNBC
Lauren Feiner
A bipartisan group of 30 lawmakers is urging President Joe Biden to push European leaders to alter language in their proposed Digital Markets Act so that it does not unfairly target U.S. tech companies.
NZ & Pacific Islands
Tonga reconnects to world as submarine cable restored after tsunami
Reuters
Kirsty Needham
Tonga was reconnected to the world on Tuesday following repairs to a submarine cable, officials said, a month after a volcanic eruption and tsunami cut communications to the remote Pacific island nation.
UK
Huawei to be stopped from selling fiber products in UK
Light Reading
Iain Morris
Huawei looked far too Chinese for its own good when the British began worrying about so-called "high-risk vendors" in the country's 5G networks. Despite its protestations of independence from China's rulers, it was roundly condemned as a security risk by the Boris Johnson-led government. Operators that had gorged on Huawei products were ordered to flush it out of their mobile systems by 2028.
Lecturers admit self-censoring classes with Chinese students
The Times
Nicola Woolcock
Academics are self-censoring to avoid causing offence to students from authoritarian states such as China, a new report has said. Two thirds said they believed that academic freedom was under threat in higher education and more than two fifths felt the same about their freedom to select teaching content.
Europe
Ukraine prepares to remove data from Russia’s reach
POLITICO
Eric Geller
Ukraine’s government is preparing to wipe its computer servers and transfer its sensitive data out of Kyiv if Russian troops move to seize the capital, a senior Ukrainian cyber official said Tuesday.
A Spanish far-right group paid just $10 to push a Twitter disinformation campaign in Kenya
Rest of World
Vittoria Elliott
A new report by Mozilla Foundation says CitizenGo manipulated trending topics to steer public discourse on reproductive health bills...According to Madung, the account holders received instructions and content to post via WhatsApp, all in support of the policy goals of a right-wing Spanish organization called CitizenGo.
Users should be allowed to sue U.S. tech giants under EU rules, civil groups say
Reuters
Foo Yun Chee
Individual users should be allowed to take U.S. tech giants to court for breaching landmark EU rules aimed at curbing their power, Privacy International, pan-European consumer group BEUC and a number of academics said on Tuesday.
Russia
Documenting and debunking dubious footage from Ukraine’s frontlines
Bellingcat
As Russia’s military escalation in and around Ukraine continues apace, a number of questionable videos and claims have appeared on social media and in Russian state media outlets. All appear to suggest Ukrainian aggression near the country’s border with Russia and two self-declared republics (occupied regions controversially recognised by Russia earlier this week) in the east of the country.
Middle East
Israel says police didn’t hack civilians without court approval
The New York Times
Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley
An official investigation refuted claims that the police had illegally hacked dozens of civilians using spyware from NSO Group, an Israeli company that has long attracted global scrutiny.
Misc
Bitcoin could be laid low by miners' malady
Reuters
Medha Singh and Lisa Pauline Mattackal
Bitcoin miners are feeling the heat - and the pain's rippling downstream to pressure prices. The cryptocurrency's spectacular rally in 2021 drew thousands of entrants into mining, or producing new coin. As a result the hashrate, or combined computational power used by bitcoin miners globally, has roughly quadrupled over the past six months to blow past 200 million "terahashes" per second. But what's that got to do with the price of bitcoin? A rising hashrate makes it becomes harder for miners to earn coin and cover their costs of hardware, electricity and staff - so many are more likely to sell, rather than hold, their newly minted cryptocurrency, exerting a bearish force on the market.
Behind the stalkerware network spilling the private phone data of hundreds of thousands
TechCrunch
Bryce Durbin
Much of the spyware you hear of today are the powerful nation-state-backed exploits that can quietly and remotely hack into iPhones anywhere in the world. These powerful hacking tools are bought and operated by governments, often targeting their most vocal critics — journalists, activists and human rights defenders.There is another kind of spyware that is more prevalent and much more likely to affect the average person: the consumer-grade spyware apps that are controlled by everyday people.
Apple gives Siri a less gendered voice
AXIOS
Ina Fried
With the latest version of iOS, currently in testing, Apple is offering a Siri voice that is less explicitly male- or female-sounding, Axios can confirm. Why it matters: It's part of an effort by Apple to offer a more diverse array of options for its virtual assistant. Last year it added two Siri options recorded by Black voice actors.
Events and Podcasts
Increasing Resilience in a Post-Pandemic World
The Sydney Dialogue
Watch our recent Sydney Dialogue panel on Increasing Resilience in a Post Pandemic World with The Hon Mathias Cormann, Secretary-General OECD, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Executive Chairperson, Biocon and Biocon Biologics, Dr Simon Milner, Vice President Public Policy, APAC Meta and Jane Halton AO PSM, Chair of Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations
Jobs
ICPC Senior Analyst or Analyst - China
ASPI ICPC
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) has a unique opportunity for exceptional and experienced China-focused senior analysts or analysts to join its centre. This role will focus on original research and analysis centred around the (growing) range of topics which our ICPC China team work on. Our China team produces some of the most impactful and well-read policy-relevant research in the world, with our experts often being called upon by politicians, governments, corporates and civil society actors to provide briefings and advice. Analysts usually have at least 5 years, often 7-10 years’ of work experience. Senior analysts usually have a minimum of 15 years relevant work experience and, in addition to research, they take on a leadership role in the centre and tend to be involved in staff and project management, fundraising and stakeholder engagement.
ICPC Data Analyst
ASPI ICPC
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) has an outstanding opportunity for talented Data Analysts to join its growing centre. ASPI’s ICPC undertakes complex research on some of the most challenging issues at the intersection of technology and public policy. How do we develop international norms to deter information operations and coercive diplomacy, how should we build international cooperation on the development of emerging critical technologies, what is the right balance between regulation and innovation? We deliver empirical research that is policy-relevant and we’re looking for people who can help us analyse data at scale.