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Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast. Hi, I'm Tamsyn Rose with the latest from the Quickie Newsroom. This week, some particularly salacious news dropped in the tech world.
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Speaker 2: In all my years on the computer, I never thought I'd see graphics cards and international sex scandal in the same story.
00:00:31
Speaker 1: Arguably the most powerful CEO, the head of chip giant Nvidia, admitted he'd had an affair. And now the woman he cheated with has been accused of working as a spy for China.
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Speaker 3: Honey trapping is an age-old art of using one's personal charm and wiles to draw somebody into a relationship that compromises their ability to resist passing secrets, essentially.
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Speaker 1: And then more news dropped.
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Speaker 4: New York Times is now reporting Jensen Huang had a relationship with an executive who reported to him, according to five people who worked at the company. To be clear, this is separate from that relationship, that affair that he has acknowledged with an alleged Chinese spy.
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Speaker 1: Today we're looking at the surveillance practice known as honey trapping. And, well, what happens now? But first, here are your headlines for Friday, November 13th. The number of people diagnosed with alcohol-associated hepatitis has increased in recent years, according to a new report from the Burnett Institute commissioned by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education. The research found the rate of alcohol-associated hepatitis increased drastically in Victoria during the COVID-19 pandemic and has since remained elevated. Researchers looked at how many people were hospitalised in Victoria with alcohol-associated hepatitis and between January 2017 and June 2024. They found that about half of the people with alcohol-related liver disease developed cirrhosis within six years. Payroll failures at the National Australia Bank will cost it $ 169 million after underpaying thousands of workers for more than a decade. The financial giant committed to paying back $ 127 million in $ 34 million in interest and $ 8 million in superannuation in an enforceable undertaking with a Fair Work Ombudsman. Back payments to the 66,000 impacted workers range from less than $ 5 to more than $ 87, 000, including superannuation and interest, with an average back payment of about $ 1, 900. At least two people have died and 10 people are in hospital after a three-story building collapsed in Brooklyn, New York. The four-unit apartment building dating from 1930 collapsed and tumbled into an adjoining construction site where excavation work was underway. The mayor said survivors pulled from the rubble were done so with a combination of critical and non-life-threatening injuries. Coming up, how common is honey trapping really and one man's mission to swim the darling? Music A 64-year-old Victorian farmer called Scott Gladman has hit the halfway mark in his swim along the Darling River to raise funds for motor neuron disease and Parkinson's. If he finishes, he would be the first person to swim the river from top to bottom. Gladman told the ABC he'd even surprised himself by what he'd achieved so far, having previously never swum more than eight kilometres in a single stretch. And a very anxious wait has finally come to an end after missing hiker William was found alive and reunited with family after six days in the Victorian bush. The 17-year-old was declared missing on November 6 after he failed to come home from a camping trip. After almost a week of scouring the bushland, he was found in a creek about two kilometres from where he was last seen. Despite spending so long outside, police said William was both in good spirits and for the most part in good health. One of the world's most powerful CEOs has stepped down from his role. It brings to a close a tumultuous week for NVIDIA, the world's biggest supplier of the highly priced and priced chips used for AI and data centers. Some estimates say the company has a market share of more than 80% and the AI boom has made them one of the world's most valuable companies. And then, this week, disaster.
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Speaker 5: Now, news has broken tonight of the US tank company NVIDIA setting up an investigation after claims that its boss, Jensen Huang, had an affair with a woman who passed information to China.
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Speaker 1: Jensen Huang sent the email to staff admitting he'd been unfaithful to his wife. Most of the memo was an apology, first to his family, then to his employees, the board, partners and shareholders. He said he took full responsibility for his actions. and the company announced it was investigating claims whether he was targeted by a foreign intelligence operation, also known as a honey trap, while he remained in place in the top job. The woman who US intelligence agencies have concluded had targeted Huang is called Alice Huang. No relation. Trip Mickle, a tech reporter from the New York Times, spoke with the Daily.
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Speaker 2: There's no clear indication of who his successor might be if he were to get hit by a bus tomorrow. And now he's become enmeshed in arguably the most explosive geopolitical controversy in corporate history.
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Speaker 1: China has denied that this woman was ever acting as a spy for them. Officially, she was a top executive of a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed that was doing work with NVIDIA. Mikkel again.
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Speaker 2: When the AI revolution started in late 2022, the U.S. had restricted China from buying NVIDIA's best chips and best technology because it wanted to stop China from being able to build technology that was as sophisticated and comprehensive as what U.S.
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Speaker 1: Companies were building.
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Speaker 3: And U.S.
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Speaker 1: News outlets are saying that the company that Alice was running was suspected of evading U.S. export controls and routing NVIDIA chips to China. And there
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are national security concerns over this, although the US President Donald Trump has somewhat downplayed the significance of this all.
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Speaker 6: And Jensen totally denies that.
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Speaker 3: I asked him today, because I did speak to him today, just to see if he's feeling all right, how you're doing.
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Speaker 6: And I asked him about that.
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Speaker 3: And he said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy.
