The Register

Report on 'Robodebt' scheme calls for major reforms, plus review of Feds' automation, data-sharing An Australian government initiative described by the then-minister in charge as "a great example of the Government using technology" has been described by a Royal Commission as "a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals."...

On a shoestring budget, Chandrayaan-3 aims to observe Luna, Earth, even exoplanets India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will next week launch Chandrayaan-3, a mission that aims to land on the moon and deploy a rover....

Friyey's cash - and beer - taps turned off In the pre-COVID rush to cash in on enthusiasm for co-working spaces, Indian outfit Friyey Space came up with an interesting take on the concept: instead of spending billions on real estate, why not install Wi-Fi and desks in locations that aren't busy during business hours?...

Yes, funnily enough, it does involve training an AI to be nice OpenAI says it is dedicating a fifth of its computational resources to developing machine learning techniques to stop superintelligent systems "going rogue."...

Just make this 'self driving' system drive itself over to the filing cabinet and fish out the documents needed An investigation by America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) into the safety of Tesla Autopilot has led to a threat of fines if Elon Musk's electric car company doesn't hand over the data requested....

TV network's attorneys 'on a DMCA rampage' ... are you sure you're ready, kids? Nickelodeon says it is probing claims that "decades old" material was stolen from it and leaked online. This follows reports on social media that someone had dumped 500GB of snatched animation files. Hilarity, and many SpongeBob SquarePants memes, ensued....

Meta rolls eyes at claim it used former Twits to create rival Twitter, via attorney Alex Spiro, has accused Meta of stealing trade secrets following the launch of Meta's Threads app, a would-be rival text-focused social media network....

Redmond's not fixing the latter because it 'relies on social engineering' Microsoft is having a rough week with troubles including an Outlook.com bug that prevented some email users from searching their messages for several hours on Thursday, and a Teams flaw that allows people to send phishing emails and malware to other Teams users....

Firefox maker promises it'll use ML responsibly - as critics say: Fork this Mozilla on Thursday attempted to explain its decision to disable, at least temporarily, the error-prone AI Explain button implemented last week on the MDN documentation website....

Won't someone think of the (checks notes) Kemp's Ridley sea turtle? SpaceX has hit back at a lawsuit brought by the American Bird Conservancy and others regarding risks to the environment near its Starship testing facility in Boca Chica, Texas....

Middle Kingdom suddenly a less appealing destination for manufacturing HPE is planning to start manufacturing some of its high-volume servers in India, with the aim of turning out $1 billion worth of kit in the next five years....

Appeal rejected: iPhone and iPad have infringing components inside A UK court has rejected Apple's appeal against a ruling which found it infringed two patents on technology it uses in its world-dominating iPhones and iPads....

Because Ferraris are meant to fly, not amble along at 2mph The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has started a project to develop software capable of fully utilizing the capabilities of exascale and post-exascale systems....

One's a bit raw and touchy, but the other is vintage stuff, brought up to date Maybe the DBUS developers have a point: desktops are like buses... you wait for ages, then two of them come along at once: Lomiri on Debian, and GSDE, the GNUstep Desktop Environment....

Prime minister set to look over promises for potential pact at the weekend UK government is negotiating a draft deal to rejoin the EU's 95.5 billion (c $103 billion) Horizon research funding program, following years of uncertainty resulting from the Brexit vote....

EU citizens' info could be at risk over new rules The UK is expected to adopt a new data protection bill this Autumn. If that happens, more than two dozen civil society groups and privacy experts want the European Commission to cancel its 2021 data sharing agreement with the UK....

Meanwhile, Vodafone worries about sci-fi tech's potential to break encryption British-based bank HSBC is to test a pilot quantum-secured metro network in London, in the hopes of preparing for potential security threats in the future. Meanwhile, Vodafone is looking to protect users of its phone network against a potential quantum threat to encryption codes....

AWS now biggest supplier in Britain, according to TechMarketView Amazon Web Services jumped to the top of the UK software and IT services industry in 2022, knocking TCS off its perch as Microsoft's growth lagged its rivals and dropped out of the top three....

Don't panic - you can still get a hybrid, with a V12 engine naturally Sorry, aspiring Lamborghini owners: the Volkswagen-owned supercar biz has reportedly sold out of the remaining pure internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles it plans to make....

CISO and head of HR depart as services market tightens Two senior execs have quit Indian tech services giant Infosys, with head of HR, Richard Lobo, and chief information security officer Vishal Salvi departing in recent days....

Beijing likes Zuck's old stuff better than his new stuff Chinese state media has published a sternly worded opinion piece that makes it plain Meta's ambition to sell its VR hardware in the Middle Kingdom is unlikely to succeed - because, unlike his fellow tech titans, he hasn't been nice to China....

Nagoya Harbor hit the rocks yesterday but looks to be afloat once more The port of Nagoya - which shifted 2.68 million shipping containers and 164 million tons of cargo in 2022 - has moved precious few in the last 24 hours after finding itself the latest victim of Russia's notorious LockBit ransomware gang....

Hey, we're just being honest, says web giant Google has updated its privacy policy to confirm it scrapes public data from the internet to train its AI models and services - including its chatbot Bard and its search engine that now offers to generate answers on-the-fly to queries....

Lends credence to theory that Pyongyang is testing ballistic missiles against international rules A North Korean satellite allegedly designed for reconnaissance was not viable for its alleged intended purpose, according to South Korea's military on Wednesday....

