The Register

Communication minister advises businesses to keep receipts" Australia's second-largest telco, Singapore-owned Optus, experienced an outage beginning Wednesday around 4am Sydney and Melbourne time that left millions nationwide without phone or internet access - either mobile or terrestrial....

After a rocky start, here's looking at Euclid Pics The European Space Agency has released the first images snapped by Euclid, its latest telescope which has been designed to help build the largest 3D map of galaxies yet....

How about you pay us every time our likeness is used by algorithms to make studio execs richer? The union representing actors in the US film, TV, and radio industries has turned down the latest contract offer from studios in its battle to regulate the entertainment sector's use of AI....

Proposed Section 702 overhaul bill rolls in as expiration date looms The White House is already trying to sink a bipartisan law bill introduced on Tuesday that would rein in the Feds' powers to snoop on US persons without a warrant under the infamous FISA Section 702....

Not actually our problem, says Chocolate Factory, but watchdog decides otherwise - again Google contractors upset that some of their teammates were allegedly unlawfully terminated in retaliation for trying to unionize at the web giant have now joined the Alphabet Workers Union - after a 26-2 vote overseen by the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)....

Frenemies in multi-year deal to offload AI inference to Big Red super-cluster Demand for Microsoft's AI services is apparently so great - or Redmond's resources so tight - that the software giant plans to offload some of the machine-learning models used by Bing Search to Oracle's GPU supercluster as part of a multi-year agreement announced Tuesday....

House reps hope to jumpstart qubit race with R&D The US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is concerned the United States could fall behind Russia and China if something isn't done to accelerate development of quantum computing systems....

Bugatti ain't got nothing on this V2 RISC-V server chip designer Ventana Micro Systems has pushed out its second generation Veyron processor, squeezing in more cores and the ability for customers to add custom accelerator bits to a bespoke system-on-chip (SoC) blueprint....

Coworking gambit divided office space - and got conquered WeWork, once valued at $47 billion, filed for bankruptcy on Monday, even as its recently appointed CEO David Tolley reassured tenants the business is "here to stay."...

Wants 'tens of metric tons of O2 production per year' on the cheap NASA has opened the brainstorming-bay doors to anyone with ideas on how to extract oxygen from Moon rocks - a key element of the space agency's work to "develop infrastructure technologies to enable a sustained presence on the lunar surface."...

Plus: Parent GM taps brakes on AI van production Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt confirms reports that his AI robo-car maker's now-paused driverless taxis need regular human intervention to help them make sense of the road, yet he is downplaying the severity....

HPE and Lidl co-owners among consortium funding 'sovereign' Generative AI company There's money to be made in AI, and HPE's venture capital arm, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, has joined a consortium investing more than half a billion US dollars in German Generative AI company, Aleph Alpha....

'Secure enclave' reports point to separate production line with blocked off access Intel looks set to be a key beneficiary of CHIPS Act funding earmarked for specifically supplying the US military....

Admins have 90 days to opt out before MFA is deployed automatically Microsoft is introducing three Conditional Access policies for sysadmins as it continues to promote the implementation of multi-factor authentication (MFA) in organizations....

Trundlebot has trundled 32km across 'punishingly cold environment bathed in dust and radiation' NASA's Curiosity Rover has notched up 4,000 days on Mars as the trundlebot continues its fourth extended mission despite showing signs of wear and tear....

Campaigners say proposals to reform laws are 'dangerous' and an attack on safety The UK government has set in train plans to introduce legislation requiring tech companies to let it know when they plan to introduce new security technologies and could potentially force them to disable when required....

Recent industry support a game-changer, especially in the software sector Synopsys is joining the RISC-V gang, revealing a trio of processor designs it will add to its ARC portfolio, targeting a range of embedded applications....

Biz says it's just following EU rules instead Italy's finance police, the Guardia di Finanzia, has seized $836 million (779 million) from Airbnb that the plod claims is unpaid tax....

Months of work reveals how this tricky malware family targets... the financial services sector A brand-new macOS malware strain from North Korean state-sponsored hackers has been spotted in the wild....

Three-year-old cores, but hey - they're cheap, relatively speaking Nearly a year after launching 4th-gen Epycs, AMD still isn't ready to retire the 3rd-Gen processor family, confirming it is now extending availability of the line through 2026 and revealing six new-ish SKUs....

Repeat performance will be able to return to Earth and might one day carry crew The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to return to the International Space Station (ISS) cargo delivery business by 2028, judging by announcements made at ESA Space Summit in Seville....

Running infrastructure in the tropics has its challenges - but so do failed disaster recovery plans Outages at two banks that stopped 2.5 million payment transactions were sparked by a technical issue with the datacenter's cooling system, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Monday....

America could drive innovation... or inject fear and doubt and kill off choice Continued pressure by US lawmakers to restrict China's access to RISC-V has been called into question....

Green move comes against backdrop of 82 energy-sucking bit barns with growing power draw needs Ireland looks set to get a datacenter powered entirely by fuel cell technology thanks to an agreement between a local company and a division of Korean conglomerate SK Group....

Traditional Unix sanity plus your choice of MATE or Xfce The first new version of GhostBSD in over a year is here. If you want to try FreeBSD, Linux's most credible rival and competitor in the FOSS OS marketplace, there's no easier way....

The cloud-only move may leave out devs writing for on-prem systems, which still make up the majority SAP is the latest to bring a set of AI-assisted coding features to its cloud-based application development environments, joining a slew of vendors making similar announcements. However, developers and analysts say they're concerned the same tech is not be available for on-prem systems they are working on migrating and lifting to the cloud....

