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2260. OpenAI learns about irony, telcos sharing coverage and Aussie-led company funds deepfake porn website

Plus: The first ever ‘cyber-farting’ UK court case

Author

Cam Wilson
January 30, 2025

Issue 2260 - Thursday 30 January, 2025

Hey! If you can see this it’s because this should (fingers crossed) only be visible to non-current subscribers.

I’m going to occasionally send out an edition for free, just in case you want to rethink about signing up which you can do here.

Enjoy! CW

(P.S. If you ever want to get in touch about anything, I’m here)

In Today’s Issue

  • OpenAI: Don’t steal from me, that’s my move

  • Telcos sharing because of the carrot and the stick

  • Australian-led company funds world’s worst deepfake porn site

  • The first ever ‘cyber-farting’ UK court case

  • Cheap Anko bluetooth speaker, Casio watches, amaysim SIM start pack, DJI Osmo Action 4, Galax GeForce RTX 4060, Samsung Galaxy tablet, BYO GPU PCs and Lenovo ThinkPads.

The News

OpenAI complains about DeepSeek theft, learns about irony

Sorry to write about DeepSeek again but how could I resist? OpenAI ‘reviewing’ allegations that its AI models were used to make DeepSeek (The Guardian). Alternative headline: Thief: ‘Someone Stole From Me. Help!’ Beyond revelling in the schadenfreude, there are few things to note: Firstly, Sam Altman isn’t positioning for a copyright infringement lawsuit. No, OpenAI is trying to get the United States government do something — tighten trade restrictions? ban DeepSeek? — a signal that was immediately picked up by Trump’s “AI Czar” David Sacks (Bloomberg, $). The second part is that while DeepSeek probably “distilled” — or in common parlance, yoinked — from OpenAI, it also appears to have legitimately come up its own “genuine and impressive innovations” that others can build on too, according to competing AI company Anthropic CEO’s interesting blog post (Dario Amodei). In all the excitement, DeepSeek was the target of a cyberattack (Reuters) and a leak (WIRED, $); while their Chinese compatriots at Alibaba got in on the fun and released its own Qwen 2.5 AI model that it claims outperforms everyone else (Reuters).

Telcos sharing because of the carrot and the stick

TPG’s network sharing arrangement with Optus goes live today which means that Vodafone’s coverage will reportedly “double” (The Australian, $). The raw numbers: the shared network will increase coverage from 400,000sq km to more than 1,000,000sq km which is supposed to cover 98.4% of the population, says TPG CEO Iñaki Berroeta. Speaking of sharing, telcos are reportedly working on the ability to temporarily serve customers from telcos if their carrier’s coverage has been interrupted by a natural disaster or technical faults (Information Age). This already happens in the US where their Federal Communications Commission requires telcos to do it. Apparently the federal government is “weighing” up making it mandatory here too.

Australian-led company funds world’s worst deepfake porn site

The internet’s foremost platform for non-consensual deepfaked sexually explicit content is MrDeepFakes. It gets millions of views every month and is a massive facilitator in the lucrative online trade of deepfake pornographic content of almost exclusively women. Creators of deepfake porn use it to host samples of their work and offer longer version or bespoke content for sale elsewhere. The website, whose ownership is unknown, makes money off this mass violation by selling memberships. Investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat published a report (Bellingcat)today that identified one of the website’s major advertisers as a Australian-led “AI girlfriend” chatbot service called Candy.ai. Last year, the AFR revealed former ASX-listed pet-sitting business Mad Paws CEO Alexis Soulopoulos was the chief of Candy.ai’s company EverAI (AFR, $), which reportedly has millions of users who pay up to US$100 a year to create a custom AI woman who chats, speaks and shares images. In response to the Bellingcat investigation, EverAI blamed its affiliate marketing program and said it had directed MrDeepFakes to remove its ads. It really sucks that the future was supposed to be hover cars but we got this instead.

Oh, Also

Plus: The first ever ‘cyber-farting’ UK court case

Sometimes I’ll summarise something for y’all, but there are times when I can’t do the source material justice. This is one of those times.

Read ‘Woman in court for aggressively farting at her boyfriend’s ex’ (Metro). It’s impossibly difficult to pick out one quote because each line is a banger, but I think it’s share the stakes of the court case: “The case is believed to be the first instance of legal action against ‘cyber-farting’ in the UK.”

Bargains

The End

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