Another Salutary Tale Repeating One Of The Same Old Stories!

This appeared last week!

Marge’s computer wouldn’t turn on. Then IT support offered ‘help’

By Nicole Pedersen-McKinnon

December 7, 2024 — 12.30am

On the morning of September 4, Marge was faced with a completely blank computer screen.

A few attempts to turn it on – and a few panicked minutes – later, a message from “IT support” popped up. It offered to help.

Marge had to ring a certain number to connect with a technician. Then: “I was told by someone to do nothing and to wait for someone to call me, which happened after about 30 seconds.

“This, I have found out, was the beginning of many unauthorised transfers of moneys from my two accounts.”

Devastatingly, the fraudsters first stole $49,500 from Marge, followed by $50,000, $10,000, $9000, and other amounts of smaller denominations.

“This was all over a period of three days and only stopped when a friend of mine visited and suggested to me that the so-called technicians could be my hackers, which turned out to be the case,” she recounted to me.

She was told not to turn off her computer or phone as they wanted to keep in contact; she was also urged not to answer any other calls “as they might actually be from the hackers”.

This scam is the remote access or Trojan type – with the fraudsters probably gaining access to Marge’s computer via a Facebook link she had used to purchase a new iPad (that never arrived).

By the time Marge realised she was the victim of such a sophisticated scam, only $229.80 could be recovered – though banks are working together to try to reverse fraudulent transactions, the rest of the transferred funds had been immediately cleared out of the recipient account. She wryly says: “Felt like having a huge party!”

This year, for the Money section, I’ve taken a deep dive into the scams perpetrated on our readers, in a bid to recover some of their lost money. And sometimes it has worked.

As scams increase, a new avenue for compensation is available for fans who fall victim to fake tickets.

With a growing legion of criminals now trying to dupe you out of money, particularly over Christmas, Scamwatch has issued a comprehensive list – until fraudsters next evolve their tactics – of the most prevalent scams:

• Online dating and romance scams
• Investment scams
• Product and service scams
• Threats and extortion scams
• Job and employment scams
• Unexpected money scams
• Impersonation scams.

It’s worth keeping these broad categories or themes front of mind. Also be on high alert if you are, or intend, transacting any property. PEXA or settlement scams – where criminals discover your purchase intention and intercede with an authentic-looking mule account – are some of the fastest growing scams.

What should you do if you are scammed? Cut off all contact and immediately contact your bank.

Note well that a further layer of scams now exists too: for which you are targeted if you Google “how to reclaim money” or “How to get back money lost to a scam”. Many of the results that pop up are secondary scam sites, requiring payment up front or worse.

What has all my advocating for scam victims this year shown me?

The key to a bank being held liable, or issuing any refund, is never to hand over passwords, or verification, token or one-time access codes. It’s in the terms and conditions and if you’ve typed or told a fraudster, you are unlikely to ever see your money again.

Instead, never trust anyone who tries to get you to part with vital information. Always hang up and get the official number from your own search of an institution that cold calls you. Find out if the contact is legitimate.

Do not click on links anywhere, from anyone, that you don’t trust (including online shopping “stores”; reputable ones, too, are sometimes duplicated in “shadow websites”).

And remember, most scams lie beneath a convincing cover story: from an authority (a government institution, bank or a telco), a deeply-in-need person (sick or downtrodden), a love prospect (romance or dating scams) or a loved one (“Mum I’ve lost my phone”).

All are designed to get behind your defences … and into your bank accounts. Please stay safe from scams this Christmas. And have a wonderful one.

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/money/banking/marge-s-computer-wouldn-t-turn-on-then-it-support-offered-help-20241206-p5kwhl.html

As the good man said “be careful out there!” The are a lot of nasty people out there wanting to exploit you and cause pain and anguish and financial loss!

David.

Do You Think This Commentator Has A Clue What He Is Talking About?

Frankly I do not!

Here is the recent article….

Trump’s revolution is coming for the health technocrats

Peter Ridd

5:00AM December 05, 2024

Of all the creatures in the US bureaucratic swamp, environmental and medical science organisations have the most to fear from the return of Donald Trump. The science behind claims of catastrophic climate change, and many environmental and medical issues, finally will be subject to scrutiny.

Trump clearly is not a believer in catastrophic climate change, otherwise his favourite phrase would not be “Drill, baby, drill”.

Like most Americans and his right-hand man, Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump can see climate change is being used as a front in the culture wars.

