U.S., EU agree to work on chip supplies, tech rules in bid to curb China | Tech giants to implement Australian child safety code | Facebook’s latest scandal putting the spotlight on children’s safety
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The United States and European Union agreed on Wednesday to deepen transatlantic cooperation to strengthen semiconductor supply chains, curb China’s non-market trade practices and take a more unified approach to regulating big, global technology firms. Reuters
Australia’s eSafety commissioner has asked the tech giants and other tech companies to develop new codes to tackle child sex abuse and other adult material after new research showing violent pornographic content has spiked online during the pandemic. The Australian
Searing reports on the company have renewed lawmakers’ efforts to update the decades-old law protecting kids online. The Washington Post
ASPI ICPC
Critical Infrastructure hit by cyber attacks every 32 minutes
The Daily Telegraph
@pwafork
“There’s two fears this report is aiming at,” said Fergus Hanson, Director of International Cyber Policy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “One is like what you’ve seen in the US where cybercriminals have used ransomware attacks to bring critical infrastructure to a halt, such as when hackers shut down the Colonial Pipeline, a major petrol artery, and you saw days of people queuing at petrol stations,” he said. “That’s obviously a big problem but can’t shut down the country in a serious way.” “The other is state actors that may want to act to exercise coercive control (over Australia) or shut down the entire economy in a conflict situation.”
World
U.S., EU agree to work on chip supplies, tech rules, China trade
Reuters
@davelawder @nanditab1
The United States and European Union agreed on Wednesday to deepen transatlantic cooperation to strengthen semiconductor supply chains, curb China’s non-market trade practices and take a more unified approach to regulating big, global technology firms.
France eyes control over chip agenda in EU-US tech alliance
POLITICO
@laurenscerulus @jacopobarigazzi
As Europe and the U.S. forge a new tech alliance, France is looking to take control over a key aspect of the pact — semiconductors.
Australia
Tech giants to implement child safety code
The Australian
@swan_legend
Australia’s eSafety commissioner has asked the tech giants and other tech companies to develop new codes to tackle child sex abuse and other adult material after new research showing violent pornographic content has spiked online during the pandemic.
YouTube ban won’t shut down most Australian anti-vaccination channels
The Sydney Morning Herald
@domp
YouTube’s sudden ban of anti-vaxxer content on its platform is unlikely to affect many local Australian channels that promote vaccine hesitancy, with the company saying the crackdown is only targeting misinformation regarding the efficacy and side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.
AUKUS is deeper than just submarines
East Asia Forum
@arzandc
But more ambitiously, beyond submarines, AUKUS seeks to win the technology competition with China by pooling resources and integrating supply chains for defence-related science, industry, and supply chains. This will be the decades-long and multifaceted purpose of AUKUS — a transnational project racing to seize advantages in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and cyber technology. This kind of technology integration is a radical idea.
Cyber-attacks hit Australia’s critical infrastructure every 32 minutes
Sky News
@PMOnAir
Sky News host Paul Murray says critical infrastructure in Australia is apparently being targeted with cyber-attacks every 32 minutes.
China
China tech stocks fall as state media fans clampdown concerns
Bloomberg
@annecronin @JeannyYu
Chinese technology stocks dropped on Thursday after state media ratcheted up calls for a deepening of regulation of online platforms to tutoring firms.
China's sweeping cryptocurrency ban was inevitable
WIRED
Gian Volpicelli
The decentralized technology clashes with the government’s plans for a state-dominated economy—one that includes its own digital currency.
China's energy crisis spreads to Beijing, impacts tech firms Apple and Tesla
ABC News
Dong Xing
China's sprawling power crisis has engulfed Beijing, as two-thirds of the country's provinces also ration power, plunging hundreds of millions of people into rolling blackouts. The energy supply problem has been put down to a mix of factors, including the price of coal and China's ambitious carbon emission plan. It's led to factory shutdowns and suspensions, and has been impacting tech firms like Apple and Tesla.
China's high-end military technology touted at biggest air show
Reuters
@DavidKirton_
China put on an extravagant display of once-secret high-end military technology at its largest air show this week, while broadcasting its growing ambitions in space exploration and for self-sufficiency in commercial aircraft.
