This week Bill Mew,​ Pete Warren and​ Dez Blanchfield ​discuss the following topics:

1) Online Safety: UK vs Aus Approach – The UK’s recent online safety bill which has made users prove their age to access adult content (largely impacting porn at this time) has led to a massive uptake in VPN use for avoidance. We can compare this with the approach in Aus which is more focused on age verification and anonymity and isn’t just focused on if you’re over 18 or not. Most of the online harms come from cyber bulling, trolling and very young users being dishonest about their age to get onto social media. We don’t let kids drive, drink or smoke at any age. Why not age gate their use of social platforms?

2) AI: is it a threat or a bubble or both? – Many are predicting massive job losses as companies use AI to replace humans. Is this fear overblown? ⁠Is there an AI bubble with large language models (LLMs) failing to scale out and new versions being iterations of earlier versions that are compounding problems such as hallucination, rather than solving them?

3) Denial of Service: cutting off the internet – Denial of service – can cutting off internet access be used to end a war, or make governments or individuals comply with rules. Who gets to decide who gets cut off, when and why? Can Elon Musk as owner of Starlink use it to cut off Ukraine or anyone else? Then again, cutting internet off to North Korea isn’t really much of a threat.