A Victorian lawyer has become the first in Australia to face professional sanctions for using artificial intelligence in a court case, being stripped of his ability to practise as a principal lawyer after AI generated false citations that he had failed to verify.
Company tax could be slashed to 20 per cent for firms with revenue below $1 billion, but businesses would be hit with a world-first “cashflow tax” to encourage them to invest in Australia and capture a share of the enormous earnings of tech giants such as Netflix and Apple.
The commission estimates its plan would deliver an estimated $15 billion boost to the economy.
While cashflow taxes have won support among academics, no country has introduced one to replace traditional company tax.
Proponents argue they are more difficult for large companies to avoid, particularly multinationals that may sell intellectual property or move debt between their international subsidiaries to reduce their overall tax burden.
Tech giants such as Apple, which in 2022-23 paid $141 million in tax on $481 million of taxable income despite reporting $12.6 billion of total income, and Amazon which reported $6.5 billion in income across four entities and paid $125 million in tax, meet their legal tax requirements in Australia.
So code that was untested (the code path that failed was never exercised), perhaps there is no test environment, and not even peer reviewed ( it did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected.) was pushed to production, what a surprise !!
There absolutely is a test environment, it was absolutely reviewed and Google has absolutely spent Moon-landing money on testing and in particular static analysis.
Moon landing money on static analysis that failed to identify the existence of a completely untested code path? Or even to shake this out with random data generation?
This is a dumbfounding level of mistake for an organization such as Google.
What makes you think it was completely untested?
The condition that triggered the null pointer exception was obviously not tested, but it doesn't mean it didn't have tests or even 100% unit test coverage for the coverage tools.
In addition it looks like the code was not ready for production and the mistake was not gating it behind a feature flag. It didn't go through the normal release process.
If Google spent Moon-landing level of money in their quality/deployment infrastructure I expect a much better coverage checker than "100% unit tested", they are famous for having a whole fuzzing infrastructure, coverage analysers for more complex interplay of logic is something I use daily in a non-Google levels of spending (even though still a big enough corporation) which often reminds me that I forgot to write a functional test to cover a potential orchestration issue.
I don't think "completely untested" is correct but tested way below expectations for such structural piece of code is a lesson they should learn, it does look like an amateur-hour mistake.
The main issues to me seem to be that the code was not gated by a flag when it was not ready to be used, thus skipping a lot of the testing / release qualification.
The current government in Queensland Australia announced 50c fares for 6 months trial. There is an election this month, the gov declared it will be made permanent, the opposition which is tipped to win has so far maintained they will also keep it. It has boosted PT travel significantly.
I am in Australia. We are somewhere in between, not as strong as Germany or Western EU countries but infinitely better than US. When some of us were laid off by a US tech firm in 2023 they had to give us prior notice for consultation and not cut off our access immediately like they did in US. This allowed us a week to understand our rights and find out the mistakes in their offer. They had to go back and come back with a new better offer as per Australian laws.
After five years of pursuing a class action lawsuit against Uber on behalf of 8000 taxi operators, Andrianakis stood on the steps of the Supreme Court of Victoria on Monday morning following a historic settlement of $272 million – the fifth-largest class action settlement in Australia’s history.
...
The class action, brought by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers in 2019, was filed on behalf of more than 8000 taxi and hire car owners and drivers who said they lost income when Uber entered the Australian market.
All Australian companies with greater than 100 employees had their gender pay gap data released for the first time. Previously only aggregated data was released.
That is very high. Australian providers offer free incoming SMS even when roaming internationally. The charge is only for data which you can disable. Vodafone Australia has $5/day roaming.
I am Australian of Indian origin who also visits family each year. I had no such issues you mention (except the google region change). My Australian bank allows cash withdrawal from ATM without forex fee, most shops in Tier1&2 cities I go to accept credit cards. Verification is through in app notification, I get a local SIM. My Australian SIM has free incoming SMS.
The only issue is some places now accept UPI payments only.
