DOGE staffer calling himself 'big balls' provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show

 Don’t forget that the line between what is legal and what is illegal shifts all the time, depending on who’s in power

The View from Here Air Mail. “Donald and Melania Trump’s foray into crypto may be the biggest financial scandal in presidential history—and it’s happening in plain sight.”

DOGE staffer calling himself 'big balls' provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show

Rest Super plays into its leakers’ hands A “confidential email” telling staff to stop leaking to the media naturally resulted in more of that very activity

There are few better ways to ensure a secret gets out than telling people it’s a secret.

It was brave for Rest Super’s chief people officer Amy Murrell to do just that in an email to the retirement fund’s entire workplace on Monday, which begged them to stop leaking to the media.

There had been “increased media coverage and scrutiny of super funds”, she wrote in the “confidential” all-staff email.

True, but this is a level of oversight that’s entirely warranted for the $4.2 trillion sector. It’s a wonder that super funds have gone under the radar while banks and insurers have copped sustained heat from APRA and ASIC, but the compulsory nature of super and close relationships with the Labor Party help.

Now, the party is over and Rest (chaired by Labor heavyweight James Merlino) is finding out the hard way. The prudential watchdog is paying them a visit this week over risk-management concerns. The corporate watchdog says its customer service for unwell or recently deceased members and their families is among the worst in the sector. The fund has an internal plan known as “Project Scarlet” to fix this.

And the public – and most importantly, the fund’s members – know about it. Not because Rest told them, but because staff members told this masthead…

This included ensuring “appropriate levels of confidentiality internally” and limited sharing of information with colleagues. The cosy industry super clubno longer trusts its own.

Viktoriia Roshchyna set out to report on claims that Russia was operating a network of unofficial detention centers in occupied Ukraine

 But in August 2023 she disappeared into one herself. For months, her whereabouts remained unknown

Inside China’s machinery of repression — and how it crushes dissent around the world

Interviews with more than 100 victims in 23 countries, along with internal government documents, reveal the sinister tactics China uses to silence critics beyond its borders.

 What We Can Learn from Water, a Great Force of Life The Tyee

YouTube at 20. The Video-Sharing Site That Conquered the Internet

TechSpot: “YouTube is a massive competitor to TV, an engagement beast, uploading as much new video every five minutes as the 2,400 hours BBC Studios produces in a whole year. 

The 26-year-old YouTube star MrBeast earned US$85 million in 2024 from videos – ranging from live Call of Duty play-alongs to handing out 1,000 free cataract operations. As a business, YouTube is now worth some $455 billion. 

That is a spectacular 275 times return on the $1.65 billion Google paid for it in 2006. For the current YouTube value, Google could today buy British broadcaster ITV about 127 times. YouTube has similar gross revenue to streaming giant Netflix – but without the financial inconvenience of making shows, since most of the content is uploaded for free.

• YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly active users, or 40% of the entire global population outside China, where it is blocked. It is also now one of the biggest music streaming sites, and the second biggest social network (to Facebook), plus a paid broadcast channel for 100 million subscribers.
• YouTube has built a video Library of Babel, its expansive shelves lined eclectically with Baby Shark Dance, how to fix septic tanks, who would win a shooting war between Britain and France … and quantum physics.
• The site has taken over global children’s programming to the point where Wired magazine pointed out that the future of this genre actually “isn’t television.” But there are flaws, too: it has been described as a conduit for disinformation by fact checkers.
• So how did all that happen? Eight key innovations have helped YouTube achieve its success…”