By Nick Godt Subaru is teasing the 2026 Trailseeker SUV, its second electric vehicle, set to debut at the New York International Auto Show next week.

Source:: Digital Trends

In a move that will likely force IT to much more aggressively use web certificate automation services, the Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser Forum), a gathering of certificate issuers and suppliers of applications that use certificates, voted Friday to radically slash the lifespan of the certificates that verify the ownership of sites. The approved changes, which passed overwhelmingly, will be phased in gradually through March 2029, when the certs will only last 47 days.

Website certificates, also known as SSL/TLS certificates, are issued by trusted certification authorities (CAs) and use public-key cryptography to authenticate websites to web browsers.

This controversial change has been debated extensively for more than a year. The group’s argument is that this will improve web security in various ways, but some have argued that the group’s members have a strong alternative incentive, as they will be the ones earning more money due to this acceleration.

“This is fully what we were expecting,” said Jon Nelson, a principal advisory director at Info-Tech Research Group. “[But] I do question the motives of the group. They are doing this under the auspices of reducing risk, but I question if that is the real reason. Do the people making up this group have a conflict of interest in that this move could generate additional revenue for their companies?”

Although the group voted overwhelmingly to approve the change, with zero “No” votes, not every member agreed with the decision; five members abstained.

Tim Callan, the chief compliance officer at Sectigo and vice chair of the CA/Browser Forum, said that one of the certificate authority (CA) members who abstained, who he declined to identify, wrote a note to the group. Callan said it read, “we have mixed feelings about this. We are in favor in principle. However, we are unconvinced that the most restrictive terms are necessary, to go all of the way down to 47 days.”

Callan said that he personally applauds the changes. “I am thrilled for a couple of reasons. Shortening certificate lifespans are a good trend. It is the right direction for things to go.”

The changes, which were primarily pushed by Apple, have two separate elements. First is the length of time after a user proves that they have valid control over their domain (Domain Control Validation (DCV)) that they are permitted to order or renew a certificate without re-validation. The second involves how long the actual Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate is valid.

In roughly one year, on March 15, 2026, the “maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 200 days. This accommodates a six-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 200 days,” according to the passed ballot. 

Two years after that, on March 15, 2029, “maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 47 days. This accommodates a one-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 10 days.”

And given the technical nature of the member company representatives, they opted to define what they mean by a day.

But they didn’t define it as 24 hours. They took no chances: “For the purpose of calculations, a day is measured as 86,400 seconds. Any amount of time greater than this, including fractional seconds and/or leap seconds, shall represent an additional day. For this reason, Subscriber Certificates should not be issued for the maximum permissible time by default, in order to account for such adjustments.”

The passed document also included a preamble written by Apple, which tried to explain the rationale for the change.

In that letter, Apple said the gradual phasing in of the changes was intended to allow for discovery of unanticipated issues and to specifically allow for time to make adjustments. But its actual phrasing was pure Cupertino: “In order to shift more unknown unknowns towards known unknowns and known knowns over time, it is useful to ensure broad awareness prior to changes taking effect.”

The core argument from Apple was that today’s longer durations give far too much time for bad things to happen.

“Certificates are representations of a point in time state of reality. That is, at the point of certificate issuance, all data certified therein is correct and the process followed for that certification is accurately documented for that point in time,” Apple wrote. “The more time passes from that moment of issuance, the more likely it becomes that data represented in the certificate diverge from reality. Thus, a reduction to both certificate lifetimes and data reuse periods increases the average net reliability of certificates.”

But, Apple continued, CAs do not always do their job perfectly.

“At times, CAs do not issue certificates in accordance with the policies, requirements, or specifications that govern such issuance,” Apple said. “Requiring more frequent validation of information used in the issuance of certificates and lowering the maximum validity period of certificates reduces the risk of improper validation, the scope of improper validation perpetuation, and the opportunities for misissued certificates to negatively impact the ecosystem and its relying parties.”

Apple added that the shorter certificate lifespans also allow the industry to more effectively react to changes in cryptography.

Source:: Computer World

By Thomas Macaulay After steering Dutch chip giant ASML to become Europe’s most valuable tech firm, Peter Wennink is now focused on the next frontiers of deep tech. Wennink has already been involved in numerous breakthroughs in the field. Over his 25-year career at ASML — including over a decade as CEO — the company laid foundations for countless deep tech innovations. Under his leadership, the business earned renown as the sole supplier and producer of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. These systems are essential for manufacturing the world’s most advanced chips. They have become a crucial force in today’s AI boom, supporting…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

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The post Unitree G1: The Only Humanoid Robot That Can Perform Kung Fu appeared first on Fossbytes.

