The news that Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok is not approved for use on devices owned by Australia’s Department of Defence, as the ABC reported today, is hardly a surprise. Defence’s default position on what apps …
Articles by: "Fergus Ryan"
In the 18 months the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was busily working away on its 623-page opus on digital platforms, Chinese-owned app upstart TikTok grew a global audience of over 700 million. With no …
Considering Australia had only 45 seconds to deliver its recommendations on China’s human rights situation at the UN review of the country’s record in Geneva yesterday, our diplomats managed to pack quite a lot in. …
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) has long been undervalued; elbowed out by sexier-sounding ‘secret intelligence’, it has also often been overlooked. But what is intelligence? For the answer, let’s go straight to the wisdom of the Middle …
Anyone watching Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress in April following the Cambridge Analytica scandal would be forgiven for thinking US politicians shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near tech policy. The questions the mostly grey-haired representatives fielded …
The world This week, the summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong‑un overwhelmingly captured the world’s attention. The two leaders signed a joint statement, President Trump followed with a lengthy press conference and The …
In the three months’ worth of data I collected from the top 10 foreign embassies in China—measured by follower numbers for my just-released report Weibo diplomacy and censorship in China—the Australian embassy’s account was censored just …
Julie Bishop was playing a dangerous game when she privately blamed the Australian media’s ‘negative reports’ for adversely affecting Australia–China relations during her meeting with her Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of the G20 in Argentina …
The Australian Defence Department has banned staff and serving personnel from downloading the Chinese social media and messaging app WeChat onto their work phones. ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre staff sat down today to discuss …
To watch the Chinese censorship apparatus working in overdrive in the past 48 hours has been to see it reach its reductio ad absurdum in real time. So sensitive are the proposed changes to the …
China’s ambition to shape the future of the internet received a helpful boost last week, courtesy of the CEOs and top executives from the most influential companies on the planet, including Apple, Google and Facebook. …
At the turn of the millennium, Bill Clinton quipped that trying to control the internet in China would be like ‘trying to nail jello to a wall’. Seventeen years later, it’s now clear that the …