In a Rasmussen poll, 60 per cent of Americans agreed with Ramaswamy’s comment that climate change had become a reli­gion that “actually has nothing to do with the climate” and was really about power and control. This is a huge and understandable vote of no confidence in the cataclysmic assertions of climate science.

Even worse, a survey published by the American Medical Association found trust in physicians and hospitals collapsed from 71 per cent to 40 per cent across the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. And who can blame people for this collapse of trust, given the genuine conspiracies by government science authorities?

In his first term Trump was unsuccessful in bringing any useful scrutiny to the more extreme climate and environmental science issues. Scott Pruitt, Trump’s first head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was a fan of employing so-called red teams to challenge the science behind many environmental regulations.

However, Trump was vigorously opposed by Washington insiders and from within his own Republican Party, so his scepticism about the veracity of science institutions came to nothing.

But times have changed and he now owns the Republican Party and all levels of federal government. Any doubts that Trump means to do something about the failing science institutions should be dispelled by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr to run the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy has maintained for years that the American medical sciences are plagued by corruption, stemming from the enormous amounts of money received from the drug industry. Do they have too much influence on government regulators? Kennedy says he wants to return the agencies “to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science”. And he has stated: “I’m not anti-vaccine. I just want good science.”

But Kennedy is just the beginning of the insurrection in the health sciences. Trump has nominated Marty Makary to head the Food and Drug Administration; Makary crossed swords with the medical establishment over Covid lockdown policies.

And Trump’s nomination for US surgeon general, Janette Nesheiwat, has strongly criticised the American Academy of Pediatrics for using puberty blockers to treat children with gender dysphoria.

But most remarkable is the nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health. He was co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which pointed out the damage of Covid lockdowns. The medical science establishment tried to crucify him, now he will be its boss.

Of course, most areas of science are rock solid and nobody doubts it. There is no doubt that Newton’s laws of motion work. Industrial science is audited by the red team called cold hard reality. But in many areas where success and failure are not obvious, better systems are needed to stop groupthink, ideology or self-interest influencing the scientific wisdom. Top among these systems is ensuring there is guaranteed debate, checking and auditing, which is largely what Kennedy is advocating.

In this regard, scientists are 180 years behind accountants and 300 years behind lawyers and politicians. Auditors are accountancy red teams. Defence lawyers are legal red teams, as is British Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch. All these innovations are examples of the wonderful development of the institutions of Western civilisation, especially the British sub-branch. They happened because there was an obvious systemic deficiency that needed correction.

Compulsory auditing of public companies started, at least theoretically, in 1844 in Britain. Arguably, it took a half-century to become effective. Similarly, defence lawyers were first allowed in criminal trials in the 1730s because it could be seen that there was a major missing part of the legal system. The accused were not good at defending themselves. Australia did not formally recognise, or even pay, the federal opposition leader until 1920. It can thus be seen that formalising official red teams has been a long process in society.

It is now science’s turn. In Australia, we need red teams to scrutinise the science behind the Great Barrier Reef and how it ended up with record amounts of coral after supposedly being almost destroyed a dozen times in the past six decades. Add to that bushfire and forest management, the Australian Covid response, the closure of our fisheries, the transgender cult, and climate and energy policy. Then throw in whether our education and social science research institutions have done more harm than good to society. Is there any chance these have been affected by groupthink, ideology or pure self-interest?

Trump, Ramaswamy, Kennedy and others hopefully will begin to Make American Science Even Greater. We need to do the same in Australia.

Peter Ridd is an adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/trumps-revolution-is-coming-for-the-health-technocrats/news-story/08d8e55aa8f795e9041ed6b31942b089

It is worth reading this rant just to see how far off beam one can become by talking to yourself in a conspiratorial echo chamber!

I feel very sad for him as he fumes and rants against the 99% majority who reckon he has basically lost it!

If you think of the obvious successes in medical science, computing and engineering it is hard to see how his world view reflects a recognisable reality!

So good luck Peter, I think I will stick with the mainstream. By the evidence of my eyes, the ‘scientific method’ works, as is seen in all its successes. Not sure what you are on about does!.

David.

I Am Not Sure This Is Going To Be A Wonderful Christmas….

This popped up last week:

Australia’s economic problems have been brewing for years

We are in the most prolonged downturn since the 1991 recession. It’s time for a treasurer to do something about it.

John Kehoe Economics editor

Dec 6, 2024 – 2.56pm

The stagnant private sector economy and deterioration in living standards exposed in the national accounts this week have been years in the making.

