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The first Scary Movie is an undeniable 21st-century cultural touchstone. It is a shamelessly raunchy, endlessly quotable (and crucially, gif-able) horror parody of ’90s slasher films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and the film’s now-iconic characters and singular sense of humor came courtesy of the Wayans Family. If Scream was, in its own right, a self-aware sendup of ’90s slashers, Scary Movie was an Inception-level, fourth-wall-breaking parody firing with the precision accuracy of a shotgun.

26 years later, the Scary Movie franchise has continued to evolve and transform in parallel with the genre it parodies: from the teen slashers of the ’90s to the gore-heavy ‘torture-porn’ of Saw in the early 2000s and the Paranormal Activity supernatural found-footage boom of the 2010s. The franchise itself has developed its own internal mythos and behind-the-scenes shuffles, with key creatives and stars moving in and out between installments. The Wayans Family departed the franchise after Scary Movie 2, while stars Anna Faris (Cindy Campbell) and Regina Hall (Brenda Meeks) hung on until Scary Movie 5. 

But with Marlon, Shawn, Keenen Ivory and Craig Wayans (alongside Rick Alvarez) returning to write the sixth Scary Movie film (simply titled Scary Movie), director Michael Tiddes back at the helm, and the (much-needed) return of Faris and Hall, Scary Movie (2026) is a welcome return to form that course-corrects in a customarily self-aware, fourth wall-breaking fashion. Taking aim at so-called “elevated horror” films like Get Out, Longlegs, and Smile, the film delivers a crop of new horror (and wider film industry) parodies at its familiar breakneck pace. 

RELATED ARTICLEMelissa Joan Hart Was Supposed to Play Cindy in SCARY MOVIEMake no mistake, a return to the Wayans’ crude, distinctly 2000s sense of humor isn’t going to win over any already reticent viewers. (Especially with the film clocking in at an hour and 45 minutes, a solid 20 minutes longer than every other installment.) And when the gags fall flat, they really fall flat. But when the Wayans take aim at specific characters, films, or genre trends rather than falling back on sex and/or gross-out humor, Scary Movie delivers on its promise of crowd-pleasing, no-holds-barred, “everyone is a potential target (even ourselves)” parody.Echoing the plot of Scream 5 (which was similarly styled as simply “Scream”), Scary Movie follows the moody, drug-addicted Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan), whose mother Cindy is now a paranoid shut-in a la Final Destination: Bloodlines. When her little sister Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif) is attacked by a familiar masked maniac, Sara and her definitely-not-the-killer boyfriend Jack (Cameron Scott Roberts) turn to Cindy for help, who in turn reunites her old group of friends when she realizes Ghostface is making a reboot-sequel hybrid. Scary Movie’s insistence on dragging the entirety of the original cast into 2026 leaves some characters feeling like arbitrary inclusions. Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri) and Sheriff Doofy (Dave Sheridan) are particularly dead weight. They are characters that, yes, were key players in the fifth Scream, but the deeply unfunny writing and performances offer nothing in terms of comedic substance. Paramount Pictures Characters that fall into similarly familiar, predictable comedic territory are Tuesday’s crop of high school friends (all corresponding to the new young Scream cast). Strangely, there’s no mention is made of Mikey Madison’s Amber, with the film instead opting to riff on Sonia Ammar’s (forgettable) Liv via Ruby Snowber’s Elle, as a bizarrely one-note nymphomaniac whose role culminates (pun intended) in a cartoonishly raunchy and overlong sex scene.Dylan Minnette’s Wes is a similarly strange, arguably unmemorable character to riff, but he nonetheless serves as one of three characters the film uses to make fun of identity politics and the LGBTQ+ community. Played by nonbinary actor Benny Zielke, Wes is reimagined as a trans teen named Jess whose dad continually misgenders him in attempts to be a supportive parent. It’s lazy, unspecific, and doesn’t have anything to do with the film it’s parodying. It is just the kind of tired, anti-woke humor that’s become seemingly part and parcel for comics over a certain age. The same writing habits also rear their ugly head (though, admittedly, in a manner motivated by the source material) with the Mindy Meeks-Martin parody character (played here by Sydney Park but originally portrayed by nonbinary actor Jasmin Savoy Brown), “Dei,” who angrily corrects an onlooker about their pronouns mid-stabbing. The pronoun jokes are repetitive, tiresome, and dead on arrival, but thankfully, these are minor characters who are killed almost as quickly as they’re introduced.Paramount PicturesInstead, we follow the “core four” from the original Scary Movie. Brenda (now rocking a Ma-inspired bowl cut and mother to the Meeks twins) is mostly sidelined, but played with boundless charm by a pitch-perfect Regina Hall, who (alongside Anna Faris) continues to be the franchise’s saving comic grace. Shawn Wayans’ Gay Ray is also back, blending the worst of the script’s lazy comedic writing with the Elle, Dei, and Jess characters to create a predictably predatory and bizarrely outdated trope. More than any other character in the franchise, Gay Ray feels *most* like an unnecessary remnant of a bygone era whose narrative and comedic contributions don’t justify his continued presence in the franchise. On the other side of the coin, though, stoners are perpetually green subject matter. Marlon Wayans’ Shorty Meeks slots remarkably well into the hyper-online, perpetually smoke-filled, highly-reactive world of Twitch live streaming. The character may have been introduced 26 years ago, but there’s nothing desperate or “how do you do, fellow kids” about seeing him on a stream with Kai Cenat or fantasizing about a foursome with the K-Pop Demon Hunters.  It’s in those moments of bizarre hyperspecificity—an animated musical parody blending two of the 2020’s most beloved kids films, Gail taking The Substance and giving birth to one of the White Chicks, Cindy getting a full-fledged John Wick fight sequence against a Matrix-esque army of Ghostfaces—where the Wayans’ writing is the strongest. No matter the genre, no matter the release date, no film is safe from a one-liner or a fourth-wall break. There’s somehow a Project Hail Mary sight gag, despite the films being released just months apart. Perhaps more than any other franchise entry, Scary Movie feels like as much of a sendup of Hollywood as it is horror. The opening sequence parodies the Scream VI opener with Samara Weaving, yes, but it’s mostly an Oscars-centric One Battle After Another gag, opting for industry commentary out of the gate. This trend continues into the third act killer reveal, which acknowledges the real-life ousting of the Wayans family from the franchise in favor of Anthony Anderson, who serves as the twist villain in a stroke of meta, self-deprecating humor. Scary Movie ends with the original stars killing off the younger generation for fear of being usurped. It is a satisfactory, appropriately self-aware ending, but one that begins to feel decidedly pointed when considered in conjunction with the film’s vitriol towards its young queer characters and staunch insistence on shoehorning in Gay Ray. Undeniably, though, this is a crowd-pleasing comedy that moves at a breakneck pace, delivering on its promise of parodying the latest decade of horror films with the Scary Movie franchise’s signature blend of crude humor, meta commentary, and (for better or worse) all of the Wayans Brothers’ stylistic quirks back in full force. It may be overlong, bizarrely fumbling through what should’ve been slam dunk parodies like Sinners and M3GAN, but when Scary Movie is funny, it’s really funny, and the return of the original cast and creatives ensures a welcome return to form for a crowd-pleasing franchise. Scary Movie ⭐ (2.5 of 5)