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Speaker 1: And just to give you some idea of why any sort of instability for this company is a really big deal for everyone. The CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic have both said that NVIDIA's infrastructure is key for their ability to run powerful models safely and at scale. And then yesterday, the New York Times broke even more news. Huang had allegedly engaged in a second affair with one of his subordinates, a 48-year-old called Kimberly Powell. She's NVIDIA's vice president of healthcare. The company's shares slid about 8% in after-hours trading on Wednesday local time. Nvidia's lost about $ 876 billion Australian dollars in stock market value this week since the board announced its investigation. And this is when the board met for an emergency meeting last night. What's alleged to have happened is a honey trap operation. Australian National University's John Blaxland is a professor of international security and intelligence studies. He explains exactly what that is.
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Speaker 3: Honey trapping is an age-old art of using one's personal charm and wiles to draw somebody into a relationship that compromises their ability to resist passing secrets, essentially.
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Speaker 1: He says it can often start with a meeting at a bar, a seemingly random meeting of two souls.
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Speaker 3: Somebody has drawn their attention and somebody comes up to them and has a drink with them and invites them back to their room or vice versa and they then are photographed and that compromising material is then subject to blackmail, is used for blackmail. Other forms of honey traps are ones where there's a more longer term relationship established but it's with somebody who's not acting completely in good faith.
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Speaker 6: They've got a hidden identity that they.
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Speaker 3: Are not revealing to their beau that is about seeking to extract sensitive secret information from that person that will give commercial advantage or state national security advantage to the collector and to the patrons of the collector.
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Speaker 1: And that would be much more like what might have happened here, although there's still so much we don't know and a real chance that we never will. Laxland says one of the ways for companies and countries interested in gaining information from a specific person or company now with such good technological security is through human fragility and ego.
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Speaker 3: The weakest link in the chain is the human. The ones and zeros can usually be relied upon
to continue being ones and zeros. But it's the human who's got control over the password, the encryption key, the contents and the map of the file structure.
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Speaker 6: They're the ones who are the most problematic.
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Speaker 1: And even the most powerful and well-trained people can be marks.
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Speaker 6: Power is quite an aphrodisiac. Power and money and wealth.
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Speaker 3: So those things, particularly if you're somebody who's been used to getting.
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Speaker 6: A lot of adulation, a lot of attention.
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Speaker 3: you've got a certain debonair je ne sais quoi about you, someone akin to Jensen Huang, say, with leather jacket wearing, you know, James Dean eat your heart out type of character, you might have tickets on yourself. You might have a sense that, well, actually, I am pretty good. And of course, it's not unreasonable to that somebody should want to be with me. And judgment can sometimes elude people.
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Speaker 1: China has repeatedly denied having anything to do with what's happened with NVIDIA. But if Huang was targeted by a spy, he'd likely already been warned that this was a possibility. Blacksland says government agencies and people in high-profile positions are usually trained in some way to know if they're being targeted.
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Speaker 6: So Quite often, these agencies will brief their people. So beware. These are the kind of telltale indicators.
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Speaker 3: If you're approached by somebody who's a 10 and you're a 3, read the tea leaves.
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Speaker 6: It should give you an indication that something's amiss, right?
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Speaker 1: Some other more obvious tells.
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Speaker 3: If somebody's starting to ask intrusive questions or if they're asking you to do something that you know that you wouldn't want to show to your life partner or to somebody at work, So, you.
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Speaker 6: Know, what's going on here?
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Speaker 3: Of course, often enough, alcohol is involved. So people's judgments are a bit cloudy. They think they're in a faraway land. No one's going to report on them. No one's going to see them, except the cameras in the hotel, perhaps, that might have been planted in the hotel room or the facilities that the person that is doing the entrapping has brought with them.
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Speaker 1: And while back in the day of things like the Cold War and other wars before it, government and defence force targets might be the most likely, corporate figures are now in the sticky crosshairs for honeypot operations.
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Speaker 3: Commercial espionage is alive and well. And it's got national security implications when it's about cutting-edge technology, when it's about chips, when it's about artificial intelligence, when it's about quantum, when it's about major industrial trends.
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Speaker 1: In the age of AI, with so much at stake with this technology, it's little wonder we're seeing this.
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Speaker 3: In this day and age, we're living in what I would describe as unrestricted competition. It's going gangbusters, and it's not just one country or another. It's many players, all competing for influence, for power, for technology, for access, etc. And this is driving countries and agencies and corporations to take measures that you wouldn't necessarily want to have splashed on the headlines the way Jensen Huang's story has done so.
00:12:50
Speaker 1: Just how common is this, though? Well, it's hard to say. Laxland's seen many examples of it around the world and some here in Australia, but the numbers, well, they aren't written down.
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Speaker 6: Nobody wants to talk about it.
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Speaker 3: Nobody really likes to air their dirty laundry. It's not something that's, you know, well, it's really documented in terms of rigorous... quantitative analysis, but history is littered with significant anecdotes of players, significant characters who've been compromised, who've been caught in a compromising situation.
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Speaker 1: And would Australia itself be using honey traps?
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Speaker 3: It's not unreasonable to assume that attractive Australian women can be used to encourage somebody who's working for someone else to be cooperative without necessarily getting Undressed.
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Speaker 1: What next? Well, you know we'll stay across it and keep you up to date here on The Quickie. That's all for now. If you have a topic you'd like us to discuss, our inbox is always open. We're at thequickie at mamamia.com.au. And make sure to rate and review us in your favourite podcast app. It helps other people find us.
00:14:02
Speaker 4: Mamamia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast.