The Register

Rushed law will lose criminal sanction, but debate about its utility is fierce Australia last week passed a Right To Disconnect law that forbids employers contacting workers after hours, with penalties including jail time for bosses who do the wrong thing....

PLUS: Rideshare mega-merger mooted; France raids Huawei; Mongolia plans first satellite APAC in Brief India has received 18 proposals to build chipmaking facilities under its Semicon India subsidy scheme, IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar revealed last week....

Expert Python programmers saw the most benefit GitHub Copilot has steered software engineers at the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ Bank) toward improved productivity and code quality, and the test drive was enough for the finance house to deploy the generative AI programming assistant in production workflows....

$7 trillion will buy you a helluva lotta fabs or every chip biz of consequence Opinion OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's dream of establishing a network of chip factories to fuel the growth of AI may be much, much wilder than feared....

Around The World in 84 days It is 50 years this week since Skylab's final crew departed the station after a record-setting 84 days of flight....

AI is here to stay though conversations won't necessarily replace queries Interview Web search, long dominated by Google, is in play again, at least among incumbents and entrepreneurs if not frustrated web searchers....

Some useful indicators of compromise right here More than 70,000 presumably legit websites have been hijacked and drafted into a network that crooks use to distribute malware, serve phishing pages, and share other dodgy stuff, according to researchers....

Bazaar of Bezos buries bargains, allegedly Amazon has been sued by two customers in the United States who claim the internet titan artificially inflates prices, hitting shoppers in the wallet....

Software company's claim of there being no active exploits also being questioned In disclosing yet another vulnerability in its Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA gateways, Ivanti has confused the third-party researchers who discovered it....

Code might get things wrong for patients but we must think of the corporate profits AI algorithms used to determine eligibility for US government healthcare coverage are increasingly verboten, the federal agency Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) told health insurance companies in a memo this week....

Don't want a GPU? How about some intellectual property or design help? Nvidia is reportedly putting together a business unit to peddle its intellectual property and design services to the likes of AWS, Microsoft, and Meta....

Plus: x86 processor shipments up for the first time in 2 years AMD is steadily accumulating CPU market share, according to new figures from Mercury Research, and Arm-based systems now account for more than 10 percent of PC client sales....

Designer updates, and AI assistants everywhere Like an incontinent hippo on a helter-skelter, Microsoft has flung out yet more Copilot functionality in the form of enhancements to Designer, an AI-infused image generator....

Keep your graphics cards safe, people CableMod has issued a recall for all its angled power adapters for GPU cards following reports of them overheating and posing a safety risk....

Big Tech's home turf set for law to ward against 'unsafe behavior' The State of California is proposing legislation to regulate the use of AI, including building a computing cluster to check for their safety....

Could it have more to do with browser's ever-increasing irrelevance? Opinion I know people who even today donate to the Mozilla Foundation and swear by the Firefox web browser. Their numbers are declining by the day....

A new chapter in the long saga of the 240/4 block is being written. If you want more and cheaper IPv4, maybe you should help Activists are again lobbying for more than 250 million unused IPv4 addresses to be released for use, potentially tackling the IPv4 exhaustion problem. However, the proposal has been tried and failed before, and again faces formidable opposition....

Resistance is futile, upgrades are inevitable and so is hardware margin inflation AI hype is now infecting a computer industry that just months ago was still wrestling with how best to define an AI PC. It won't come as a surprise that the biggest brands could be creating short-term customer expectations that go unfulfilled....

An orchestra of fails for the security vendor We've had to write the word "Fortinet" so often lately that we're considering making a macro just to make our lives a little easier after what the company's reps will surely agree has been a week sent from hell....

No guarantee it'll come to Windows proper, but testers can give it a poke Microsoft has confirmed that Copilot is on its way into Notepad, with a release of the application being rolled out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels on Windows 11....

That Windows 7 license is little more than a digital paperweight now Microsoft's decision to close pathways allowing Windows 7 and 8 users to upgrade to Windows 10 is still catching people out, months after the company took action....

It's not NTP. There's no way it's NTP. It was NTP Interview Back in late 2010, "Zimmie" was working in IT support for a vendor that made VPN devices and an associated operating system. He got a call on a Monday from a customer - a large specialty retailer in the US - about its VPN hardware that had stopped working over the weekend....

Meanwhile ITER's not slated to start deuterium-tritium ops until 2035 The Joint European Torus (JET) has bowed out with a final hurrah by setting a world record in energy output....

Watchdog orders a rethink in time for the next emergency UK government must figure out how to share spending data across departments after up to 59 billion ($74.4 billion) in expenditure was lost to fraud and error early in the pandemic....

This is a fine approach if you want great uptime stats. Security? Not so much On Call As Friday dawns with its promise of rebooting the working week, The Register presses the button to publish another instalment of On Call - our weekly, reader-contributed column that shares real-world tales of being flummoxed by the farces they're asked to fix....

