A mysterious piece of “under development” code is playing havoc with the Windows Firewall after the latest preview update for Windows 11 24H2.
The problem manifests as an error in the Event Viewer for Windows Firewall With Advanced Security and can occur following the installation of the June 2025 Windows non-security preview update.
Microsoft is about to retire default outbound access for VMs in Azure
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In the latest entry in Windows 11 24H2’s hall of shame – aka Microsoft’s Release Health Dashboard – the company explained: “The event appears as ‘Config Read Failed’ with message ‘More data is available.’
“Although this event is logged in Event Viewer every time the device is restarted, they do not reflect an issue with Windows Firewall, and can be disregarded.”
So, there you go. Something in the update has upset the Windows Firewall, but users should ignore it and continue with their day.
The problem is “related to a feature that is currently under development and not fully implemented,” according to Microsoft. It also stated that the Windows Firewall “is expected to function normally,” which is reassuring, and “there is no impact to Windows processes associated to [sic] this event.”
The Event Log is also used to monitor the health of Windows devices, so spurious errors – even ones that can be ignored – will be a headache.
The Register asked Microsoft for more details about the mystery feature in question, but the company has yet to respond.
Confessing to leaving an in-development feature in production code is not a great look, particularly when it triggers errors in the Event Log. Isn’t that what the Windows Insider program is for?
That said, let the programmer who has never left a bit of work-in-progress code in an app that can, in theory, never be accessed by end users cast the first stone.
We’d like to say that we expect better from Microsoft, but judging by the cavalcade of problems that have cropped up with Windows 11 24H2 since it first seeped under the Redmond build lab’s door, we’re relieved that at least this one doesn’t seem to be crashing anything.
Microsoft did not provide an estimated timeframe for when the issue will be resolved. It said, “We are working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release.” ®
Susan Choi’s sixth novel takes a little-known and appalling aspect of Japanese-Korean history and fashions it into a rich generational saga that teems with intelligence, curiosity and, in terms of reading, sheer pleasure. Like the flashlight of its title it casts an evasive, variably illuminating beam, focusing on the hidden lives of characters, their careless and destructive lies, random yet weighted connections to each other, vulnerability and extraordinary ability to survive.
Choi’s previous work, Trust Exercise (2019) won the National Book Award in her native US. Of that novel, Choi has said that it “takes up the question of national identity, and the extent to which it coincides or does not coincide with ethnic and with cultural identity”.
Flashlight, which began as a New Yorker short story, has not dissimilar concerns as it takes in a sweep of places and periods from the 1950s to the early 2000s: suburban Indiana, downtown Los Angeles, the Japan of both city and shore, late 1980s Paris and London and, in its grave and beautiful conclusion, the border with North Korea.
It opens in the “dog days of August” 1977 in an unremarkable coastal town in Japan. On its beach one night, a nine-year-old girl is discovered suffering from hypothermia and half-drowned. Her father, with whom she had been taking an evening walk, has vanished.
Despite prolonged searches no trace of him is found, and the pair’s sandals remain side by side where they were placed at the end of the jetty. They become the objects of a temporary shrine of rice bowls, flowers, fruit and trinkets donated by local people, until they are washed away.
Identity, names and statelessness — their arbitrary bestowing and removal — are central themes in this questioning novel
What is left following this catastrophe is a traumatised family — American mother Anne, and daughter, Louisa. The latter is angry, hitting out, eternally furious with her mother and, as time passes, barely remembering her father, Serk, who was presumed washed out to sea.
Of what happened that evening, despite a psychiatrist’s delving, she has no memory: that will come much later, when “her body is leaden as if she has swum all that distance again, through the muscling, relentless, gelatinous cold force of the waves”.
Serk’s alleged drowning remains in the background until two-thirds of the way through the novel as the sea — helped by a large dose of the fatalism that readers of fiction rely on — gives up its secrets. Before his disappearance, Serk is a lecturer in engineering who emigrated from Japan to the US on a visa, although as an ethnic Korean his Japanese citizenship had been cancelled in 1952.
Identity, names and statelessness — their arbitrary bestowing and removal — are central themes in this questioning novel. Serk is known variously throughout as Hiroshi (his Japanese name), Seok (Korean), and lastly, the Crab, by which time he has been almost subsumed into mythological status.
