Jul 21, 2026 · 3 min listen · Last updated July 21, 2026
From storyflo. This is your daily audio brief. Theo, July 21st. The systems update — five tech stories that bear on what's coming next. Let's get into it. First, from Ars Technica. The Space Force is now seeking to buy up to $30 billion in rocket launches.
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The Space Force is now seeking to buy up to $30 billion in rocket launches
It seems as though $5.6 billion wasn't enough. That was the news from the US Space Force on Friday, when military officials announced they were tripling the maximum value of one of the service's National Security Space Launch contracts to $17 billion.
The expansion of the Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 contract comes as the Pentagon signals rising demand for military satellite launches.
Index funds are touted as one of the safest ways to invest. Rather than picking and choosing individual stocks, index funds let you bet on the market as a whole. So what happens when a company like SpaceX - a giant gamble, and, in my opinion, terribly overpriced - is fast-tracked into the Nasdaq-100? Does it suddenly threaten the stability of index funds based on the Nasdaq-100? Can a $1.77 trillion IPO crater the retirement funds of regular people who would ordinarily have no interest in investing in Elon Musk's meme stock?
The answer has less to do with SpaceX and more to do with index funds
Here are the 30,000 songs Sony is suing Udio’s AI music generator over
Sony Music Entertainment has filed another lawsuit against Udio, accusing the AI music generator of infringing the copyright of more than 30,000 of its songs, ranging from Elvis Presley's Hound Dog to Beyoncé's Say My Name, and Harry Styles' As It Was. The lawsuit, filed in a New York court on Monday, claims that this list represents "only a small portion of Plaintiffs' works that Udio infringed," as reported earlier by Music Business Worldwide.
In 2024, Sony, along with Universal Music Group and Warner Records, filed a lawsuit against Udio and the AI music-maker Suno.
Kick your mouse out of the house with this AI-assisted keyboard utility
Imagine never having to reach for your mouse to navigate around Windows again. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Well wake up: We have some peripherals to burn. Neverclick, from developer Lazo Velko, was published recently with the promise to allow users to perform mouse actions on every single object on their screen with nothing but keyboard shortcuts.
AI vendors have found someone to pay their infrastructure bills: You
Forrester warns that customers should brace for bigger software bills next year as software and AI vendors raise prices and pile on usage charges. Working from a survey of more than 2,600 business and technology decision-makers, the tech research company said software budgets were expected to rise "as vendors increase prices or add usage charges to pass their AI costs to customers." In the last six months, Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub have shifted some services away from flat-rate subscriptions toward usage-based billing, prompting cost concerns among users.
EU forces Google to share its toys with the other AI and search kids
Spelled out in big colorful letters that even Google can understand, the EU is now requiring the Chocolate Factory to share search data with competitors while enhancing Android AI interoperability for bots other than Gemini. Needless to say, the company would like to find a way to disable this default. The European Commission (EC) announced a pair of specification decisions on Thursday. The first covers AI vendors' ability to integrate into Google's mobile OS, and the other forces Google to give search data to other search engines in order to “rebalance the playing field," as the EC put it.
Mozilla speeds Firefox release schedule to biweekly
Firefox releases will soon get even closer together – but not ESR ones, which remain annual, with the next one due out soon. The change was announced last week on the [email redacted] mailing list by Mozilla’s director of engineering Sylvestre Ledru: “We are planning to move Firefox Desktop and Android from a 4-week release cadence to a 2-week release cadence starting in September 2026. “This will be an experiment… This does not mean that all work needs to ship twice as fast. Work that is not ready should not be rushed, and features can still take the time they need to bake.
Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'
WHO, ME? Regrets? We've had a few. And so have many readers of The Register, who we try to help by getting their stories of workplace mistakes off their chests every Friday in a reader-contributed column we call "Who, Me?" This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "Johnny," who told us he was once hired as a Visual Basic developer, a job he thought was beneath him. He got on with things anyway, until he was given a new project that he decided to write in C# despite that language being new at the time.
Building a Foundation Stack for General-Purpose Robots
This article is brought to you by X Square Robot.
Large language models gave artificial intelligence a working recipe. Pretrain a large model on broad data, and general capability follows. Robotics has no such recipe. Robotics systems have long been assembled from separate perception, planning, and control parts that rarely add up to intelligence a robot can carry from one task to another, or one machine to another.
Deno project is going to add cross-platform desktop apps in next major update
The next major release of Deno, a JavaScript/TypeScript runtime, will include new commands to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technology. Deno desktop will compile an application from a plain TypeScript file or from frameworks such as Next.js, Astro, Deno Fresh, TanStack Start or Vite SSR (server-side rendering). A distinctive feature is that the native WebView is used by default, rather than bundling the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). The advantage is much smaller applications.