The post SCARY MOVIE Is a Mixed Bag of Crude Humor and Meta Commentary (Review) appeared first on Nerdist.

At least four of them lost reelection bids after anti-abortion groups and key party allies backed their challengers instead. Two others — a state representative from North Dakota and a state senator from Tennessee — face contested primaries. By Cassandra Jaramillo for ProPublica If Eric Murphy loses his primary election on June 9, he believes he already knows one reason why.

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Lovable says it has now surpassed $500 million in annualized run-rate revenue and its users are building businesses and replacing internal software.

Signal insists that plans to compel tech companies to scan devices for nude images of children announced by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday at London Tech Week "will not keep children safe." "It endangers us all," the encrypted messaging platform said, adding that the mechanism required to implement it would be "dangerous." And it wouldn't be a pro-privacy statement without calling it "dystopian." Signal argues that the proposed technology could at some point be repurposed to enable state-sponsored surveillance of all citizens' comms, or used as a mass censorship tool. "Forcing all UK residents to prove their age and/or have all their content scanned, simply to exercise their fundamental right to communicate, is a perilous proposition," Signal stated. "We know that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however sincere-sounding the promises of those who initiate them are, never remain narrowly scoped. Once created, they will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider 'threats' or 'harmful content.'" Similar accusations have been leveled against the UK government in response to its various attempts to improve online safety via legislation. For example, the government has long presented the Investigatory Powers Act as a way to enshrine in law necessary powers available to law enforcement and UK intelligence to intercept communications for the sake of preventing terrorist attacks. More recently, the Online Safety Act was introduced to impose new obligations on digital platforms to prevent children from accessing online harms. However, privacy proponents have shunned both. Rather than simply providing powers to prevent terror attacks, critics say the IPA enables public bodies to spy on people's calls or texts. It's colloquially known as "The Snooper's Charter." Digital rights organizations have also claimed the OSA is more about online censorship than it is about restricting the types of content children are allowed to view on the web. The PM's proposals are not law yet. Instead, Starmer's speech amounted to a three-month ultimatum to tech companies: make the changes the UK wants to see or the government will legislate. Essentially, whichever way the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others want to play it, some form of device-level scanning appears likely to be pushed onto UK devices soon. "When it comes to the safety of our children, standing by is not an option. Nobody gets a free pass. That is why I'm making sure Britain is the first country in the world to make it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images," Starmer said. "And I expect tech firms to make that happen. This is not an impossible challenge – these are some of the most innovative companies in the world. But if they choose not to, then we will act and change the law." The government's announcement was backed by a slew of campaigners and charities that argued child protection has not been as big a part of tech innovation as it should have been in recent years. Roxy Longworth, author and founder of Behind Our Screens, said: "I told myself, back in 2021, that if I went public with what happened to me and it stopped one life from being ruined, then it was worth it, but the more I campaigned the angrier I became. "Every child needs to be protected from platforms who for far too long have been allowed to turn a blind eye to the damage being done to them. This announcement makes me hopeful that there won't be kids sat in their room feeling the same pressure and shame that consumed my teenage years." Likewise, Chris Sherwood, chief exec at the NSPCC, said: "Every day these protections are not in place, more children will continue to face devastating harm in the online world. That's why we strongly support the government's decision to make it mandatory for these companies to block inappropriate material at device level. This marks a major step forward in our fight against online child sexual abuse." The UK government singled out Apple and Google, saying that it demands both block nudity by default across their devices. That includes cameras, third-party apps, and messaging services, which would prevent children from taking, viewing, or sending nude images. It proposed that the nude-block-by-default approach would keep children safe, while still allowing adults to remove the block by verifying their ages. Client-side scanning remains a highly controversial technology, but supporters present it as striking a balance between privacy and safety. Advocates argue it should appeal to the pro-privacy crowd by keeping all data on the device, rather than blurring nude images in transit, for example, which would involve sending that data to an intermediary. However, in the case of Signal, an encrypted messenger, it breaks the private comms trust model, even if the message content is not