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Audit finds budget uncertainties and tiny staff make it hard to mount a fight against killer space rocks NASA is struggling to meet all the goals of its Planetary Defense Strategy and Action Plan, the effort that aims to prevent humanity being wiped out by space rocks that hit Earth....

Musk promised a million auto-autos by 2020. He's delivered maybe 10 Video On Monday, Elon Musk proudly launched his often-promised Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, but early videos shot by riders show how far the service lags behind Waymo....

The problem is focusing on property rights rather than privacy The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says the revised version of the NO FAKES Act, reintroduced in April, would be a disaster for free speech and innovation if signed into law....

Why are you even reading this story? Patch now! Citrix patched a critical vulnerability in its NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway products that is already being compared to the infamous CitrixBleed flaw exploited by ransomware gangs and other cyber scum, although there haven't been any reports of active exploitation. Yet....

Anthropic scores a qualified victory in fair use case, but got slapped for using over 7 million pirated copies One of the most tech-savvy judges in the US has ruled that Anthropic is within its rights to scan purchased books to train its Claude AI model, but that pirating content is legally out of bounds....

Fifth and final Crew Dragon ready for first flight to the ISS tomorrow NASA has a launch date for Axiom Mission 4. The much-delayed private astronaut expedition is now targeting for liftoff on Wednesday, June 25....

SPEX Technologies still gets the win, but failed to 'adequately tie a dollar amount' to infringing acts, says order Western Digital has succeeded in having the sum it owed from a patent infringement case reduced from $553 million down to just $1 in post-trial motions, when the judge found the plaintiff's claims had shifted during the course of the litigation....

Say hello to a year's support, but bid goodbye to Pocket The latest Mozilla Firefox is trickling out - and it's an Extended Support Release (ESR)....

A good reminder not to download apps from non-vendor sites Unknown miscreants are distributing a fake SonicWall app to steal users' VPN credentials....

Another OEM has decided we're now in the agentic AI age HPE Discover 2025 In another sign that AI agents have taken over the enterprise zeitgeist, the theme at HPE Discover this year is all about cramming the automated workflow bots anywhere they'll fit, whether or not agentic AI is mature for all use cases....

ULA's Atlas V deploys second load of Amazon's broadband satellites The second batch of Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband satellites has launched, but Team Bezos has a long way to go to match the coverage of Elon Musk's Starlink....

'Jobright Agent' can apply for jobs on your behalf The jury is still out on whether AI will take your job, but there's a new AI tool that promises to help you find a new one if you're pressed....

'Things will break,' Aviatrix CPO tells El Reg Interview In September, Microsoft will retire default outbound access for VMs in Azure. "It's not quite a Y2K moment," says Aviatrix CPO Chris McHenry, "but things will break."...

Summer Solstice release lands as another distro ditches the old display protocol Depending on who you ask, the recent turbulent times in the world of X11 could be a new dawn - or the eddies around a sinking ship....

20TB of galactic shots a day, backed by Microsofties High on a Chilean mountain the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is, at last, photographing the galaxy and the first shots have found 2,104 new asteroids in the Solar System in its initial ten hours of operation....

Russian judge lets off accused with time served - but others who refused to plead guilty face years in penal colony Four convicted members of the once-supreme ransomware operation REvil are leaving captivity after completing most of their five-year sentences....

CMA roadmap outlines potential restrictions on how ad slinger operates in the country Google is one step closer to strategic market status (SMS) designation in the UK following a proposal from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) regarding search and advertising....

AI boom sparks surge in bit barn funding as firms tout high barriers and sticky clients What do investors find most attractive about datacenters? One of the simple answers is customer lock-in. "When your contracts come to an end, your customers typically prefer to stay at your datacenter," said one asset firm exec....

Split your shell for fun and profit - even over remote connections All the fun of a tiling window manager right on the console, without needing a GUI at all. What's not to like?...

Sales are already surging thanks to Beijing's subsidies and Trump's tariffs China recently launched an initiative to reduce the incidence of obesity in the country, a move analyst firm IDC thinks will fatten the market for smartwatches and smart wristbands....

Nothing startling, even with Google's AI extras Lenovo has released the first Chromebook Plus packing MediaTek's Kompanio Ultra, the system-on-chip that includes a 50 TOPS neural processing unit, and at first glance it looks speedy and includes some AI features but is otherwise mundane....

Gotta keep 'em separated so the marketers and snoops can't come out and play Psylo, which bills itself as a new kind of private web browser, debuted last Tuesday in Apple's App Store, one day ahead of a report warning about the widespread use of browser fingerprinting for ad tracking and targeting....

VMware spin-out is making friends and choosing some enemies Omnissa, the independent company that acquired VMware's former end-user compute portfolio, has tweaked its App Volumes product that packages and deploys desktop apps for use on virtual PCs so it works on physical machines too....

Chinese crew built 1,000+ device network that runs on home devices then targets critical infrastructure A stealthy, ongoing campaign to gain long-term access to networks bears all the markings of intrusions conducted by China's Typhoon' crews and has infected at least 1,000 devices, primarily in the US and South East, according to Security Scorecard's Strike threat intel analysts. And it uses a phony certificate purportedly signed by the Los Angeles police department to try and gain access to critical infrastructure....

Prepping to fight the next war, not the last one video The US Army, alongside British and other NATO partners, is testing the latest counter-drone kit at a training area in Germany. Early feedback is promising, even if most of the hardware isn't American-made....