“Mini-programs” took over Chinese platforms. Now they’re being used to contact trace — and undermine user privacy.
Rest of World
@dong_mengyu
That makes me wonder what would happen to all the data I had duly provided via dozens of mini-programs during my recent visit home. Now that the Chinese government is determined to make pandemic control a “regular” aspect of daily life, will we ever have the option to say no again?
Chinese espionage group deploys new rootkit compatible with Windows 10 systems
The Record
@campuscodi
Named GhostEmperor, Kaspersky said the group uses highly sophisticated tools and is often focused on gaining and keeping long-term access to its victims through the use of a powerful rootkit that can even work on the latest versions of Windows 10 operating systems.
‘There’s cameras everywhere’: testimonies detail far-reaching surveillance of Uyghurs in China
The Guardian
@JMBooyah
China’s surveillance machine has grown with the aid of Chinese and international technology companies. But few have faced repercussions.
Huawei hires former BBC executive as editor in chief in push to hire more foreign talent amid tensions with UK
South China Morning Post
@therealjoshye
Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Co has appointed former head of BBC news programmes Gavin Allen as its “executive editor in chief”, marking the telecoms equipment maker’s latest high-profile international hire.
USA
Facebook’s latest scandal is putting the spotlight on children’s safety online
The Washington Post
@Cat_Zakrzewski
Searing reports on the company have renewed lawmakers’ efforts to update the decades-old law protecting kids online.
Facebook Senate hearing on kids and mental health
The Wall Street Journal
Watch the complete Senate hearing with Facebook's Antigone Davis on social media and kids’ mental health.
Facebook tries to minimize its own research ahead of hearings on children’s safety
The Washington Post
@Cat_Zakrzewski @rachelerman
The company is going on the defensive as Congress is scheduled to grill a Facebook executive about the company’s record on children’s and teens’ mental health.
Facebook's failed 'Instagram Kids' is much bigger than one platform
MSNBC
@tiffanycli
Facebook has once again found itself in hot water with Congress, with a hearing that kicked off Thursday after The Wall Street Journal revealed a number of internal problems at the social media company, including that it “knows Instagram is toxic for many teen girls.”
How an Instagram star’s $7 million mission to rescue Afghan civilians struggled to get off the ground
The Washington Post
@jonswaine
On Aug. 17, Tommy Marcus, an Instagram star who posts as “Quentin Quarantino,” asked his 690,000 followers to help fund evacuation flights for Afghan civilians fleeing Taliban rule. Yet no Afghans have been evacuated on flights chartered by Flyaway, an examination by The Washington Post found. The examination found that Flyaway spent $3.3 million on flights that were cancelled for which it has not received refunds. Organizers are trying to reschedule those flights.
Former OnlyFans employees could access users' and models' personal information
VICE
@samleecole
Addresses, passports, bank statements and other sensitive personal data were viewable, long after leaving the company.
A hospital hit by hackers, a baby in distress: The case of the first alleged ransomware death
The Wall Street Journal
@kpoulsen Robert McMillan @_melaevans
A lawsuit says computer outages from a cyberattack led staff to miss troubling signs, resulting in the baby’s death, allegations the hospital denies.
Messy, incomplete U.S. data hobbles pandemic response
The Washington Post
@JoelAchenbach @yabutaleb7
How many people have been infected at this point? No one knows for sure, in part because of insufficient testing and incomplete reporting. How many fully vaccinated people have had breakthrough infections? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to track only a fraction of them. When do inoculated people need booster shots? American officials trying to answer that have had to rely heavily on data from abroad.
How a secret Google geofence warrant helped catch the Capitol riot mob
WIRED
Mark Harris
A WIRED investigation has found 45 federal criminal cases that cite Google geolocation data to place suspects inside the US Capitol during the January 6 riot.
3G networks are shutting down next year. Here’s what you should know.
The Washington Post
@heatherkelly
If you have an old phone, an alarm system or an ankle monitor, your tech could stop working properly next year.
Military units track guns using tech that could aid forces
Associated Press
@JimLaPorta
Determined to keep track of their guns, some U.S. military units have turned to a technology that could let enemies detect troops on the battlefield, The Associated Press has found.
