NASA will rely on SpaceX's Crew Dragon for two crewed missions to the ISS in 2025 while evaluating whether Boeing's Starliner requires another test flight for certification. SpaceNews reports: In an Oct. 15 statement, NASA said it will use Crew Dragon for both the Crew-10 mission to the ISS, scheduled for no earlier than February 2025, and the Crew-11 mission scheduled for no earlier than July. Crew-10 will fly NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers along with astronaut Takuya Onishi from the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. NASA has not yet announced the crew for the Crew-11 mission.

Earlier this year, NASA had hoped that Boeing's CST-100 Starliner would be certified in time to fly the early 2025 mission. Problems with the Crew Flight Test mission, which launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, led NASA to conclude in July that the spacecraft would not be certified in time. It delayed that Starliner-1 mission from February to August 2025, moving up Crew-10 to February. NASA also announced then that it would prepare Crew-11 in parallel with Starliner-1 for launch in that August 2025 slot. "The timing and configuration of Starliner's next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing's path to system certification is established," NASA said in its statement about the 2025 missions. "NASA is keeping options on the table for how best to achieve system certification, including windows of opportunity for a potential Starliner flight in 2025."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 37Signals is not a company that makes its policy or management decisions quietly. The productivity software company was an avowedly Mac-centric shop until Apple's move to kill home screen web apps (or Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) led the firm and its very-public-facing co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, to declare a "Return to Windows," followed by a stew of Windows/Mac/Linux. The company waged a public battle with Apple over its App Store subscription policies, and the resulting outcry helped nudge Apple a bit. 37Signals has maintained an active blog for years, its co-founders and employees have written numerous business advice books, and its blog and social media posts regularly hit the front pages of Hacker News.

So when 37Signals decided to pull its seven cloud-based apps off Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2022, it didn't do so quietly or without details. Back then, Hansson described his firm as paying "an at times almost absurd premium" for defense against "wild swings or towering peaks in usage." In early 2023, Hansson wrote that 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps.

Late last week, Hansson had an update: it's more like $10 million (and, he told the BBC, more like $800,000 in gear). By squeezing more hardware into existing racks and power allowances, estimating seven years' life for that hardware, and eventually transferring its 10 petabytes of S3 storage into a dual-DC Pure Storage flash array, 37Signals expects to save money, run faster, and have more storage available. "The motto of the 2010s and early 2020s -- all-cloud, everything, all the time -- seems to finally have peaked," Hansson writes. "And thank heavens for that!" He adds the caveat that companies with "enormous fluctuations in load," and those in early or uncertain stages, still have a place in the cloud.

Tom's Hardware reports on some interesting hardware history being shared on X.com: AMD engineer Phil Park identified a curious nugget of PC architectural history from, of all places, a year-old Quora answer posted by former Intel engineer [and Pentium Pro architect] Robert Colwell. The nugget indicates that Intel could have beaten AMD to the x86-64 punch if the former wasn't dead-set on the x64-only Itanium line of CPUs.
Colwell had responded on Quora to the question "Shouldn't Intel with its vast resources have been able to develop both architectures?" This was a marketing decision by Intel — they believed, probably rightly, that bringing out a new 64-bit feature in the x86 would be perceived as betting against their own native-64-bit Itanium, and might well severely damage Itanium's chances. I was told, not once, but twice, that if I "didn't stop yammering about the need to go 64-bits in x86 I'd be fired on the spot" and was directly ordered to take out that 64-bit stuff. I decided to split the difference, by leaving in the gates but fusing off the functionality. That way, if I was right about Itanium and what AMD would do, Intel could very quickly get back in the game with x86. As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what did happen.
Phil Park continued the discussion on X.com. "He didn't quite get what he wanted, but he got close since they had x86-64 support in subsequent products when Intel made their comeback." (So, Park posted later in the thread, "I think he won the long game.")

Park also shared a post from Nicholas Wilt (NVIDIA CUDA designer who earlier did GPU computing work at Microsoft and built the prototype for Windows Desktop Manager): I have an x86-64 story of my own. I pressed a friend at AMD to develop an alternative to Itanium. "For all the talk about Wintel," I told him, "these companies bear no love for one another. If you guys developed a 64-bit extension of x86, Microsoft would support it...."