Labour productivity has failed to improve since 2016; business investment is languishing close to 1990s recession levels; there has been no serious economic reform; undisciplined government spending is in vogue after too much stimulus during the pandemic; and the Reserve Bank of Australia has been forced to push up interest rates to grind household and business activity to a halt and bring inflation under control.

As a result of all of this, economic growth slowed to just 0.8 per cent through the year to September, and in per-person terms the economy has been shrinking for almost two years after adjusting for population growth. It is the most prolonged downturn since the 1991 recession. A better measure of living standards – disposable income per person – is 10.5 per cent below its peak.

The soft-hearted want to take the easy path and blame the RBA. The hard-headed know this problem has been brewing in Canberra over multiple governments under Liberal and Labor prime ministers and treasurers.

For years, serious economists have warned Australian economic policy was on the wrong track. Now it is coming home to roost.

Economist Alex Sanchez, a former adviser to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and self-described “Labor dry” of the Hawke-Keating reformist mould, says the platform has been burning for more than a decade.

“The sad thing as a country is that we’ve known about it, but done nothing to arrest it,” he says. “It just seems to have gotten all too hard, which is not characteristic of our country’s nature.”

“And I hold myself to account as well,” he adds, having stepped down from the government in July.

But in Canberra, it has been all buck-passing and blame-shifting. Labor is trying to deal with the symptoms of inflation and declining living standards. But cost-of-living handouts do not treat the underlying cause of the problem.

The political class increasingly sees every problem as a distributional issue rather than the poor fundamentals.

Making matters worse, profligate spending by federal and state governments is now in direct conflict with the RBA’s efforts to tame inflation. Governments have their foot on the accelerator as the RBA keeps its foot firmly on the brake.

Approaching an election, an increasingly desperate Albanese government is on a collision course with the RBA as Labor prepares to roll out more cost-of-living relief and a big-spending childcare package. The prime minister’s election slogan to Australians is “we have your back”.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has dropped the pretence that fiscal and monetary policy are working in the same direction. He now says the record government spending is propping up the economy to save it from technical recession.

While the government wants to avoid the economy going backwards, the extra dollars it is spending will inevitably prolong the inflation pain and elevated interest rates.

Labor did not cause the outbreak of the biggest inflation shock since the 1980s. Extraordinary pandemic stimulus from the Morrison Coalition government (backed by Labor) and the RBA; government-mandated lockdowns; closed borders; global supply chain disruptions; and a war in Ukraine that temporarily lifted global energy prices were the chief culprits.

Yet, the criticism from some economists is that after 2½ years in government, Labor should have done better managing the inflation outbreak and the economy more broadly.

The good news is the unemployment rate is a low 4.1 per cent. A jobs surge in government-dominated care sectors and the bureaucracy has held up the labour market. Chalmers has also delivered two budget surpluses due to a revenue boom from income tax and soaring commodity export prices.

The lucky treasurer

Economist Chris Richardson says Chalmers has been the luckiest treasurer in history, but there has been no real restraint on spending. Chalmers’ budgets have added $60 billion extra in net discretionary spending. The budgets have contained $104 billion in new spending decisions, but raised only $44 billion in extra revenue to pay for it.

That’s a generous calculation because it includes billions in theoretical revenue from a new superannuation tax on retirement savings balances above $3 million that is unlikely to pass parliament.

Total federal and state government spending in the September quarter was at a record 29 per cent of nominal GDP. Extraordinarily, it is the same level it reached during the peak of the pandemic lockdowns in mid-2020 when massive stimulus payments including JobKeeper were flowing.

Higher spending on the $49 billion National Disability Insurance Scheme, aged care, defence, state government public servants and infrastructure projects has pushed the nation’s finances into a long-term structural deficit.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warned again this week that expansionary budgets will need to be reined in over the coming years to address fiscal pressures.

“Robust government spending growth has kept GDP growth positive as tight monetary conditions restrained private consumption and investment,” the OECD noted.

Westpac economist and former Treasury official Pat Bustamante says the “once-in-a-lifetime” expansion in the public sector is propping up the labour market, but skewing productivity.

“The longer this dynamic continues, the larger the risk we remain stuck in the slow lane when the public-sector sugar hit runs out,” he says.

The fundamental problem was laid out in a McKinsey report presented to company chairmen and chief executives this week. For much of this century, Australia has coasted on the easy gains from the mining boom and high immigration. Labour productivity growth has been virtually zero since 2016 and has slumped to 30th out of 35 rich countries. McKinsey’s “national emergency” warning is no exaggeration.

