New from me: Would you trust OpenAI's ChatGPT with your sensitive medical data? 🤔 The company says ChatGPT Health is 'not intended for diagnosis or treatment', but Australian health literacy expert @kirstenmccaffery.bsky.social worries some users may overly trust its advice. Full story up on IA:

New: Toyota says it is developing new security accessories after seven men were charged with stealing 60 Toyota vehicles from the Brisbane region using a high-tech security exploit. Full story on @information-age.bsky.social: ia.acs.org.au/article/2026...

From a new smartphone with echoes of the past, to classic plastic toys gaining cool new electronics— here are the CES gadgets we think you should know about. 👀 Read more: ia.acs.org.au/article/2026...

Neither of them is a cat, we promise. Story by @lennyeggsbenny.bsky.social:

The Communication Workers Union says Optus bosses need to be held responsible for September 18's Triple Zero outage, instead of more junior staff. "... the fundamental ways in which Optus operates needs to be heavily scrutinised and those at the top need to be held accountable,” they told me.

One example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.

Tesla is no longer the world’s highest selling battery electric vehicle maker after Chinese rival BYD overtook the company in annual sales for the first time, according to sales figures reported on Friday. Read more: ia.acs.org.au/article/2026...

Ex-Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun has Lunch with the FT and in one of those instances so rare that you know he didn't sign an NDA, says exactly why as.ft.com/r/e503690d-8...

CSIRO says it welcomes a $233m funding boost announced by the federal government, but maintains it still needs to cut more than 300 full-time roles. The secretary of its Staff Association says the suggestion that a $233m boost will not prevent a single job cut “just fails to pass the pub test”.

⚠️ TWENTY TWENTY SIX ⚠️

After previously trying to get out of a fine in Australia by arguing that it was not Twitter, X is now arguing in the US that it is, in fact, Twitter.

With another year of technology news now behind us, it’s time to look back at Information Age’s most popular stories of 2025 — as read by you. 👀 Read more: ia.acs.org.au/article/2025...

Browsing Shutterstock this morning and someone has already made weird AI images of a fake Bondi Beach memorial. The company says it "does not review AI-generated content for compliance with Shutterstock’s content compliance standards", but AI must not be used to generate false or harmful imagery. 🤷‍♂️

Kids can see stuff on most of the platforms without being logged in, just quietly

New from me: Australia's medical regulator the TGA has approved the Apple Watch's hypertension notification feature, which detects signs of high blood pressure, for domestic use. The feature was announced in September and has already been available in more than 150 other countries for months.

Anyone else had this email from OpenAI for apparently not using ChatGPT enough? The “no pressure” bit is really something.

This was one of the most confusing Senate committee hearings I have ever watched or covered. It can pretty much be summed up in this quote from TPG CEO Iñaki Berroeta: “I have no idea, I don’t know.”

lol www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8UvLHp5/

New: @microsoft.com won't say how much its Australian business, enterprise and government customers will see their Microsoft 365 subscription prices rise by on 1 July 2026 (which it's using new AI features to justify). But it has detailed its US price hikes "to give customers ample time to plan". 👇

Despite not being designated under Australia’s under-16s social media ban, Bluesky is now asking local users to verify their age to access certain features.

OpenAI will be the first major customer of a new $7 billion NextDC hyperscale AI data centre facility to be built in the Western Sydney suburb of Eastern Creek, the two companies announced on Friday. Read more: ia.acs.org.au/article/2025...

Please help me help Google understand that AI should not replace our headlines? www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

New: Netflix declined to comment on why mobile casting had been removed when contacted by @information-age.bsky.social, but a spokesperson suggested the feature was no longer widely used by its subscribers. Details: ia.acs.org.au/article/2025...

+ Overall including other media, the government is spending around $10 million to advertise the under-16s social media ban between October and 20 December — which is only 10 days after the ban begins.

A West Australian IT worker and father has been jailed for at least five years after using fake 'free Wi-Fi' networks to steal intimate photos and videos from the personal accounts of women. Read more: ia.acs.org.au/article/2025...

Some personal news: I just hit a new record for the number of emails received about one single PR pitch: Nine emails in a seven day period. 😓 (And yes, it was about AI. Of course it was about AI)

Exclusive: Did Elon Musk’s X forget to pay its membership fees to Australian tech lobby group DIGI until we at @information-age.bsky.social got in touch? It certainly seems that way. 👀 The social media platform had been stripped of its membership in June “due to unpaid membership fees”, DIGI said.