Interesting coda: When it became clear that x86-64 was beating Itanium in the market, Intel reportedly petitioned Microsoft to change the architecture and Microsoft told Intel to pound sand.

"Six years after the Spectre transient execution processor design flaws were disclosed, efforts to patch the problem continue to fall short," writes the Register: Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi of Swiss University ETH Zurich on Friday published details about a cross-process Spectre attack that derandomizes Address Space Layout Randomization and leaks the hash of the root password from the Set User ID (suid) process on recent Intel processors. The researchers claim they successfully conducted such an attack.... [Read their upcomong paper here.] The indirect branch predictor barrier (IBPB) was intended as a defense against Spectre v2 (CVE-2017-5715) attacks on x86 Intel and AMD chips. IBPB is designed to prevent forwarding of previously learned indirect branch target predictions for speculative execution. Evidently, the barrier wasn't implemented properly.

"We found a microcode bug in the recent Intel microarchitectures — like Golden Cove and Raptor Cove, found in the 12th, 13th and 14th generations of Intel Core processors, and the 5th and 6th generations of Xeon processors — which retains branch predictions such that they may still be used after IBPB should have invalidated them," explained Wikner. "Such post-barrier speculation allows an attacker to bypass security boundaries imposed by process contexts and virtual machines." Wikner and Razavi also managed to leak arbitrary kernel memory from an unprivileged process on AMD silicon built with its Zen 2 architecture.

Videos of the Intel and AMD attacks have been posted, with all the cinematic dynamism one might expect from command line interaction.

Intel chips — including Intel Core 12th, 13th, and 14th generation and Xeon 5th and 6th — may be vulnerable. On AMD Zen 1(+) and Zen 2 hardware, the issue potentially affects Linux users. The relevant details were disclosed in June 2024, but Intel and AMD found the problem independently. Intel fixed the issue in a microcode patch (INTEL-SA-00982) released in March, 2024. Nonetheless, some Intel hardware may not have received that microcode update. In their technical summary, Wikner and Razavi observe: "This microcode update was, however, not available in Ubuntu repositories at the time of writing this paper." It appears Ubuntu has subsequently dealt with the issue.

AMD issued its own advisory in November 2022, in security bulletin AMD-SB-1040. The firm notes that hypervisor and/or operating system vendors have work to do on their own mitigations. "Because AMD's issue was previously known and tracked under AMD-SB-1040, AMD considers the issue a software bug," the researchers explain. "We are currently working with the Linux kernel maintainers to merge our proposed software patch."
BleepingComputer adds that the ETH Zurich team "is working with Linux kernel maintainers to develop a patch for AMD processors, which will be available here when ready."

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you dread the thought of calling to change an airline ticket or negotiate your internet bill, a new artificial intelligence tool may provide a solution. DoNotPay, which offers an assortment of consumer-friendly services like tracking subscriptions, generating burner phone numbers, and searching for unclaimed property, now features a bot that will call customer service numbers for users, navigate through phone menus and sit through hold music, then politely but firmly advocate on users' behalf.

The company shared examples of its AI calling a cellphone provider for help porting a phone number and talking with an airline to cancel a flight within the 24-hour cancellation window. Joshua Browder, CEO and founder of DoNotPay, says getting updates on lost luggage and seeking compensation for flight delays are also common use cases. DoNotPay already offered tools to connect to customer service agents via chat windows, and to draft and send emails, faxes, and even snail mail to companies on behalf of users.

But while the service's artificial intelligence had enough smarts to wait on hold for users, then hand over a call when an agent was available, until recently AI models were not capable of carrying on a convincing voice conversation with a human operator in real time. Browder says that changed with Open AI's GPT-4o model, unveiled in May. "That has reduced the delay by about 70%, so instead of it taking three seconds to come up with a response, it now takes under a second, and that's finally fast enough to hold these phone conversations," he says. "So now we're doing thousands of these calls."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: A new ClickFix campaign is luring users to fraudulent Google Meet conference pages showing fake connectivity errors that deliver info-stealing malware for Windows and macOS operating systems. ClickFix is a social-engineering tactic that emerged in May, first reported by cybersecurity company Proofpoint, from a threat actor (TA571) that used messages impersonating errors for Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, and OneDrive. The errors prompted the victim to copy to clipboard a piece of PowerShell code that would fix the issues by running it in Windows Command Prompt. Victims would thus infect systems with various malware such as DarkGate, Matanbuchus, NetSupport, Amadey Loader, XMRig, a clipboard hijacker, and Lumma Stealer.