sent to a third party. Client-side scanning can involve checking content against a database of known objectionable material. In the context of child exploitation, image hashes would be checked against a database of other hashes associated with abuse material. If the hashes match, then the image would be blocked. Some implementations scan using AI, rather than against a database. So while the image in this scenario is not sent to a third party, it does mean that Signal could no longer say that message content stays between sender and receiver only. Further, because the databases of objectionable material would need to be updated, this introduces additional problems. Updated databases or models would need to be pushed to devices, creating another trust and security dependency. The attack surface also widens, as it is conceivable that attackers could try to manipulate them. As Signal points out, it would be technically possible for the same scanning mechanisms to be updated to block other things, like messages criticizing the government, to take one hypothetical example. Authorities could also feasibly implement ways of seeing which device contains images or other content that has registered matches with its objectionable material database, potentially opening the door to surveillance. The company's statement [PDF] called for public funds to be funneled into other areas to improve child safety, including education, social services, and guardrails on AI technologies and platforms, instead of drafting legislation to block children's nudes by default on devices. "What the UK government wants instead is invisible surveillance infrastructure, switched on by default and potentially rushed into law under cynical pretexts," it said. "All of this with scant care for the actual needs of the children they claim to be protecting or the horrifying and far-ranging consequences that will ensue in practice." Signal has not threatened to pull out of the UK, however, despite the government's promises to enact the plans, via legislation or the threat of it. The company has previously mulled exiting Sweden over proposed encryption-busting laws, and more recently Canada, as it debates a bill that would compel platforms like Signal to gather its users' metadata, which could include their locations and who they are talking to. ®

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Google has fixed its fifth actively exploited Chrome zero-day of 2026, and this one earned its finder a $55,000 bounty. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-11645, is an out-of-bounds memory access bug in Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. Google confirmed that the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild, but has disclosed little beyond the bare technical details. The company patched the issue in the latest Stable Channel releases for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It also awarded a $55,000 bounty to the researcher using the handle "303f06e3," who reported the bug on April 27. The reward suggests Google viewed the report as potentially serious, particularly given its location in V8, the JavaScript engine at the heart of Chrome. Bugs in V8 have featured regularly in both Chrome security advisories and exploit chains over the years, making it one of the browser's more closely watched components. As is standard when active exploitation is involved, Google has withheld technical details that could help others carry out the attack before users have had a chance to patch. CVE-2026-11645 is the fifth exploited Chrome zero-day fixed this year. Google started 2026 by patching CVE-2026-2441, a use-after-free flaw in CSS. Two more zero-days followed in March, CVE-2026-3909 and CVE-2026-3910, before another actively exploited vulnerability, CVE-2026-5281, was patched in April. For Google's browser engineers, 2026 is shaping up to be another busy year. The company patched eight Chrome zero-days across all of 2025, and it’s already more than halfway to that figure with more than six months still to go. There is no indication that the latest flaw has been used in broad, indiscriminate attacks. Zero-days are often reserved for targeted operations until patches become available, after which researchers and criminals alike begin dissecting the fixes to understand what changed. For Chrome users, the advice remains much the same as it was after the first four zero-days this year: restart the browser, install the update, and avoid giving attackers an unnecessary head start. ®

Orbital founder Euwyn Poon built 250,000 scooters at Spin. Now he wants to launch 10,000 space data centers.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

James Hepp is sick of excuses.

The 36-year-old farmer manages about 1,600 acres of corn, soy, and small grains in northern Iowa. He keeps a close eye on his bottom line and says he wants to build a business that his three young children would be foolish not to join. For Hepp, a first-generation farmer, that means doing things differently from his neighbors.

In an effort to preserve soil health, he tills only narrow strips of land, leaving much of his field undisturbed. Hepp also avoids applying nitrogen fertilizer when he’s not growing crops.

At first, Hepp’s approach to farming focused on cutting costs. It let him make fewer passes with the tractor, saving money by using less diesel, herbicides, and fertilizer. The benefits for soil and water quality were a bonus.

“We’re doing this and it works. Like, what do you mean that you can’t afford to do it?”