Exclusive: Did Elon Musk’s X forget to pay its membership fees to Australian tech lobby group DIGI until we at @information-age.bsky.social got in touch? It certainly seems that way. 👀 The social media platform had been stripped of its membership in June “due to unpaid membership fees”, DIGI said.

New: Ben Greene, the co-founder and ex-CEO of Australian defence technology company EOS (Electro Optic Systems), is being sued by ASIC. The markets regulator alleges he delayed disclosing knowledge that the firm’s 2022 earnings would be lower than forecast. Story on @information-age.bsky.social:

New: Australia will establish its own AI Safety Institute in 2026, the government says. 💻 AI experts have welcomed the move, but the Opposition says Labor is sending "mixed messages" about how it plans to regulate the tech. Details on @information-age.bsky.social: ia.acs.org.au/article/2025...

I tried Temu's $11.60 AI live translation earbuds so you don't have to.

In 2019 Meta did causal research looking at the effects of randomly asking Facebook users to stop using the platform for a month. After the first week of the study, results showed that leaving the platform was good for people’s mental health. Meta then shut the project down.

Shares in Australian-American defence technology company DroneShield dropped 20 per cent on Wednesday when its American CEO resigned, just a week after its value tanked when its Australian CEO and other senior figures sold tens of millions of dollars' worth of stock. Read more:

Good job, YouTube ads algorithm. Good job.

I first saw Microsoft's TV ad about "The computer you can talk to" during an NFL game. So I spent a week talking to the Copilot AI in Windows 11. Surely, it must be easy to replicate the specific tasks Microsoft wants millions of people to see... Right? RIGHT?? www.theverge.com/report/82244...

New: CSIRO staff will take part in meetings to discuss the potential merging of several of the agency’s research units. News of CSIRO's latest job cuts comes just days after the heads of its digital and manufacturing research arms — which have both seen job losses — left the agency simultaneously.

I don’t want to seem out of touch but I don’t actually understand the economy anymore.

The Australian government says it is moving ahead with imposing a ‘digital duty of care’ on Big Tech companies such as Google, Meta, TikTok, and X, opening public consultation on Friday after delaying the proposed legislation earlier this year. Read more: ia.acs.org.au/article/2025...

New: The Australian government’s workforce is facing “a potential digital talent shortfall of more than 8,000 people in the next five years”, according to its Digital Transformation Agency. Minister for the Public Service, Katy Gallagher, told me “the DTA’s report reinforces what we already know...

Had the pleasure of chatting on the Influencing Insider podcast about my road to tech journalism, how @information-age.bsky.social works and why you shouldn't email your PR pitch seven times. Available at all good podcast stores: open.spotify.com/episode/379N... podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/i...

The Australian government's AI plan for federal workers has dropped. Also in this story: - the @cpsu.org.au's concerns about potential job losses and impact on government services from AI - some comments from Sovereign Australia AI and US software giant Salesforce

More on the iPhone Pocket here, including @jfingas.bsky.social's excellent point about the "cultural element" behind Apple's move into crossbody phone holders. 👇

So the iPod Sock is back - but it’s called the iPhone Pocket, it’s really long, it starts at $US150, and it was somehow “inspired by the concept of a piece of cloth”. For a second I had to double-check it wasn’t April Fool’s Day. www.apple.com/newsroom/202...

Filling out a banking form that asks for my occupation, and in what I am choosing to consider as a sign of the times, "journalist" is not a selectable option, but "cryptocurrency" is

The wildest part of Tesla's shareholder event last week? When Elon Musk argued the company's Optimus robot “will actually eliminate poverty”.

this is the craziest thing I've read in a long time???? Meta projected that 10% of its revenue last year, $16 billion, came from scams. Meta intentionally charges the scammers MORE and knows that people who click on scams are more likely to see more of them www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Exclusive: The head of CSIRO's Data61, Dr Jon Whittle, and the head of CSIRO’s manufacturing research unit, Dr Marcus Zipper, will leave their roles simultaneously on Friday, 14 November. Full story on @information-age.bsky.social: ia.acs.org.au/article/2025...

Dang.

Coming soon to a podcast repository near you. 👇

Microsowwy.