Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · 1d

The latest chapter in the ANOM story, in which the FBI and AFP deployed a fake secure phone system to spy on organised crime. The Australian High Court has unanimously ruled the operation legal and data collected can be used as evidence in prosecutions www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

High Court endorses use of encrypted phone app to monitor crime figures

The High Court has ruled on the use of information gathered through the AN0M app, which was developed by the Australian Federal Police for surveillance.

www.abc.net.au

Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · 1d

This is a feature, not a bug. Rare events are, by definition, more informative than common ones.

Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · 2d

Congratulations to you, Ally, and to TOPLAS. Bright times ahead

Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · 12d

There’s a reason that human-to-human touch produces such strong emotional reactions, that the slightest unintended brush between humans elicits “sorry”. Humanoids will surely be unsafe to operate with humans absent such fine sensing.

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Reposted by Toby Murray

Tim Miller @tmiller-uq.bsky.social · 13d

The deadline for my postdoc on scalable clinical decision support is closing in 1 week: 4 October (Australian Eastern standard Time). Please share with anyone that you think would be interested

Tim Miller @tmiller-uq.bsky.social · 23d

I'm hiring again! Please share. I'm recruiting a postdoc research fellow in human-centred AI for scalable decision support. Join us to investigate how to balance scalability and human control in medical decision support. Closing date: 4 October (AEST).
uqtmiller.github.io/recruitment/

Recruitment

uqtmiller.github.io

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Reposted by Toby Murray

Mike Dodds @m-dodds.bsky.social · 22d

I wrote about Claude Code, which to my absolute astonishment is quite good at theorem proving. For people who don't know theorem proving, this is like spending your whole life building F1 engines and getting lapped by a Tesco's shopping trolley www.galois.com/articles/cla...

Claude Can (Sometimes) Prove It

www.galois.com

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Reposted by Toby Murray

Tim Miller @tmiller-uq.bsky.social · 23d

I'm hiring again! Please share. I'm recruiting a postdoc research fellow in human-centred AI for scalable decision support. Join us to investigate how to balance scalability and human control in medical decision support. Closing date: 4 October (AEST).
uqtmiller.github.io/recruitment/

Recruitment

uqtmiller.github.io

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Reposted by Toby Murray

Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 22d

My university is now on Bluesky 💙

University of Melbourne @unimelb.bsky.social · 23d

Hello 👋

We're the official #UniMelb account!

Follow us for news, updates and information about UniMelb. For now, enjoy the blue skies over our Parkville campus 💙

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · 25d

Neat paper showing that automated bug fixing systems can be manipulated into introducing security flaws (eg. reverting CVE fixes) into your code. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05372

arxiv.org

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · 26d

You’d think that the car company run by the bloke who runs a rocket company would have learned from Apollo 1

Dana Hull @danahull.bsky.social · 27d

🧵
1/ What is this photograph?

It's a custom-made mask fitted for a software engineer in northern Virginia who suffered third-degree burns on her face when the Tesla Model Y she was in crashed and caught on fire. A heroic crowd of bystanders could not open the doors

Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · 28d

I’m hindsight it will seem obvious I think that perhaps the most under appreciated factor that kept memory safety so dangerous for so long was that no single company had control over the hardware, OS and compiler.

halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 28d

I have often stated that well-implemented memory tagging will be a game changer for memory corruptions. And it seems that with the next iPhone it's finally here: security.apple.com/blog/memory-...

Blog - Memory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices - Apple Security Research

Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort spanning half a decade that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon hardware with our adv...

security.apple.com

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Sep 9

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Reposted by Toby Murray

Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · Sep 3

My petition to the 🇦🇺 Australian government: make part-time PhD students' stipends tax exempt!

📋 Read and sign here: www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...
⏰ Deadline: October 1

e-petitions

www.aph.gov.au

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Aug 28

Just as with social media in 2010s, the current environment seems to grant new technologies a presumption of innocence when it comes to harms. We need high quality evidence; or risk blunt regulation eg UK Online Safety Acy, AU Socmed ban etc

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Aug 28

I agree with the conclusion but quibble:
1. The lack of evidence linking to ChatGPT in the case of the VC’s purported public psychosis
2. The correlational evidence in the linked RCT being used to argue causation
3. Overly simplistic solutions like aborting conversations about suicide

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Aug 27

❤️

Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Aug 27

Thoughtful reflections on how universities can and must adapt to the rise of generative AI, including by returning to ancient practices. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...

Left unaddressed is how scalable online education will survive the rise of AI without sacrificing academic integrity

Opinion | Students Hate Them. Universities Need Them. The Only Real Solution to the A.I. Cheating Crisis.

www.nytimes.com

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Reposted by Toby Murray

Tom Eastman @tom.eastman.nz · Aug 26

Can't even build death star anymore, because of ewok

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Aug 26

And Australia

Reposted by Toby Murray

Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · Aug 26

A university and an academic publisher walk into a bar.

The publisher orders a pint, sells it back to the university, asks the barman to pay the bill.

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Aug 26

Given that so much of what passes for professional boils down to looks and feel, it’s not surprising that GenAI should be used to produce professional reports

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Aug 26

Let’s be real. If one wants proper, rigorous research, then one asks a university and not a consultancy firm. I’m not sure that GenAI is materially damaging the quality of the average consultancy report. Meanwhile … www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Consultancy firms win nearly $1bn in Australian contracts in past year despite new outsourcing rules, research shows

Greens senator Barbara Pocock says figures do not match Labor government’s rhetoric about cutting back on use of consultants

www.theguardian.com

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Aug 23

A key corollary is that big mistakes early in a chat can lead to compounding errors later on. This is perfectly exemplified by the scenario in the linked story: a sycophantic early response that indulges a user’s false hopes, on which the LLM repeatedly doubles down as the chat progresses.

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Aug 23

Put another way: the longer the chat (or the more “memories” it draws on from prior chats) the more likely the LLM is high on its own bullshit.

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · Aug 23

A forensic article on LLM induced hallucinations. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t... A much simpler explanation is that errors *accumulate* in long LLM conversations because the LLM’s next answer deep in a chat is a literal function of all of the prior bullshit it has generated so far.

Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens.

www.nytimes.com

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