In July, McAfee reported that the ClickFix campaigns were becoming mode frequent, especially in the United States and Japan. A new report from Sekoia, a SaaS cybersecurity provider, notes that ClickFix campaigns have evolved significantly and now use a Google Meet lure, phishing emails targeting transport and logistics firms, fake Facebook pages, and deceptive GitHub issues. According to the French cybersecurity company, some of the more recent campaigns are conducted by two threat groups, the Slavic Nation Empire (SNE) and Scamquerteo, considered to be sub-teams of the cryptocurrency scam gangs Marko Polo and CryptoLove.

Chipmaker Qualcomm has indefinitely paused production and support of its Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows, citing quality concerns. Qualcomm says the product "has not met our usual standards of excellence." The cancellation comes shortly after the recent launch of over 30 Snapdragon X-series powered PCs.

One year from today, on October 14, 2025, Microsoft will stop releasing security updates for PCs that are still running Windows 10. From a report: Organizations and individuals will still be able to pay for three more years of updates, with prices that go up steadily each year (Microsoft still hasn't provided pricing for end users, only saying that it will release pricing info "closer to the October 2025 date.") But for most PCs running Windows 10, the end of the line is in sight.

wiredmikey writes: As the dust settles following the massive Windows BSOD tech outages caused by CrowdStrike in July 2024, the question is now, how do we prevent this happening again? While there was no current way Microsoft could have prevented this incident, the OS firm is obviously keen to prevent anything similar happening in the future. SecurityWeek talked to David Weston, VP enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, to discuss Windows kernel access and safe deployment practices (or SDP).
Former Ukranian officer Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov created a Signal channel where military communications specialists could talk with civilian radio experts, reports MIT's Technology Review. But radio communications are crucial for drones, so... About once a month, he drives hundreds of kilometers east in a homemade mobile intelligence center: a black VW van in which stacks of radio hardware connect to an array of antennas on the roof that stand like porcupine quills when in use. Two small devices on the dash monitor for nearby drones. Over several days at a time, Flash studies the skies for Russian radio transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops in the fields and in the trenches.

He is, at least in an unofficial capacity, a spy. But unlike other spies, Flash does not keep his work secret. In fact, he shares the results of these missions with more than 127,000 followers — including many soldiers and government officials — on several public social media channels. Earlier this year, for instance, he described how he had recorded five different Russian reconnaissance drones in a single night — one of which was flying directly above his van... Drones have come to define the brutal conflict that has now dragged on for more than two and a half years. And most rely on radio communications — a technology that Flash has obsessed over since childhood. So while Flash is now a civilian, the former officer has still taken it upon himself to inform his country's defense in all matters related to radio...

Flash has also become a source of some controversy among the upper echelons of Ukraine's military, he tells me. The Armed Forces of Ukraine declined multiple requests for comment, but Flash and his colleagues claim that some high-ranking officials perceive him as a security threat, worrying that he shares too much information and doesn't do enough to secure sensitive intel... [But] His work has become greatly important to those fighting on the ground, and he recently received formal recognition from the military for his contributions to the fight, with two medals of commendation — one from the commander of Ukraine's ground forces, the other from the Ministry of Defense...

And given the mounting evidence that both militaries and militant groups in other parts of the world are now adopting drone tactics developed in Ukraine, it's not only his country's fate that Flash may help to determine — but also the ways that armies wage war for years to come.
He's also written guides on building cheap anti-drone equipment...

Formed in 2021 by cybersecurity professionals (and backed by high-powered VCs including Dell Technologies Capital), Halcyon sells an enterprise-grade anti-ransomware platform.