Productivity – how efficiently labour produces goods and services – is the key determinant of living standards and contributed more than 80 per cent of income growth for the three decades before the pandemic, the Productivity Commission estimates.

Governments are pumping in more money to the non-market economy (such as the NDIS, aged care and public service), which is expanding at almost triple the pace of the private sector. While higher demand for social services seems inevitable as the country becomes richer and older, bigger government is indisputably weighing down productivity.

Productivity is falling in the non-market economy and has had zero growth for 20 years. This is Chalmers’ “care economy”.

Productivity Commission chairwoman Danielle Wood said in July it “always has been and always will be difficult” to improve productivity in labour-intensive industries. “So what that means is as those sectors expand as a share of the economy, as they inevitably will, that will drive down productivity overall, and you have got to work harder elsewhere,” she said.

In other words, governments and business need to drive larger-than-usual productivity gains in the private sector to offset the expanding non-market economy. But it’s not happening. While private sector productivity is now growing at just below pre-pandemic averages, overall productivity is shrinking.

The key to getting private sector productivity firing is business investment, and it has been stuck around 1990s recession levels as a share of the economy for the past eight years under both Coalition and Labor governments.

Less investment in new tools and equipment and a shallowing of the capital stock makes workers less productive. Business cannot afford to sustainably pay higher real wages unless worker output is rising. Or if employers are forced to lift nominal wages without a productivity offset, the cost pressures will inevitably be passed on to consumers through higher prices, contributing to inflation.

Election cannon fodder

Today, real incomes and living standards have gone backwards due to a combination of higher inflation, elevated interest rates and income tax payments. It is election cannon fodder for Peter Dutton’s opposition.

Shadow treasurer Angus Taylor sharpened his attack this week when he said Australians were paying the price for Labor’s “big government, big Australia” policies. Taylor is economically literate to diagnose the problems. But the Coalition is yet to roll out meaningful policies to fix the challenges. Next week, it will unveil a big taxpayer gamble on nuclear energy.

Teal independent MP Allegra Spender is almost the only MP making a meaningful contribution to the tax reform debate, after publishing a green paper which she will use as a guide for demands in the event of a hung parliament after the election.

Australia’s over-dependency on growth-inhibiting taxes on personal income and non-mining corporate profits has been repeatedly called out by the International Monetary Fund, OECD and former Treasury secretary Ken Henry’s tax review.

Overhauling tax, workplace relations, fixing the energy system mess, competition and less stifling red tape should form the basis of a modern reform agenda.

It’s not beyond us for Australia to once again enter the hall of fame of being great economic reformers.

— Chris Bradley, McKinsey senior partner

Business is exasperated about the Albanese government and is giving up hope on Labor. The platitudes from the government have worn thin, particularly after a series of workplace law changes that empower unions and reduce flexibility.

The tensions were laid bare this week after Chalmers admitted that eventually – perhaps after election spending – the private sector must drive the economy.

In response, the bosses of BHP and Wesfarmers demanded a reduction in red tape and a more friendly environment for investment.

“I kind of wish he’d said this a year ago because this is exactly the message that’s been coming from ourselves, but also from broader business,” BHP Australia president Geraldine Slattery said.

The number of restrictive clauses in federal law (including “shall”, “must”, “may not”, “required” and “prohibited”) has surged by 50 per cent since 2007, according to McKinsey.

Labor’s policies involve bigger government reallocating resources around the economy.

Chalmers’ values-based capitalism is captured by subsidies for manufacturing and green energy such as solar panels, batteries and critical minerals, a $470 million taxpayer bet on PsiQuantum, the care economy and trying to shoehorn superannuation funds and the Future Fund to invest in the government’s priorities of the energy transition, housing supply and infrastructure.

It’s a very different economic approach to the Bob Hawke-Paul Keating Labor governments in the 1980s and 90s. Their focus was on expanding the market economy via productivity growth to pay for social security net programs such as Medicare and compulsory superannuation.

Liberals John Howard and Peter Costello followed up by introducing the GST and cutting other taxes, workplace relations flexibility and delivering 10 budget surpluses.

Then the mining boom arrived in the mid-2000s to deliver tax revenue windfalls, and that made Australia complacent.

The reform task has been made harder by the 24/7 media cycle, social media, powerful lobby groups, the proliferation of political advisers with no outside experience becoming MPs, a less ambitious and more politicised bureaucracy, a more divided electorate and rising budget pressures.

