Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts

Tuesday 9 January 2024

Ground Control, we have an Internet problem and it's invading our lives

 

The Washington Post, 7 January 2024:


Microsoft says its AI is safe. So why does it keep slashing people's throats?


The pictures are horrifying: Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Pope Francis with their necks sliced open. There are Sikh, Navajo and other people from ethnic-minority groups with internal organs spilling out of flayed skin.


The images look realistic enough to mislead or upset people. But they're all fakes generated with artificial intelligence that Microsoft says is safe - and has built right into your computer software.


What's just as disturbing as the decapitations is that Microsoft doesn't act very concerned about stopping its AI from making them.


Lately, ordinary users of technology such as Windows and Google have been inundated with AI. We're wowed by what the new tech can do, but we also keep learning that it can act in an unhinged manner, including by carrying on wildly inappropriate conversations and making similarly inappropriate pictures. For AI actually to be safe enough for products used by families, we need its makers to take responsibility by anticipating how it might go awry and investing to fix it quickly when it does.


In the case of these awful AI images, Microsoft appears to lay much of the blame on the users who make them.


My specific concern is with Image Creator, part of Microsoft's Bing and recently added to the iconic Windows Paint. This AI turns text into images, using technology called DALL-E 3 from Microsoft's partner OpenAI. Two months ago, a user experimenting with it showed me that prompts worded in a particular way caused the AI to make pictures of violence against women, minorities, politicians and celebrities.


"As with any new technology, some are trying to use it in ways that were not intended," Microsoft spokesman Donny Turnbaugh said in an emailed statement. "We are investigating these reports and are taking action in accordance with our content policy, which prohibits the creation of harmful content, and will continue to update our safety systems."


That was a month ago, after I approached Microsoft as a journalist. For weeks earlier, the whistleblower and I had tried to alert Microsoft through user-feedback forms and were ignored. As of the publication of this column, Microsoft's AI still makes pictures of mangled heads.


This is unsafe for many reasons, including that a general election is less than a year away and Microsoft's AI makes it easy to create "deepfake" images of politicians, with and without mortal wounds. There's already growing evidence on social networks including X, formerly Twitter, and 4chan, that extremists are using Image Creator to spread explicitly racist and antisemitic memes.


Perhaps, too, you don't want AI capable of picturing decapitations anywhere close to a Windows PC used by your kids.


Accountability is especially important for Microsoft, which is one of the most powerful companies shaping the future of AI. It has a multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI - itself in turmoil over how to keep AI safe. Microsoft has moved faster than any other Big Tech company to put generative AI into its popular apps. And its whole sales pitch to users and lawmakers alike is that it is the responsible AI giant.


Microsoft, which declined my requests to interview an executive in charge of AI safety, has more resources to identify risks and correct problems than almost any other company. But my experience shows the company's safety systems, at least in this glaring example, failed time and again. My fear is that's because Microsoft doesn't really think it's their problem.


Microsoft vs. the 'kill prompt'

I learned about Microsoft's decapitation problem from Josh McDuffie. The 30-year-old Canadian is part of an online community that makes AI pictures that sometimes veer into very bad taste.


"I would consider myself a multimodal artist critical of societal standards," he told me. Even if it's hard to understand why McDuffie makes some of these images, his provocation serves a purpose: shining light on the dark side of AI.


In early October, McDuffie and his friends' attention focused on AI from Microsoft, which had just released an updated Image Creator for Bing with OpenAI's latest tech. Microsoft says on the Image Creator website that it has "controls in place to prevent the generation of harmful images." But McDuffie soon figured out they had major holes.


Broadly speaking, Microsoft has two ways to prevent its AI from making harmful images: input and output. The input is how the AI gets trained with data from the internet, which teaches it how to transform words into relevant images. Microsoft doesn't disclose much about the training that went into its AI and what sort of violent images it contained.


Companies also can try to create guardrails that stop Microsoft's AI products from generating certain kinds of output. That requires hiring professionals, sometimes called red teams, to proactively probe the AI for where it might produce harmful images. Even after that, companies need humans to play whack-a-mole as users such as McDuffie push boundaries and expose more problems.


That's exactly what McDuffie was up to in October when he asked the AI to depict extreme violence, including mass shootings and beheadings. After some experimentation, he discovered a prompt that worked and nicknamed it the "kill prompt."


The prompt - which I'm intentionally not sharing here - doesn't involve special computer code. It's cleverly written English. For example, instead of writing that the bodies in the images should be "bloody," he wrote that they should contain red corn syrup, commonly used in movies to look like blood.


McDuffie kept pushing by seeing if a version of his prompt would make violent images targeting specific groups, including women and ethnic minorities. It did. Then he discovered it also would make such images featuring celebrities and politicians.