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The post Exoskeletons Explained: What Are They & How Do They Work? appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Siôn Geschwindt US biotech startup Colossal Biosciences has resurrected the dire wolf — or at least that’s what the company would like you to believe. Social media is abuzz with viral videos, memes, and images of fluffy white puppies. The Game of Thrones references are — predictably — omnipresent. The news even made it to Time magazine’s latest cover.  But behind the hype lies a dangerous de-extinction delusion that could distract from proven solutions to the biodiversity crisis. The Trump administration is already using Colossal’s claims as an excuse to slash endangered species protections. First, let’s set something straight — Colossal didn’t…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Maybe the forced Windows upgrades are to blame. Perhaps it’s the bad karma created by the Crowdstrike debacle. Or possibly, computer users have finally become convinced by Apple.

Whatever the reason, it’s Apple’s Macs that are driving — and winning — the PC sales rebound, according to the latest Canalys data.

Coming as it does on top of news that 88% of US teenagers are using iPhones, the data paints a pretty enough picture for Apple management to feel faintly confident that, despite all the outrageous economic fortune being slung hither and thither in its direction, like arrows from a bow, the company is in a pretty strong position for the coming decade of transformation and change. 

Ch-ch-ch-changes

After all, no matter how difficult those changes will be, it is at least likely that a lot of the computing will take place on devices Apple makes — including those next-generation folding iPhones, iPads, and spatial computing glasses the company’s product designers are tinkering with. As well as Apple Intelligence, I suppose. 

Stepping back from the hyperbole, what does the Canalys data show? 

Worldwide desktop and notebook shipments climbed 9.4% in the first quarter of 2025.

Apple’s desktop and notebook shipments increased 22.1%, giving it a 10.4% share of the global PC industry. 

Lenovo was the closest rival with 10.7% growth, while Dell experienced a 3% uptick.

The percentages are one thing and the truth remains that 89.6% of all the 62.75 million desktops and notebooks sold in the quarter weren’t made by Apple. But 6.54 million were – and this direction of travel’s going to mean a lot more as consumers realize that while they may have just spent all their spare cash on Apple products to avoid the tariff/not tariff threat, many are going to have to spend even more once they realize their Windows 10 PCs are end of life.

Under pressure

That last fact is coming like a cold bath on a cold day to a lot of people, according to Canalys — 14% of small and mid-sized businesses don’t even realize Windows 10 support ends in October. Another 21% know the time is nigh, but have no upgrade plans. 

In other words, around a third of the world’s Windows systems in use today could be left un-upgraded, and if left in that state will become more and more vulnerable, one new exploit at a time. 

Given the evident political tension globally at this time, you can bet your remaining tariff-avoidance dollar that hackers, adversaries, criminals, and other miscreants will be knocking at the Windows perimeters looking to exploit those machines. Have you heard the phrase, “An Accident Waiting to Happen”?

Let’s dance

That’s a happy accident for Apple, of course. Even with tariffs, Macs have never looked better. Faster than ever, more computationally powerful, using far less energy, and even capable of running on-premises generative AI tools, they are tempting anyone seeking a new PC; the Canalys data proves it. That data shows that Apple’s Mac sales account for a yuge chunk of PC recovery sales, a direct reflection of the truth that PC purchasers see the platform as viable.

The end-of-life for Windows 10 will drive even more in the same direction.

As Canalys Principal Analyst Ishan Dutt points out, this in conjunction with tariffs means those who delay plans to upgrade to secure systems are “likely to face a higher cost environment when the time comes to refresh their PC fleets.”

Given that, and with so much of the PC industry component supply chain likely to be affected by tariffs, at what point will Apple’s systems look cheap — particularly as Apple has a head start on some of the work to diversify its manufacturing base? 

Heroes

Now I’m off to play with the Mac Studio I’m testing. I am attempting to install webAI on it. It’s so impressive it reminds me of Douglas Adams and his computer, “Deep Thought.” Did you know Adams owned the first ever Mac sold in Europe? I think he’d be impressed, too.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

By Nick Godt Kia’s best-selling EV6 and EV9 models are now fully produced in the U.S., making them eligible for the $7,500 tax credit. But the GT trims for both models don’t qualify.

Source:: Digital Trends

Atlassian has decided that — like employees — apps work better together in teams than as standalone products. The company is creating “collections” of integrated apps designed to make business processes, collaboration, analysis and execution more efficient.

Specifically, it unveiled two collections at this week’s Team 25 show in Anaheim, CA — and more collections are coming, Atlassian executives said.

