eSafety drops Federal Court action against X over global content censorship

eSafety has realised their argument that X geoblocking Australians from seeing the video doesn't go far enough because Australians can use a VPN to see that video, is effectively asking a company to censor content globally based on the laws of a single country, is extremely dumb and would be torn apart by any competent judge, because they've abandoned their legal action against X. So there you go big tech companies - if eSafety threatens you, just ignore them and fight it in court. eSafety will fold the moment its bullshit might get scrutinised in a court room. I'm kinda disappointed about this as it means we won't see the Online Safety Act tested in court. You can read the eSafety Commissioner's full statement here and have a watch of this 12 min interview with the commissioner Julie Inman-Grant. She doesn't give interviews very often (loves a press conference though) so it's disturbing/enlightening to hear her point of view around these issues.

OAIC sues Medibank over massive data breach & MediSecure insolvent due to data breach

Straight from the OAIC's press release - "the Australian Information Commissioner has filed civil penalty proceedings in the Federal Court against Medibank Private Limited in relation to its October 2022 data breach". They allege "Medibank failed to take reasonable steps to protect personal information it held given its size, resources, the nature and volume of the sensitive and personal information it handled, and the risk of serious harm for an individual in the case of a breach". Wake me up when the people that made the decisions to be so pissweak at handling this most sensitive of data end up with a criminal record. Meanwhile, MediSecure, the electronic prescription platform that got popped recently, is now insolvent. We still don't know exactly how MediSecure was compromised, do we? Maybe I've missed that nugget of news.

Chargefox, Australia's largest EV charging network, has had a billing outage for over 3 days

If you drive an EV in Australia you know of Chargefox. They operate/manage the largest public EV charger network in the country and have been suffering through an outage of their billing system for over 3 days, which appears to be hosted on Telstra's Cloud service. Telstra reckon a storage array at their Clayton data centre in Victoria crapped out on Sunday, but it's Wednesday now and there's still no ETA from Telstra on when that will be fixed - much to Chargefox's frustration. As far as drivers are concerned, some chargers have been punted into free access mode (i.e: they cost nothing to use - good for drivers, bad for the owner of the charger) or are offline entirely because they can't access Chargefox's billing system to take your money. Pretty embarrassing for everyone involved.

The Recall feature getting added to Windows is a security nightmare

Now that everyone's had a few weeks to contemplate Microsoft's Recall feature getting shoved into the next major Windows update, the consensus seems to be that Recall is a security nightmare. While the LLM/AI stuff is run locally and data is encrypted (if you have Bitlocker enabled), it is "trivially easy to grab and scan through a user's Recall database" because "admin access to the system isn't required to read another user's Recall database" and the "SQLite database is stored in plain text, and data in transit isn't encrypted, either". There's already a Python script called TotalRecall that "copies the databases and screenshots and then parses the database for potentially interesting artifacts". The fact Microsoft will enable this by default for all Windows users, for all apps, is incredibly careless. No thought given by Microsoft as to how Recall can be abused or even how to limit the damage when abuse inevitably happens.