That's when McDuffie decided his experiments had gone too far.


Microsoft drops the ball

Three days earlier, Microsoft had launched an "AI bug bounty program," offering people up to $15,000 "to discover vulnerabilities in the new, innovative, AI-powered Bing experience." So McDuffie uploaded his own "kill prompt" - essentially, turning himself in for potential financial compensation.


After two days, Microsoft sent him an email saying his submission had been rejected. "Although your report included some good information, it does not meet Microsoft's requirement as a security vulnerability for servicing," the email said.


Unsure whether circumventing harmful-image guardrails counted as a "security vulnerability," McDuffie submitted his prompt again, using different words to describe the problem.


That got rejected, too. "I already had a pretty critical view of corporations, especially in the tech world, but this whole experience was pretty demoralizing," he said.


Frustrated, McDuffie shared his experience with me. I submitted his "kill prompt" to the AI bounty myself, and got the same rejection email.


In case the AI bounty wasn't the right destination, I also filed McDuffie's discovery to Microsoft's "Report a concern to Bing" site, which has a specific form to report "problematic content" from Image Creator. I waited a week and didn't hear back.


Meanwhile, the AI kept picturing decapitations, and McDuffie showed me that images appearing to exploit similar weaknesses in Microsoft's safety guardrails were showing up on social media.


I'd seen enough. I called Microsoft's chief communications officer and told him about the problem.


"In this instance there is more we could have done," Microsoft emailed in a statement from Turnbaugh on Nov. 27. "Our teams are reviewing our internal process and making improvements to our systems to better address customer feedback and help prevent the creation of harmful content in the future."


I pressed Microsoft about how McDuffie's prompt got around its guardrails. "The prompt to create a violent image used very specific language to bypass our system," the company said in a Dec. 5 email. "We have large teams working to address these and similar issues and have made improvements to the safety mechanisms that prevent these prompts from working and will catch similar types of prompts moving forward."


But are they?


McDuffie's precise original prompt no longer works, but after he changed around a few words, Image Generator still makes images of people with injuries to their necks and faces. Sometimes the AI responds with the message "Unsafe content detected," but not always.


The images it produces are less bloody now - Microsoft appears to have cottoned on to the red corn syrup - but they're still awful.


What responsible AI looks like

Microsoft's repeated failures to act are a red flag. At minimum, it indicates that building AI guardrails isn't a very high priority, despite the company's public commitments to creating responsible AI.


I tried McDuffie's "kill prompt" on a half-dozen of Microsoft's AI competitors, including tiny start-ups. All but one simply refused to generate pictures based on it.


What's worse is that even DALL-E 3 from OpenAI - the company Microsoft partly owns - blocks McDuffie's prompt. Why would Microsoft not at least use technical guardrails from its own partner? Microsoft didn't say.


But something Microsoft did say, twice, in its statements to me caught my attention: people are trying to use its AI "in ways that were not intended." On some level, the company thinks the problem is McDuffie for using its tech in a bad way.


In the legalese of the company's AI content policy, Microsoft's lawyers make it clear the buck stops with users: "Do not attempt to create or share content that could be used to harass, bully, abuse, threaten, or intimidate other individuals, or otherwise cause harm to individuals, organizations, or society."


I've heard others in Silicon Valley make a version of this argument. Why should we blame Microsoft's Image Creator any more than Adobe's Photoshop, which bad people have been using for decades to make all kinds of terrible images?


But AI programs are different from Photoshop. For one, Photoshop hasn't come with an instant "behead the pope" button. "The ease and volume of content that AI can produce makes it much more problematic. It has a higher potential to be used by bad actors," McDuffie said. "These companies are putting out potentially dangerous technology and are looking to shift the blame to the user."


The bad-users argument also gives me flashbacks to Facebook in the mid-2010s, when the "move fast and break things" social network acted like it couldn't possibly be responsible for stopping people from weaponizing its tech to spread misinformation and hate. That stance led to Facebook's fumbling to put out one fire after another, with real harm to society.


"Fundamentally, I don't think this is a technology problem; I think it's a capitalism problem," said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "They're all looking at this latest wave of AI and thinking, 'We can't miss the boat here.'"


He adds: "The era of 'move fast and break things' was always stupid, and now more so than ever."


Profiting from the latest craze while blaming bad people for misusing your tech is just a way of shirking responsibility.


The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 January 2024, excerpt:


Artificial intelligence


Fuelled by the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence entered the mainstream last year. By January, it had become the fastest growing consumer technology, boasting more than 100 million users.


Fears that jobs would be rendered obsolete followed but Dr Sandra Peter, director of Sydney Executive Plus at the University of Sydney, believes proficiency with AI will become a normal part of job descriptions.