But after more than a decade of hearing government agencies and ag commodity groups in Iowa urge farmers to fall in line with the state’s voluntary Nutrient Reduction Strategy and adopt conservation practices that could limit the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff fouling waterways, Hepp is fed up with inaction.

“You know, the Nutrient Reduction Strategy has been around for what, 13 years now?” said Hepp, often held up as a role model for his runoff-reducing efforts. “If you’re not doing it now, I don’t know what’s going to make you do it besides regulation.” 

Hepp represents one-third of the “Lobe Rangers,” a trio of corn and soy growers in Iowa’s flat and fertile Des Moines Lobe who have taken to social media to highlight the enormous gap between the conservation goals outlined in Iowa’s strategy for nutrient loss and the actual adoption of conservation practices on cropland. Fifth-generation farmers Matthew Bormann and Zack Smith round out the squad.

Bormann, Hepp and Smith are hardly the first Iowans to call for policies that target the environmental footprint of a relatively unregulated industry. Regulation has been a rallying cry in the last year for environmental groups, politicians and citizens who fear the state’s poor water quality could be linked to its rising cancer rates.

But as award-winning farmers and former county Farm Bureau board members who’ve made a living growing thousands of acres of Iowa’s two biggest commodity crops, Bormann, Hepp, and Smith represent a different demographic in the reform camp: industry insiders.

In March, the men began posting short videos to Facebook demonstrating regenerative practices at work on their farms and calling for policy interventions to improve water quality. Their posts quickly gained traction on social media feeds across the state.

As Iowa grapples with a worsening clean-water crisis fueled by agricultural pollution, the Lobe Rangers see themselves as proof that regulation won’t herald the downfall of Iowa farmers. 

“We’re doing this and it works,” Hepp said. “Like, what do you mean that you can’t afford to do it?”

Last year, farmers in Iowa grew nearly 3 billion bushels of corn and 600 million bushels of soybeans. That’s enough grain to fill over 7,000 miles of railcars, a train that could stretch from the US East to West coast twice over. 

But the large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer that farmers are applying in the state have unwanted consequences, often leaching off fields to fuel algal blooms or unsafe nitrate levels in the state’s waterways before traveling south and harming the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2013, Iowa unveiled its Nutrient Reduction Strategy as a set of guidelines to stem the flow of chemicals from farmland into waterways and public drinking water sources. Since its inception, as in most agricultural states, the strategy has relied strictly on voluntary farm conservation efforts. 

State programs and federal grants through the US Department of Agriculture offer financial incentives and technical support for farmers who adopt conservation practices, like planting cover crops or adding buffer strips along waterways on their farms. 

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and state Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig doubled down on those incentives in a legislative package revealed in early May, which includes an additional $52 million to expand on-farm conservation in central Iowa and $100 million for public water treatment infrastructure.

On his northern Iowa farm, James Hepp plants cover crops after each harvest. Anika Jane Beamer/ICN

Critics, including the Lobe Rangers, say the favored voluntary approach has done little to improve Iowa’s water quality.  “People want clean water. If that’s the case, we need to have policy that gives us a mathematical chance of that happening,” said Smith, sheltering in his farm shop before a spring storm. “We don’t have anything close to that right now.”

Scenarios outlined in the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy in 2013 estimated that at least 60 percent of the state’s cropland would need to be planted with cover crops in the off-season to meet the state’s goal of 45 percent less nitrogen and phosphorus in major waterways by 2035. Yet last year, only about 17 percent of the state’s corn and soy fields were planted with cover crops.

“This sort of thing doesn’t get said by Republicans,” Smith said.

That discrepancy isn’t talked about enough, said Bormann, a former president of his county Farm Bureau and winner of a “Young Farmer Achievement Award” from the Iowa Farm Bureau in 2013. 

“Right now, it’s easy to stick your head in the sand, because there’s no consequences, you know,” Bormann said. But Iowans must “start talking about it,” he added. “It’s just going to make agriculture better.”

While the Lobe Rangers’ posts often spark conversations among farmers in the comments, they aren’t trying to win over their peers, Hepp said. 

Instead, the men are running their social media campaign to target politicians, political candidates and the voting public.

The three farmers think they are a valuable resource for lawmakers who fear hurting, or being accused of hurting, Iowa agriculture.

“We’re not tree huggers. We’re…farmers and, you know, we’re actually doing it. We’re actually doing it to scale,” Bormann said. “We can tell you what works, what doesn’t, what it’s actually going to take.”

Meanwhile, many of the organizations that have historically drawn attention to Iowa’s clean water crisis are “left-leaning groups” that get discounted because of their political bent or advocacy history, Smith said. “And that’s really unfortunate, because it doesn’t mean their ideas aren’t good,” he said. 

So when the Lobe Rangers penned an op-ed in the Des Moines Register in April, calling on state legislators to restore funding to a water quality sensor network that’s relied on philanthropic grants since 2023, Smith thought the men needed to note their political affiliations: two Republicans and one independent. 

“This sort of thing doesn’t get said by Republicans,” Smith said. “Even if you think it.”

“We want [politicians] to know that there is a group of farmers that know we have a problem, and that there are solutions,” he said.