His parents, originally from Korea, were forced through poverty to move to Japan; several years after the second world war, which ended when Serk was six, they begin to make plans to return — to a now divided country, communist North Korea, the DRPK. By this time, Serk (the Americanisation of Seok) is about to graduate from college; his next sibling, a sister, Soonja, hastily marries to avoid leaving Japan.
Their parents, seduced by the promised paradise that awaits them and their three youngest children, make the journey “home”. After their return, their letters are scarce, stating only their great happiness, which sits oddly alongside urgent requests for basic food and clothing, for medicine and blankets. The letters gradually cease.
Choi’s narrative winds back and forth over some 50 years. The viewpoints of its principal characters alternate — from Louisa as a child, then a college student, then a married woman with children of her own; to Anne, her mother; to Serk, and to Tobias, Anne’s son by another man. Aged 19, she had been forced to give him up for adoption directly after giving birth. Anne’s and Serk’s marriage foundered from the start, blighted by his arrogance, silences and their bitter arguments.
By the time of Serk’s disappearance Louisa’s relationship with her parents resembles that of “a Venn diagram” with the child as the only common factor.
In the US her father is overprotective, to the point of obsessiveness. But when they relocate to Japan for what is meant to be his year-long secondment, Louisa is expected to be independent, like a Japanese child.
Having felt that she wasn’t white enough for the US, she is too tall for Japan, and initially she struggles. (Later, as a student travelling in France, she will be subject to a horrible instance of racist violation that prefigures the darker revelations that Choi has in store).
In Japan, Anne is the outsider, just as Serk always seemed in the US; confined to their damp flat with a mysterious wasting illness (eventually diagnosed as MS), while Serk takes Louisa on visits to meet a stranger, a woman from his past.
At this point Anne is reunited with Tobias, whose role in this complex familial structure — a spiky, snarly one that resists affection — is to be the savant, annoyingly compassionate older brother whom Louisa ridicules until she finally sees the point of him.
Culturally the late 1970s were a showcase for the blockbuster sci-fi film — on one of their last outings together Serk and Lousia attend a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is tempting to believe more in fantastical alien abduction than in the human shadow puppets of a totalitarian regime that, for Serk and others, will prove all too real as Choi delivers the book’s shocking last third: “Time is not a river moving ceaselessly into the future but a stagnated pool. Breathing at its surface, drowning in its depths, are the same.”
Here the personal graphically collides with the geopolitical. Yet it has been lying quietly in abeyance all along, like Louisa’s abandoned childhood backpack or Anne’s cassettes casually taped from Japanese radio. They are all clues hiding in plain sight in a restless, leisurely and capacious work of such emotional force and controlled style that it surely cannot be overlooked by this year’s Booker judges.
Flashlight by Susan Choi Jonathan Cape £20/Farrar, Straus and Giroux $30, 464 pages
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X-rays of the ankle showed swelling in the soft tissue but without some signs of infection. The doctors wondered if the man had osteomyelitis, an infection in the bone, which can be a complication in people with diabetic ulcers. The large size and duration of the ulcer matched with a bone infection, as well as some elevated inflammatory markers he had on his blood tests.
To investigate the bone infection further, they admitted the man to the hospital and ordered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). But the MRI showed only a soft-tissue defect and a normal bone, ruling out a bone infection. Another MRI was done with a contrast agent. That showed that the man’s large arteries were normal and there were no large blood clots deep in his veins—which is sometimes linked to prolonged standing, as the man did at his laundromat job.
As the doctors were still working to root out the cause, they had started him on a heavy-duty regimen of antibiotics. This was done with the assumption that on top of whatever caused the ulcer, there was now also a potentially aggressive secondary infection—one not knocked out by the previous round of antibiotics the man had been given.
With a bunch of diagnostic dead ends piling up, the doctors broadened their view of possibilities, newly considering cancers, rare inflammatory conditions, and less common conditions affecting small blood vessels (as the MRI has shown the larger vessels were normal). This led them to the possibility of a Martorell’s ulcer.
