In The Guardian

The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute an Atlanta resident in connection with the movement against the police training center known as Cop City because he had GrapheneOS on his phone, an open-source operating system that enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean.

The case, which had its first hearing on Monday, centers on a little-known US federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

Experts said it may be the first time the law has been aimed at the operating system, which works on Google Pixel phones, and expressed concerns about a technology created for privacy and security being used to criminalize protesters.

“It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

The defendant, Sam Tunick, was stopped for interrogation at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport on 24 January last year, after vacationing in the Dominican Republic. Unbeknown to him, federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

[…]

Marlon Kautz, a member of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, said: “We all have a right to secure our private data against unconstitutional searches. And we should – especially in a time of rising authoritarianism.”

Meanwhile, Boutry, who lives in France, said Tunick’s case was of a piece with tendencies in France and Spain, where authorities have been frustrated in attempts to gain access to the phones of journalists, lawyers and political opponents due to GrapheneOS.

In Catalonia, Spain, police have been profiling people with Google Pixel phones, assuming they have GrapheneOS installed and are drug dealers or gang members.

At the same time, Boutry said, the “main goal [of the operating system] is protection of privacy”.

“They’re our phones and the state can’t tell us how to use them.”

Well, what a surprise!

Saul Eslake, an independent economist, said the scheme had likely been used by people who would have bought homes anyway while inflating their debt.

“The way it was expanded by Albanese goes to the heart of why we have the housing problems that we have,” Eslake said.

“Whenever governments do things that allow people to spend more on housing than they would have otherwise, they end up spending more on housing.”

A borrower with $50,000 in savings, if required to make a 20% deposit, would only have been able to borrow $200,000. Under the 5% deposit scheme, they would be able to borrow $1m

“We cannot be a multicultural society,” she told the packed club.

“We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.”

Hanson also made a broadside attack on transgender rights, pledging to sack Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner and claiming “almost every instrument of government [is] dedicated to a transgender ideology which seeks to redefine humanity”.

The deal would have been Palantir’s largest yet in British policing, after others worth £330m and £240m with NHS England and the Ministry of Defence.

The row has been inflamed by the fact that Khan has previously made clear that Londoners only wanted to see public money being paid to companies that “share the values of our city”.

[…]

The row has cast fresh light on Palantir’s record of winning public contracts in the UK. Scotland Yard previously appointed Palantir on a much smaller contract to use AI to monitor staff behaviour in an bid to root out corrupt officers. This contract was awarded directly, without advertisement or open competition, because its value was just below the £500,000 threshold required for City Hall’s approval.

Khan said on Thursday: “In general terms, what you’re allowing is these private companies to almost have a loss leader, so they give you a good deal or something for nothing for a short bit of time [and] you can become reliant upon them.”

In 2023 the government’s chief commercial officer raised concerns with Palantir about the practice of offering public services for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold.

Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at the tech equity campaign Foxglove, said: “Palantir is notorious for its ‘land and expand’ approach, in which it wins small contracts or even offers free services at first, then uses those to build a much wider role in our public services.”.

He said Khan had “seen through this practice, and put a stop to it – while rightly highlighting Londoners’ concerns over Palantir’s ethical record”.

[…]

Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat member of the Commons science and technology select committee said he was “delighted” by City Hall’s decision.

“To get another contract without competition would have been a disgrace,” Wrigley said. “Palantir have failed to deliver to their promises on too many projects. Buying projects through free trials to then write the contract spec should be banned from government procurement.”

Khan’s move will be a blow to the Labour government’s efforts to use AI to improve policing. In January, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, called for police to “ramp up use of AI” and to adopt the technology “at pace and scale”.

Harrowing, but unsurprising reading:

Systemic weaknesses in New South Wales’ childcare sector have allowed predators to work in the industry and abuse children, a scathing inquiry has found.

In its final report, published on Wednesday, a NSW upper house inquiry into the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector found “the proliferation of for-profit services and a lax regulatory approach” had led to “predators” being allowed to work in childcare and abuse children.

The report said operators backed by private equity have “no place” in the sector, and that the state’s regulator for early education had “failed to respond appropriately” to services with “extensive histories of non-compliance, breaches, safety incidents and persistently poor ratings”.

Woolworths and Coles are big companies that plan to stay around for a long time. Could not one or both of them commit to a policy of truthful advertising and stand by it long enough to establish a reputation that customers could trust?

This hasn’t happened – with supermarkets, or telecoms, or banks or anywhere else, at least in the absence of comprehensive public shaming driven by government action. But why not?

One explanation, apparent from the evidence in the Coles case, is that no one wants to be the first to move. Given the short-term pressure that decision-makers are under, it’s easy to imagine that any proposal of this kind will be put in the too-hard basket and left there.

Another possibility is that distrust is so widespread that no single company can break the pattern. The era of neoliberalism has certainly strengthened this distrust. There was a time when used car dealers were famously untrustworthy but financial institutions were pillars of probity. Today, when buying a second-hand car, the biggest risk is not that the speedo will be wound back but that you will be sold a loan with deceptively high interest. In this context, you just assume everyone is lying.

