Australia's social media ban… A looming implementation disaster

Australia's social media ban… A looming implementation disaster

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....

November 4, 2025
CommBank's AI boyfriend

CommBank's AI boyfriend

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....

August 12, 2025