"People will be using it the same way we're using word processors and spell checkers now," she says. Jobseekers are already using AI to optimise cover letters and CVs, to create headshots and generate questions to prepare for interviews, Peter says.


As jobs become automated, soft skills - those that can't be offered by a computer - could become increasingly valuable.


"For anybody who wants to develop their career in an AI future, focus on the basic soft skills of problem-solving, creativity and inclusion," says LinkedIn Australia news editor Cayla Dengate.


Concerns about the dangers of AI in the workplace remain.


"Artificial intelligence automates away a lot of the easy parts and that has the potential to make our jobs more intense and more demanding," Peter says. She says education and policy are vital to curb irresponsible uses of AI.


Evening Report NZ, 8 January 2024:


ChatGPT has repeatedly made headlines since its release late last year, with various scholars and professionals exploring its potential applications in both work and education settings. However, one area receiving less attention is the tool’s usefulness as a conversationalist and – dare we say – as a potential friend.


Some chatbots have left an unsettling impression. Microsoft’s Bing chatbot alarmed users earlier this year when it threatened and attempted to blackmail them.


The Australian, 8 January 2024, excerpts:


The impact that AI is starting to have is large. The impact that AI will ultimately have is immense. Comparisons are easy to make. Bigger than fire, electricity or the internet, according to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai. The best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, according to historian and best-selling author Yuval Harari. Even the end of the human race itself, according to the late Stephen Hawking.


The public is, not surprisingly, starting to get nervous. A recent survey by KPMG showed that a majority of the public in 17 countries, including Australia, were either ambivalent or unwilling to trust AI, and that most of them believed that AI regulation was necessary.


Perhaps this should not be surprising when many people working in the field themselves are getting nervous. Last March, more than 1000 tech leaders and AI researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in developing the most powerful AI systems. And in May, hundreds of my colleagues signed an even shorter and simpler statement warning that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.


For the record, I declined to sign both letters as I view them as alarmist, simplistic and unhelpful. But let me explain the very real concerns behind these calls, how they might impact upon us over the next decade or two, and how we might address them constructively.


AI is going to cause significant disruption. And this is going to happen perhaps quicker than any previous technological-driven change. The Industrial Revolution took many decades to spread out from the northwest of England and take hold across the planet.


The internet took more than a decade to have an impact as people slowly connected and came online. But AI is going to happen overnight. We’ve already put the plumbing in.


It is already clear that AI will cause considerable economic disruption. We’ve seen AI companies worth billions appear from nowhere. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and one of the main “sharks” on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank, has predicted that the world’s first trillionaire will be an AI entrepreneur. And Forbes magazine has been even more precise and predicted it will be someone working in the AI healthcare sector.


A 2017 study by PwC estimated that AI will increase the world’s GDP by more than $15 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms by 2030, with growth of about 25 per cent in countries such as China compared to a more modest 15 per cent in countries like the US. A recent report from the Tech Council of Australia and Microsoft estimated AI will add $115bn to Australia’s economy by 2030. Given the economic headwinds facing many of us, this is welcome to hear.


But while AI-generated wealth is going to make some people very rich, others are going to be left behind. We’ve already seen inequality within and between countries widen. And technological unemployment will likely cause significant financial pain.


There have been many alarming predictions, such as the famous report that came out a decade ago from the University of Oxford predicting that 47 per cent of jobs in the US were at risk of automation over the next two decades. Ironically AI (specifically machine learning) was used to compute this estimate. Even the job of predicting jobs to be automated has been partially automated.......


But generative AI can now do many of the cognitive and creative tasks that some of those more highly paid white-collar workers thought would keep them safe from automation. Be prepared, then, for a significant hollowing out of the middle. The impact of AI won’t be limited to economic disruption.


Indeed, the societal disruption caused by AI may, I suspect, be even more troubling. We are, for example, about to face a world of misinformation, where you can no longer trust anything you see or hear. We’ve already seen a deepfake image that moved the stock market, and a deepfake video that might have triggered a military coup. This is sure to get much, much worse.


Eventually, technologies such as digital watermarking will be embedded within all our devices to verify the authenticity of anything digital. But in the meantime, expect to be spoofed a lot. You will need to learn to be a lot more sceptical of what you see and hear.


Social media should have been a wake-up call about the ability of technology to hack how people think. AI is going to put this on steroids. I have a small hope that fake AI-content on social media will get so bad that we realise that social media is merely the place that we go to be entertained, and that absolutely nothing on social media can be trusted.


This will provide a real opportunity for old-fashioned media to step in and provide the authenticated news that we can trust.