'New era of ocean science' hoped to follow debut of billion-dollar plankton-spotter NASA has successfully launched PACE, its latest near-billion-dollar climate-monitoring satellite that will study how microscopic plankton and aerosol particles are impacted by global warming....

Finds modest savings, but isn't modest about ability to land big customers or sell AI Cloudflare has joined the ranks of hyperscalers that have delayed replacement of their hardware, telling investors it's found a way to operate its infrastructure for five years instead of four....

Reserve Bank also wants a national 2FA framework The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced on Thursday it would make its digital currency programmable, and ensure it can be exchanged when citizens are offline....

That listing for a gig that looked too good to be true may have been carrying SQL injection code Singapore-based infosec firm Group-IB has detected a group that spent the last two months of 2023 stealing personal info from websites operated by jobs boards and retailers websites across Asia....

Capitalism made communism stronger The US has gone to great lengths to stifle China's fledgling semiconductor industry and deprive it of the tools to develop AI models. Yet a newly published congressional report has found that American venture capital firms are at least partially responsible for funding the Middle Kingdom's explosive growth in these arenas....

Honor among thieves about to be put to the test The US government has placed an extra $5 million bounty on Hive ransomware gang members - its second such reward in a year. And it also comes a little over 11 months since the FBI said it had shut down the criminal organization's network....

HTTP 301 Moved Permanently Mitchell Baker announced on Thursday she's stepping down as CEO of Firefox maker Mozilla Corporation to resume her role as executive chair of the not-for-profit software house....

Say Gemini again, I dare you. I double dare you. Say Gemini one more goddamn time Google on Thursday said it is bringing Gemini Ultra - its most powerful large language model yet - to the world in the form of a rebranded subscriber-only Bard....

Never mind the court orders obtained to thwart Volt Typhoon botnet Analysis The FBI's latest PR salvo, as it fights to preserve its warrantless snooping powers on Americans via FISA Section 702, is more big talk of cyberattacks by the Chinese government....

No walled garden can keep out every weed, we suppose LastPass says a rogue application impersonating its popular password manager made it past Apple's gatekeepers and was listed in the iOS App Store for unsuspecting folks to download and install....

The clock's ticking on those 2030 net zero climate goals Europe's largest bank, HSBC, has tapped Google Cloud to make sure a proposed $1 billion in investments go to green tech startups and don't end up in the hands of scammers....

Existing telemarketing abuse laws apply to AI voices, too, says Commission The US Federal Communications Commission has finally formally declared AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal, and it didn't even need a new law to get the job done....

Chromebooks earn 'Least Likely to Survive a Screwdriver' award The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has published a study showing that Apple has work to do to make its laptops more easily repairable. At the same time, Samsung snatched the bottom place when it comes to cellphone repairability....

One of most important malware loaders to cybercrims who are jumping on vulnerabilities faster than ever Researchers suspect the criminals behind the Raspberry Robin malware are now buying exploits for speedier cyberattacks....

2 MWh of energy storage using dirt, winches, and cables set to be installed in Finland The deepest metal mine in Europe, unused since 2022, is set to host a giant underground gravity battery....

It's all part of a push to get more devs using AI tools While blasting customers with the promise of AI, Microsoft is now telling its employees to tiptoe into the brave new world too....

You think your latency is bad? How about 45 hours to see if a command worked? NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has confirmed that work to resolve a data issue aboard Voyager 1 continues, almost two months since the spacecraft began spouting gibberish....

Linux users have enjoyed such functionality for decades Microsoft has accidentally announced the arrival of sudo in Windows, bringing to an end fervent industry chatter about the tool emerging in the company's flagship operating system....

Fourth conviction in South Africa-linked scheme The head of financial engineering at fintech platform Hydrogen Technology has been convicted of manipulating the price of a security and scheming to defraud investors in the company's cryptocurrency, HYDRO....

Security researcher buddies allegedly tag team a four-month virtual gift card heist at Cupertino tech giant A cybersecurity researcher and his pal are facing charges in California after they allegedly defrauded an unnamed company, almost certainly Apple, out of $2.5 million....

Telcos demonstrate configuration in action at research facility. Now to find customers that want to buy one Telco BT has demonstrated network slicing, long slated as a key element for providing full fat 5G networks promised to subscribers....

Redmond has until end of this quarter to make 'substantive progress' A trade group representing 27 cloud businesses is back at the negotiating table in a bid to resolve the lawsuit it filed over Microsoft's alleged anti-competitive licensing policies....

Remember that satnav that spoke like Homer Simpson? Now imagine AI doing that in any language, on any device Microsoft has filed a patent application for an "automatic dubbing" system that strips speech from media and inserts new voices in its place....

Data from Cassini suggests hidden depths beneath crater-ridden body Mimas, a moderate-sized moon orbiting Saturn, is likely to possess liquid oceans hidden under its icy surface, according to a research paper published this week....

Management either weren't told about risks or ignored them, report finds Before Edinburgh University went live with its disastrous Oracle finance and HR system rollout, senior managers either didn't get the message about "red" risks or ignored it, an independent report has found....