For a few hours on Wednesday morning, chunks of Australia’s daily infrastructure simply stopped answering. A nationwide outage at Telstra, the country’s largest carrier, cut phone service for thousands of customers, froze tap-to-pay terminals and brought regional trains to a halt. The disruption began at about 4.30am and spread through systems that most people never […]
The New Zealand government has ruled out restricting or banning VPNs as part of its planned under-16 social media ban. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Education Minister Erica Stanford both moved to kill the idea after a rapid privacy backlash, TechRadar reports. “I can reject that outright. There’s no plan to ban VPNs at all,” Luxon […]
A Google executive told an Australian inquiry that a video smearing a shooting survivor as a “crisis actor” meets YouTube’s standards. So it stays online. Google has defended keeping up a conspiracy video about a mass shooting in Sydney, the Associated Press reports. The clip falsely paints a wounded survivor of the antisemitic massacre as […]
The world’s first national ban on social media for under-16s is faltering at the very first gate, according to the testers who helped Australia’s government design its age-check regime. In a follow-up study first reported by Reuters, the team opened 50 accounts across nine of the 10 platforms covered by the law, declaring the account […]
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Friday condemned senators who blocked amendments to the country’s world-first social media ban for children, warning that the delay would give tech platforms time to destroy documents that could be used as evidence against them. The conservative Liberal Party and the minor Greens party referred the legislation to an eight-week Senate […]
The ACCC alleges Amazon buried unfair terms in Prime contracts, then used them to add ads to Prime Video for more than a million subscribers without offering refunds. The complaint Australia’s consumer regulator filed against Amazon this week turns on a small print clause and a large grievance. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission alleges […]
Six months after Australia became the first country to bar under-16s from social media, the government has concluded that the platforms are not taking the rule seriously enough, and is preparing to make the consequences of ignoring it considerably more expensive. New legislation announced this week would roughly double the maximum penalty for a systemic […]
Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar
A law is only as strong as the door it actually closes, and Australia’s ban on social media for under-16s appears to have left a window open. On 26 June, six months after the world-first measure took effect, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was keen to make the ban as strong as possible, after […]
The AI infrastructure startup raised $1.5bn in a Series F, with Australia’s Blackbird VC putting in what may be the largest single outlay yet by an Australian firm. Baseten has raised $1.5bn in a Series F round that values the AI infrastructure startup at up to $13bn, a number that arrives barely 18 months and […]
