Good morning. Let’s get into the tech news.
1. Canva CFO steps down
The Australian reports that Canva CFO Damien Singh has departed the company, as an internal investigation into his conduct was underway. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for inappropriate behaviour and we’re fully committed to thoroughly investigating and actioning any instances of this,” the company said in a statement to The Australian while declining to reveal the nature of the accusations being investigated.
2. ACMA fines five telcos for breaching anti-scam rules
The ACMA has fined Message4U Pty Ltd (under the name Sinch MessageMedia), SMS Broadcast Pty Ltd, DirectSMS Pty Ltd, Esendex Australia Pty Ltd, and MessageBird Pty Ltd for breaching Australian anti-scam rules. Through the five telcos, millions of SMS scams were facilitated with text-based Sender IDs, without sufficient enough checks to ensure users were legitimate and not just impersonating real companies. “Scammers will always look for cracks in systems and if even one telco fails to have its compliance in order, it can open the door for scammers to target Australians,” ACMA member Samantha Yorke said.
3. Microsoft claims hackers using its AI tools
Microsoft claims that it has caught Russian, Chinese, and Iranian hackers using its AI tools. Reuters reports that hackers affiliated with state military and governments had been tracked and found to be using the company’s AI tools, such as “Independent of whether there’s any violation of the law or any violation of terms of service, we just don’t want those actors that we’ve identified, that we track and know are threat actors of various kinds, we don’t want them to have access to this technology,” Microsoft Vice President for Customer Security Tom Burt said to Reuters.
4. Zuckerberg bags out the Vision Pro
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tried the Apple Vision Pro and, unsurprisingly, he thinks the device his company makes is better. The much cheaper Meta Quest 3 is more of a traditional VR headset with more utility outside of Apple’s ecosystem. Zuckerberg said that the Quest was better “for the vast majority of things” that VR is used for. I hate to side with Zuckerberg, but looking at early impressions of the Vision Pro, it’s hard to fight with a lot of what he’s saying – that is if you’re a VR fan, of course, otherwise both devices would likely be uninteresting to you.
5. PS5 at the ‘latter stage of its life cycle’
Kotaku Australia reports that Sony considers the PlayStation 5 gaming console to be in the “latter stage of its life cycle”, and that no more major franchise titles will be released until mid-2025 at the earliest. “As such, we will put more emphasis on the balance between profitability and sales. For this reason, we expect the annual sales pace of PS5 hardware will start falling from the next fiscal year,” Sony SVP Naomi Matsuoka said on an earnings call. Rich words considering you had to perform a perfect triple somersault to get one of these devices during the height of the pandemic.
BONUS ITEM: He’s my buddy.
A 24-year-old platypus found in a Melbourne creek is the oldest ever discovered in the wild. https://t.co/umcg2F2YGT
— ABC News (@abcnews) February 14, 2024
Have a lovely day.