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A broadcasting loophole means Australia-based fans of the English Premier League (EPL) are subjected to numerous betting ads for offshore gambling firms that would otherwise be prohibited from display on Australian screens.
That is the basis of a complaint made to a media watchdog against the broadcaster, Optus Sport, reports The Guardian.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is probing a complaint against Optus by journalist and gambling researcher, Jack Kerr. He is alleging gambling ads featured in every single minute of play during a Premier League soccer game in December 2023, when Aston Villa hosted Manchester City.
Optus Sport has held the rights to EPL games in Australia since 2016 with the company recently securing an extension to the deal, having paid around $600m to retain the lucrative rights through to the end of the 2027-28 season.
The broadcaster enjoys a subscriber base of over one million customers in Australia for its streaming service.

Mr Kerr detailed in his complaint, “interactive gambling companies are one of the most frequently seen products on these pitch-side billboards” and the clubs “typically show ads for multiple betting companies throughout a match”.
It is understood the pitch-side advertising boards are controlled and managed by the Premier League clubs and can be tailored for different markets, in a mix of collective league sponsors and specific club agreements.
What are the gambling restrictions in Australia?
In Australia, the Interactive Gambling Act does not allow offshore gambling companies to offer bets to people based in Australia and further prohibits the promotion of their services. Crucially, an exemption is offered if an advert is “an accidental or incidental accompaniment to the publication of other matter”.
The latter points to the crux of the position adopted by Optus, with its spokesperson stressing the company “complies with the relevant Australian laws in its coverage of all rights and content. Australian gambling advertising laws contain exemptions for pitch-side advertising”.

“It is standard in sports rights agreements to be required to transmit the original feeds in full, without editing, and Optus Sport’s arrangements are no different,” they continued.
“Optus Sport is prohibited by the rights owners from replacing any pitch-side ads using virtual advertising or otherwise.”

Gambling companies pour millions into the EPL due to its mammoth global reach, with the league broadcast to an estimated 800 million homes in around 190 countries.
Last year, Premier League clubs agreed to end primary shirt sponsorship deals with gambling brands as of the end of the 2025/26 campaign.
At present, eight of the 20 clubs in the competition have betting companies as front-of-shirt sponsors, with the endorsements representing a collective value of around £60m (A$116m) per year.

Image: Premier League/X

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Threads is introducing a new feature to allow users to store posts for later access in a move that brings it in line with other platforms.
The Meta-owned social media network is rolling out Save on Threads, a similar function to bookmarking posts on Instagram, as well as rival platform X.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has been a prominent voice on Threads through its formative stage and with his close involvement in developing the app, he confirmed yesterday the new feature would “broadly” be available immediately.
If you want to check if you can use it yet, you will be able to store content by tapping on the three-dot menu in the top-right corner. From here, the Save button will bookmark the post to be used at a later point.
If you cannot see these options, your profile will soon have access.
It effectively works in the same way as Instagram and X (still colloquially known as Twitter) with the exception that there is no bookmark icon underneath posts.
What improvements have been made to Threads?
Coming from the same parent company, Threads is closely related to Instagram, including a similar design appearance, but the save function on Instagram benefits from its depth. Collections is the place where you can store posts and reels in separate folders, whilst Collaborative Collections enables users to join forces with friends or colleagues to save content for a common purpose.
With Threads only just launched in July 2023, the platform is still in its fledgling phase and ahead of its first anniversary, there are various development works in action as Meta seeks to boost its appeal.
Head of Instagram Mosseri said they were working on two “most requested” features in the form of a native camera button and a ‘save post’ motion by swiping down on the screen.
Image: Julio Lopez/Pexels
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Organizations face endless challenges, especially now when everything revolves around tech. These range from sophisticated cyber threats to commonly ignored compliance requirements. However, amidst the rapidly evolving cyber threat realm, organizations must protect sensitive company data for various benefits. Being cyber-secure and having a healthy cybersecurity posture preserves and improves customer trust and business continuity.
How to Protect and Strengthen Your Cybersecurity Posture
One of the key components of a comprehensive organizational cybersecurity posture is attack surface management (ASM). This revolves around looking for and finding ways to stop potential cybersecurity issues. Below are a few ways attack surface management improves your company’s cybersecurity.
1. Risk Reduction
ASM plays a significant role in reducing cybersecurity risks. Attach surface management helps address various vulnerabilities within your organization’s digital footprint. It allows your cybersecurity teams to find and prioritize vulnerabilities. As such, they get ample time to stop these risks at an early stage.
Reducing the attack surface, which is the entry point that attackers exploit, significantly lowers the likelihood of successful attacks. ASM tools continuously scan and assess your organizational digital footprints for vulnerabilities such as weak security controls and software flaws.
Attack surface management also plays an important role in patch management. Identifying digital systems that require updates ensures timely patches and updates are made. This closes the gaps and reduces the likelihood that present vulnerabilities get exploited. Generally, systematically identifying and prioritizing system vulnerabilities and weaknesses in attack surfaces minimizes organizational exposure to cyber threats.
2. Incident Response
Incident response is an important cybersecurity element. Having an incident response strategy reduces the time it takes to respond and bounce back from an infiltration. Attack surface management helps businesses detect and respond to cybersecurity issues effectively by providing in-depth visibility into their vulnerabilities in the following ways:

Early detection: Cybersecurity professionals conducting ASM continually monitor the organization’s attack surface for signs of compromise or unauthorized access.
Threat hunting: ASM empowers cybersecurity teams to conduct proactive threat hunting for signs of compromise or malicious activities. ASM tools help organizations identify hidden threats and emerging attack patterns.
Incident triage and prioritization: Through ASM, organizational incident response teams can triage and prioritize cybersecurity incidents based on potential impact on company data and business operations.

Integrating attack surface management into the incident response process helps organizations adopt a proactive approach to cybersecurity. This allows for a coordinated response to potential and emerging threats.
3. Improved Resilience
Improved resilience is the other key outcome of proficient attack surface management. Better resilience makes it possible for organizations to withstand and recover faster from cybersecurity incidents. Attack surface management involves continuous monitoring of your organization’s digital assets to identify and address weaknesses.
Introducing measures that adapt to arising cybersecurity threats helps organizations remain resilient to cyber threats. ASM also provides a solid base for agile incident response. Security teams can quickly pick up and respond to potential threats. This significantly minimizes the impact of successful attacks on your business operations.
Organizations can effectively improve their resilience against threats by embracing ASM in their cybersecurity strategies. Adopting these proactive measures improves your ability to withstand and recover from an attack.
4. Cost Saving
An effective ASM also has cost-saving benefits to businesses and organizations. For starters, a good ASM helps identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities in your organization’s digital infrastructure. This prevents breaches and incidents that cost your organization in terms of remediation efforts, legal fees, and damaged reputation.
That aside, a proper ASM reduces downtime and disruption. Cybersecurity incidents like DDoS attacks significantly disrupt business operations. This leads to downtime and disrupts productivity. Attack surface management minimizes the occurrence of such incidents. ASM similarly improves operational efficiency. Automating various aspects of threat detection and vulnerability management improves your organization’s operational efficiency.
ASM also saves costs by streamlining compliance efforts. Well drafted attack surface management ensures that organizations remain compliant with various industry regulations and data protection guidelines. Meeting compliance requirements proactively helps businesses avoid non-compliance penalties.
5. Better Visibility
Proper visibility of your digital systems is the backbone of an effective cybersecurity strategy. Attack surface management improves visibility into your organization’s digital assets and vulnerabilities in many ways. ASM solutions like network scanning and asset profiling regularly take an inventory of the organizations’ digital assets and possible attack surfaces.
Attack surface management also provides real-time monitoring of your businesses’ attack surface for potential vulnerabilities. Real-time monitoring makes it possible for your cybersecurity teams to detect suspicious activities in their early stages. Early detection of potential vulnerabilities also promotes risk prioritization.
Cybersecurity teams use ASM tools to gather insights into the potential impact and severity of identified vulnerabilities. This allows them to prioritize mitigation efforts based on the level of risk exposure.
Proper attack surface management is a key foundation of a robust cybersecurity posture. It gives organizations the requisite tools and insights required to strengthen their defense. Managing the attack surface improves the organization’s visibility into potential threats and vulnerabilities.
The post How Attack Surface Management Strengthens Your Cybersecurity Posture appeared first on ReadWrite.

