Medibank cops strict operating conditions from insurance regulator over cyber attack

Medibank has been forced to undertake some strong regulatory requirements by the Australian Prudential and Regulation Authority (APRA) as a result of its "major cyber incident" back in October. The health insurer now has to keep at least $250m in capital on hand, "reflecting weaknesses identified in Medibank's information security environment" and will need to keep that level of capital "until an agreed remediation program of work is completed by Medibank to APRA’s satisfaction". APRA also "expects Medibank to ensure there is appropriate accountability and consequence management, including impacts to executive remuneration". Good, more of this kinda thing, particularly the consequences for executives.

There's an ASD-designed Essential Eight Assessment Course at TAFE now

If you're a business that wants to avoid what happened to Medicare happening to you, the Essential Eight Assessment Course from the Australian Signals Directorate could be of interest. It's a face-to-face program that goes for three days and "will teach participants how to conduct accurate and consistent Essential Eight maturity assessments" - the Essential Eight being either mitigation strategies cooked up by the Australian Cyber Security Centre to "protect Microsoft Windows-based internet-connected networks". It'll be delivered via a range of TAFE institutes across the country and costs $2,000 per person. One for the ol' professional development budget.

Google adjusts privacy policy to clarify they'll take everything on the internet to feed their AI

Google has modified its privacy policy to state "we may collect information that's publicly available online or from other public sources to help train Google's AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities". It's one thing to scrape data and manipulate it in order to at least pretend to drive traffic to my business. It's quite different to take that data without consent, use it to build products I assume Google will make vast sums of money off and not give me anything in return. The fucked thing is, unless I have deep pockets and sue Google or OpenAI there's no way for me to have my stuff out in the open and not have it ingested by these crooks.

Old ex-corporate micro PCs are good for many boring computer related tasks

The Cheapskate's Guide has a post about using thin client computers as general purpose computers. These things are designed to pretty much host a remote desktop session and are spread across numerous large enterprises. When they get too old to use they end up on eBay for under $80 (just search for "thin client", filter by Buy It Now & Australia Only then sort by price + postage first). Personally, I wouldn't bother with these thin clients with their gutless CPUs and opt for Dell, HP or Lenovo "micro" PCs. More RAM, proper SSD, proper CPU and more or less the same price. They use a bee's dick more electricity (perhaps 15W instead of 8W-10W when idle) but the micro PCs are just way more useful. They're better than a Raspberry Pi or some other single board computer too if all you're gonna run on it is Linux and shove it in a corner.