These ulcers, first described in 1945 by a Spanish doctor named Fernando Martorell, form when prolonged, uncontrolled high blood pressure causes the teeny arteries below the skin to stiffen and narrow, which blocks the blood supply, leading to tissue death and then ulcers. The ulcers in these cases tend to start as red blisters and evolve to frank ulcers. They are excruciatingly painful. And they tend to form on the lower legs, often over the Achilles’ tendon, though it’s unclear why this location is common.
WASHINGTON — The European Space Agency will soon select the finalists for a competition intended to support the development of new launch vehicles by European companies.
During a panel discussion at the Paris Air Show June 17, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said that the agency received 12 proposals for the European Launcher Challenge, a program to award launch contracts to new vehicles as well as fund demonstrations of upgraded vehicles. Companies are eligible for up to 169 million euros ($199 million) each.
Those 12 proposals are currently going through technical reviews by ESA, which will select a group of them for funding consideration at the ESA ministerial conference in late November.
“It will be that not all 12 of these proposals will go the ministerial,” he said. “I cannot predict how many will be left after this evaluation period and therefore how many will go to the ministerial.”
ESA is using an alternative approach to funding the European Launcher Challenge than its traditional georeturn approach, where member states subscribe to programs and are guaranteed contracts in amounts proportional to the funding they provide. Instead, ESA plans to select a group of companies, after which member states at the ministerial will determine which ones they want to fund.
“Quite a few member states are preparing their decisions in case their candidates are selected as being brought forward for funding at the ministerial conference,” he said. “If you ask me the number that will go to the ministerial, it’s too early to say, but we should know in a couple of weeks.”
Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation, said after the panel that he expected the downselected companies to be announced as soon as July 7.
ESA has not disclosed the companies that did submit European Launcher Challenge proposals, although some companies widely believed to be participating have been announcing milestones in recent weeks to emphasize the progress they are making.
MaiaSpace, a French company developing a launch vehicle with a reusable first stage, hosted several French government ministers at its facilities outside Paris June 13. There, the company announced its intent to build a 10,000-square-meter factory there for producing the vehicle.
Yohann Leroy, chief executive of MaiaSpace, said at the Paris Air Forum earlier the same day that there was demand for small launch vehicles despite competition from rideshare services that have stymied other vehicle developers. Dedicated small launchers are often compared to taxis while rideshares are linked to buses.
“The market for microlaunchers exist. There are a lot of people who are interested in a taxi, provided the taxi can be the price of the bus,” he said. “If you want to succeed in launching a taxi, you have to make the price close to the price of the bus.”
Some companies have hinted they are interested in using the European Launcher Challenge to support work on larger vehicles. “Microlaunchers can never compete in price per kilo” against larger vehicles, said Miguel Bello Mora, chairman of the board of Orbex, said at the same Paris Air Forum panel.
That company is working on its Prime small launcher but has announced plans for a larger vehicle, Proxima, even before the first Prime launch. “We believe there is a gap and there is room for several players,” he said. “Medium size is where we target.”
Not everyone in the European small launch vehicle industry is satisfied with the competition. “It’s a pretty weird program,” said Stanislas Maximin, executive chairman of Latitude, in an interview. He said he felt the competition was either a way to help companies already far advanced in technology and fundraising or those who have struggled to raise private financing.
Nonetheless, he said Latitude submitted a proposal for the competition. “It will help us improve the launch system,” he said, such as increasing the payload capacity of its Zephyr rocket from 200 to 300 kilograms. “It allows us to go faster.”
Latitude, based in France, is also using the competition to expand its presence in Europe. “What it helps us to do is be more European. We’re building relationships with European partners,” he said.
While he said he was concerned the program will be used by some countries to support companies that don’t necessarily need such assistance, “we feel like we are in a good position to win it.”
Fresh off a milestone season that saw Richard Carapaz make history with a stunning solo victory on Stage 17 of the 2024 Tour and capture the prestigious polka dot jersey as King of the Mountains, this expanded collaboration brings even more races, more visibility, and more ambition to the road ahead.
After a high-impact activation last summer that introduced Cadillac’s all-electric LYRIQ to the cycling world, Cadillac is now doubling down with a strategic, two-season commitment alongside EF Education-EasyPost and EF Education-Oatly. The extended partnership through 2026 will bring the LYRIQ and Cadillac branding to nearly 100 races over the course of the partnership—including a presence on the team’s official kit for 2025.