Kirin X90 SoC made on two-year-old 7nm N+2 process Despite concerted efforts by the Chinese to bolster domestic semiconductor production in defiance of US trade policy, new evidence uncovered by Canadian research outlet TechInsights suggests SMIC, the Middle Kingdom's top chip manufacturer, remains generations behind the rest of the world....

Plus 'low-level' hacktivist attempts The US Department of Homeland Security has warned American businesses to guard their networks against Iranian government-sponsored cyberattacks along with "low-level" digital intrusions by pro-Iran hacktivists....

It would be the first major US nuclear plant built in over 15 years New York State is set to build America's first major new nuclear plant in more than 15 years, amid growing energy demands, particularly from power-hungry AI datacenters....

Criminals targeted the hospital and physician network's Detroit cancer clinic this time McLaren Health Care is in the process of writing to 743,131 individuals now that it fully understands the impact of its July 2024 cyberattack....

$1.5 billion offered for database company valued at $1.2 billion four years ago Document database company Couchbase is set to be bought by a private equity biz in all-cash transaction valued at approximately $1.5 billion....

Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Dave Cutler have dinner Sysinternals founder Mark Russinovich's after-dinner photo just flipped the nerd world into Kardashian-like levels of internet meltdown....

Power chip biz to hand over equity to lenders, wipe out most shareholders, and keep running during restructuring Wolfspeed, maker of bandgap chips for power and radio frequency applications, is to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the "near future" after striking an agreement with creditors to cut its $6.5 billion debt by roughly 70 percent....

Cyber Monitoring Centre issues first severity assessment since February launch Britain's Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) estimates the total cost of the cyberattacks that crippled major UK retail organizations recently could be in the region of 270-440 million ($362-591 million)....

MPs hear doubts over efficiency savings that are reliant on speculative gains from IT, machine learning Leading economists have questioned how the UK government's Spending Review can determine exactly 10 percent cuts to admin budgets - partly powered by AI and digital transformation - across central departments when they are starting from different places and have different projects to manage....

Not quite the answer to life, the universe and everything, but not far off Opinion The smaller the org, the better the jobs. Not universally true, but a good rule of thumb. Small organizations have fewer layers of management, and each individual has much more influence. One voice in 50 is 100 times louder than one in 5,000. You get to say what you want to do andgetto do it. Happiness....

And was saved by an even worse meltdown caused by someone else Who, Me? Welcome to another working week and therefore another installment of Who, Me? - The Register's reader-contributed column where you confess to making a mess and somehow find safe egress....

Also points to important markets among the 300 million people who will soon work as delivery riders or influencers Huawei's chairman Xu Zhijun - aka Eric Xu - has called out China's enormous lead in fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) installations....

PLUS: India tries to untangle TXT marketing opt-ins; China's AI crackdown succeeds; Australia and Boeing team AWACS, drones; and more! Asia In Brief Chinese web giant Baidu last week staged a livestream hosted by an AI version of local influencer Yonghao Luo and scored 13 million hits and $7.5 million of sales....

PLUS: 5.4M healthcare records leak; AI makes Spam harder to spot; Many nasty Linux vulns; and more Infosec in brief A former US Army sergeant has admitted he attempted to sell classified data to China....

Turn out the lights, the internet is over Google AI Overviews and other AI search services appear to be starving the hand that fed them....

Skull emoji knife emoji moneybag emoji Seven people, including a 14-year-old, have been arrested or surrendered to Danish authorities after allegedly using encrypted messaging apps to hire other teenagers for contract killings in what Europol calls a "violence-as-a-service" operation....

Don't trust mystery digits popping up in your search bar Scammers are hijacking the search results of people needing 24/7 support from Apple, Bank of America, Facebook, HP, Microsoft, Netflix, and PayPal in an attempt to trick victims into handing over personal or financial info, according to Malwarebytes senior director of research Jerome Segura....

Welcome to bill shock, AI style Microsoft's GitHub this week said paying GitHub Copilot customers will now face monthly limits on certain types of high-powered AI requests, and will have to pay more if they want to surpass those limits....

'The selected vendor must be willing to receive consideration that is primarily non-monetary,' says the USPTO The US Patent and Trademark Office is exploring a plan for using AI at the agency to speed up the process of granting patents - but its initial request for information says that vendors should expect to be paid in exposure rather than cold, hard cash....

DataFusion and WarehousePG meant to deal with AI-related workloads, not to compete with analytics data platforms PostgreSQL exponent EDB has enhanced its new data platform, claiming this will help bring transactional, analytical, and AI workloads into a single environment....

If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck... Aflac is the latest insurance company to disclose a security breach following a string of others earlier this week, all of which appear to be part of Scattered Spider's most recent data theft campaign....

It's a marketing move to lure more affiliates, says infosec veteran The latest marketing ploy from the ransomware crooks behind the Qilin operation involves offering affiliates access to a crack team of lawyers to ramp up pressure in ransom negotiations....

French satellite operator plans capital raise backed by state and key investors including Bharti Satellite biz Eutelsat is looking to raise 1.35 billion ($1.55 billion) to grow its Low Earth Orbit (LEO) network to take on Starlink and benefit from anticipated growth in demand for connectivity....

Q1 revenue jumps to $11.7B, with 400 and 800 GbE driving the spike The long-dormant market for datacenter network switches is booming thanks to AI....

X11 is very far from dead - no matter if some want it to be Comment Considerable new activity is happening both in the established X.org X11 server and around its new fork, Xlibre....