In their mission to connect with political candidates, they’ve found common ground with Chris Jones, a career water scientist and Democrat running an underdog campaign for state secretary of agriculture. For years, Jones has been an unflinching advocate of regulatory fixes for nutrient pollution.

His 28-point policy solution for cleaner water includes a ban on fall tillage of cropland, taxation or restrictions on the use of fertilizer and manure, and a requirement that rented farmland be planted with cover crops at the owner’s expense.

“It is very important that we see that mainstream farmers can do it right,” Jones told Inside Climate News. “These guys, they show that you can survive by doing different things.” 

Jones regularly reposts the Lobe Rangers’ videos to his campaign Facebook page. “What they’re doing could be perceived as somewhat radical,” he said. “From my perspective, it’s not radical. It’s common sense.”

Though they now have nearly 3,000 Facebook followers, none of the Lobe Rangers are particularly keen influencers. They’ve sought video-editing help from Smith’s college-aged daughters and developed their logo (a sort of Zorro and Lone Ranger hybrid, standing among stalks of corn with his sword drawn) using AI.

But the men aren’t entirely new to being spokesmen for the agricultural industry.

Each has been the subject of glowing profiles about their use of regenerative practices, written and shared by trade groups such as the Iowa Corn Growers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau.

Bormann wants the Lobe Rangers to draw attention to the gap between Iowa’s stated conservation goals and realities on the ground.Anika Jane Beamer/ICN

When industry leaders highlight the conservation efforts of just one or two farmers, it sends the wrong message about the reality of Iowa agriculture, Bormann said. 

“It’s a PR thing where it makes it sound like Iowa farmers are doing such practices,” Bormann said. “And the truth is, they’re not.”

Just last year, Hepp received the Iowa Farm Bureau’s Young Farmer Leadership award. Now, his relationship with the group, which favors the current voluntary nutrient-pollution efforts, has cooled off. “We’ve kind of got our heads on the chopping block,” he said. 

In an email to Inside Climate News, the Iowa Farm Bureau affirmed its ongoing support for Hepp.

The group invited him to upcoming farm bureau meetings and a July economic summit, a spokesperson wrote. And last summer, farm bureau staff attended a conservation field day on Hepp’s farm “in support of his efforts.” 

“We value the opportunity to share a range of perspectives and practices that help farmers learn from one another,” the organization wrote.

Many farmers in Iowa’s aging agricultural economy are fearful of change, Hepp said. Adopting conservation practices is tantamount to admitting you were wrong.

French officials are investigating a compromise of the government’s encrypted messaging service Tchap after attackers hijacked an account and gained access to public chat rooms. The incident came to light on June 7 when France's National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) detected suspicious activity on Tchap, the government's homegrown messaging service used across ministries and public sector organizations. The French Digital Affairs Directorate (DINUM), which operates the platform, said it immediately began investigating the compromise and moved to block the affected account. French officials insist the damage was limited and said the attacker could only see messages posted in public chat rooms, which are accessible to all Tchap users. Private conversations, the government says, are encrypted, and their contents remain inaccessible even when an account is compromised. Not everyone is buying that version of events. A cyber criminal has claimed responsibility for the attack and said they were able to gain access after they “social engineered” a valid agent account associated with Tchap's education environment. The alleged hacker claims they accessed more than 73,000 user accounts, 643,000 messages, nearly 60,000 media files, and hundreds of chat rooms. The post, shared by Dark Web Intelligence, also claimed user enumeration was possible through a directory search function and suggested the data included references to documents marked "Diffusion Restreinte," a French government restricted-distribution classification. None of those claims have been independently verified, and DINUM's statement makes no mention of user directory exposure, restricted documents, or the volumes of data cited by the hacker. What French officials have confirmed is that investigators are still working through logs to determine exactly which conversations were accessed and whether any data was exfiltrated. The agency has also notified France's data protection watchdog, CNIL, after determining that personal information may have been exposed through content shared in conversations accessible to the attacker. “A message has been sent to all Tchap users reminding them that a public chat room can be found and joined by any user and that its content is not encrypted,” French officials added. “In accordance with Tchap's terms of service, no personal, sensitive, or confidential information should be exchanged in public chat rooms: such exchanges should be reserved for private chat rooms.” Whether the incident amounts to a limited exposure of public chat rooms or something considerably larger will depend on what investigators find in the logs, but for now, the government and the attacker are telling very different stories. ®