McKinsey senior partner Chris Bradley says governments and business should build a shared understanding of the productivity challenge and create a sense of urgency.

“The incredible economy that we built did not happen by fluke. It happened through amazing leadership from both sides of politics.

“The ingredients were a shared diagnosis of the problem, an absolute focus on urgency and a package deal of things that are collectively better.

“It’s not beyond us for Australia to once again enter the hall of fame of being great economic reformers.”

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/australia-s-economic-problems-have-been-brewing-for-years-20241205-p5kw02

All this makes a pretty depressing read, made a lot worse by the stupidity of the Opposition suggesting a quick little dose of nuclear would make the medicine go down, and solve all our problems.

With solar, wind, tidal and fossil sources available in abundance, and nothing that even vaguely resembles a nuclear industry at present it seems to me we need to go slow and carefully to develop  the nuclear skills we need and plan for serious phased adoption the decade after next. We have the luxury of time to get it right and to learn from all the mistakes of others of the last 20 years! In the meantime we have heaps of conventional energy sources!

We have time to do things properly and safely and this is what we should do I reckon!

What do you think?

David.

I Thought Australia Was In A Good Deal Better Shape Than This, But Some Stresses Are Showing Recently I Feel!

This appeared last week:

We feared rising antisemitism would lead to violence. Those fears came true

Gabi Kaltmann

Rabbi

December 6, 2024 — 7.00pm

Last week, I stood alongside other faith leaders and the minister for multicultural affairs in the city to announce the state government’s new anti-racism strategy. As a rabbi and multifaith leader, it was a privilege to participate in this vital initiative. But on my way home, an incident shook me to the core.

As I stepped off the tram on Burke Road in Camberwell, a man I had never seen before spotted my skullcap, came up to me and shouted, “F---ing Jew, free Palestine”, before running off.

I was stunned and horrified. As I stood there, processing what had just happened, I thought about how much Melbourne, the city where I was raised, had changed. I had never before been targeted in this way simply for being Jewish.

Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists murdered 1200 Israelis, took 250 hostages, and ignited a war with Israel, antisemitism has surged in Australia. Jewish Australians are experiencing an unprecedented rise in threats and hostility. Synagogues and Jewish businesses have been attacked, security has been tightened at Jewish schools, and those of us who are visibly Jewish now live with a heightened sense of vulnerability. Frankly, many of us are terrified.

On Friday morning, I woke to the devastating news that the Adass Israel Synagogue, one of Melbourne’s largest and busiest, had apparently been attacked by arsonists. Two people studying Torah inside suffered burns, and the building was severely damaged. Thankfully, no lives were lost.

The synagogue was founded by Holocaust survivors who fled to Australia in search of safety, and the congregation represents a community that is visibly and unmistakably Jewish. The members of Adass live a deeply religious, apolitical life, entirely focused on faith, family and acts of kindness. They have no political affiliation with Zionism or the State of Israel. Yet they were attacked simply because they are Jewish.

For months, Jewish leaders have been warning that rising antisemitism would escalate into violence. It was a warning I raised at the beginning of the year due to the number of unsettling incidents across our city. Tragically, those warnings have now become reality. Burning a synagogue is a violent attack on a community, its history and its future.

Antisemitism doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It flourishes when hatred and intolerance are allowed to fester. Since the October 7 attacks, Jewish Australians have been grappling with an increasingly hostile environment. Many feel abandoned by a society that prides itself on inclusivity but has not taken sufficient action to protect us.

Despite promises of increased security funding, progress has been slow. The appointment of a federal antisemitism envoy is a positive step, but it is not enough. What we need now is decisive action at the national level.

As a Jewish community leader, I am calling for a federal summit on antisemitism. This summit should bring together lawmakers, policymakers and community leaders to confront the fear and anxiety Jewish Australians have been living with for the past 14 months. It should provide a platform for co-ordinated action, ensuring that laws, resources and policies are implemented effectively across the country.

This is not just about the Jewish community. Antisemitism is often a harbinger of broader societal problems. When hatred against one group is allowed to grow unchecked, it inevitably spreads. Addressing antisemitism is not only about protecting Jewish Australians; it is about safeguarding the values of tolerance and diversity that underpin our nation.

The attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue is a stark reminder that antisemitism is not a distant problem; it is here. Now is the time for action.

Let “zero tolerance” truly mean zero tolerance. Let us show that Australia is a country where people of all faiths and backgrounds can live in safety and dignity.

Gabi Kaltmann is a rabbi at the Ark Centre in Hawthorn.