North-East Asia
Online Tiananmen museum is blocked in Hong Kong as Internet curbs widen
The Washington Post
@theodorayuhk
Access to an online museum commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre appeared to be blocked in Hong Kong, the latest regression for Internet freedoms and a strike against a symbol of what distinguished the city from mainland China.
Hong Kong passes tougher anti-doxxing bill that spooked big tech
Bloomberg
@KariSoo1
Hong Kong has strengthened its laws banning the publication of personal information to harass people, or “doxxing,” the latest move in a security campaign that has spooked tech giants in the Asian financial center.
UK
British firm claims quantum-computing breakthrough
BBC News
@ruskin147
A UK start-up says it has made one of the world's smallest quantum computers.
Russia
Facebook could face hefty fine in Russia over banned content, says regulator
Reuters
Gleb Stolyarov & Alexander Marrow
Russian authorities on Thursday warned social media giant Facebook (FB.O) it faces a fine of up to 10% of its annual turnover in the country unless it deletes content Moscow deems illegal.
The Kremlin forced U.S. tech firms to shut down an app some Russian voters hoped to use. Now what?
The Washington Post
Tetyana Lokot @Marielle_W_
This month, as voting began in Russia’s parliamentary election, technology giants Google (owned by Alphabet) and Apple bowed to Kremlin pressure. They removed Smart Voting, a tactical voting app created by the associates of opposition leader Alexei Navalny from their app stores for users in Russia.
The Americas
How an 11-Foot-Tall 3-D Printer Is Helping to Create a Community
The New York Times
@debra_kamin
Investors are watching to see whether 3-D housing can become a model for building elsewhere.
Gender and Women in Cyber
CISA and Girls Who Code announce partnership to create career pathways for young women in cybersecurity and technology
Girls Who Code
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced a new partnership today with Girls Who Code (GWC) to develop pathways for young women to pursue careers in cybersecurity and technology. This partnership will seek to tackle diversity disparities by working to heighten the awareness of cybersecurity and technology careers and working with employers to build tangible pathways for young women, especially young women of color, to get hands-on experience in the private sector, the non-profit sector, or government.
Misc
‘Stalkerware' apps are proliferating. Protect yourself.
The New York Times
@bxchen
These spyware apps record your conversations, location and everything you type, all while camouflaged as a calculator or calendar.
Hundreds of scam apps hit over 10 million android devices
WIRED
@lilyhnewman
Google has taken increasingly sophisticated steps to keep malicious apps out of Google Play. But a new round of takedowns involving about 200 apps and more than 10 million potential victims shows that this longtime problem remains far from solved—and in this case, potentially cost users hundreds of millions of dollars.
There's a multibillion-dollar market for your phone's location data
The Markup
@jonkeegan @alfredwkng
Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone. An estimated $12 billion market, the location data industry has many players: collectors, aggregators, marketplaces, and location intelligence firms, all of which boast about the scale and precision of the data that they’ve amassed.
Why the cybersecurity industry should treat civil society as critical infrastructure
The Record
@kansasalps
Protecting civil society from these threats must be a key part of cybersecurity policy discussions, Chima told The Record, much like we think about how we need to protect power grids and other utilities that keep society functioning.
Events & Podcasts
Research
Teen girls bod image and social comparison on Instagram. An exploratory study in the U.S.
The Wall Street Journal
This document from Facebook researchers, posted in early 2020 on an internal company site, examines teenage girls' experience with appearance comparisons on social media and how that affected their body image and mental health.
Evolving the 5 Eyes: Opportunities and challenge sin the new strategic landscape
Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies & Macdonald-Laurier Institute
The Five Eyes began primarily as an intelligence-sharing and technology collaboration arrangement. But in a new joint publication between the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, authors John Hemmings and Peter Varnish argue that the Five Eyes grouping could be used by Canada and others to expand the ability to counter and deter China and Russia across multiple areas, including technology, information, military, and economics.
Six stories of resilience: Digital technologies as drivers of development in the Covid-19 era
The Asia Foundation
@Asia_Foundation
The Asia Pacific region is adapting to the many challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic in part by leveraging the power of digital.
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.