“As someone who’s passionate about cycling, this partnership with EF Pro Cycling resonates on a personal level. Both our teams embrace ambition, precision, and a willingness to lead the way forward. Whether it’s on two wheels or four, we believe progress comes from daring to do things differently. That’s what this partnership is all about,” said Jean-Pierre Diernaz, Chief Marketing Officer, GM Europe.
“In 2024, Cadillac proved that going fully electric at the world’s hardest bike race—the Tour de France—was possible. It was no small feat, but Cadillac made it look effortless. In 2025 and beyond, we want to set a new standard for what performance, sustainability, and innovation look like in professional sport,” said Jonathan Vaughters, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, EF Pro Cycling.
All-Electric Performance, Front and Center Cadillac’s LYRIQ will once again take center stage as a mobile command center for the team, serving as a zero-emissions support vehicle across some of the world’s most iconic and challenging courses. More than just a car, the LYRIQ plays a critical role in EF Pro Cycling’s strategy—offering a calm, quiet space for race planning, carrying spare bikes and gear, and acting as a lifeline for riders in high-pressure moments.
From steep mountain passes to winding coastal roads, the LYRIQ’s precision, comfort, and endurance will be on full display—proving its capabilities in the toughest real-world conditions.
Beyond the Race: A Lifestyle in Motion Cadillac’s growing presence in Europe isn’t confined to the road. This partnership will extend to unique moments off the saddle, including exclusive activations at the Cadillac City Store in Paris where fans can engage with the brand and discover its world in new and unexpected ways. The store will also serve as the official hotspot to celebrate the end of the Tour de France—bringing the energy of the race into the heart of the city for a memorable finish.
Shared Spirit, Shared Momentum Both Cadillac and EF Pro Cycling embody a spirit of reinvention. Whether it’s the instantly recognizable pink jersey or the sharp, unmistakable silhouette of the LYRIQ, this partnership is designed to stand out—and move forward boldly.
Together, they represent a powerful alignment of performance, sustainability, and style—accelerating Cadillac’s mission to redefine luxury for a new generation of drivers across Europe.
Scientists with NASA’s Lucy mission are finally wrapping up the process of refining the data gathered by the spacecraft’s April 20 encounter with Donaldjohanson, an asteroid in our solar system’s main asteroid belt. And it’s, uh, as peanut-shaped as we first saw it.
Earlier this year, Lucy’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager snapped an image of Donaldjohansson while quickly swooping past it, at a distance of about 600 miles (960 kilometers), with the smallest visible features measuring around 130 feet (40 meters) across—an impressive close-up, considering the overall scale of anything we observe in space.
Regrettably, the Sun’s position behind Lucy reduced the contrast of the asteroid’s smaller details. But the close visit is invaluable nevertheless, as it’s allowing scientists to carefully comb over the details of its surface after adjusting for the brightness.
A stereo image pair combining the last complete approach image (right) with a slightly clipped image taken 72 seconds later (left). Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/Brian May/Claudia Manzoni
“Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology,” said Hal Levison, Lucy’s principal investigator, in an earlier press release about the asteroid. Donaldjohansson likely got its lumpy shape from a cosmic collision between two smaller objects around 150 million years ago. It’s a relatively common shape among smaller asteroids in the solar system, so what we learn from Donaldjohanson could inform our understanding of many other cosmic objects.
“As we study the complex structures in detail, they will reveal important information about the building blocks and collisional processes that formed the planets in our Solar System,” Levison added in the same release.
Donaldjohansson is not the main objective of the Lucy mission, whose itinerary is set for the eight Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun. Still, Lucy’s Donaldjohanson encounter—and the November 2023 flyby of asteroid Dinkinesh—is an excellent “dress rehearsal” for Lucy as it continues its journey toward the cooler, outer regions of the solar system, according to NASA’s Erin Morton in a statement earlier this week.
Lucy’s next milestone is set to occur in August 2027, when the spacecraft will finally start to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids in earnest—starting with Eurybates, a carbonaceous asteroid so big that it has its own satellite, Queta.