Literally... Systems Approach Perhaps the single biggest aspect of systems building I've come to appreciate since shifting my focus from academic pursuits to open source software development is the importance of testing and test automation....

And decided Intel's GPUs are worthy of on-prem AI action VMware hasn't been sitting on its hands while waiting for Broadcom to buy it: it has spent the past couple of years planning a move on the data services market....

A little peek behind the control panel, analytics curtain Cloudflare has explained how it believes it suffered that earlier multi-day control plane and analytics outage....

But plenty of tech folk wish management would just leave them alone IBM's Red Hat has some good news for UK businesses, with a survey putting Blighty's businesses ahead of competitors in Germany, France, and Spain when it comes to enterprise-wide IT automation....

Health records, financial situations, religious leanings, it's all out there, or so this study says The sensitive personal information of US military personnel and their families is available from US data brokers for a pittance, Duke University academics have found....

Mass production of C-3POs pitched for 2025 Beijing is issuing guidelines on the development of humanoid robots with the lofty goal of mass producing the technology by 2025 and having a reliable supply chain by 2027....

As Meta promises to stop political advertisers from using its generative ML tools In what may be another example of AI bias for future textbooks, WhatsApp's sticker maker apparently generated violent imagery when asked about Muslim Palestinians - and refrained from doing so for Jewish Israelis....

18 months in the slammer no laughing matter, but the rest... maybe A 34-year-old woman has been jailed for 18 months after trying to use Rentahitman.com - no, really - to pay a contract killer to eliminate a rival she was beefing with. Her would-be assassin-for-hire unsurprisingly turned out to be an FBI agent....

Plus: Doritos 'trials AI software' to mute noise of chip-crunching gamers Video Microsoft today started what it promises will be a multi-year partnership with an AI gaming startup that will let developers use generative neural networks to create characters, dialog, and adventures for Xbox games....

Audit: Craptastic security potentially put govt info in hands of enemies America's immigration cops have pushed back against an official probe that concluded their lax mobile device security potentially put sensitive government information at risk of being stolen by foreign snoops....

Neural network lab also plans to open app store with revenue sharing Video OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and less memorably branded AI models, held its first developer conference on Monday in San Francisco, where it announced a new foundational model, more affordable pricing, customizable, low-code models called GPTs, and a store to distribute them....

They're ugly but UV lighting blamed for human damage, not the dumb idea We've heard of getting burned by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but this is a new one: attendees at a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) event over the weekend in Hong Kong are reporting eye pain and difficulty seeing after an evening party went wrong....

Fortnite-maker largely lost against Apple, but can it beat the Chocolate Factory? Another front is opening in Google's antitrust war today, as a trial between the search giant and Fortnite dev Epic Games over Google's Play Store fees is kicking off in a California court....

Nothing is certain except death and taxes Heirs of Samsung patriarch billionaire Lee Kun-hee are selling approximately US$2 billion (2.6 trillion won) of company shares, reportedly to help pay off the inheritance tax due after his 2020 death....

And that includes ransomware crims, claims US of alleged sanctions-buster A Russian woman the US accuses of being a career money launderer is the latest to be sanctioned by the country for her alleged role in moving hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of oligarchs and ransomware criminals....

Which way is up? Just feel the vibrations, man Spatial disorientation among pilots led to 101 deaths, 65 lost aircraft and $2.32 billion of damages in the US Airforce between 1993 and 2013, according to research. The problem also hits astronauts, whose senses can be bamboozled when they are severed from the familiar pull of Earth's gravity....

See? It's not just Chromebooks. Now how about some flexibility around Win 10? Microsoft will offer driver and firmware updates for its Surface devices for an additional two years, claiming the decision is in response to customer demand. This comes after Google promised its rival Chromebook devices will get updates for a decade....

Plus: CVSS 4.0 is here, this week's critical vulns, and 'incident' hit loan broker promises no late fees. Generous Infosec in brief Okta has confirmed details of its October breach, reporting that the incident led to the compromise of files belonging to 134 customers, "or less than 1 percent of Okta customers."...

Getting contributions out of freeloaders Exclusive Element has become the latest company to change its open source license, but rather than going down a source-available path, it has opted to move from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3....

Plus: AI companies enter non-binding agreement to governmental safety tests of models, and more AI In Brief X, the micro-blogging site formerly known as Twitter, revealed its "first AI" to a select group of users over the weekend....

Dodged Apollo 13 disaster because of rubella, but helped to rescue the crew Obit Thomas K Mattingly II, command module pilot of Apollo 16 and commander of two Space Shuttle missions, has died aged 87....

Southend-on-Sea Council unwittingly exposed sensitive records of more than 2,000 staff for five months Southend-on-Sea City Council has reported a data breach, joining a growing list of UK public sector organizations to have accidentally and illegally exposed sensitive files this year....

A load of hot air? The UK government is stumping up 36 million ($41.4 million) to help support a green energy project that aims to use waste heat from a datacenter to keep nearby homes warm....

Ad blockers are firewalls for our sanity - turning them off is madness Opinion YouTube wants its pound of flesh. Disable your ad blocker or pay for Premium, warns a new message being shown to an unsuspecting test audience, with the barely hidden subtext of "you freeloading scum." Trouble is, its ad blocker detecting mechanism doesn't exactly comply with EU law, say privacy activists. Ask for user permission or taste regulatory boot. All good clean fun....