It’s been a big fortnight for subscription traps.

You know when you try to cancel a paid subscription or membership, and feel like you turn into Scotty James in the halfpipe, twisting and turning through the process? That’s a subscription trap.

At the start of the month, the federal government passed a law imposing serious penalties on any business - tech companies, gyms, and streaming/entertainment providers amongst them - that fail to give users an easy way to cancel their plan.

Then, a few days ago, New York became the first city in the U.S. to pass similar legislation.

THEN, also a few days ago, Australia’s federal court imposed one of the most significant penalties on a company for a subscription trap, fining U.S. online advice platform ‘JustAnswer’ $10m over a $2 sign-up offer that also enrolled customers in a much more expensive monthly plan.

The trapsters are on notice!

Telstra executives will face a Senate inquiry on Friday over last week’s nationwide outage, which blocked more than 600 Triple Zero calls and disrupted businesses and public transport.

The inquiry will examine what caused the outage, whether underinvestment contributed to it, and whether Australia’s telecommunications sector needs stronger regulation.

No deaths have been linked to the outage.

Here’s what to know.

The outage began around 4:30am on Wednesday after a software fault caused equipment responsible for synchronising time across parts of Telstra’s network to malfunction.

When the network fell out of sync, many of Telstra’s 25 million customers were left without mobile or data services.

Train services across NSW and Victoria were disrupted, while some businesses were unable to process EFTPOS payments.

The outage also prevented more than 600 calls from connecting to Triple Zero. Telstra subsequently carried out 639 welfare checks, with seven callers found to require assistance.

Most services were restored by 4pm on Wednesday, but problems affecting Triple Zero calls were not fully resolved until 1:30pm on Thursday.

The Senate inquiry was established after the Optus outage in 2025 and will now be expanded to investigate the Telstra failure. Telstra executives will give evidence on Friday.

It will examine the cause of the outage, its impact on the Australian economy and whether the telecommunications sector’s largely self-regulated model is working.

The inquiry is also expected to question reports that the failure involved outdated equipment and whether Telstra had adequately invested in replacing it.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who will chair the hearing, questioned how telecommunications companies could avoid greater consequences when they provide critical infrastructure.

“And how can companies get away with this when they are delivering what is now an essential service?” she said. “It’s essential, critical infrastructure.”

Hanson-Young has called for affected customers to be compensated and questioned whether telcos should face minimum service standards similar to those imposed on water and energy providers.

Telstra has argued that telecommunications networks are inherently complex and that additional regulation could increase costs for consumers.

Telstra is conducting an internal investigation, while the Australian Communications and Media Authority is investigating whether the company met its legal and regulatory obligations.

Telstra could face civil penalties of up to $30 million for failures involving Triple Zero. However, customers do not have an automatic right to compensation for broader mobile service outages.

The outage is the latest in a series of major telecommunications failures, following nationwide Optus outages in 2023 and 2025.

Telstra reported a $2.3 billion profit from $23.12 billion in revenue last financial year.

Reporting by Lachlan Keller.

An AI-powered shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates, the daughter of Bill Gates, has been suspended from a leading affiliate network after allegedly claiming commissions for online sales it did not generate.

An investigation by Bloomberg found the app Phia was inserting its own referral codes into transactions without users’ knowledge, potentially overriding referrals from other publishers.

Phia says the issue was caused by a recent software release and has since been fixed.

Here’s what to know.

Phoebe Gates, 23, is the daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and philanthropist Melinda French Gates.

Gates launched the AI-powered “personal shopping assistant” with her friend Sophia Kianni in 2025. It has since been downloaded more than 1.2 million times.

Phia has raised more than $US43.5 million ($AU62.7 million) from investors, including Sydney Sweeney, Khloé Kardashian and Hailey Bieber.

Once downloaded, Phia operates as a browser extension designed to help shoppers compare prices, find second-hand fashion and apply discount codes at checkout.

If a shopper makes a purchase through a Phia referral, the app can receive a commission from the retailer without adding to the price paid by the customer.

This is known as affiliate marketing, a common model also used by other online shopping tools, including Honey.

A Bloomberg investigation last week found that Phia had allegedly claimed commissions for sales it did not generate.

During testing across more than 50 retail websites, Bloomberg found the app opened background browser tabs without notifying users and inserted its own referral codes.

These codes allegedly overrode legitimate referrals from other publishers, meaning Phia could receive a commission even when it had not directed the shopper to the retailer.

The practice is commonly known as “cookie stuffing”. Cookies are small pieces of data stored in a user’s browser that can, among other functions, record which publisher referred a shopper to a website.

Bloomberg said its findings were supported by separate testing conducted by independent researcher Ben Edelman and Capital One Shopping, which operates a competing browser extension.

Testers also reviewed Phia’s publicly available code. Bloomberg reported that the activity could be harder for users to notice on mobile browsers, where open tabs are less visible than on desktop browsers.

A Phia spokesperson told Bloomberg the company had identified and fixed the issue.

“Within the last 24 hours, we were made aware that in a recent release our codebase was causing misattributions from a subset of users,” the spokesperson said.

“As soon as we were notified, our team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and has since resolved the issue.”

When Bloomberg tested the app again following Phia’s response, it found the automatic referral activity had stopped.

Impact.com, a major affiliate marketing and influencer platform, has suspended Phia from its network over the alleged activity.

The platform said Phia had breached its policies and that it was reviewing affected transactions. It is also working with the company to determine what corrective action should be taken.

An affiliate network acts as an intermediary between businesses offering commissions and publishers promoting their products.

The allegations against Phia follow similar claims made against Honey, a browser extension owned by PayPal, in 2024.

Honey is facing ongoing class actions alleging it improperly replaced influencers’ affiliate links and withheld some discount offers from users. The allegations have not been determined by a court.

Reporting by Lachlan Keller.

A 25-year-old French pharmacy cream is having a moment - and it's not hard to see why.

Avène Cicalfate+ Restorative Protective Cream has been a dermatologist go-to for 25 years, loved for calming and repairing sensitive, irritated skin. Made with Avène Thermal Spring Water and a gentle, clinically-tested ingredient, it visibly repairs skin within 48 hours and helps with everything from post-procedure sensitivity to everyday dryness and redness.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are fighting online again – and this time, the insults involve alleged trade secret theft and data centres in space.

After Apple sued OpenAI, accusing the ChatGPT maker of stealing trade secrets to develop new hardware, Musk called Altman “Scam Altman” in a post on X.

Altman hit back: “Homeboy you’re the one selling public market investors on short-term space datacenters”, which was a dig at Musk’s plans to put AI computing infrastructure into orbit.

OpenAI has denied Apple’s allegations.

Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but their relationship has spectacularly unravelled. Musk left the company in 2018 and later sued OpenAI, alleging it had abandoned its founding principles.

Clearly, the group chat is beyond repair.

Reporting by Lachlan Keller.