geek

18 Jun 2026

Slashdot

Tesco Moving 40,000 Server Workloads Off VMware Amid Broadcom's 'Abusive Conduct'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom, is moving 40,000 server workloads off of VMware amid "abusive conduct" from Broadcom, recent legal filings claim. Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK's High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from The Register, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years. But when Broadcom took over VMware in November 2023, it would not honor the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay "excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid" and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying "duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products," the initial complaint read, The Register reported at the time. Tesco, which reported 73.7 billion pounds (about $98.7 billion) in revenue in its fiscal year 2026, has since started migrating away from VMware and Broadcom's mainframe products, according to late-May court filings reported on by The Register today. In January, Broadcom stopped supporting Tesco's VMware products, Tesco said, and Tesco has been paying for third-party support since. In its initial filing, Tesco also said that Broadcom refused to upgrade software or provide all security updates to customers without subscriptions. One of Tesco's recent filings, per The Register, reads: "Faced with Broadcom's abusive conduct, and given the criticality of virtualization and mainframe software and services to its business, Tesco has been forced to incur material costs to procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality, and to migrate to that software in a manner, and on a timeframe, that creates very significant risks to its business." If it works "at exceptional pace," Tesco will be completely off VMware by the end of 2027 at the earliest. However, "the timeframe in which that migration must be undertaken has created and continues to create operational and commercial risk, and at material ongoing cost and disruption to the business," Tesco reportedly noted. Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses. Tesco initially requested at least 100 million pounds (about $133.6 million) in damages each from Broadcom, VMware, and reseller Computacenter, plus interest. In its recent filings, Tesco said it turned down at least four offers from Broadcom to continue using VMware and Broadcom's mainframe tech. [...] The case is expected to go to court between November 1, 2027, and February 25, 2028, The Register reported. Afterward, it could go to trial. Further reading: HPE Tempts VMware Users, Partners With Year of Free Virtualization Software

17 Jun 2026

Slashdot

Microsoft Working To Patch 'RoguePlanet' Zero-Day

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Microsoft on Wednesday published an advisory acknowledging the public disclosure of a vulnerability in Defender that could lead to privilege escalation. The security defect, tracked as CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score of 7.8), was dropped last week by security researcher Nightmare Eclipse (also known as Chaotic Eclipse). "We are working to provide a high-quality security update that addresses this vulnerability. We will provide information in this CVE when the update is available," Microsoft adds. RoguePlanet, Nightmare Eclipse explained last week, targets a race condition in Microsoft Defender and allows attackers to gain System privileges. The researcher released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that demonstrates local privilege escalation (LPE) on Windows 11 and Windows 10 systems with the June 2026 patches installed. [...] On Wednesday, Nightmare Eclipse pointed out that the PoC works regardless of whether Defender's real-time protection is enabled or disabled. It may even work in passive mode, the researcher said.

OSnews

Android 17 released for Pixel devices with very few interesting improvements

Yesterday, Google released Android 17 to Pixel devices, so late last night I updated my Pixel 10 Pro with the intent to write a news item about the release today. The reality is that that I totally forgot I even upgraded last night, because Android 17 is about the biggest nothingburger I've ever seen. Virtually all of the new features listed in the upgrade blurb on my phone were "AI" nonsense I don't encounter, so over the course of the day, I didn't really notice anything new about my phone's operating system. The only interesting feature that I think will be particularly useful on tablets and perhaps foldable devices is something called "App Bubbles". Basically, you can turn any application into an overlay that can be minimised into a bubble, which then lives anywhere on your screen. Tap it, and you can maximise the overlay again. This little multitasking bubble can contain multiple applications, effectively making it a dock or taskbar. Neat, but I didn't see much use for it on my phone. The remainder of the new non-"AI" features are hard to spot, at best. I guess the ability to turn one half of a foldable display into a gamepad is neat if you can deal with gaming on glass buttons (I cannot), and the changes to location access (you can now grant it for just one time) and contacts access (it's more fine-grained and temporary now instead of granting access to everything forever) are welcome, but that's about it for user-facing features. Under the hood, the one thing that stands out is that Google is enforcing stricter memory limits for applications, based on how much RAM a device has. The idea is that this should prevent memory leaks from getting out of control and leading to crashes, which is nice, especially for devices with less RAM. Android 17 is available for Pixel devices now, and will probably find its way to non-Pixel devices over the coming months or years. With how little meat there is on Android 17's bones, this might be the first release where Android's update woes don't really matter.

17 Jun 2026 10:44pm GMT

Ars Technica

Second carcass-eating fly species cleared by FDA for maggot wound therapy

Maggot therapy lacks robust data, but it has fans and a fail-safe "bacon therapy."

