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Latest news and analysis of enterprise software applications

Excel burning

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

For once, Oracle ERP wasn’t the problem

Age verification

EU waves through open source age-check tool to keep kids safe online

'Online platforms can rely on our app,' says Commish, 'there are no more excuses'

smashed spectacles

Microsoft beefs up Remote Desktop security with ... hard-to-read messages

Ailing scaling blamed by Windows-maker for unreadable missives

Frustrated woman using PC

Microsoft gives your Word documents an AI co-author you didn’t ask for

Also rolls out agentic Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint, letting 21st century Clippy lend a... hand

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Double trouble

Hybrid clouds have two attack surfaces and you’re not paying enough attention to either

Windows Admin Center flaws mean on-prem can attack cloud, and vice-versa

Thunderbird in hand worth 2 Outlooks as fresh FOSS fave and Firefox arrive

Still here, still changing, still relevant, still your best choice

judge

Microsoft software resale appeal catches eye of £3.5B class action

Court of Appeal hearing in ValueLicensing dispute may shape parallel proceedings

NHS hosptial photo, by Marbury via Shutterstock

NHS staff resist using Palantir software

Staff reportedly cite ethics concerns, privacy worries, and doubt the platform adds much

europe night image

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

Meanwhile, Collabora splits from LibreOffice Online amid claims TDF ejected 'all Collabora staff and partners'

astronaut

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

In space no one can hear you scream, at Microsoft

Gmail celebrates 22 years by finally letting users change their addresses

Congratulations, XxXh4xx0r420xXx, you can now use that account in your professional life, too

Illustration of barbed wire around the Russian flag

UK fines Irish Apple outpost over sanctions-busting payments to Russian dev

Regulator says payments totaling £635K reached entity owned and controlled by a designated person

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AI agents

Oracle: AI agents can reason, decide and act - liability question remains

Fusion Agentic Applications promise autonomous enterprise decisions. Gartner urges caution

Firefox 149 with a vertical tab bar showing the announcement and the Reg article on the beta

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

In other browser news, Opera now caters to penguinista gamers

angry boss

Microsoft publishes a workaround for Samsung's C:\ drive woes

Friends and family support techs: get ready for permission changing and batch file creating

samsung

Microsoft points at Samsung after Galaxy app bug locks users out of C:\

'Access denied' errors hit certain Windows 11 machines running vendor utility

The Google Chrome web browser

After years of being stood up, ARM64 Linux users finally get Chrome date

Someone, somewhere, ticked a box on a build farm. The wait is over

lloyds storefront in Piccadilly, london

Lloyds Banking Group apps play mix-and-match with customer transactions

Some account holders see names, salaries, and child benefit payments… just not their own

copilot

Microsoft 365 confirms new premium tier, stuffed with AI and few discounts

E7 arrives with a hefty price. Got to keep those shareholders happy

LibreOffice

LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2

Plain-text fans rejoice as Writer gains native CommonMark import and export

Attic

LibreOffice Online dragged out of the attic, dusted off for another go

Browser-based version back on the menu, reopening questions about TDF's relationship with Collabora

prompt

Lovable-hosted app littered with basic flaws exposed 18K users, researcher claims

Who's to blame – the vibey platforms or the humans who ignore security warnings?

meta-ray-ban

Hide from Meta's spyglasses with this new Android app

Academic urges users not to harass those suspected of snooping with (sp)eyewear

Ladybird flying away

Indie web browser Ladybird flutters toward Rust with a little help from AI

Project ditches Swift and translates C++ with LLM assistance

Resilient, continuously active data – with no compromise

When the gap between data generation and action is a strategic liability, it's time for a fix

WinApps on Ubuntu 25.10's GNOME desktop, showing OneNote, the app launcher, and VMM.

Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

Can't live without Adobe? Get on board WinBoat – or WinApps sails a similar course

Clock face showing the hands at two minutes to midnight

Microsoft starts the countdown for the end of Exchange Web Services

Windows giant might try turning it off and on again to see who notices

Java microservice, photo via Shutterstock

Why high-performance Java is becoming a business imperative

A new generation of JVM technologies is reshaping how businesses build, deploy, and scale mission-critical Java applications.

Bald eagle in front of an American flag. God Bless America.

Palantir declares itself the guardian of Americans' rights

CEO Alex Karp meets criticism with soaring revenues and a sermon

schoolkid with backpack /satchel

Microsoft illegally installed cookies on schoolkid's tech, data protection ruling finds

Austrian education ministry unaware of tracking software until campaigners launched case

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phone

Microsoft Intune changes to start biting unprepared admins

Mobile application management updates mean apps could soon be blocked

People racing to Black Friday sales

Accenture bets AI will ring up retail sales with Profitmind investment

Let the bots figure out what to sell for how much

rust

Brave refurbishes Rust adblocking engine for reduced memory footprint

Have your privacy cake and consume the web too

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stocks

StockHistory function becomes StockMystery as Microsoft Excel bugs out

New Year glitch leaves users staring at connection errors instead of market data

grave

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

It's January 2026, and Google is finding innovative new ways to make one of its services worse

