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LEO communications satellites are proliferating like rabbits

Nearly all images from some space telescopes in low Earth orbit could be affected by light from man-made satellites as the number of communication spacecraft surges, new research led by NASA has found.…

Despite Windows 10 losing free support, Statcounter shows Windows 11 holding only a modest lead of 53.7% market share compared to Windows 10's 42.7%. Analysts say the slow transition reflects both hardware limitations and a lack of must-have Windows 11 features compelling organizations to refresh their fleets. The Register reports: The Register spoke to Lansweeper principal technical evangelist Esben Dochy, who noted that consumers were more likely to have devices that couldn't be upgraded or follow the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule when it comes to change. He also pointed out consumers in the EU get Microsoft Extended Security Updates (ESU) for free. For businesses, though, it's different. Dochy told us: "The primary blocker is slow change management processes. These can be slow due to bad planning, lack of resources, difficulty in execution (in highly distributed organizations) etc. "The ESU are used to be secure while those change management processes take place, but organizations will have to pay to get those ESU making it more expensive for unprepared or inefficient organizations." [...] The challenge facing Windows 11 is that, other than the end of free support for many versions, there is no must-have feature to make enterprises break a hardware refresh cycle, particularly in a difficult economic environment. Microsoft has not released official statistics on Windows 11 adoption. However, hardware vendors have noted the sluggish pace of transition. Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke commented during an analyst call: "If you were to look at it relative to the previous OS end of support, we are 10-12 points behind at that point with Windows 11 than we were with the previous generation."

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Starting in March, Frontline Worker and Kiosk–only mailboxes lose EWS access

Microsoft is getting serious about the end of Exchange Web Services (EWS) and has announced that, starting in March 2026, it will begin blocking EWS access to mailboxes without license rights.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Multiple divisions at Microsoft have lowered sales growth targets for certain artificial intelligence products after many sales staff missed goals in the fiscal year that ended in June, The Information reported on Wednesday. It is rare for Microsoft to lower quotas for specific products, the report said, citing two salespeople in the Azure cloud unit. The division is closely watched by investors as it is the main beneficiary of Microsoft's AI push. [...] The Information report said Carlyle Group last year started using Copilot Studio to automate tasks such as meeting summaries and financial models, but cut its spending on the product after flagging Microsoft about its struggles to get the software to reliably pull data from other applications. The report shows the industry was in the early stages of adopting AI, said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria. "That does not mean there isn't promise for AI products to help companies become more productive, just that it may be harder than they thought."

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IT giant touts unified management, stretched clusters, and AI-ready networking at Discover Barcelona

HPE is laying out its enterprise stall with enhancements to its GreenLake hybrid cloud portfolio, while converging its Aruba and Juniper networking to offer customers AIOps across both, plus high-speed connectivity for AI processing.…

schwit1 shares a report from CNN: A private Chinese space firm successfully sent its Zhuque-3 rocket to orbit but failed in its historic attempt to re-land the rocket booster Wednesday -- the first such trial by a Chinese firm as the country's growing commercial space sector races to catch up with American rivals like SpaceX. The rocket entered orbit as planned, but its first stage did not successfully return to a landing site, instead crashing down, the company said in a statement. "An anomaly occurred after the first-stage engine ignited during the landing phase, preventing a soft landing on the designated recovery pad," the statement said. "The debris landed at the edge of the recovery area, resulting in a failed recovery test." The team would "conduct a comprehensive review" and continue to "advance the verification and application of reusable rocket technology in future missions," the statement added. You can watch a video of the launch and subsequent crash here.

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Russian vehicles will depart soon, but Baikonur launchpad damage clouds future arrivals

NASA confirmed this week that for the first time, all eight of the International Space Station's docking ports are currently occupied – four by Russian vehicles.…

The Zig Software Foundation has quit GitHub after years of unresolved GitHub Actions bugs -- including a "safe_sleep" script that could spin forever and cripple CI runners. Zig leadership puts the blame on Microsoft's growing AI-first priorities and declining engineering quality. Other open-source developers are voicing similar frustrations. The Register reports: The drama began in April 2025 when GitHub user AlekseiNikiforovIBM started a thread titled "safe_sleep.sh rarely hangs indefinitely." GitHub addressed the problem in August, but didn't reveal that in the thread, which remained open until Monday. That timing appears notable. Last week, Andrew Kelly, president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation, announced that the Zig project is moving to Codeberg, a non-profit git hosting service, because GitHub no longer demonstrates commitment to engineering excellence. One piece of evidence he offered for that assessment was the "safe_sleep.sh rarely hangs indefinitely" thread. "Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs while being completely neglected," Kelly wrote. "After the CEO of GitHub said to 'embrace AI or get out', it seems the lackeys at Microsoft took the hint, because GitHub Actions started 'vibe-scheduling' -- choosing jobs to run seemingly at random. Combined with other bugs and inability to manually intervene, this causes our CI system to get so backed up that not even master branch commits get checked."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from GamesIndustry.biz: Japanese game makers are struggling to locate affordable commercial fonts after one of the country's leading font licensing services raised the cost of its annual plan from around $380 to $20,500 (USD). As reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game license plan at the end of November. The expensive replacement plan -- offered through Fontwork's parent company, Monotype -- doesn't even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan's bigger studios. The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters. UI/UX designer Yamanaka stressed that this would be particularly problematic for live service games; even if studios moved quickly and switched to fonts available through an alternate licensee, they will have to re-test, re-validate, and re-QA check content already live and in active use. The crisis could even eventually force some Japanese studios to rebrand entirely if their corporate identity is tied to a commercial font they can no longer afford to license.

