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1 day ago | 
theregister.com | Richard Speed
A legal claim has been brought against Microsoft over alleged licensing practices that could result in a multibillion-pound payout for UK customers. The claim alleges that "the software giant abused its market dominance and engaged in conduct that restricted competition to its new licenses from pre-owned licenses for Microsoft products. That conduct affected and inflated the prices of both new licenses and pre-owned licenses."The software products concerned include Office and Windows.
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1 day ago | 
theregister.com | Richard Speed
The odyssey of the Soviet Union's failed attempt to reach Venus came to an end over the weekend with the probe either disintegrating during reentry or what remained of it splashing harmlessly into the ocean. A Venera-8 descent module (source: NASA archive)The spacecraft, dubbed Kosmos 482, had orbited the Earth since it launched in March 1972.
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2 days ago | 
theregister.com | Richard Speed
Exclusive European cloud vendor Nextcloud has accused Google of deliberately crippling its Android Files application, which it says has more than 800,000 users. The problem lies with the "All files access" permission, where broad access to files on a device is required. While most applications can make do with Google's more privacy-friendly storage access tools, such as Storage Access Framework (SAF) or the MediaStore API, others require more permissions – hence the "All files access" privilege.
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2 days ago | 
theregister.com | Richard Speed
The Windows team has come up with a bug so bad that Microsoft has had to postpone some Insider builds until the issue is dealt with.
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2 days ago | 
theregister.com | Richard Speed
At last, an AI model we can really get behind: LegoGPT takes a text prompt and spits out a physically stable design. However, before we get carried away and ask it to come up with a LEGO® Sistine Chapel, the tool can only generate designs that fit within a 20 x 20 x 20 grid using just eight basic brick types (1 x 1, 1 x 2, 1 x 4, 1 x 6, 1 x 8, 2 x 2, 2 x 4, and 2 x 6). There's no "nice part usage" here.
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3 days ago | 
theregister.com | Richard Speed
Who, Me? Sometimes, a favor done for friends years ago can come back to bite you in a very corporate way. Welcome to another cautionary tale from the files of Who, Me? Today's annecdote comes from an event at the Centre for Computing History in which a recount of swears and shocked suits was told by someone we'll Regomize as "Bob," for that is not his name. Our story takes us back to the white hot heat of the Microprocessor Revolution tm in the early 1980s.
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4 days ago | 
lxer.com | Richard Speed
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the slurpiest mobile browser of them all? The answer, according to VPN vendor Surfshark, is Chrome. Surfshark's research focused on the top ten browsers based on AppMagic rankings. This included Safari due to it being the default browser on iPhones. Between them, Chrome and Safari account for almost 90 percent of the mobile browser market, according to Statcounter, while also being among the top for data collection. At first glance, it doesn't look good for Chrome.
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4 days ago | 
theregister.com | Richard Speed
The UK's Ministry of Defence (MOD) is gradually shifting its spending from the US to Europe, according to research from Tussell. The RAF took delivery of two new F-35B Lightning jets – flown in from Texas and built by Lockheed Martin – at its base in Marham, Norfolk this week.
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5 days ago | 
theregister.com | Richard Speed
NASA has quietly scrapped a plea for third parties to take its VIPER rover to the lunar surface. The US space agency stated that it is canceling the Lunar Volatiles Science Partnership solicitation, which was aimed at getting VIPER to the Moon at no cost to government. The original plan was to deposit the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) on the Moon as part of a Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract.
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6 days ago | 
lxer.com | Richard Speed
Debian bookworm is getting what could be its last hurrah as the basis for Raspberry Pi's operating system, with what's likely to be its final appearance on a release for the diminutive computers. The last major release of Raspberry Pi OS was in November 2024, meaning that there are plenty of changes in this latest update, both visible and under the hood. One of the most visible changes is around how the screen locking works.