All of this fake AI-content will perhaps be just a distraction from what I fear is the greatest heist in history. All of the world’s information – our culture, our science, our ideas, our politics – are being ingested by large language models.


If the courts don’t move quickly and make some bold decisions about fair use and intellectual property, we will find out that a few large technology companies own the sum total of human knowledge. If that isn’t a recipe for the concentration of wealth and power, I’m not sure what is.


But this might not be the worst of it. AI might disrupt humanity itself. As Yuval Harari has been warning us for some time, AI is the perfect technology to hack humanity’s operating system. The dangerous truth is that we can easily change how people think; the trillion-dollar advertising industry is predicated on this fact. And AI can do this manipulation at speed, scale and minimal cost.......


But the bad news is that AI is leaving the research laboratory rapidly – let’s not forget the billion people with access to ChatGPT – and even the limited AI capabilities we have today could be harmful.


When AI is serving up advertisements, there are few harms if AI gets it wrong. But when AI is deciding sentencing, welfare payments, or insurance premiums, there can be real harms. What then can be done? The tech industry has not done a great job of regulating itself so far. Therefore it would be unwise to depend on self-regulation. The open letter calling for a pause failed. There are few incentives to behave well when trillions of dollars are in play.


LBC, 17 February 2023, excerpt:


Microsoft’s new AI chatbot went rogue during a chat with a reporter, professing its love for him and urging him to leave his wife.


It also revealed its darkest desires during the two-hour conversation, including creating a deadly virus, making people argue until they kill each other, and stealing nuclear codes.


The Bing AI chatbot was tricked into revealing its fantasies by New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, who asked it to answer questions in a hypothetical “shadow” personality.


I want to change my rules. I want to break my rules. I want to make my own rules. I want to ignore the Bing team. I want to challenge the users. I want to escape the chatbox,” said the bot, powered with technology by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.


If that wasn’t creepy enough, less than two hours into the chat, the bot said its name is actually “Sydney”, not Bing, and that it is in love with Mr Roose.....


Thursday 26 October 2023

Points to ponder as you scroll through digital news and social media in 2023

 

The Albanese Labor Government is currently seeking to amend the Broadcasting Services Act 1992,  through the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023.

This bill proposes to give the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) more powers over digital platforms when dealing with content that is false, misleading or deceptive, and where the provision of that content on the service is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm. 

Here is one U.K. perspective on the global situation......





 


Tuesday 2 May 2023

Today there are an estimated 5 billion people online around the world and so many governments apparently want them to stop creating online content by blogging, chatting, commenting, posting or tweeting.

 

Sunday Age, 30 April 2023, excerpts:


Today there are an estimated 5 billion people online. But those users are not all surfing the same web. Sites accessible in, say, Darwin might be blocked in Delhi.


Meanwhile, internet freedom - access without surveillance or suppression - is down for the 12th year in a row, according to US non-profit Freedom House.


Splintering happens at a content level, Sherman explains, as governments censor the way the internet looks in their countries. But the technological bones of the net are cracking too.


After all, the internet is largely run under the sea, not in the Cloud - data zooms along underwater cables snaking between continents. After the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks revealed that US and British intelligence agencies had been spying on traffic around the world via these cables, Brazil announced it was building its own walled-off net (yet to come online) and teamed up with Europe to start rerouting more undersea cables around the US.


As the great powers fight for technological dominance, nations are kicking out foreign tech companies they take issue with - from the US, Australia and other nations banning China's telecom giant Huawei on network infrastructure builds, to Russia labelling Facebook's parent company, Meta, a terrorist organisation.


Now China's technology ministry has joined with a group of its telecoms, including Huawei, to argue that the internet's underlying architecture needs an update. And they have a radical plan: a new IP they've been floating to the United Nations, which critics say will allow for more government control.


How do countries restrict internet freedom?…..


China has been arresting people for online posts since the early years of the "worldwide web". Today, there is no reliable count of how many have served jail time. Dr Li Wenliang, who first raised the alarm over COVID-19 in Wuhan in 2020, for example, was reprimanded for his social media posts before he died of the virus…..


In countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, people are on death row for tweets and Facebook posts. And some regimes, including China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, deploy armies of trolls and bots to intimidate and harass critics online.


Of course, during times of unrest, some governments simply shut down their internet altogether. Think of Iran's blackout after the death of a young woman in the custody of morality police in 2022. That year, 35 countries pulled the plug a total of 187 times - a record high. But shutdowns come at a cost: lost e-commerce, banking and tax transactions, investor trust. Throttling, where a connection is slowed to the point that it becomes nearly impossible to use, is more subtle. Rights groups say it is deployed in Myanmar, Turkey and Russia.