Here is the link:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/we-feared-rising-antisemitism-would-lead-to-violence-those-fears-have-come-true-20241206-p5kwge.html

I fear we have all seen this movie before and we know it never ends well, without careful and deliberate course corrections. We all have to keep working hard to make sure that all parts of our society are equally supported and respected. This approach is certainly the way I want things to play out with balance and respect for all! My feeling is that all community leaders need to work harder in times of civil stress, as we seem to be seeing at present.

My view is that we are in not too bad a shape right now but that the maneuvering room is rather reduced at present and we need to remain alert to the various stresses and strains in the community. The world is clearly a more dangerous and complex place than it has been in a good while! I rather fear the new Trump Presidency may not help. Time will tell, but I see complex times ahead!

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 776 – Results – 08 December 2024.

Here are the results of the poll.

Does The Use Of Facial Recognition Technology Need Clear Disclosure When Being Used For Commercial and Surveillance Purposes?

Yes                                                                      19 (86%)

No                                                                         3 (14%)

I Have No Idea                                                      0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 22

A clear-cut out-come – people want to know when they are being watched!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

Poor voting turnout. 

0 of 22 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many special thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

I Think Albo Is Kidding Himself If He Thinks He Can Control Access To Social Media.

Just what is happening when the Government thinks it can insist ordinary law-abiding citizens manage the use of social media among those who can read enough to understand it but who are not adult? It will be a struggle!

‘Black Friday sale on VPNs’: Social media ban faces early obstacles

Tess Bennett Technology reporter

Nov 29, 2024 – 12.48pm

Passing the world-first laws that restrict Australians under the age of 16 from accessing social media may have been the easy part. Enforcing them is another story altogether.

From Monday, Australia’s online safety regulator will pressure social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook owner Meta, Snapchat and TikTok to introduce ways to verify the age of their users to comply with the blanket ban.

The tech giants – which widely criticised the laws as rushed and lacking crucial details about how they will be implemented in practice – must now work with the eSafety Commissioner, who has 12 months to figure out how the new regime will operate when it takes effect in late 2025.

If they fail to comply, platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X and Reddit could be fined up to $50 million after the government secured bipartisan support for the laws this week.

Attention has already turned to how kids can circumvent the ban, with Fred Schebesta, the co-founder of comparison website Finder advertising a Black Friday sale on Virtual Private Networks – software that allows users to appear as though they are accessing the internet from a different country.

“Parents! Finder is having a VPN sale for Black Friday. Special discount for those under 16,” the tech and crypto entrepreneur posted on X.

The legislation does not specify how sites should verify users’ ages. However, Australians won’t be forced to provide their passports or driver’s licences. Platforms can only collect government-issued identity documents if they have provided users with an alternative method of verifying their age.

Alternative methods could include monitoring user interactions and behaviour for signs that they are underage or facial age estimation software.

Findings of the Australian government’s age-verification trials, which are examining how biometrics, age estimation software and parental certification could be used to stop young people accessing social media, will be reported in June.

“The social media ban legislation has been released and passed within a week and, as a result, no one can confidently explain how it will work in practice – the community and platforms are in the dark about what exactly is required of them,” Sunita Bose, the managing director of tech industry group DIGI, said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Friday that the onus was on the social media providers to ensure the safety of Australian children.“We’ve got your back is our message to Australian parents,” Mr Albanese said.

Spokeswomen for Meta, TikTok and Snap told AFR Weekend they were still working through the details of how to set up internal teams to work through the implementation period.

“The task now turns to ensuring there is productive consultation on all rules associated with the bill to ensure a technically feasible outcome that does not place an onerous burden on parents and teens and a commitment that rules will be consistently applied across all social apps used by teens,” a Meta spokeswoman said.

Both Snapchat and Meta have urged the government to require device makers and app store owners like Apple and Google to verify users’ ages at the app store level, which they argue would minimise the need for social media companies to collect identity information.

Passage of the laws through the Senate on Thursday night made headlines around the world. CNN, The New York Times, The Associated Press, the BBC, London’s The Mirror and The Washington Post were among the mainstream outlets that carried stories, as well as all the biggest international technology news websites.

The coverage noted the sweeping ban had widespread support, but that it lacked details of how it would work and that it could pose risks to privacy and children’s social connection.

The Wall Street Journal called the ban “one of the world’s most restrictive social media laws”, and online British news outlet The Independent described it as a “test case” for other governments such as those in France and some US states which are planning to legislate social media age restrictions.

