The Register

When we sanction you, it's for national security. When you sanction us, that's just spiteful US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has attempted to reset US/China relations, while also framing recent tech-related measures imposed by Beijing as inappropriate....

FTTP builds? 25M homes target on track. 68% coverage of 5G in UK. Mega redundancies programme initiated. He's off BT's CEO Philip Jansen today fired the starting gun on the race to find his successor by confirming he intends to stand down from his role inside 12 months, ending what some have branded a rollercoaster" tenure....

UK benefits department forced to use 'legacy bridge' to help reduce error after underpaying people by c 1B The UK's government has upped its estimate of the number of people hit by a state pension underpayment related to errors caused by a complex mesh of legacy systems dating back to the 1980s....

Ofcom takes quick glance, says: It's off to the CMA with you The cloud infrastructure market should be referred to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for investigation, says telecoms regulator Ofcom in a freshly filed interim report....

Plus: Adobe is limiting how staff can use external generative AI tools, and the Pentagon is testing different large language models In brief Award-winning novelists Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, and, separately comedian Sarah Silverman and novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, have sued OpenAI and accused the startup of training ChatGPT on their books without consent, violating copyright laws....

War is obscene but it's also responsible for many technological advances Opinion Every week there are so many stories about different things but with a common theme....

Health service techie learns what happens when you brute-force a bureaucracy Who, Me? Ah, dear reader, it's so delightful to have your company once again for Who, Me? in which fine upstanding Regizens like yourself regale us with tales of tech gone not so much right as ... the other thing....

Doing the dirty work for Australia's Woodside Energy will help prepare bot for work in space NASA announced on Friday its humanoid robot, Valkyrie, is headed to Western Australia, where Perth-based Woodside Energy will put it through its paces with a view to "remote caretaking of uncrewed and offshore energy facilities."...

ALSO: Shell fails to learn from past leaks; hundreds of solar plants found open to Mirai; and this week's crit vulns In brief With riots rocking the country, French parliamentarians have passed a bill granting law enforcement the right to snoop on suspects via "the remote activation of an electronic device without the knowledge or consent of its owner."...

Expect the saga of this release to stretch out a bit over northern summer Linux kernel overseer Linus Torvalds has delivered the first release candidate for version 6.5 of the kernel, but warned this release may not go entirely smoothly....

Alibaba's valuation of its fintech outfit now way below numbers touted ahead of cancelled 2020 IPO China's crackdown on web giants Alibaba and Tencent appears to be over, with the two to pay a combined $1.4 billion in fines to atone for past sins as Beijing moves on to "normalized" supervision....

ALSO: Google Cloud extends support in Korean and Mandarin; Cambodia lashes Meta; MSFT India boss bails; and more Asia In Brief Microsoft last week announced its consistent global pricing policy means Australian and New Zealand customers will soon pay more for its wares....

Rulings on affirmative action and free speech may not play nicely with diversity initiatives Analysis The US Supreme Court has issued two decisions that threaten to upend efforts by tech companies to become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive....

Slow June, people voting with their feet amid this AI craze, or something else? Global traffic to OpenAI's ChatGPT website fell by an estimated 10 percent between May and June, marking the first time the number of visitors to the conversational large language model has decreased since it was launched in November....

Snafu blamed on config change GitLab, a hosted git service not unlike Microsoft's GitHub, was down for some users as of Friday morning, Pacific Time....

It's certainly not the country's 'first homegrown open source desktop operating system' Version 1.0 of the openKylin Linux distro for the domestic Chinese market is here - and it works pretty well in English, too....

If it works, the X-59 could enable a new era of commercial supersonic travel that doesn't shatter windows NASA's mission to create a supersonic aircraft that doesn't rattle windows and vibrate teeth is one step closer to reality as the experimental X-59 aircraft dubbed the "Son of Concorde" may soon be ready for its first test flights....

Big Blue's top brass either don't get it or don't care Opinion What is Red Hat thinking?...

Ubuntu vendor takes its toys... back into the crib? Canonical's LXD tool, previously maintained in public under the auspices of the Canonical-sponsored Linux Containers project, is being taken in-house....

Regulators concerned iRobot could receive preferential treatment on the company's ecommerce platform The European Commission (EC) has announced an in-depth investigation into Amazon's proposed acquisition of iRobot over concerns it may restrict competition in the robot vacuum cleaner market....

Three months after mega breach by Russian cybercrime group Capita has informed some of its employees that its own pension fund was among the victims of a cybercrime attack on its system, resulting in the theft of their personal details, they say....

Commission official insists it has to protect itself against US subsidies Moves to fight off a new "rules of origin" edict that some electric vehicle automakers claim could shut down their operations in the UK aren't going anywhere, judging by the words of a senior Euro Commish official....

Tender designed to bring together 48k users running Oracle, Microsoft and more into 1 SaaS system A five-month-old UK government department is set to lead a massively complex ERP procurement to bring together software running some of Whitehall's largest units....

When our reader found this out, he learned even heavenly bolts can't defeat lawyers On Call Lightning may never strike twice, but each and every Friday The Register runs another edition of On Call, our reader-contributed tales of tech support gigs that did not spark joy....

It looks like memory glut and consumer indifference to smartmobes are persisting Samsung Electronics issued a warning Friday that its Q2 profit would likely drop 96 percent, year over year - probably due to a lingering oversupply of memory plus overall economic malaise....

Our vultures ponder decentralization over convenience Register Kettle It feels like for years we've been moaning about the disastrous effect of social media on society....

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....