Hello and happy day off for sports to our friends in Victoria. Let’s get on with it, shall we?
1. Changes to the 35-year-old Privacy Act
Starting today with potential changes to Australia’s Privacy Act, which, per The Guardian, would give Aussies the right to sue for serious breaches of privacy. The changes to the Privacy Act have been in the works for a long time. In a report handed down earlier this year, 116 proposals were made. Dreyfus agreed to almost all of them, flagging a few as needing more work and a handful as ‘nope’. Unfortunately considered ‘nope’ was the ability to opt-out of receiving targeted advertising.
2. Nvidia’s France offices raided
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that France’s competition authority this week raided Nvidia’s local offices on suspicion the chipmaker engaged in anticompetitive practices. While the authority did not say what practices it was investigating, it did say the operation followed a broader inquiry into the cloud-computing sector, Reuters explains (WSJ article is behind a paywall I cannot break). According to the report, the broader inquiry revolves around concerns that cloud-computing companies could use their access to computing power to exclude smaller competitors. Nvidia declined to comment.
3. HIA discloses customer info breach
Heading back home and the Australian Financial Review reports the Housing Industry Association (HIA) is telling customers this week that some personal information it shared with PwC in 2016 had been stolen by Russian-linked cybercriminals who breached widely used file-sharing software, MOVEit Transfer. Russian-linked cybercrime group Cl0p first broke into file-sharing software ‘MOVEit’ in May and began stealing data from entities including U.S. federal agencies and multinational organisations. We reported in June PwC had been caught up in the saga.
4. Epic Games spins off SuperAwesome, divests Bandcamp
Epic Games is laying off 16 per cent of its employees, around 830 people, as the company moves to divest Bandcamp and spin off most of SuperAwesome. Announced in a blog post, the company said it had been “spending way more money than we earn” for “a while now”. It pointed the finger at its most popular game, Fortnite, saying that while it’s still popular, growth is currently driven primarily by creator content, which is a “lower margin business”.
5. Google gives publishers choice around AI use
Ending things today with Google, which has announced a new control that would let publishers decide whether their content will “help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products”. Per Engadget, the control is a crawler called Google-Extended, and publishers can add it to the file in their site’s documentation to tell Google not to use it for those two APIs. It reportedly comes as web publishers repeatedly tell Google that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases.
BONUS ITEM: As both a Collingwood Magpies AND Penrith Panthers fan, the bonus item today had to be in support of one of them.
Enjoy your weekend, I’m nervous as hell. I’ll return to normal tech programming on Tuesday morning.