Timing, as we noted previously, is everything. Now hard-pressed tech services biz Kyndryl is dishing out shares worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to execs in the middle of a redundancy program – and some staff are not amused. According to SEC filings made on June 5, chairman and CEO Martin Schroeter was awarded 19,406 units of common stock, valued at $12.25 per share. On the same day, Kyndryl confirmed Group President Elly Keinan and interim CFO Harsh Chugh were given 133,894 shares and 651 shares respectively. The transaction date for all three was listed as March 6, 2026, so even though these agreements were approved before the current job cuts, the fact they landed while Kyndryl is seeking volunteers to take redundancy terms has annoyed some staff who are fearful for their future. One insider noted Kyndryl's executive generosity was filed with the SEC "while we are handing out redundancy letters, zero pay rises and zero bonuses." A spokesperson at Kyndryl told The Register: "These are routine SEC filings that disclose equity vestings from previously granted awards, as well as annual stock grants for our current fiscal year, which are typically done at Kyndryl in the early June timeframe." Following stagnant sales and shrinking profits in Kyndryl's year ended March 31, 2026, the former global infrastructure division of IBM – spun off in November 2021 – began a multi-country exercise to cut costs. A spokesperson confirmed to The Register on May 20 it was undertaking "limited workforce rebalancing in some countries affecting a small percentage of our workforce to address labor costs and streamline our operations." Staff in the UK, for example, entered a 45-day consultation period, meaning at least 100 employees are expected to leave. In the first instance, the corporation is seeking volunteers willing to depart with a four-month pay package. If it doesn't hit the requisite number of exits, compulsory redundancies are expected, according to sources. Kyndryl has not told us how many positions it expects to cut in this round, though it did confirm on an earnings call for fiscal 2026 it is taking a charge of $200 million to pay for severance. Kyndryl employs 73,000 globally. As The Reg revealed, staff were told their job was at risk of redundancy on May 20, the same day that the employee staff survey was sent out. We suspect this tarnished their view of their working environment and culture. Still, no doubt some in the ranks are pleased to note that CEO Schroeter's latest stock award takes his total tally to 2.449 million shares. Likewise, Keinan now owns 1.603 million and Chugh 184,455. The average wage paid to a Kyndryl employee in 2025 was $39,464 versus $15.8 million awarded to Schroeter, according to a proxy statement. Kyndryl, like Atos and DXC, has struggled to report sustained financial growth since cloud computing took off in a big way. Fewer enterprises own and manage datacenters these days, meaning there are fewer big-ticket infrastructure management contracts up for grabs. Some staff are skeptical about Kyndryl's efforts to diversify into AI and cloud service integration work for AWS, Microsoft, and Google. ®

A cult vampire movie filmed in Santa Cruz has become one of Broadway’s most unexpected hits. But can the spirit of Santa Carla survive the journey from Boardwalk to Broadway?

BORK!BORK!BORK! Good news from the Paris Metro. To show off the nation's technological prowess, Parisian techies have eschewed such fripperies as advertisements and transit information in favor of a good, old-fashioned directory browser. Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader "DJ Finsletown," the screen adorned a carriage of Line 11 at the Chatêlet terminus earlier in June. It looks to us as though a web server threw a bit of a wobbly and showed users its undercarriage. Then again, France did give us the can-can dance, in which participants perform high kicks that reveal their underwear, so perhaps this is simply the tech version of the music hall standard. Our reader pondered whether the system behind the scenes was struggling with a recent heatwave, or the borkage was the result of some over-exuberance by football fans following PSG's recent Champion's League final victory. What is perhaps more likely is that some techie in a backroom somewhere opted for a Gallic shrug rather than reaching for the inevitable CTRL-ALT-DEL to revive the stricken system. Line 11 is notable for being one of the least-used lines of the Paris metro system until a recent extension. It also featured some of the oldest-running stock and was notable for rubber-tired trains and heat that might make London's Central Line commuters mutter "steady on." It was also one of the last lines to be constructed in central Paris, on the former route of the Belleville funicular. The funicular, which ran along the streets in a manner familiar to San Francisco residents, ceased operation just over 100 years ago, in 1924. Line 11 got the nod in 1935. As for the web server disgorging its contents, that is a far more modern innovation. Heck, it might even be some AI advert demonstrating what might, or might not, happen if an agent is let loose on a system. In the case of the latter, a borked display would, we suspect, be the least of the problems faced by passengers. Or, as our reader joked, "Probably likely the train's IT systems just went on strike, like all good French fonctionnaires!" ®

The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors will decide Tuesday whether to move forward with a ballot measure to make changes to an ordinance that requires voters to approve any onshore facility of over 20,000 square feet that supports offshore drilling operations.

For families in Watsonville and the Pajaro Valley, California’s pesticide air monitoring system offers the appearance of protection while leaving significant gaps in what is measured and how exposure risks are understood, writes retired nurse and healthcare activist Kathleen Kilpatrick. A single monitor is expected to represent vast agricultural regions where residents live, work and attend school near heavily sprayed fields, even though only a fraction of pesticides are tracked. She argues that the system reassures regulators more than communities, particularly as local residents face overlapping exposures from pesticides, air pollution and other environmental hazards. Real protection, she contends, requires reducing pesticide use near schools and neighborhoods — not simply expanding a monitoring network that captures only part of the problem.