Head coach Andy Farrell insists his son Owen is ready for a return to international rugby after he was called up into the squad for the Qatar Airways British & Irish Lions Tour to Australia 2025.
Owen, who has played his Test career at fly-half or inside centre, joins an elite group as he becomes only the fifth player to participate in his fourth Lions Tour.
The 33-year-old, who recently rejoined Saracens from Racing 92, has six Lions caps to his name from his three previous Tours while the most recent of his 112 England caps came at the 2023 Rugby World Cup.
He replaces Elliot Daly in the squad after he was ruled out for the rest of the Tour with a fractured arm sustained in the 52-12 win against the Queensland Reds on Wednesday.
READ MORE: The Making of Owen Farrell
Andy Farrell said: “I suppose for all of us, really, we look at international games or we look at club games, or whatever, but the person is still the person and the character is still the character.
“The player inside is still the player inside if he is fit and well and ready to fire, and we see all of that [in Owen] – that hunger has always been there.
“We see him adding to the group and injecting a bit of life and experience, as far as what he can bring to the squad.”
When asked what Owen’s reaction to being called up was, Andy Farrell said: “Well he didn’t cry like Finlay [Bealham]! I suppose that’s what happens when it’s your fourth Tour.
“He’s delighted like everyone else. It was just a very short conversation, as in ‘yep, I can get ready, get packed, ready to go.”
Owen Farrell will join the Lions’ touring party on Friday, but naturally there was disappointment for Daly who had impressed at full-back in Australia, including two tries against the Western Force.
Daly becomes the second Lions player to have their Tour ended prematurely after scrum-half Tomos Williams was ruled out with a hamstring injury following the 54-7 victory over the Force.
Andy Farrell said: “It’s disappointing for all of us, like it was for Tomos.
“In the same manner, he’s an unbelievably popular guy amongst the group and obviously he’s vastly experienced.
“The experience that he’s not just got 70-odd caps at Test level but in a Lions shirt he’s somewhat of a Lions legend in regard to the 16 times he’s pulled the shirt on and 11 consecutive games – that’s amazing, isn’t it?
“Five caps, it could have been six had he come off the bench (against South Africa in 2021), he’s a very experienced player who was back to his best as well, so it’s very sad,”
Remember when Lily Zhang and Anthony Edwards challenged each other to an unlikely sports cross-over at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games?
With basketball star Edwards convinced he could take points off of Zhang and her USA Table Tennis teammates, their banter was one of the many viral storylines from Paris.
More importantly, though, it gave the profile of table tennis a boost in the United States ahead of the country hosting the next Olympic Games at LA 2028.
This week, Las Vegas, Nevada, holds the first-ever World Table Tennis United States Smash from 3–13 July – the first time one of the sport’s Grand Smashes, the top tier of the global circuit akin to the golf majors or tennis grand slams, is played in the United States.
It’ll be another chance for Zhang and her teammates – as well as the sport’s big names from around the world, who’ll be travelling to play in front of a U.S. audience for the first time – to propel table tennis into the consciousness of sports fans in the country.
“It was great that we got more eyes on the interaction but also our sport,” Zhang told Olympics.com at the recent World Championships of her exchanges with Edwards in Paris. “[Table tennis] is not the biggest sport in the U.S. yet, so we’re always looking to get more exposure.”
Having a major tournament on home soil is an opportunity to raise the profile of table tennis in the U.S. once more. It’ll be an occasion for Zhang and her teammates to show the country that they’re still around, not just a once-every-four-years team which pops up during the Olympics.
“I think any time we come out to international tournaments to represent our country, to leave our heart out on the tables, I feel like people see that and appreciate that,” Zhang said. “We’re all just trying our best to represent our country as best as we can, and hopefully that brings more eyes to the sport.
“I think once people get a chance to watch and to come out and support [in person], they really enjoy it and find themselves getting into it.”
There’s another thing Zhang hopes to achieve at the United States Smash in Vegas: Remind the next generation of players that pursuing table tennis is a viable career option – especially with LA28 coming up.
“Hopefully, inspire younger players to pick up the racquet – and to keep playing as well, not just start. In the U.S., a lot of players stop when they go to university, so to be able to have a pathway for a professional career in table tennis, is really the main goal.”