And this month they announced they're offering protection against ransomware attacks targeting Linux systems, according to Linux magazine: According to Cynet, Linux ransomware attacks increased by 75 percent in 2023 and are expected to continue to climb as more bad actors target Linux deployments... "While Windows is the favorite for desktops, Linux dominates the market for supercomputers and servers."
Here's how Halcyon's announcement made their pitch: "When it comes to ransomware protection, organizations typically prioritize securing Windows environments because that's where the ransomware operators were focusing most of their attacks. However, Linux-based systems are at the core of most any organization's infrastructure, and protecting these systems is often an afterthought," said Jon Miller, CEO & Co-founder, Halcyon. "The fact that Linux systems usually are always on and available means they provide the perfect beachhead for establishing persistence and moving laterally in a targeted network, and they can be leveraged for data theft where the exfiltration is easily masked by normal network traffic. As more ransomware operators are developing the capability to target Linux systems alongside Windows, it is imperative that organizations have the ability to keep pace with the expanded threat."

Halcyon Linux, powered through the Halcyon Anti-Ransomware Platform, uniquely secures Linux-based systems offering comprehensive protection and rapid response capabilities... Halcyon Linux monitors and detects ransomware-specific behaviors such as unauthorized access, lateral movement, or modification of critical files in real-time, providing instant alerts with critical context... When ransomware is suspected or detected, the Halcyon Ransomware Response Engine allows for rapid response and action.... Halcyon Data Exfiltration Protection (DXP) identifies and blocks unauthorized data transfers to protect sensitive information, safeguarding the sensitive data stored in Linux-based systems and endpoints...

Halcyon Linux runs with minimal resource impact, ensuring critical environments such as database servers or virtualized workloads, maintain the same performance.
And in addition, Halcyon offers "an around the clock Threat Response team, reviewing and responding to alerts," so your own corporate security teams "can attend to other pressing priorities..."

The PC market is not showing many signs of a rebound, despite the hype around AI PCs, with market watchers split over whether unit shipments are up or down slightly. From a report: Those magical AI PC boxes were supposed to fire up buyer enthusiasm and spur the somewhat listless market for desktop and laptop systems into significant growth territory, but that doesn't appear to be happening. According to the latest figures from Gartner, global PC shipments totaled 62.9 million units during Q3 of this year, representing a 1.3 percent decline compared with the same period last year. However, this does follow three consecutive quarters of modest growth.

"Even with a full line-up of Windows-based AI PCs for both Arm and x86 in the third quarter of 2024, AI PCs did not boost the demand for PCs since buyers have yet to see their clear benefits or business value," commented Gartner Director Analyst Mikako Kitagawa. This is perhaps understandable when AI PCs are largely just a marketing concept, and vendors can't agree on exactly what the the definition of an AI PC should be. Even worse, some buyers of Arm-based Copilot+ machines discovered that their performance isn't actually very good with some applications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Liliputing: The Fedora Asahi Remix GNU/Linux distribution is now shipping with alpha versions of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan graphics drivers that allow you to play some games on Macs with M1 or M2 series processors. But there are a few things to keep in mind. One is that most of the PC games you're likely going to want to play are designed to run on Windows PCs with DirectX drivers and x86 processors. So there's some emulation required to get them to run on Macs with ARM-based processors, a Linux-based operating system, and Vulkan drivers.

Some of the work was also made possible by the folks at Valve, who developed the Proton software that allows many PC games to run on Linux. And during a live demo at XDC 2024, developer Alyssa Rosenzweig demonstrated the Steam game client loading and running on an Apple Silicon Mac running Asahi Linux. For that reason, it takes a lot of RAM -- according to the Asahi team, "most games require 16GB of memory due to emulation overhead." So you're probably not going to be able to do much entry-level gaming on an entry-level Mac with just 8GB of RAM.

Some of the titles that have been confirmed to be playable include Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Control, Portal 2, and Ghostrunner. But there's a difference between playable and smooth. Developers say performance improvements will be required before "newer AAA titles" can run at 60 frames per second or higher. But less demanding games like Hollow Knight should run at full speed.