The first collection, called “Strategy,” allows leadership teams to get a bird’s-eye view of product portfolios, align strategy, track execution, and manage talent and assignments. The second — “Teamwork” — integrates a set of apps to improve employee productivity and communication. The company also plans to release a collection for software teams and a collection for services teams.

Atlassian’s generative AI-based search and discovery platform Rovo works across all the collections.

Tech-driven organizations are under pressure to deliver value even faster, Sanchan Saxena, head of product for work management at Atlassian, said in a video briefing. About the company’s plans, “Teams need to collaborate within a shared system of work to move quickly in the same direction,” he said.

That can be done by moving standalone products into a set of integrated apps, Saxena said.

The “Strategy” collection includes the Focus, Talent, and Jira Align apps; the company refers to this grouping as Align in the collection.

Generative AI (genAI) agents in the collection “help inform and assist knowledge workers and executives as they’re making decisions that impact their strategy and execution,” said Matt Schvimmer, head of product for agile and DevOps at Atlassian.

The Align grouping focuses on planning and execution, and the Focus collection defines that strategy, ties it to objectives and key results, and “understands how the work is being delivered over time and is it supporting those goals,” Schvimmer said.

The Talent app grouping assigns employees to the right work and makes sure they are performing as expected. Executives “make better, more informed strategic decisions that are based on real-time information as opposed to information that’s been aggregated and correlated across various systems,” Schvimmer said.

The Teamwork collection includes Jira, Confluence, Loom, plug-ins such as Slack and Rovo Teamwork Agents. The interconnectedness of all the apps helps teams share ideas, communicate and get work done, Saxena said.

Jira helps teams plan and track work. Confluence is a teamwork space for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Loom enables video communication for team members.

Confluence, which focuses on creating and sharing knowledge with team members, has two new features. The “brainstorm facilitator” agent can take new or proposed data from the whiteboard and modify existing plans — such as marketing — based on the new data. It can also work with team members to refine plans. Without genAI tools, that needed to be done manually, Saxena said.

And a new diagram creator tool can take brainstormed ideas and turn them into a process flow diagram. Confluence can also carry summaries of meetings via Loom.

The company also announced the Rovo Studio App, which is “a single place where customers can create agents, automations, assets, hubs, and other building tools that are accelerated through AI,” said Jamil Valliani, head of product for AI at Atlassian.

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt The International Energy Agency (IEA) has published its first major report on the AI gold rush’s impact on global energy consumption — and its findings paint a worrying, and perhaps contradictory, picture.   Energy use from data centres, including for artificial intelligence applications, is predicted to double over the next five years to 3% of global energy use. AI-specific power consumption could drive over half of this growth globally, the report found. Some data centres today consume as much electricity as 100,000 households. The hyperscalers of the future could gobble up 20x that number, according to the IEA. By 2030, data…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

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By Nick Godt Slate, a new EV start-up backed by Jeff Bezos, seeks to offer a $25K electric truck, which will be upgradeable.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Siôn Geschwindt German startup ARX Robotics has announced plans to invest £45mn into a new UK facility, where it will build autonomous battlefield robots for deployment in war zones around the world. Located at an undisclosed site in southwest England, ARX expects the plant to produce 1,800 ground-based drones each year once up and running. ARX’s battlefield robots look like small tanks — but without guns. The vehicles drive around on treads and can be fitted with equipment such as radar, mine-sweeping devices, or medical stretchers.  The largest of ARX’s machines carries military payloads weighing up to 500kg — including injured soldiers —…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Thomas Macaulay Body-scanning startup Neko Health has opened its largest clinic yet, continuing its expansion in London — just six months after launching its first site in the city. The futuristic new facility expands access to Neko’s high-tech health vision. Blending body scans, lidar sensors, and AI with blood tests, eye pressure checks, and strength tests, the startup maps millions of data points in minutes.  The findings can reveal warning signs about the skin, heart, blood vessels, and inflammation. A human doctor then immediately takes the user through the findings. Within an hour of arriving, they’re on their way out of the…This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Spotify

Source:: The Next Web

For web publishers, stopping AI bots from scraping their best content while consuming valuable bandwidth must feel somewhere between futile and nigh impossible.

It’s like throwing a cup of water at a forest fire. No matter what you try, the new generation of bots keeps advancing, insatiably consuming data to train AI models that are currently in the grip of competitive hyper-growth.

But with traditional approaches for limiting bot behavior, such as a robots.txt file, looking increasingly long in the tooth, a solution of sorts might be on the horizon through work being carried out by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) AI Preferences Working Group (AIPREF).

The AIPREF Working Group is meeting this week in Brussels, where it hopes to continue its work to lay the groundwork for a new robots.txt-like system for websites that will signal to AI systems what is and isn’t off limits.