17 Jun 2026 10:11pm GMT

Slashdot

Smartphone Market To Shrink 15% This Year Due To Memory Crisis

CCS Insight expects global smartphone shipments to fall 15% this year as AI-driven demand pushes memory manufacturers toward higher-margin server chips. "[S]ome entry-level devices have already seen their sticker prices go up by more than 50 percent since last year," reports The Register. From the report: The firm found that the primary smartphone market (meaning new devices) contracted 4.4 percent in the first quarter of this year, despite sales channels front-loading (meaning stockpiling) product inventory, as device prices begin to rise sharply. As CCS notes, this casts an ominous shadow on the outlook for the rest of the year, and it seems things have worsened since The Register first started reporting on the smartphone memory woes. Back in January, the forecast was for handset price rises of 6-8 percent, while the most pessimistic outlook was that the global market might contract as much as 5.2 percent. By February, analysts were expecting to see a decline in shipments of around 8 percent across the global market, and for prices to increase by about 14 percent. The root cause of all this is the AI craze, which has seen huge demand for high-performance GPU-filled servers to process it all. Chipmakers have moved to capitalize on this by prioritizing production of high-margin memory components for those servers, rather than making the plain old DRAM and NAND needed for PCs and phones. "The memory chip crisis shows no sign of slowing down in the near future, ramping up the pressure on manufacturers and consumers. Memory components now account for more than 30 percent of a manufacturer's bill of materials in some smartphones." said CCS research analyst Ben Hatton. "The full impact has yet to be felt in many regions, but it's clear that device prices will accelerate over the rest of the year."

Ars Technica

Sooner than expected? Useful quantum error correction promised for 2028.

Elsewhere, beyond-classical quantum hardware, plus classical computing fires back.

17 Jun 2026 8:44pm GMT

California says AT&T lied to FCC in attempt to shut off old phone network

FCC considers AT&T petitions to preempt state rules and discontinue phone service.

17 Jun 2026 8:07pm GMT

16 Jun 2026

OSnews

KDE Plasma 6.7 released

The KDE team released KDE Plasma 6.7 today, and with it comes a long list of improvements, new features, bug fixes, new old themes, and so much more. A new feature that is sure to please those among us who use virtual desktops: you can now have different virtual desktop setups per display. It's been a long-requested feature, so it's great to see it makes its way to the KDE users. I despise virtual desktops, but I'm happy to see something that I assumed was already part of KDE to finally actually become available. Another major feature in KDE Plasma 6.7 is something we've already talked about: the return of the classic Oxygen and Air themes from the KDE 4.x days. These themes have seen extensive work over the past year or so to make them usable on the latest KDE release, which includes tons of bug fixes, visual nips and tucks, and countless additions to the collection of assets required to make a modern KDE theme look complete. This includes a ton of new icons in the old styles, light and dark modes, accent colour support, and much more. There's still work left here, including adding support for QtQuick/Kirigami applications - which brings us to the next major new addition to KDE 6.7 This is also something we've already talked about: Union. I won't repeat what I already explained last time Union came up, but suffice it to say that Union effectively unifies the various different ways KDE applications are themed, allowing theme designers to use relatively standard CSS to create themes that cover every aspect of the KDE user experience. Before Union, theme designers had to create individual, unique themes for a variety of parts of KDE - the Plasma desktop, QtWidgets using QStyle, QtQuick/Kirigami - which was a ton of work, and in the case of QtQuick/Kirigami, wasn't really possible at all. As such, without Union, KDE's theming is essentially broken, and Union fixes that. For now, Union is not enabled by default, and must be installed and enabled separately for testing. Of course, there's a ton of other smaller new features, changes, and bug fixes as well. KDE Plasma 6.7 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.

16 Jun 2026 8:20pm GMT

Apple adds keylogger to iOS App Store for targeted advertising: tied to your account and unencrypted

A week or so ago, Apple announced a bunch of features for the App Store on iOS, including personalised recommendations based on your activity and usage of iOS. It turns out this includes a keylogger (taplogger?) in the App Store, which records every single tap you make, every single letter you enter, and a lot of other information. All of this information is unencrypted and sent to Apple. Now Apple is putting the extensive identifiable analytics they collect in the App Store in action. They record every tap and there's no way to turn it off. They can even calculate your typing speed. ↫ Michael Tsai, quoting Mysk The provided screenshots of the data collected are terrifying, especially because the data is unencrypted, sent to Apple, and fully tied to your user account. Apple clearly wants a slice of that big, juicy advertising pie, and they, too, are discovering that the easiest and best way to serve targeted ads is to collect as much data as they can about you. Of course, this is something the entire internet (but not OSNews!) and several megacorporations are built on by now, but Apple has been incredibly sanctimonious about how it supposedly actually cares about user privacy, making this keylogger yet another case of Apple's hypocrisy on full display. Of course, if you care about privacy, you're entirely free to download your iOS applications from somewhere other than the App Store and install them yours… Oh, wait.

16 Jun 2026 6:41pm GMT