Bloomberg described the laws as “some of the most stringent internet usage restrictions outside of China and other non-democratic regimes and could provide impetus to other governments to act”.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/technology/how-the-world-reacted-to-our-social-media-ban-20241129-p5kui5

My view is that this is a hysterical “moral panic” on the part of technologically ignorant politicians.

If there was a serious risk, how come we can wait for 12 months to do something?

It is all just political posturing IMVHO! The 'nanny state' really will struggle on this one and I have to say I reckon the platforms need to watch what is going on and exclude the clearly under age. They won't like it, but it should be part of their 'social license'.

David.

I Have To Say This Is A Really Interesting Question! Glad My Career Is Pretty Much Done…

This popped up last week and posed a rather existential question!

The Observer Artificial intelligence (AI)

If AI can provide a better diagnosis than a doctor, what’s the prognosis for medics?

John Naughton

Studies in which ChatGPT outperformed scientists and GPs raise troubling questions for the future of professional work

Sun 1 Dec 2024 03.00 AEDT

AI means too many (different) things to too many people. We need better ways of talking – and thinking – about it. Cue, Drew Breunig, a gifted geek and cultural anthropologist, who has come up with a neat categorisation of the technology into three use cases: gods, interns and cogs.

“Gods”, in this sense, would be “super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously”. In other words, the AGI (artificial general intelligence) that OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his crowd are trying to build (at unconscionable expense), while at the same time warning that it could be an existential threat to humanity. AI gods are, Breunig says, the “human replacement use cases”. They require gigantic models and stupendous amounts of “compute”, water and electricity (not to mention the associated CO₂ emissions).

“Interns” are “supervised co-pilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work”. In other words, things such as ChatGPT, Claude, Llama and similar large language models (LLMs). Their defining quality is that they are meant to be used and supervised by experts. They have a high tolerance for errors because the experts they are assisting are checking their output, preventing embarrassing mistakes from going further. They do the boring work: remembering documentation and navigating references, filling in the details after the broad strokes are defined, assisting with idea generation by acting as a dynamic sounding board and much more.

Finally, “cogs” are lowly machines that are optimised to perform a single task extremely well, usually as part of a pipeline or interface.

Interns are mostly what we have now; they represent AI as a technology that augments human capabilities and are already in widespread use in many industries and occupations. In that sense, they are the first generation of quasi-intelligent machines with which humans have had close cognitive interactions in work settings, and we’re beginning to learn interesting things about how well those human-machine partnerships work.

One area in which there are extravagant hopes for AI is healthcare. And with good reason. In 2018, for example, a collaboration between AI researchers at DeepMind and Moorfields eye hospital in London significantly speeded up the analysis of retinal scans to detect the symptoms of patients who needed urgent treatment. But in a way, though technically difficult, that was a no-brainer: machines can “read” scans incredibly quickly and pick out ones that need specialist diagnosis and treatment.

The study demonstrated doctors’ sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they had made, even when ChatGPT suggested a better one

But what about the diagnostic process itself, though? Cue an intriguing US study published in October in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which reported a randomised clinical trial on whether ChatGPT could improve the diagnostic capabilities of 50 practising physicians. The ho-hum conclusion was that “the availability of an LLM to physicians as a diagnostic aid did not significantly improve clinical reasoning compared with conventional resources”. But there was a surprising kicker: ChatGPT on its own demonstrated higher performance than both physician groups (those with and without access to the machine).

Or, as the New York Times summarised it, “doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. And, to the researchers’ surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors.”

More interesting, though, were two other revelations: the experiment demonstrated doctors’ sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they had made, even when ChatGPT suggested a better one; and it also suggested that at least some of the physicians didn’t really know how best to exploit the tool’s capabilities. Which in turn revealed what AI advocates such as Ethan Mollick have been saying for aeons: that effective “prompt engineering” – knowing what to ask an LLM to get the most out of it – is a subtle and poorly understood art.

Equally interesting is the effect that collaborating with an AI has on the humans involved in the partnership. Over at MIT, a researcher ran an experiment to see how well material scientists could do their job if they could use AI in their research.

The answer was that AI assistance really seems to work, as measured by the discovery of 44% more materials and a 39% increase in patent filings. This was accomplished by the AI doing more than half of the “idea generation” tasks, leaving the researchers to the business of evaluating model-produced candidate materials. So the AI did most of the “thinking”, while they were relegated to the more mundane chore of evaluating the practical feasibility of the ideas. And the result: the researchers experienced a sharp reduction in job satisfaction!