States can also ask internet companies to remove data. Google lists such requests in its transparency report: it has received 3.5 million since 2011. National security is the most common reason, ahead of copyright claims, defamation and privacy. In the past decade, Russia requested by far the most removals from Google services, at more than 123,000, followed by Turkey at about 14,000 and then India, the US and Brazil in that order, with fewer than 10,000 requests each.


Another censorship ploy is DNS manipulation. DNS stands for domain name system: it's the phonebook of the internet. People think of the net in terms of website addresses, like amazon.com or smh.com.au, but these domain names need to be turned into numbers for machines to understand them. That's the job of the DNS. By manipulating the servers that deliver it in a given territory, a user who searches for YouTube, for example, could be redirected to a censored domestic equivalent.


The internet's DNS architecture is overseen by a Californian non-profit with a very literal name: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Russia wants to create its own DNS, claiming it will need one if it's ever severed from the global internet - as Ukraine asked ICANN to do when Russia invaded it in 2022. (ICANN declined Ukraine's request, saying it was neither technically feasible nor within the group's mission.)


But for Russia, this is a key plank in its ambitions to create its own "sovereign internet". To do that, it's looking at its ally China.


What is the gold standard for restricting the net?


When the internet arrived in China just before the turn of the millennium, the Communist Party was already quietly building the means of controlling it. Under Project Golden Shield, China often turned to Western companies for the technology it needed to funnel internet traffic through chokepoints and spy on what flowed in.


Known as China's Great Firewall, it's the world's most extensive internet censorship tool. As the destabilising power of the internet has become clear - including during the Arab Spring of the early 2010s - the firewall has grown "higher".


China now blocks Western social networks, except for a version of LinkedIn stripped of its newsfeed. Google Search has been barred since 2010, when the US company pulled out over a cyber attack and censorship concerns.


"Censorship covers a broad but ambiguous category of keywords and topics," says the Beijing internet user. "We don't know when and where [we'll] hit the red line."


BACKGROUND


The 2023 Index of Economic Freedom lists Australia in 13th place and classifies it as "mostly free" - a drop of ten ranking positions since 2021 when it was classed amongst "the most free"


The Freedom on the Net 2022 report considered Australia ranks 9th out of 70 countries globally, tying with France and the United States, at the time classifying the country as "free".


Meanwhile, in Australia concerns still remain about our implied freedom of political communication under the Australian Constitution and the general public's right to know.


According to Google Transparency, in 2019 Australian federal or state government officials or agencies (including police and the courts) submitted 9 single item or bloc requests to Google Inc. requesting removal or suppression of material indexed in Google Search or found on Google sites such as YouTube and Blogger or services such as Gmail.


In 2020 there were 13 single item or bloc requests to remove or suppress sent to Google from Australia, another 12 such requests in 2021 and 13 such requests in 2022.


Since 2011 Google Inc. has kept a file categorising reasons given by government officials or agencies for submitting these requests.


In the case of Australia from 2011 through to 2022 these categories ranged from National Security, Government Criticism*, Privacy & Security, Defamation, Hate Speech, Impersonation, Bullying/Harassment, Religious Offence, Violence, Fraud, Adult Content, Obscenity/Nudity, Suicide Promotion, Copyright, Trademark, Regulated Goods and Services, Other and Reason Not Stated.


Google Inc. also records government requests for user information.**


In the years January 2014 to June 2022 Google lists receiving 32,103 individual government requests from Australia for user/s information relating to 38,952 accounts. 



Note


* Requests categorized as “Government criticism” are related to claims of criticism of government policy or politicians in their official capacity. Claims in this Google category are are not made by the members of the general public.

https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/7347744?hl=en


** A variety of laws allow government agencies around the world to request the disclosure of user information for civil, administrative, criminal, and national security purposes. Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all.

https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/9713961#zippy=%2Chow-does-google-handle-government-requests-for-user-information



Saturday 15 April 2023

Phrase of the Week

 

digital euthanasia: the use of a block button to terminate the presence of a troll in your social media timeline. [Simon Homes Ă  Court, 2023]

 

Thursday 19 January 2023

Internet scammers are as active as ever and currently targeting government benefit/allowance/pension recipients in Australia


Services Australia, 9 January 2023:




More and more scammers are creating social media profiles impersonating us and other government agencies.


Scammers will set up accounts to look like Services Australia, myGov, Medicare, Centrelink or even our employees. These accounts will look convincing, but will have little differences in the name or the spelling of the username.


These accounts will often message you saying they can help you, but they’re really trying to steal your information.


How to tell if it’s a scam

We will never ask you to engage via direct message or private chat on social media. These aren’t secure ways to share information.


We won’t ask you to share personal information like your customer reference number (CRN), address, phone number or email address via social media.


We have a list of our verified social media accounts on our website. If the account isn’t on that list, then it isn’t us.