Illustration of a Unix-ish terminal

Finally - a terminal solution to the browser wars

A full-featured, Sixel-capable terminal browser for those who’d rather skip AI assistants

app store

Devs say Apple still flouting EU's Digital Markets Act six months on

Coalition for App Fairness warns App Store fees remain unlawful despite non-compliance ruling

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

Salesforce has come up with the most credible threat yet to ServiceNow, and Benioff is crowing about it

Some within the CRM giant balked, but Benioff prevailed

Diarmuid Early (pic: Datarails)

Irish Excel whiz sheets all over the competition in Vegas showdown

Diarmuid Early takes world title after outpacing 11 rivals

Fear and disgust

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Medical software maker also had a vastly unhealthy approach to security

frustrated notepad user

Microsoft wedges tables into Notepad for some reason

WordPad died for this?

A lantern in acave. A conceptual interpretation/illustration for an article about text based 1970s game Zork. Shutterstock

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

Redmond dusts off Infocom's classic text adventures and puts the originals into public hands

ICE Agent

Lawsuit seeks to probe Uncle Sam's role in ICE-tracking app takedowns

EFF wants to know if citizens had their First Amendment rights violated

Welders wearing protective clothing fixing welding and grinding industrial construction oil and gas or water and sewerage plumbing pipeline outside on site. Photo by Andrea Slatter/Shutterstock

PHP 8.5 lays down long-awaited pipe operator, adds new URI tools

Unfashionable web workhorse refreshed for its ongoing run

email

Thunderbird 145 finally adds ‘native’ Exchange support

EWS-powered email only for now, with calendars and contacts still on the to-do list

A pile of Mastodon logos

Mastodon CEO steps down with €1M payout and a deep sigh

Burnout and slowing growth push Eugen Rochko into an advisory role after nearly a decade in charge

Grey letters spelling out Microsoft at its HQ in Remond, Washington

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

Windows giant disagrees and plans to appeal

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Instruction manual

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Org chart games were more important than speed and accuracy

code

Avalonia brings Linux, browser support to Microsoft's MAUI cross-platform app solution

Third-party framework builds alternative backend using its own renderer and WebAssembly

Thirty years old

MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

Dave Plummer's 85 KB troubleshooting tool shipped with his home number on the code

Security fence

OWASP Top 10: Broken access control still tops app security list

Risk list highlights misconfigs, supply chain failures, and singles out prompt injection in AI apps

unhappy party

Microsoft Configuration Manager to switch to an annual release cadence

Intune is where the party's at, even if admins might prefer the Configuration Manager kitchen

guy_eating_bagel

Gorge on Microsoft Store apps with 16-at-once installer

For now it works only with the web version of the Microsoft Store

Office 365, photo by dennizn via Shutterstock

International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb

Rough justice? Redmond out as Germany's openDesk judged a better fit

excel

Anthropic's Claude is learning Excel so you don't have to

Good luck to the 1,000 enterprise guinea pigs on the initial preview

App store icon

Apple faces £1.5B payout after losing UK App Store case

iPhone maker overcharged devs and users, says competition court

iphone

Excel is three sheets to the window on iOS as update borks everything

iPhone and iPad users vexed by denial of spreadsheets

works on surface

End of support for older Office and Windows Server versions pile on the pain for admins

Windows 10 is the least of some people's problems

Bot using a computer

X to combat bot problem by showing more info about users

Meet [user] from [location]

Schleswig-Holstein flag

Schleswig-Holstein waves auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft stack

Germany's northernmost state bins Outlook – and tens of thousands of Redmond licenses

Sellafield Nuclear Reprocessing Plant in Cumbria

Britain's biggest nuclear site looks set to outlast SAP support again

Sellafield considers using legacy ECC software beyond extended 2030 cut-off

A man hiding from a lot of emails coming from a laptop

Exchange Online will start archiving your oldest emails before your inbox bursts

Microsoft promises fewer 'mailbox full' errors in face of message deluge

Type arms of an old typewriter

Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

Dropping descenders to achieve a perfect baseline

ICE Agent

Apple ices ICE agent tracker app under government heat

Cupertino yanks ICEBlock citing safety risks for law enforcement

glacier

Dirty little Electron secret tanks macOS 26 performance

Apple's bad QA or poor coding by developers?

android reclines on a keyboard on smartphone

Google's dev registration plan 'will end the F-Droid project'

Open source Android app store cannot exist if Google's plans go ahead, says F-Droid board member

posting notes

HCL stretches support window for Domino v9/v10 despite repeated end-of-life deadlines

The corpse of Lotus Notes keeps twitching

excel

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

Q: How many Excel users do you need to correctly set the number formatting of a cell? A: Monday, January 1st, 1900

fired

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Contractor sneakily fired after pointing out odious ignorance

c++ code

Rust-style safety model for C++ 'rejected' as profiles take priority

Safe C++ proposal author claims that 'will not ever work'