The Register

Because nobody wants a bazillion volts zorching critical infrastructure

Japanese tech conglomerate NTT has created a drone that triggers lightning, is then struck by a heavenly bolt it instigated, and survives the experience – all in the name of preventing damage from natural lightning.…

Ten billion bucks coming in for a soft landing, customers may be about to experience a bumpy ride

Beleaguered aerospace giant Boeing has sold some of its “Digital Aviation Solutions” portfolio to private equity outfit Thoma Bravo.…

India and China deliver a nice milestone, with help from ancient internet history

Asia has become the second region in the world to reach 50 percent IPv6 capability, according to data from labs run by the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC).…

Meanwhile, OpenAI expresses an interest in unbundling Chrome from Google

Google has agreed to unbundle its Play Store and Android operating system in India, but only on smart TVs, and will also cough up a $2.4 million fine after being found to have breached competition law.…

IT guy says their claims are toothless – and they owe him $400K

A group of pediatric dental practices in North Carolina have accused a longtime contractor of refusing to return control of several web domains after his contract was terminated.…

Chrome will keep third-party cookies, a win for web giant's ad rivals

After six years of work, Google's Privacy Sandbox, technology for delivering ads while protecting privacy, looks like dust in the wind.…

Uncle Sam says Chinese factories use proxies to dodge import taxes

world war fee  Solar panels made in a number of Southeast Asian countries face massive new import duties into America, some as steep as 3,521 percent, after a US Department of Commerce probe apparently found the countries were being used as tariff-dodging proxies for Chinese state-subsidized manufacturers.…

As cyber-agency faces cuts, makes noises about switching up program

Two top officials have resigned from Uncle Sam's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, furthering fears of a brain drain amid White House cuts to the federal workforce.…

Receiver warns of ‘potential interferences’ and appoints senior British lawyers to oversee candidate nomination process

The African Network Information Center (AFRINIC) will hold elections on June 23rd, perhaps giving the regional internet registry the chance to convene a board for the first time in three years.…

10 other certificates 'were mis-issued and have now been revoked'

Certificate issuer SSL.com’s domain validation system had an unfortunate bug that was exploited by miscreants to obtain, without authorization, digital certs for legit websites.…

On top of that, Trump's increased federal spending almost completely negates $150B in cuts

Comment  Elon Musk's Trump-blessed DOGE unit has made a lot of noise and a lot of headlines for its heavy-handed hatchet tactics within supposedly bloated governmental organizations.…

Using LLMs to pick programs, people, contracts to cut is bad enough – but doing it with Musk's Grok? Yikes

Updated  A group of 48 House Democrats is concerned that Elon Musk's cost-trimmers at DOGE are being careless in their use of AI to help figure out where to slash, creating security risks and giving the oligarch's artificial intelligence lab an inside track to train its models on government info.…

In effect: 'Ha ha – the government is borked and so are you'

Ransomware scumbags - potentially those behind the Fog gang - are channeling their inner Elon Musk with their latest ransom note, spotted by researchers at Trend Micro.…

Plenty of tortillas onboard but not quite so much science this time

SpaceX's latest cargo mission to the International Space Station (ISS) – CRS-32 – just docked to the orbiting outpost, bringing extra crew supplies, which resulted in the deferral of several science payloads.…

Can't run Windows 11? Don't want to? There are surprisingly legal options

You will have to reinstall everything, but there is another way to escape the end of Windows 10 support in October – and it's cheaper than a new PC.…

Re-writing applications takes years, is expensive, in-house expertise needed

When moving to the cloud, companies with significant investments in Microsoft infrastructure wares simply can't afford to rewrite everything for Linux, so they end up migrating to Azure to dodge the markups Redmond charges for running its server software in competitors' clouds.…

Security bods can earn up to $10K per report

Ransomware threat hunters can now collect rewards of $10,000 for each piece of intel they file under a new bug bounty that aims to squash extortionists.…

Retailer tight-lipped on details as digital hiccup disrupts customer orders

UK high street mainstay Marks & Spencer told the London Stock Exchange this afternoon it has been managing a "cyber incident" for "the past few days."…

What used to be a serious issue mainly in Southeast Asia is now the world’s problem

Scam call centers are metastasizing worldwide "like a cancer," according to the United Nations, which warns the epidemic has reached a global inflection point as syndicates scale up and spread out.…

Hyperscaler says there's no decrease in demand, it's just looking for good deals

Amazon has joined Microsoft in pausing some datacenter leasing deals, sparking fresh concerns about whether the AI hype train may be running out of steam.…