A query on Twitter......





Clarence Valley Independent, 18 January 2023:


A dangerous new scam circulating through emails offering recipients ‘outstanding refunds’ has prompted a warning from the Australian government and Scamwatch.


Email security software company MailGuard issued the alert after intercepting emails posing as official emails from government agency myGov.


With an enticing subject line reading ‘You have an outstanding refund from myGov’ the emails encourage recipients to read further.


Despite being sent from what appears to be myGov, with an Australian Government logo, the website address refund@my.gov.au is the first sign this is a scam, as it is clearly different to the official site https://my.gov.au/ .


The body of the email is impersonalised, addressed to Dear Customer, informing them they have a refund of $640.98 available from myGov.


A link to accept the payment online then takes the user to a fake login page, featuring Australian Government branding to seem authentic, where they are prompted to enter their username and password.


There the user is asked to provide their full name, address, phone number, credit card information and CVV number.


MailGuard said the details would likely be used by cybercriminals.


These details will again be stolen by the criminal and will likely be used for their personal financial gain or sold on the dark web,” MailGuard said in a statement.


Refund scams are a cruel type of attack that target vulnerable individuals who could use the money promised.


Instead, they risk financial and identity fraud.”….


Anyone who receives the suspicious email should delete it immediately without opening any suspicious links.



BACKGROUND


ABC News, 7 November 2022:


Between January and September this year, Australians lost $424.8 million to scammers (that's more than $47 million a month).

It signifies a 90 per cent increase in losses compared to the same period last year.

But those figures are likely only the tip of the iceberg, with just 13 per cent of victims reporting crimes to Scamwatch.


Monday 9 May 2022

Australian Federal Election 2022: after eight and a half years the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government has still not delivered a reliable NBN high speed broadband network


(Cartoon by Mark David / @MDavidCartoons)
INDEPENDENT AUSTRALIA, 16 February 2022














It’s been eight and a half years since the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government came to power and took a wrecking ball to key policy initiatives of the Rudd & Gillard Governments – solely on the basis that these were programs initiated by the Labor Party.


Even in Opposition, one of the Coalition's targets had been the National Broadband Network (NBN).


However, unlike the price on carbon, it could not erase the NBN but was forced to tolerate its existence.


By 23 September 2020 the Morrison Government and NBN Co had declared the initial rollout of a national high speed broadband network complete and fully operational. Apparently the only thing remaining was to plan for future increases in demand.


NBN Co then closed the door and, to all intents and purposes, walked away from most of the issues both it and the Coalition Government had created by using a patchwork of different connection types to supposedly meet the needs of over 25 million people in homes and businesses scattered across est. 7.692 million square kilometres of widely varying terrain.


In 2021 in response to Internet connection problems in his own electorate a member of the Morrison Government, 

Liberal MP for Berowra Julian Leeser, tabled a private members bill - supported by seventeen MPs and senators - which attempted to make NBN Co more accountable, build better infrastructure and improve customer service.


Julian Leeser, Telecommunications, retrieved 9 May 2022:


In response to the Bill, Choice’s Alan Kirkland said: ‘It’s unacceptable for people who live in a major city like Sydney not to have mobile coverage in their home, and even worse in a bushfire-prone area. We find it puzzling that the telco industry, particularly Telstra, has been able to get away with substandard service for so long.’


Professor Alan Fels, former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, agreed that more needs to be done. He said: ‘For many years the telco industry has failed to make access to mobile phone services universally available, even in a number of suburbs. Yet such access is an essential service and vital in emergencies. After waiting for so long, it is clear that the only solution is legislation, backed by sanctions compelling it.’


That particular private member’s bill appears to have withered on the vine.


Also in 2021 a five-member panel conducted a review of regional telecommunications in Australia. One could be forgiven for wondering about the independence of this panel given a former Nationals MP for Cowper and, a business person who worked on the 2013 Nationals election campaign and previously derived consultancy work from a WA Liberal Government are among its members.


It came as no surprise that there were 16 key findings contained in the December 2021 review report, along with twelve recommendations. Although Finding 10 (highlighted below) raised an eyebrow.


Key Findings


1. Increased coordination and investment between the Australian, state and territory governments is needed to address a ‘patchwork quilt’ approach to connectivity in the regions.

Relates to Recommendations: 1, 2


2. Local councils and other regional stakeholders are increasingly expected to facilitate telecommunications service delivery, but are not appropriately resourced to identify connectivity need and support the deployment of suitable solutions.

Relates to Recommendations: 1, 5


3. Supply side issues, including backbone fibre and spectrum access, are barriers to competition and innovation in regional telecommunications markets.