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Statcounter shows the gap narrowing as users cling to older hardware and familiar workflows

Windows 11 has not significantly widened its market share lead over Windows 10, despite support for many versions of the latter ending almost two months ago.…

Awarded a £239M contract, outsourcer apologizes for any inconvenience to 1.5M members

Pension scheme members are facing a string of errors and malfunctions as they try to log into and retrieve account details from the UK's civil service portal the government is paying Capita £239 million ($318 million) to build and run.…

Commerce Department wants equity in xLight as it backs a free-electron laser to challenge ASML

The US Department of Commerce has signed a preliminary letter of intent to provide up to $150 million to xLight, a Palo Alto-based startup led by former Intel chief Pat Gelsinger, that is working on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.…

Bye-bye bcachefs, but hello there bhyve

The last new kernel release of 2025 is here, and it's looking likely this will be the new LTS kernel release.…

China's private launch firm LandSpace is preparing the debut flight of its Zhuque-3 rocket, aiming to become the country's first to land a reusable orbital-class booster using a Falcon-9-style return profile. Ars Technica reports: Liftoff could happen around 11 pm EST tonight (04:00 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China. Airspace warning notices advising pilots to steer clear of the rocket's flight path suggest LandSpace has a launch window of about two hours. When it lifts off, the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) rocket will become the largest commercial launch vehicle ever flown in China. What's more, LandSpace will become the first Chinese launch provider to attempt a landing of its first stage booster, using the same tried-and-true return method pioneered by SpaceX and, more recently, Blue Origin in the United States. Construction crews recently finished a landing pad in the remote Gobi Desert, some 240 miles (390 kilometers) southeast of the launch site at Jiuquan. Unlike US spaceports, the Jiuquan launch base is located in China's interior, with rockets flying over land as they climb into space. When the Zhuque-3 booster finishes its job of sending the rocket toward orbit, it will follow an arcing trajectory toward the recovery zone, firing its engines to slow for landing about eight-and-a-half minutes after liftoff. At least, that's what is supposed to happen. LandSpace officials have not made any public statements about the odds of a successful landing -- or, for that matter, a successful launch...

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Bruce66423 shares a report from the Los Angeles Times: Tattoo ink doesn't just sit inertly in the skin. New research shows it moves rapidly into the lymphatic system, where it can persist for months, kill immune cells, and even disrupt how the body responds to vaccines. Scientists in Switzerland used a mouse model to trace what happens after tattooing. Pigments drained into nearby lymph nodes within minutes and continued to accumulate for two months, triggering immune-cell death and sustained inflammation. The ink also weakened the antibody response to Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE's COVID vaccine when the shot was administered in tattooed skin. In contrast, the same inflammation appeared to boost responses to an inactivated flu vaccine. "This work represents the most extensive study to date regarding the effect of tattoo ink on the immune response and raises serious health concerns associated with the tattooing practice," the researchers said. "Our work underscores the need for further research to inform public health policies and regulatory frameworks regarding the safety of tattoo inks." The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Japan’s Askul still can’t run all its sites, but at least the fax line held up OK

Japanese e-tailer Askul has resumed online sales, 45 days after a ransomware attack.…

Anthropic has made its first acquisition by buying Bun, the engine behind its fast-growing Claude Code agent. The move strengthens Anthropic's push into enterprise developer tooling as it scales Claude Code with major backers like Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Google. Adweek reports: Claude Code is a coding agent that lets developers write, debug and interpret code through natural-language instructions. Claude Code had already hit $1 billion in revenue six months since its public debut in May, according to a LinkedIn post from Anthropic's chief product officer, Mike Krieger. The coding agent continues to barrel toward scale with customers like Netflix, Spotify, and Salesforce. Further reading: Meet Bun, a Speedy New JavaScript Runtime

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Think tank ASPI says Beijing is even using it to steal fish from the ocean

China has embraced AI to help it censor and surveil its citizens and is exporting its techniques to the world, according to a new report by think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The San Francisco city attorney filed on Tuesday the nation's first government lawsuit against food manufacturers over ultraprocessed fare (source may be paywalled; alternative source), arguing that cities and counties have been burdened with the costs of treating diseases that stem from the companies' products. David Chiu, the city attorney, sued 10 corporations that make some of the country's most popular food and drinks. Ultraprocessed products now comprise 70 percent of the American food supply and fill grocery store shelves with a kaleidoscope of colorful packages. Think Slim Jim meat sticks and Cool Ranch Doritos. But also aisles of breads, sauces and granola bars marketed as natural or healthy. It is a rare issue on which the liberal leaders in San Francisco City Hall are fully aligned with the Trump administration, which has targeted ultraprocessed foods as part of its Make America Healthy Again mantra. Mr. Chiu's lawsuit, which was filed in San Francisco Superior Court on behalf of the State of California, seeks unspecified damages for the costs that local governments bear for treating residents whose health has been harmed by ultraprocessed food. The city accuses the companies of "unfair and deceptive acts" in how they market and sell their foods, arguing that such practices violate the state's Unfair Competition Law and public nuisance statute. The city also argues the companies knew that their food made people sick but sold it anyway.

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Extra infosec investments are taxiing towards the runway

India’s Civil Aviation Minister has revealed that local authorities have detected GPS spoofing and jamming at eight major airports.…