Prime doesn't pay - well, not that much, anyway A former Amazon manager described by prosecutors as the "mastermind" behind a nearly $10 million scheme to steal money from the online megaretailer using fake invoices has been sentenced to 16 years behind bars in federal prison....

Organizers change rules as generative ML takes over everything Artists using machine learning software to make music can win a Grammy someday, thanks to a change in the awards' rules....

Just use it sparingly, as it may crash equipment or burn out memory Boffins at the University of California, Davis have devised a purportedly practical way to apply a memory abuse technique called Rowhammer to build unique, stable device fingerprints....

Cops reckon gang swiped as much as $30M from financial orgs International cops have arrested a suspected "key figure" of a cybercrime group dubbed OPERA1ER that has stolen as much as $30 million from more than 30 banks and financial orgs across 15 countries....

Release is good news for fans of Windows 7, 8, and macOS from Sierra to Mojave. The latest version of Firefox browser is out and should help keep some older operating systems viable, at least for another year....

World powers scramble into emergency meetings as US Treasury Secretary heads to Beijing for talks China's move to restrict exports of two elements used in semiconductors has sparked concerns ahead of a visit to Beijing by the US Treasury Secretary, with one Chinese official warning that this is "just the beginning."...

ChatGPT back to partying like it's 2021 OpenAI's experiment with allowing ChatGPT to search the web via Bing has been suspended because the feature inadvertently allowed users to bypass paywalls....

Plus: Facebook corp loses appeal on crossing data streams in Germany Elon Musk's Twitter can breathe easy when it comes to European Union - the beleaguered social media platform won't be challenged in the single market of member states by its newly minted rival, "Threads" from Meta....

No immediate risk of delisting, but company intends to claw its way back The New York Stock Exchange has notified MariaDB, the database services biz formed around a fork of MySQL, that it is not in compliance with its listing manual after the company's share price dipped below $1 over a 30-day period....

Class action claims company refusing to pay mandated fees A proposed class action brought by a former Twitter worker laid off last year, allegedly for not clicking yes on Elon Musk's "go hardcore or go home" email, has accused the company of holding up 891 arbitrations....

How to use a part of your computer you possibly didn't know it had If you have a plain ol' vanilla wheel mouse, it has an extra button you may not know about, and that button has a whole set of handy functions. Here's how to use it....

Can't buy advanced GPUs... and might be blocked from renting them soon The US is preparing to escalate its campaign to block Chinese access to AI by including cloud services among the technologies that require government permission before they can be provided to Chinese customers....

Don't tell Big Red too much, experts advise Exclusive Oracle is firing off unsolicited emails to businesses offering to discuss Java subscription deals, seemingly in an effort to extract information which could be to its benefit in future license negotiations....

Survey suggests 'mediocre services' now cost 14% more UK broadband subscribers are being hit by a double whammy of service disruptions and above-inflation price hikes, but many are caught in fixed-term contracts and unable to switch, according to consumer advocate Which?...

Here come the taishoku daiko to tell your boss to do one... in a polite but unequivocal way Certain tech bosses are notoriously temperamental - so much so that conflict-averse folks have been known to put in their notice while the execs are on leave. But some Japanese employees have taken this a step further - actually employing an agent to quit their job for them....

Wants administrators, manufacturers, and the software they use, to be better China wants its manufacturers to become more reliable, after finding that three key sectors - machinery, electronics, and automobiles - aren't at levels that match global standards of excellence....

Digital payment skeptics of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but grifters and crims Singapore has joined the ranks of nations requiring digital payment operators to follow the same sort of regulations and customer protection requirements that apply to conventional financial institutions....

Zuck's Instagram-adjacent Twitter clone to debut later this week Twitter users dismayed by Elon Musk's chaotic leadership of the microblogging service will soon have an alternative - albeit one run by another tech billionaire. Meta's long-rumored Twitteresque effort is set to debut later this week....

Boss says it has traffic galore and a beautiful balance sheet Yahoo! - the outfit that dominated the web in the late 1990s before Google ate its lunch - is plotting a return to the stock market....

Independence Day launch will leave Europe dependent on the US for space missions On Tuesday July 4, the last Ariane 5 rocket will blast off from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. As the rocket's red glare fades, Europe will be without a heavy-lift rocket for the first time in decades, with no reusable one in sight....

Despite Redmond's best efforts to convince competition regulators that product bundles are OK European Union antitrust regulators are edging closer to launching a full-blown probe into Microsoft's bundling of products with Office 365 amid failing efforts by the vendor to deter an official investigation....

When you're on the wrong side of Red Hat, these could be subject to change Last week, the Rocky Linux project said it had found a way to continue delivering its RHEL-based distribution. Now we have some information on how it's doing it....

Post-Brexit strategy set to replace legacy of patchwork systems The UK's tax collector has awarded Deloitte a deal worth up to 100 million ($127 million) to provide a digital gateway for businesses getting goods across UK borders as part of its strategy for post-Brexit trade....

Cognitive scientists question bold claims from OpenAI, Microsoft and others Feature Another day, another headline. Last week, a year-old startup attracted $1.3 billion from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia, valuing Inflection AI at $4 billion....

Both countries want it, but respective red lines could torpedo an agreement The notion that a trade deal between the UK and India might see a flood of cheap tech workers heading to Britain appears to have been scuppered. The British government is prepared to consider temporary visas for skilled workers, but that's as far as it goes....

Boffins given five months to migrate, with vanilla DaaS suggested as the alternative IBM has killed its Cloud for Education - a service it launched just two years ago and touted as "infrastructure and services for academic and research lab compute needs."...