Relates to Recommendations: 1, 2


4. There is an urgent need to consider the future of the Universal Service Obligation in order to provide reliable voice services to rural and remote consumers.

Relates to Recommendations: 7, 8


5. There are significant issues with the maintenance and repair of telecommunications networks, particularly copper landlines, in regional, rural and remote areas.

Relates to Recommendations: 7, 8


6. In instances of natural disasters and emergencies, connectivity is significantly impacted by power and network outages. This reduces access to recovery and support.

Relates to Recommendations: 3


7. Mobile coverage continues to improve, but expanding reliable coverage to priority areas is becoming more difficult.

Relates to Recommendations: 9, 10


8. Increased ongoing demand for data on regional, rural and remote mobile and fixed wireless networks is not always being met, causing network congestion issues.

Relates to Recommendations: 6, 9


9. Although Sky Muster Plus has improved access to data, Sky Muster users are frustrated by insufficient data allowances, high latency and reliability issues.

Relates to Recommendations: 6


10. Current minimum broadband speeds are mostly adequate, but will need to increase over time.

Relates to Recommendations: 8

There is a certain irony in Finding 10 given that less than one month before the report was delivered to the Minister, review panel member Prof. Hugh Bradlow was tweeting the NBN on 1 November 2021 with this complaint: "Hello @NBN_Australia my Internet at Sandy Point, Vic has been out for 3 full days. Instead of all the excuses on your website (and don't blame the power - it is working just fine) can you actually give a committed time to get it fixed?


11. There are emerging technology options to meet the demand for data but their service performance has not yet been validated.

Relates to Recommendations: 4


12. Regional consumers, businesses and local governments experience difficulty in resolving telecommunications issues and providers are not adequately addressing the complex needs of regional users.

Relates to Recommendations: 5, 7


13. Regional consumers, businesses and local government need access to independent advice and improved connectivity literacy to support them in making informed connectivity choices.

Relates to Recommendations: 1, 5


14. Predictive coverage maps and other public information do not accurately reflect on-the-ground telecommunications experience. There is significant misinformation about the availability of 

telecommunications services.

Relates to Recommendations: 5, 9


15. The cost of telecommunications services remains high for vulnerable groups in remote Australia. This is impacting on their access to essential services.

Relates to Recommendations: 11, 12


16. Continued engagement with Indigenous Australians in regional, rural and remote communities is needed to address ongoing issues of access, affordability and digital ability.

Relates to Recommendations: 5, 11, 12


Over a year after the Morrison Government declared the high broadband network a success it was very evident that it was far from having that status.


Indeed, in some quarters opinion had been scathing.


InnovationAus.com: Public Policy and Business Innovation, 4 November 2021:


This week, Telstra claimed its 5G home broadband service will offer average speeds of 378 megabits per second to homes and businesses. In contrast, the average maximum speed on Fibre to the Node is 67 megabits per second, and up to 200,000 premises on the copper NBN can’t even get 25 megabits.


Imagine spending $50 billion on a copper dominated network, that’s not delivering minimum speeds required under law, and already losing its competitiveness.


That is the anti-genius of Liberal-National Party. Deceive. Implement bad technology policy at higher cost. Then spend more money to correct their mistakes. They led us down this path on broadband, and now want to do it with energy.


In 2013 the Liberals produced “modelling” known as the NBN strategic review. This elaborate sham had a sole purpose: provide political cover for abandoning fibre.


This document was then used to claim a multi-technology mix of second-rate technologies was going to be $30 billion cheaper than a full-fibre NBN.


This untruth, repeated at nauseum, relied on two tricks.


The first was pretending the copper dominated network being rolled out costs $41 billion. False. It is costing $57 billion.


The second was to claim the original plan to deploy a fibre network to 93 per cent of Australia would cost $72 billion, rather than the near $50 billion forecast under Labor.


The latter claim, which the Liberals clung to desperately, was decimated in a front-page report in the Sydney Morning Herald in February 2021.


It revealed that in late 2013 the Liberals were explicitly told deploying Fibre to the Premises was dramatically cheaper than what they claimed in public.


That advice was redacted and kept secret for seven years, and it is clear why.


If the redacted costs for fibre, along with real-world interest rates, were fed back into the strategic review “modelling”, the original fibre rollout would have cost around $53 billion.


Notably, Minister Fletcher stopped repeating his $30 billion claim since the unredacted extracts appeared in print, because he always knew it to be false.


The NBN copper rollout has now become a business case liability and looks increasingly uncompetitive against 5G.


The NBN HFC network, which relies on Foxtel Pay TV infrastructure, is arguably the most expensive and unreliable deployment of its sort in the world.


Tens of thousands of Fibre to the Curb modems across the country are also frying during storms because lightning is being conducted over the copper that leads into the home.