The patient tally from the Synnovis ransomware attack continues to grow two years later, with Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust confirming it was caught up in the breach. The trust told The Register that the Synnovis breach affected about 2,380 records relating to patients who underwent specialist diagnostic testing. The disclosure follows a similar announcement by Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which earlier this month said that almost 33,000 patient records had been caught up in the same breach. According to Mid and South Essex, some of the compromised data cannot yet be directly linked to individual patients, meaning the trust is still unable to determine the final number of people affected. It also said the precise time period covered by the stolen records has yet to be established, although patients tested after June 3, 2024, the day of the attack, were not affected. "We are still waiting for confirmation on exact numbers," Dawn Scrafield, deputy chief executive of Mid and South Essex, told The Register. "Once we have established who those patients are, we will be in contact with any who have been affected." The disclosure highlights the drawn-out fallout from the attack. Synnovis told us it completed its forensic review by the end of last summer and said it had notified all affected organizations by November. However, Mid and South Essex said it was only informed in December 2025 and is still trying to work out exactly which patients are tied to the compromised records six months later. "Any decision on patient notification, including the number of patients to be notified, is made by the affected organization as part of their assessment," a Synnovis spokesperson said in a statement. "Synnovis, as the Processor of the data, is not involved in any of the assessments regarding if, when or how many patients a Controller determines necessary to notify." The company said it does not believe the stolen information presents a high risk to individuals because of its fragmented nature, but acknowledged that affected organizations are still assessing what was taken and whether patients should be contacted. The breach was one of the most disruptive cyber incidents ever to hit the NHS. The Qilin attack crippled pathology services across south east London, forcing hospitals to cancel thousands of appointments and operations while clinicians struggled with delays to blood testing and transfusion services. Patient data was later published online after the gang's extortion attempt failed. However, the fallout wasn't limited to canceled operations and delayed blood tests. Last year, King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust confirmed that delays caused by the outage contributed to the death of a patient, marking one of the first officially acknowledged fatalities linked to a ransomware attack. ®

The startup is one of many entering the RV space, but it's banking on a hybrid power system that can go far beyond campsites.

At the beginning of last year, the UK government was riding high in its first term, having swept to power the previous July. It wasted no time making bold claims: publicly funded services, including the NHS, local councils, and central government were missing out on a potential £45 billion ($55 billion) in productivity savings due to outdated or poorly used technology. To tackle these issues, Peter Kyle, the then Technology Secretary, promised "digital tools, AI and common sense to overhaul public sector technology – so it saves money, treats people with respect, and just makes sense." It was barely 18 months ago, yet everything seems so different: for the government and its digital strategy. Last week, the House of Commons' Science, Innovation and Technology Committee (SITC) named the £45 billion figure as an example of minister-led hype that undermines, rather than boosts, efforts to make the public sector more effective and efficient with digital technologies. The committee said hype represented "overly optimistic projections" that could affect the government's ambitions. Having apparently swallowed a tech vendor slide deck in one mouthful, the government had already claimed its £45 billion saving figure – between 4 and 7 percent of public sector spending – "could be achieved through full potential digitization of public sector services… [through] process simplification, AI-driven automation of manual tasks, greater availability, adoption of low-cost digital channels and reduced fraud through compliance automation." However, as The Register has already reported, others were much more skeptical. In October last year, Nick Davies, programme director at the Institute for Government, said the figure was a "huge amount, given that most of what government is spending on is either salaries or is on different kinds of infrastructure." He pointed out there was a huge difference between productivity improvements – making services better with the same spending – and cashable savings. "There is certainly a kind of inefficiency, duplicative spending across the public sector that you could spend more effectively, but without knowing more about where that £45 billion comes from, it's harder to say," he said. The problem of hype is far from new, and does not belong solely to the Labour government. In 2018, when the Conservatives were in power, the government promised a "tech revolution is coming to the NHS." The "vision" was designed to create a modern tech architecture to underpin a new generation of digital services. Two years after it began, that NHS digitization strategy still had no implementation plan and risked repeating the UK health service's legendary IT failures, according to a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). It said the NHS should urgently publish a detailed plan describing how it aims to meet its ambitions for transforming digital services. "Without a proper implementation plan, the [government] cannot be sure that the £8.1 billion of taxpayers' money being invested in the digital transformation programme will deliver value for money," said the parliamentary watchdog. The government's latest plans for digital savings underscore how dangerous hype can be. The government's "estimate that the digitization of public services could deliver an annual saving of £45 billion is worryingly optimistic. While assumptions are an unavoidable part of economic projections, hyperbole diminishes the case for change," the parliamentary report said. "Optimistic projections and messaging… undermine the credibility of the government's arguments, confuse and demoralize civil servants and encourage the belief that over-optimism, rather than achievement and honesty, will be rewarded," the report said. A government spokesperson responded by claiming digital platforms were already making a real difference to public services, noting that the Roadmap for Digital Government, launched earlier this year "sets out a detailed programme of reform with clear milestones and ongoing progress tracking already in place." "We welcome the committee's report and will consider its recommendations carefully," the spokesperson added. The government said it has clear metrics to help show whether delivery is leading to real improvements, focusing on outcomes. An official said it is using the best available data to understand how services, capability, and performance are changing and it plans to publish regular updates. However, the committee criticized the government's decision to publish its "roadmap" as a website rather than the usual command paper, as it "allows updates to be made without triggering GOV.UK alerts, which limits the extent to which the government can be held accountable for its delivery." The report said: "An example of how DSIT's priorities had changed since the publication of the blueprint came in April 2026 when the Minister for Digital Government and Data confirmed that internal pilots of in-house productivity tools had been paused after they had been 'superseded by more modern, widely available platforms,' without specifying which ones." Hype is not the only threat to progress in improving digital government. Legacy systems were also in the crosshairs of the SITC report. It said "a lack of authoritative data on legacy systems across the public sector was a significant issue," four years after the previous administration promised to do just that – with a shared spreadsheet. The committee also named vendor lock-in as a barrier to progress, citing concerns about the dominant position held by AWS and Microsoft, as well as controversial contracts with Palantir. Again, this is not a new challenge. Hype, however, might be the easiest to fix. Moving away from legacy systems is complex, and escaping vendor lock-in takes time. Avoiding overinflated expectations? Even a politician could do that. ®

Zepto's advertising revenue jumped 151%, outpacing the company's 104% growth in operating revenue.