Ubuntu 24.10 'Oracular Oriole', the latest version of the popular Linux distro, introduces several enhancements including a revamped GNOME Initial Setup for ARM64 devices, updated file management features, and a more seamless experience with dialog boxes that adjust to aspect ratios. Celebrating Ubuntu's 20th anniversary, this release also "offers a few touches for those who want to go down memory lane," reports Tom's Hardware. "When the system boots up, you'll see the 20 Years Ubuntu logo right at the bottom of the screen. You can also set the desktop background to the original Ubuntu 4.10 wallpaper, and a Warty Brown accent color is an available option if you want to complete the feel. To round out the experience, Ubuntu 24.10 uses the original startup sound from 4.10, which plays every time you log in." From the report: The most significant change, as OMG! Ubuntu notes that ARM64 devices now use GNOME Initial Setup, which offers a cleaner, slicker way of setting up the operating system after the first install. When I set up Ubuntu 24.10 in a virtual machine in my MacBook Air, it felt easier to install and use than my MacBook and Windows laptops. We also get updated dialog boxes that adjust based on the Windows aspect ratio, making it useful for portrait devices like smartphones and tablets.

Several other quality-of-life updates in Ubuntu 24.10, like new File Manager features, make navigating your bookmarks and internal drives easier on the sidebar. Apps also now use the default File Manager when browsing your hard drive, providing a more seamless experience. And, if you run a search on non-indexed folders, you'll find an info button that will explain why your search query is taking longer than usual.

Microsoft is enhancing passkey support in Windows 11 with a redesigned Windows Hello experience that allows users to sync passkeys to their Microsoft account or third-party providers like 1Password and Bitwarden. The Verge reports: A new API for third-party password and passkey managers means developers can plug directly into the Windows 11 experience, so you can use the same passkey from your mobile device to authenticate on your PC. Right now it's possible in some apps to do this through QR codes and other ways to authenticate from a mobile device, but Microsoft's full support means the passkeys experience on Windows is about to get a lot better.

Microsoft is also redesigning the Windows Hello prompt, including the ability to setup syncing of passkeys to your Microsoft account or saving them elsewhere. Once you've completed a one-time setup process you can use facial recognition, fingerprint, or PIN to authenticate with a passkey across multiple Windows 11 devices. Windows Insiders will get access to these new passkey features "in the coming months."

smooth wombat writes: The Windows 11 24H2 update has had a host of issues associated with it including disappearing mouse cursors and blue screens related to Intel drivers. Now comes word that the new update leaves behind over 8 GB of undeletable cache files.

According to Windows Latest, attempts to delete the cache via the Control Panel are unsuccessful. Although you can select the cache for deletion and initiate the deletion process, the cache remains. Various other methods to remove the Windows update cache failed, too. It only cleared after a clean Windows installation altogether.

Microsoft has released Windows 11 Dev build 26120.1930, which contains the ability to remap the Copilot key. The changes are rolling out gradually to Dev Insiders with the "Get the latest features as soon as they are available" toggle on. Neowin reports: [H]ere are the updates that are also gradually rolling out, but this time for all Dev Insiders: "We are adding the ability to configure the Copilot key. You can choose to have the Copilot key launch an app that is MSIX packaged and signed, thus indicating the app meets security and privacy requirements to keep customers safe. The key will continue to launch Copilot on devices that have the Copilot app installed until a customer selects a different experience. This setting can be found via Settings - Personalization - Text input. If the keyboard connected to your PC does not have a Copilot key, adjusting this setting will not do anything. We are planning further refinements to this experience in a future flight." Other changes introduced in the build include a new simplified Chinese font, Windows Sandbox improvements, and several bug fixes. Full release notes are available here.

OpenAI has introduced "canvas," a new interface for ChatGPT that provides a separate workspace for writing and coding projects. "Canvas is rolling out in beta to ChatGPT Plus and Teams users on Thursday, and Enterprise and Edu users next week," reports TechCrunch. "Once canvas is out of beta, OpenAI says it plans to offer the feature to free users as well." From the report: In our demo, [OpenAI product manager Daniel Levine] had to select "GPT-4o with canvas" from ChatGPT's model picker drop down window. However, OpenAI says canvas windows will just pop out when ChatGPT detects a separate workspace could be helpful, say for longer outputs or complex coding tasks. You can also just write "use canvas" to automatically open a project window. Levine showed TechCrunch how ChatGPT's new features could help write an email. Users can prompt ChatGPT to generate an email, which will then pop out in the canvas window. Then users can toggle a slider to adjust the length of the writing to be shorter or longer. You can also highlight specific sentences, and ask ChatGPT to make changes such as "make this sound friendlier," or add emojis. Users can also ask ChatGPT to rewrite the whole email as-is in another language.