Last week, the German-owned supermarket chain took another step into the Australian mainstream, trialling a grocery delivery service with DoorDash in Canberra ahead of a potential expansion around the country.

Aldi has long resisted offering deliveries, given the service would make a basket of groceries more expensive, undercutting its price advantage over Coles and Woolworths.

[…]

Aldi tried a similar service with a third-party delivery provider in the UK, but it didn’t last. The chain is also hesitant to build its own delivery system because that would add significant costs to the business, which would either result in higher grocery prices or less profits for its German owners.

Prof Gary Mortimer, a retail expert at the Queensland University of Technology, says Aldi has had to respond to the delivery trend.

“Online food and groceries now represent anywhere between 10 to 12% of supermarket revenue,” Mortimer says.

“As Aldi enters into that space, even using a third-party provider like DoorDash, Coles and Woolworths will be looking at how they go about defending that market share.”

Retail expert Bronwyn Thompson says Aldi considers the competitive advantage of a delivery service to be worth the additional expense.

“If they’re trying to be more of a ‘whole shop’ destination, this is part of that,” Thompson says.

Guardian Australia has spoken with several young workers and families who feel their teenagers were pressured to join the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) in their first days on the job, including a 14-year-old who was recruited in mid-2024 on her first shift at Hungry Jack’s.

[…]

Lachlan, said he got a text from the union around the time his daughter Sarah was signed up, but he did not believe that was sufficient. Lachlan is a union member himself, but in his view the SDA organiser’s manner left no room for his daughter to say no.

He said it was not the right approach for a 14-year-old first-time worker: “I support the unions, but I don’t support predatory tactics.”

He said Sarah is now a member of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU), an upstart union that formed in 2016 in opposition to the SDA.

[…]

In the mid-2010s, a series of reports in the Age detailed how part-time workers at McDonald’s, Coles and other retail employers were being underpaid due to deals negotiated by the union, leading to accusations of a “cosy” relationship between the SDA and employers. “[The SDA] has always bargained in the best interests of workers within the industrial relations framework at the time,” the union said at the time.

A number of SDA-brokered deals between workers and employers came under scrutiny at the time. Its 2015 deal with Coles, for example, had to be remedied after the Fair Work Commission decided it failed the “Better-Off Overall Test” (BOOT) because a cut in penalty rates had left a substantial number of workers worse off.

Well said:

This week, it was revealed that despite the Australian government’s world-first teen social media ban, around seven in 10 children remain on major platforms. What’s more, the eSafety report also shows that there has been no notable change in cyberbullying or image-based abuse reported by children.

For a policy that was touted as the solution to keeping kids safe from harm online, this is a damning indictment of the ban’s effectiveness.

Who could possibly have predicted that this wasn’t going to work? Well, lots of people.

Countless experts were ignored, including those in the fields of digital wellbeing, digital rights advocacy, youth mental health and more than 140 academics and 20 Australian civil society organisations. Even the eSafety commissioner herself had doubts, and internally the government was aware of a lack of evidence to support the ban before they passed the legislation anyway.

[…]

Ultimately, the fundamental problem with age-gating is that it fails to address any of the root problems with our current online landscape – that is, the extractive business models and pernicious design features of mainstream tech companies. We all exist in a highly commercialised information ecosystem, rife with algorithmically amplified misinformation, scams, harmful content and AI slop. Children are particularly vulnerable to these issues but the reality is that it impacts everyone, even if you’re blissfully absent from Facebook or Instagram.

Not only is the social media ban working just as predicted (that is to say, it’s not); what other, more effective alternatives might the Australian government have pursued while spending the better part of two years chasing this red herring? What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?

If this is the first time you’re hearing about it, you’re not alone. Despite the significance of the changes, these latest rules are the result of industry codes, which differs to regular legislation. These codes don’t go through parliament. Instead, they’re developed by the tech industry and registered by the eSafety commissioner in a process called co-regulation. On one hand, this can be good: it can allow for more flexibility or technology-specific detail that is less appropriate in legislation. On the other: it creates risk of industry co-option, and by bypassing parliamentary process, can give an enormous amount of power to an unelected official (in this case, the eSafety commissioner).

Greens senator David Shoebridge has called the implications of age verification for search engines “staggering” and noted that “these proposals don’t have to go through an elected parliament and we can’t vote them down no matter how significant concerns are. That combined with lack of public input is a serious issue.”

The age verification policy development process has been littered with blunders that make a mockery of meaningful consultation and evidence-based policy development. It is particularly striking that these codes were drafted before the completion of the government’s $6.5m trial into the efficacy of age assurance. Later, the trial’s preliminary findings conceded the technology is not guaranteed to be effective, and noted “concerning evidence” that some technology providers were seeking to collect too much personal information.

While a government-commissioned survey on the teen social media ban found overwhelming support in theory, it also found most people have no idea what that means in practice, with many uncomfortable with the methods it might entail – such as biometric face scanning or handing over your credit card details. And while there was much fanfare around the social media ban, it’s not clear there is a social licence to extend this approach to search engines and beyond. It seems many people may be unpleasantly surprised.