Interesting, n’est-ce pas? These researchers are high-flyers, not low-status operatives. But suddenly, collaborating with a smart machine made them feel like… well, cogs. And the moral? Be careful what you wish for.

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/30/if-ai-can-provide-a-better-diagnosis-than-a-doctor-whats-the-prognosis-for-medics

I will say, straight of the bat, I have no idea of the answer, but I do think the human touch from your kindly doctor is rather hard to replace!

David.

It Is Really Fun To Look Back And See What A Mess The myHR Was Five Years Ago. Seems Little Has Changed!

This appeared a bit over six years ago!

Hidden conflict: My Health Record boss privately giving advice to health firms

By Esther Han

November 15, 2018 — 12.00am

The chairman of the agency responsible for the bungled My Health Record rollout has been privately advising a global healthcare outsourcing company.

The Herald discovered the relationship between the UK based government contracting giant Serco and the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) chairman Jim Birch after obtaining internal documents that detail the board members' conflicts of interest.

The revelation comes as federal Health Minister Greg Hunt was forced to extend the My Health Record opt out period after a compromise deal with the Senate crossbench and a last minute meltdown of the website left thousands of Australians struggling to meet the original deadline.

Since April 2016, Mr Birch has been ADHA chairman with oversight of the My Health Record system, which will automatically generate digital medical records for millions of Australians who do not opt out by the end of January.

The ADHA board's "Personal Interests Disclosures Register", released under Freedom of Information laws, shows Mr Birch began "providing strategy advice to Serco" in November 2017. The register is not publicly available.

After the Herald submitted questions last week on whether the relationship posed a conflict of interest, Mr Birch quit the Serco advisory role.

Serco has won a number of multi-billion dollar government contracts to privately run - and in some cases deliver healthcare in - some of Australia's prisons, hospitals and detention centres.

The ability of Serco to navigate the controversial area of digital health records would be invaluable to any future expansion plans, given its "global healthcare strategy".

A spokeswoman for Mr Hunt said all 10 board members had declared their interests.

"Board members do not have access to system operations and board members cannot be present while a matter is being considered at a board meeting in which the member has an interest," she said.

Lisa Parker, a public health ethics expert at University of Sydney, said the public had been asked to trust that the agency is acting in its best interests. She said it should make public any information relevant to that trust.

The original My Health Record opt out deadline was October 15, 2018.Credit: Alamy

"Some members of the public may select not to place their trust in board members who they perceive to have conflicts of interest," Dr Parker said.

"This does not mean that transparency is wrong, rather it means that allowing associations that give rise to real or perceived conflicts of interest threatens the viability of the potentially important resource that is the My Health Record."

More competing interests exposed

The register also shows Mr Birch knows the chief executive of health-tech startup Personify Care, Ken Saman, and has been giving him advice since August last year.

The software company recently released "Personify Connect", a product that provides hospitals with "seamless integration" of its original patient monitoring platform with My Health Record.

Despite being scheduled to speak at a "Personify Care breakfast seminar" later this year, Mr Birch has never publicly declared this potential competing interest.

Mr Birch is also chairman of another startup called Clevertar that allows businesses to create "virtual agents" and offer "personalised healthcare support, delivered at scale". This relationship is on the public record.

Public sector ethics expert Richard Mulgan, from Australian National University, said the chairman should submit to a higher standard than ordinary board members and distance himself from anything suggesting a conflict of interest.

He said perception was just as important as reality and the public, not the people involved, was the best judge of whether there was a problem.

November 15th is the opt-out date for My Health Record, but exactly what does this data system mean for Australians?

"The personal interests register must be published," Professor Mulgan said. "The fact they haven't can only lead to the perception there are conflicts of which they are ashamed."

Mr Birch, Personify Care and Clevertar did not respond to the Herald's questions.

A Serco spokesman confirmed the company met with Mr Birch "occasionally ... over the past 12 months regarding business management", but did not answer whether it had paid him.

An ADHA spokesman said under laws, "no board member alone has the ability to make a decision in board meetings or for decisions made without meetings".

In regards to Serco, it said it "has no commercial relationship with Serco and the company does not and has not had access to the My Health Record system".

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/hidden-conflict-my-health-record-boss-privately-giving-advice-to-health-firms-20181107-p50eh9.html

The mess that is the myHR has been rolling on for a very long time now. Are there any recent reports that it is now just wonderful and widely used all over?

I have not heard any such reports!

I wonder what Mr Jim Birch thinks about the myHR all these years later?

David.