The features for the coding canvas are slightly different. Levine prompted ChatGPT to create an API web server in Python, which spawned in the canvas window. By pressing an "add comments" button, ChatGPT will add in-line documentation to explain the code in plain English. Further, if you highlight a section of code that ChatGPT created, you can ask the chatbot to explain it to you, or ask questions about it. ChatGPT is also getting a new "review code" button, which will suggest specific edits for the code in the window, whether generated or user-written, for them to approve, edit themselves, or decline. If they press approve, ChatGPT will take a stab at fixing the bugs itself.

"The Fight to Repair Newsletter is reporting that U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling out agricultural equipment giant John Deere for possible violations of the federal Clean Air Act and a years-long pattern of thwarting owners' ability to repair their farm equipment," writes longtime Slashdot reader chicksdaddy. From the report: Deere "appears to be evading its responsibilities under the Clean Air Act to grant customers the right to repair their own agricultural equipment." That is costing farmers an estimated $4.2 billion annually "causing them to miss key crop windows on which their businesses and livelihoods rely," Warren wrote in a letter (https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/3/24260513/john-deere-right-to-repair-elizabeth-warren-clean-air-act) dated October 2nd. The letter from Warren (PDF), a Senator from Massachusetts and strong repair advocate, is just the latest volley lobbed at Illinois-based Deere, an iconic American brand and the largest supplier of agricultural equipment to farms in the U.S. Deere controls an estimated 53 percent of the U.S. market for large tractors and 60 percent of the U.S. market for farm combines.

In recent weeks, Deere faced criticism, including from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, after laying off close to 2,000 U.S. based employees at facilities in Iowa and Illinois, moving many of those jobs to facilities in Mexico. The company has also been repeatedly called out for complicating repair and service of its farm equipment -- often relying on software locks and digital rights management to force farmers to use Deere dealers and authorized service providers for even the simplest repairs.

Microsoft has discontinued Windows Mixed Reality support in its latest Windows 11 update, rendering a number of VR headsets obsolete. The move, reported by UploadVR, affects devices from major manufacturers. An estimated 80,000 users will lose access to their headsets upon upgrading to Windows 11 24H2. UploadVR adds: Despite the name, all Windows MR headsets were actually VR-only, and are compatible with most SteamVR content via Microsoft's SteamVR driver. The first Windows MR headsets arrived in late 2017 from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, aiming to compete with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that had launched a year earlier. They were the first consumer VR products to deliver inside-out positional tracking, for both the headset and controllers.

All the original Windows MR OEMs except Samsung used the same cheap fixed panels LCD design with fixed lenses, while the Samsung Odyssey had IPD adjustment and OLED panels - the same OLED panels that would be featured in HTC Vive Pro and Oculus Quest a year and a half later. Even though the LCD headsets were sold for as low as $200 at times, and even though Samsung offered (for the time) high-resolution OLED panels, Windows MR headsets failed to ever reach widespread adoption amongst PC VR gamers. On the Steam Hardware Survey Windows MR peaked at around 10% of SteamVR usage share in 2019, and now sits around 3.5%. The move follows Microsoft recently discontinuing the HoloLens 2.

Microsoft gives its Edge web browser an unfair advantage and EU antitrust regulators should subject it to tough EU tech rules, three rival browsers and a group of web developers said in a letter to the European Commission. From a report: The move by Vivaldi, Waterfox, Wavebox and the Open Web Advocacy could boost Norwegian browser company Opera which in July took the European Commission to court for exempting Edge from the Digital Markets Act (DMA). [...] "Unfair practices are currently allowed to persist on the Windows' ecosystem with respect to Edge, unmitigated by the choice screens that exist on mobile," they said, pointing to Edge set as the default browser on all Windows computers. "No platform independent browser can aspire to match Edge's unparalleled distribution advantage on Windows. Edge is, moreover, the most important gateway for consumers to download an independent browser on Windows PCs."