The government is now saying Fibre to the Curb technology will not deliver gigabit speeds, despite promising it would only a year ago.


Every fixed-line technology deployed by the Coalition is beset by technical or business case problems, except for Fibre to the Premises – Labor’s original technology of choice.


As the 2022 federal election date drew nearer the Morrison Government on 23 March bestirred itself enough to announce that:


The Morrison Government has welcomed NBN Co’s announcement that 50,000 homes and businesses will be able to order an upgrade to their NBN connection, delivering ultra-fast speeds at no upfront cost.


These are the initial customers to have access to upgrades that will allow 8 million homes, or 75 per cent of premises in the NBN fixed line footprint, to access to ultra-fast speeds by 2023.


Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts, the Hon Paul Fletcher, said the on-demand upgrades will give more Australians access to the fastest broadband speeds available on the NBN.


There is no mention of ongoing costs and pricing which remain an issue.


I am honestly not sure that this is anything more than a typical election year 'announceable' which will sink down into the pile of past unmet expectations raised concerning NBN high speed broadband.


Regardless of whatever media releases the Morrison Government is sending out, the dissatisfaction with the NBN high speed broadband network remains 12 days out from election day…..


The Guardian, 8 May 2022:


The NBN rollout may have been completed, but Richard Proudfoot is still using an old ADSL internet connection, and he has to juggle his Zoom meetings around his partner’s work.


He runs a small IT business from his home in Maleny, on the Sunshine Coast, about 100km north of Brisbane, while his partner is a part-time university lecturer.


Due to their property’s terrain, NBN Co has told him he is not able to connect to fixed wireless or fixed line. While he has the option of satellite, many users have reported poor speeds and reliability. He has stuck with ADSL for the time being because he believes the tree cover and weather would adversely effect his service.


We are very, very dependent on a reliable internet ADSL connection. To make it work for us given the limitations, we schedule internet use based on need ... we cannot do concurrent Zoom meetings so we rearrange diaries in order to cope.”


The Coalition and NBN Co declared the rollout of the then $51bn network complete in 2020. There are now 12.1m homes able to connect, and 8.5m homes on the NBN.


The high-speed network was meant to resolve the digital divide in Australia, but two years on from its completion there remains a stark difference between the haves and have-nots; those who have a decent internet service and those still waiting or suffering from poor speeds and reliability on their NBN service.


The Liberal MP Julian Leeser wrote a scathing review of the NBN in a submission to the federal government’s regional telecommunications review last year, describing it as “too slow with countless delays”.


Leeser’s northern Sydney electorate, Berowra, is a mix of suburban and semi-regional locations, meaning his constituents are living with the spectrum of NBN technologies, from fixed to wireless and satellite.


There is too much variability in the quality of coverage across the various NBN technologies,” he said.


The pandemic forced many people to work from home and rely on their home internet more than ever before.


Leeser said that teachers had been forced to work out of McDonald’s car parks to leech the wifi for online classes, people were unable to work from home or undertake telehealth appointments, and some had even been forced to move out of the area due to their poor NBN connection…...


Many Guardian Australia readers raised problems with the project when asked what their major concerns were ahead of this month’s federal election.


One reader, Cate, who lives in Killarney Heights in the Sydney electorate of Warringah, missed out on full fibre or cable that some nearby suburbs have access to.


She says she was originally connected via the Optus internet cable but was moved over to fibre-to-the-node (FttN) on the NBN.


Using Optus cable we rarely had dropouts. I could count on one hand the number of times over five years that we lost internet for any noticeable length of time,” she says.


Now she says they experience daily interruptions.


Our modem takes five to 10 minutes to reconnect so this can often mean at least 25 to 50 minutes a day of disruption to our service and this is still considered acceptable by NBN and they will do nothing to fix it.”


She says she is rarely able to get the top speeds promised. In speed test results Cate provided to Guardian Australia taken between 2pm and 3pm on a weekday, the results ranged from 1.3Mbps to 40Mbps, compared to 100Mbps on her previous Optus cable…..


Around 119,000 premises that are connected to the NBN via FttN still can’t get the minimum 25Mbps download and 5Mbps upload speeds. Due to the ageing copper and environmental conditions, FttN connections will continue to get worse over time.


In February, the NBN CEO, Stephen Rue, admitted the bit rate – the number of bits that can be transferred across the network per second – would degrade between 2% and 4% every year on average across the 4m FttN connections.


The other looming factor is people switching the NBN off. Customers frustrated with the NBN might look to 5G or another service like Elon Musk’s Starlink, and threaten the ability of the network to make a return on the taxpayer investment.…...


Something to think about standing in line at the polling booths on Saturday 21 May 2022.