Paris Buttfield-Addison

Australia’s world-first ban on social media for children under 16 takes effect in just over a month on December 10, 2025, yet nobody knows exactly how it will work. The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 passed parliament in a rushed process in November last year, imposing potential fines of up to $50 million on platforms that fail to keep out underage users. While 77% of Australians support the ban, only 25% believe it will actually work, and with weeks until launch, the mounting controversies, technical failures, and expert warnings suggest it’s becoming exactly the shitshow sceptics predicted....

These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond. Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, and expanded thoughts from this edition of the programme: Water on the moon? China just made space history, and it’s not the headline you’d expect....

Australia has a new plan to keep kids safe online. On the surface, it sounds simple, maybe even sensible. The government is banning anyone under sixteen from having a social media account. From December, platforms like Instagram and TikTok will have to kick the kids off in an effort to stop social harm. It’s a nice idea. But when you pull back the curtain, you find a privacy disaster waiting to happen....

These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond. Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, and expanded thoughts from this edition of the programme: The World’s Space Community Came to Sydney The 76th International Astronautical Congress wrapped up in Sydney this month, bringing thousands and thousands of attendees from most countries....

These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond. Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, from this edition of the programme: Space Command: Politics Over Strategy President Trump announced he’s moving US Space Command from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama—reversing the Biden administration’s decision and bringing domestic politics into military space strategy....

CBA has been naughty, and too reliant on their AI boyfriend. Here’s what happened: A CBA customer contacted bank requesting contact details for Secretlab (a company that is not us, and makes chairs) CBA staff member queried ChatGPT (possibly via their own personal, unauthenticated access to ChatGPT) to obtain phone number for Secretlab (chairs) CBA staff disclosed the retrieved phone number to the requesting customer The retrieved phone number is a number belonging to one of the directors of Secret Lab (a company that does not make chairs, and is us), a customer of CBA, and is used for our CBA account and our Director’s CBA account Therefore, CBA disclosed customer personal information to another, unrelated customer, and trusted a third-party LLM (ChatGPT), accessed seemingly unauthenticated on the consumer ChatGPT platform, as a source for data to provide to another customer During investigation, CBA staff replicated the same ChatGPT query process, seemingly on a personal phone, again unauthenticated, and on the consumer ChatGPT platform: Signs indicate this might be routine practice amongst CBA staff Oh, and they gave out the phone number for us, Secret Lab (not chairs), to someone looking for Secretlab’s (chairs) phone number....

These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond. Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, from this edition of the programme: The most valuable 14 seconds in Australian aerospace history happened last month, while the most expensive corporate rivalry ever fought in orbit just turned 40....

The recent delisting of over 17,000 games from the independent platform Itch.io wasn’t a content moderation decision made by the platform itself. It was an act of financial coercion. Instigated by an Australian activist group and carried out by payment processors like Mastercard, it sets a dangerous precedent for all creative fields online. The stated goal of the campaign was to combat media that glorifies sexual violence. An aim that sounds laudable, making it difficult to argue against in public....

While the rest of the world loses its collective mind over artificial intelligence, Tasmania is sitting on an amazing competitive advantage… and might be about to throw it away by jumping on the AI bandwagon. Everything that makes Tasmania economically successful is the exact opposite of what AI represents. And if Tasmanian businesses start chasing AI “efficiency” instead of leveraging their authentic advantages, they’ll transform from premium producers into generic commodity suppliers....

These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond. Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, from this edition of the programme: The $88 Million Satellite That Just Stopped Talking MethaneSAT, backed by Jeff Bezos and designed to track methane emissions from oil and gas operations, has gone silent after just over a year in orbit....