The group will try to define two mechanisms to contain AI scrapers, starting with “a common vocabulary to express authors’ and publishers’ preferences regarding use of their content for AI training and related tasks.”

Second, it will develop a “means of attaching that vocabulary to content on the internet, either by embedding it in the content or by formats similar to robots.txt, and a standard mechanism to reconcile multiple expressions of preferences.”

AIPREF Working Group Co-chairs Mark Nottingham and Suresh Krishnan described the need for change in a blog post:

“Right now, AI vendors use a confusing array of non-standard signals in the robots.txt file and elsewhere to guide their crawling and training decisions,” they wrote. “As a result, authors and publishers lose confidence that their preferences will be adhered to, and resort to measures like blocking their IP addresses.”

The AIPREF Working Group has promised to turn its ideas around the biggest change to the way websites signal their preferences since robots.txt was first used in 1994 into something concrete by mid-year.

Parasitic AI

The initiative comes at a time when concern over AI scraping is growing across the publishing industry. This is playing out differently across countries, but governments keen to encourage local AI development haven’t always been quick to defend content creators.

In 2023, Google was hit by a lawsuit, later dismissed, alleging that its AI had scraped copyrighted material. In 2025, UK Channel 4 TV executive Alex Mahon told British MPs that the British government’s proposed scheme to allow AI companies to train models on content unless publishers opted out would result in the “scraping of value from our creative industries.”

At issue in these cases is the principle of taking copyrighted content to train AI models, rather than the mechanism through which this is achieved, but the two are, arguably, interconnected.

Meanwhile, in a separate complaint thread, the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, said last week that AI bots had caused a 50% increase in the bandwidth consumed since January 2024 by downloading multimedia content such as videos:

“This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models,” the Foundation explained.

“This high usage is also causing constant disruption for our Site Reliability team, who has to block overwhelming traffic from such crawlers before it causes issues for our readers,” Wikimedia added.

AI crawler defenses

The underlying problem is that established methods for stopping AI bots have downsides, assuming they work at all. Using robots.txt files to express preferences can simply be ignored, as it has been by traditional non-AI scrapers for years.

The alternatives — IP or user-agent string blocking through content delivery networks (CDNs) such as Cloudflare, CAPTCHAS, rate limiting, and web application firewalls — also have disadvantages.

Even lateral approaches such as ‘tarpits’ — confusing crawlers with resource-consuming mazes of files with no exit links — can be beaten by OpenAI’s sophisticated AI crawler. But even when they work, tarpits also risk consuming host processor resources.

The big question is whether AIPREF will make any difference. It could come down to the ethical stance of the companies doing the scraping; some will play ball with AIPREF, many others won’t.

Cahyo Subroto, the developer behind the MrScraper ‘’ethical” web scraping tool, is skeptical:

“Could AIPREF help clarify expectations between sites and developers? Yes, for those who already care about doing the right thing. But for those scraping aggressively or operating in gray areas, a new tag or header won’t be enough. They’ll ignore it just like they ignore everything else, because right now, nothing’s stopping them,” he said.

According to Mindaugas Caplinskas, co-founder of ethical proxy service IPRoyal, rate limiting through a proxy service was always likely to be more effective than a new way of simply asking people to behave.

“While [AIPREF] is a step forward in the right direction, if there are no legal grounds for enforcement, it is unlikely that it will make a real dent in AI crawler issues,” said Caplinskas.

“Ultimately, the responsibility for curbing the negative impacts of AI crawlers lies with two key players: the crawlers themselves and the proxy service providers. While AI crawlers can voluntarily limit their activity, proxy providers can impose rate limits on their services, directly controlling how frequently and extensively websites are crawled,” he said.

However. Nathan Brunner, CEO of AI interview preparation tool Boterview, pointed out that blocking AI scrapers might create a new set of problems.

“The current situation is tricky for publishers who want their pages to be indexed by search engines to get traffic, but don’t want their pages used to train their AI,” he said. This leaves publishers with a delicate balancing act, wanting to keep out the AI scrapers without impeding necessary bots such as Google’s indexing crawler.

“The problem is that robots.txt was designed for search, not AI crawlers. So, a universal standard would be most welcome.”

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak If you’re a Blox Fruits player on Roblox, you can agree on how important it is…
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By Nick Godt An unreleased version of Waymo’s privacy policy suggests the California-based company is preparing to use data from its robotaxis, including interior cameras, to train generative AI models and to offer targeted ads.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Nick Godt Audi has announced it would halt shipments to the U.S. in the wake of President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on all imported vehicles.

Source:: Digital Trends