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Summer is awesome, we all know this. Me? I’m a big summer guy. The clocks change, the temps increase, the days stretch and I start thinking about beach trips, Christmas holidays, diving into my swimming pool and getting the barbecue fired up. But this time it feels like summer is tinged with a mild anxiety. In short, I’m living in fear of my mortal enemy: The Sun. Because despite being a pale Scotsman, I’ve always been fairly lackadaisical about the impacts of UV rays. This has resulted in me getting regularly sunburnt in ways that scale from the hilarious to genuinely alarming. Yes, you should continue to buy the sunscreens that are currently on the shelves But now things have changed. Now I’m thinking a little bit more about how…
The federal government has put forward a proposal to make it illegal for big supermarkets to charge too much for groceries. The Treasury last month finished consulting on draft legislation that would hit large retailers with penalties for supplying products at “excessive prices”. The government says a price could be deemed excessive if it was significantly and persistently above what a large retailer would be able to charge if it was faced with workable competition in the relevant grocery product market. The plan comes after the ACCC last year conducted an inquiry into Australia’s supermarket sector and found it to be dominated by Coles and Woolworths, with significant barriers to competitors entering and expanding on a large scale. The commission noted Coles and Woolworths were among the most profitable supermarket…
As we collectively watch the AI-generated horse bolt further and further into the distance in stunning can’t-even-tell-it’s-AI-anymore clarity, you’d be forgiven for being more than a little concerned about what’s in store for us humble, fallible, exhausted human beings. You’ve heard of drip pricing, surge pricing, maybe even dynamic pricing, but what about surveillance pricing? Obviously, it’s not good. If you don’t want your day ruined, now’s a good time to stop reading and move on to the next article. Surveillance pricing refers to the harvesting and analysis of your personal data, with the help of AI, to give you a personalised price. How helpful of AI to work out the exact maximum that you’re willing to pay for a product or service, and the optimal way to sell it to…
It hasn’t been a good look for Australia’s second-largest telco. In the Optus outage of 28 September 2025, nine triple-0 calls reportedly failed to get through, and three people reportedly died after failing to connect to triple-0 during a bigger Optus outage that occurred ten days earlier. In 2023, a nationwide Optus outage left around 10 million people without service and 2000 calls to triple-0 unanswered. In October 2025, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) called on the federal government to make a reliable triple-0 system a condition of Optus’s licence to operate. Later that month, the Australian Communications and Media Authority approved the registration of new rules to strengthen Australia’s triple-0 ecosystem. The new Emergency Calling – Network and Mobile Phone Testing Industry Code requires telcos to provide…
An initiative to protect Australians from SMS impersonation scams has been delayed and is now expected to come into effect in July 2026. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) hadpreviously announced the SMS Sender ID Register would be up and running by December 2025. Advocacy group the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network says the delay gives regulators and businesses the extra time they need to make sure the register is implemented properly. A sender ID is the name that can appear at the top of a text message thread to tell you who it’s from. Companies and government agencies often use them when communicating with consumers, but scammers have been able to use technology to send malicious messages under the same IDs. Under the register initiative, organisations wanting to keep…
In a groundbreaking October court judgement, Australian February 2022 that resulted in the personal medical information of 223,000 people potentially falling into the hands of scammers. It was the first time a business had paid a penalty in a privacy violation case brought by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), which oversees the Act. Most of the penalty ($4.2 million) was for failing to protect the data in the first place. The breach was a major cybercrime incident, yet ACL dragged its heels – first by failing to investigate whether a data breach had occurred and then by taking too long to inform the OAIC once the business knew its systems had been infiltrated. “This outcome represents an important turning point in the enforcement of privacy law in…