The White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) has urged the largest players in emerging technologies to adopt safer programming languages.
The advice was released as part of a new report titled “Back to the Building Blocks: A Path Toward Secure and Measurable Software.”
The ONCD stated, “method manufacturers can use to reduce memory safety vulnerabilities is to secure one of the building blocks of cyberspace: the programming language. Using memory-safe programming languages can eliminate most memory safety errors.”
What is the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD)?
The ONCD advises the President of the United States on matters of cybersecurity policy, and strategy and highlights any concerns in this space. The security entity spans all U.S. government departments, private companies, and international partners to coordinate federal cybersecurity policy.
“The challenge of eliminating entire classes of software vulnerabilities is an urgent and complex problem,” The new report would state.
“It is a path that requires the convergence of government initiative, private sector innovation, and groundbreaking academic research. Working together to proactively eliminate software vulnerabilities alleviates the burden from those least equipped to bear it, and empowers front-line cyber defenders to look forward. Defining high-quality cybersecurity realigns incentives and provides confidence in what cyberspace can be.”
The Biden-Harris Administration has received recognition from industry leaders for this decision to reaffirm the vulnerabilities that must be considered in lockstep with technological advancements.
The ONCD would post on the official X page about the clamor of support from members of academia and the private sector about the White House’s direction:

In support of our report calling for a memory safe future, we have received an incredible response with statements of support from a variety of companies, academic experts, and leaders in civil society. Join us!https://t.co/N725GaEoPa
— Office of the National Cyber Director (@ONCD) February 26, 2024

Fidelma Russo, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Hybrid Cloud and Chief Technology Officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise said, “we commend Director Coker and the Administration for this initiative, which is an important response to the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape. Memory-safe computing prevents vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by threat actors, and will be a new internal standard at HPE for cloud-native development.”
Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, Dan Boneh commented that the “White House is taking a pragmatic approach, and is proposing to start this conversion with critical space systems, which is a good testing ground for the proposed approach. Preventing memory safety bugs is only the beginning of a long journey towards more secure software.”
“We, as a nation, have the ability – and the responsibility – to reduce the attack surface in cyberspace and prevent entire classes of security bugs from entering the digital ecosystem but that means we need to tackle the hard problem of moving to memory-safe programming languages,” National Cyber Director Harry Coker would say.
Featured image: Pexels
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The iconic farming simulator Stardew Valley has announced that 30 million copies have been sold ahead of the new 1.6 patch. Eric Barone, the game’s developer/creator would post a special thank you message on X, via his handle ‘Concerned Ape’ about the upcoming patch release date:

It’s the 8th anniversary of Stardew Valley. Thank you for all the support over the years! Today I am announcing the PC Release date for the 1.6 update: –March 19th–. Console & Mobile will follow as soon as possible. pic.twitter.com/dMEFydjSqC
— ConcernedApe (@ConcernedApe) February 26, 2024

The game update will be coming to the eight-year-old title on March 19 and brings with it a host of changes to the 8-bit environs.
Set to drop on PC initially and to consoles “as soon as possible” according to the series creator.
The last patch for the game was way back in December 2021, so this news will delight the series’ hardcore fans looking for more mod support. Barone, did reply to a fan asking “Will Stardew get more future updates like 1.6 and 1.7?”
He said in his reply on X that in regards to patch “1.6, yes. But it’s mostly a modding-focused update (which makes modders’ lives easier). There will be some new content but it won’t be huge. 1.7? Who knows.”
The success of the title has remained throughout its near-decade-long life and despite the intermittent content updates, there is a thriving modding community that has released unofficial patches. As reported via Games Radar, a five-year-old mod reached over 2 million downloads this month.
Since September Barone has remained quiet about the patch farming fans have been eagerly waiting for. He did post a sneak peek of the items coming to the title, but until now the release date had never been confirmed.
In a post on X, Barone would show the improvements coming in 1.6:

1.6 content sneak peek. no release date yet pic.twitter.com/vyhbFRkZ00
— ConcernedApe (@ConcernedApe) September 27, 2023

These include alternative story quests and endings to the celled simulator and more than a hundred new lines of dialogue.
The popular festivals held in the town square of Pelican Town will see one new major and two unknown mini-events take place.
The success of the farming simulator isn’t contained to devices as Barone still has a real-world cookbook coming to delight fans of the in-game cuisine that can be crafted. The book’s page says that prospective cooks can celebrate “seasonal ingredients through unique recipes inspired by the game.”
On the game’s blog, Barone said the game’s “unique fare like the Lucky Lunch, Strange Bun, Seafoam Pudding, Pink Cake, and much more” will be incorporated in this release by Penguin Random House on May 14, 2024.
So fans of the title will have a new patch to help them grow and an upcoming recipe book to take on the real-life life-counterparts to the 8-bit fruits of their labor.
Image Credit: Stardew Valley.
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