Can Apple's new AI glow up put to bed accusations that it's losing an all-important industry race?

OPINION The US government is reportedly weighing whether to take a financial stake in AI companies, which looks a bit like negotiating for a seat on the Titanic. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic, the marquee brands in US AI, are profitable yet. While Anthropic may be nearer to that point if its accounting survives scrutiny, OpenAI's $1.4 trillion in financial commitments over the next eight years have been interpreted as a red flag for investors. This raises (at least) two questions: Should the US government be picking winners? And should the US government be picking losers? The first question appears already to have been decided. As noted by the US Council on Foreign Relations, since January 2025, the feds have invested $20.9 billion in sixteen deals that involve direct ownership. This represents a change from more hands-off financial arrangements involving grants, loans, and tax incentives. The Department of Commerce, for example, has taken a 10 percent stake in Intel, once a symbol of American technical prowess and now a national security backstop. The Development Finance Corporation had invested in minerals, energy, and infrastructure. And the Department of Defense has undertaken at least seven similar deals. Neoliberal US notions about competition and the separation of church, state, and private industry have succumbed to the new world disorder. When economists from Harvard and Yale looked at the issue in a 2021 paper titled "The Dance Between Government and Private Investors: Public Entrepreneurial Finance around the Globe," they were cautiously optimistic. Authors Jessica Bai (Harvard), Shai Bernstein (Harvard), Abhishek Dev (Yale) and Josh Lerner (Harvard) looked at 755 entrepreneurial finance policies in 66 countries during the period from 1995 to 2019. They concluded that "government funding programs are associated with subsequent increases in innovation," as measured by "top patents." They offered some caveats, such as the observation that "government programs frequently rely on private capital markets through capital matching requirements, where private capital groups are often allowed to invest in more preferential terms than the public funds." And they also noted that economists have long recommended government investment in response to market failures – areas where private funding has chosen not to invest, presumably due to the uncertainty of returns. A recent example of that would be the US Commerce Department's decision to invest $2 billion in quantum computing in exchange for a minority controlling stake in nine technology companies. Pure-play quantum computing companies like D-Wave, Quantinuum, IonQ, and Rigetti Computing are not making a profit. But concern that quantum computing might some day do meaningful computing not possible with classical computers is enough to keep the funds flowing for now. The US government's reported interest in AI companies might be interpreted in a similar light, as a bailout for companies that have committed to spend heavily on data centers before demand has been demonstrated and pricing has stabilized. With OpenAI and Anthropic preparing to go public, the White House would do better to wait before placing its bet. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is said to have pushed for federal investment last year but publicly repudiated the idea after CFO Sarah Friar suggested federal loan guarantees. If the feds were to buy into OpenAI, the deal might take the form of a public wealth fund – so the public would receive revenue from intellectual property that AI firms have captured and are reselling. US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) last week said he planned to introduce a bill called the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. Funded by a one-time 50 percent tax paid in AI company stock, it would give the public a say in how AI is used and a portion of the revenue generated by AI companies (which, again, follows from the largely uncompensated capture of public content). Meanwhile, the White House last week issued an executive order directing "the national security enterprise to accelerate AI adoption to meet surging demand, adapt the best commercial and open-source technologies for mission use, assure that fielded systems are robust, steerable, controllable, and preserve clear lines of accountability under the Constitutional chain of command." And the order promises "new partnerships with willing private-sector companies to secure America’s cutting-edge AI against global threats." Buying into these companies doesn't make a lot of sense if they can deliver on their promises at a viable price. The market would ensure plenty of good options for federal procurement. But if leading AI models are priced like Claude Mythos, reported to run $25 per million input tokens and $125 per million output tokens, or about 5x Opus 4.8, there may be some concern that leading edge AI will be too costly for much of the market. Uber's $1,500 monthly token spending cap per employee AI tool suggests companies won't reward the AI industry for over-investing. If cutting-edge AI is going to be priced out of reach for most industries and if it really can accomplish things that lesser models cannot, the case for federal involvement gets stronger. It would be a shame if the feds rewarded OpenAI and its peers with taxpayer money because that would reward fiscal irresponsibility and hinder startups hoping to innovate. Worse still, it would commit funds prematurely and unnecessarily for some notional national security edge that's razor thin and is being dulled by evolving open weight models and foreign model providers. The jury is still out – there are at least 115 lawsuits against AI companies – on whether there's a broad, sustainable market for AI services outside of software development and perhaps a few other knowledge work markets. The government should wait for the courts, the public, and the market to weigh in before riding to the rescue. ®