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Your_Mom writes:

Did you hear it was just a ban on Chinese humanoid robots? It's not:

When the Trump administration announced yesterday that it was banning "advanced robotic devices" from entering the United States, the headlines were all about humanoids. But spying doesn't require legs — and neither does the FCC's robot ban.

The robot ban will sweep up robot vacuum cleaners too, FCC media relations director Katie Gorscak confirms to The Verge.

It's not coming for your existing Roomba, and companies can keep importing and selling already approved ones. But the government claims that future foreign robots pose a national security risk, and even robovac companies are suddenly being asked to commit to US manufacturing.

While the government did include "humanoid robots" and "quadrupeds" among the bots it wants to ban, the ban is far broader than that. It covers almost any new software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.

By that definition, the FCC is banning future robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, and the robots that crate around packages at your local Amazon warehouse, too.

It was already clear from the government's ban announcement that it was thinking about robot vacuums. In the National Security Determination that the FCC is using to justify the ban, the government explicitly calls out my reporting on the incredibly poor security that let one man access 7,000 DJI robovacs around the world.

But like the consumer router ban, the FCC isn't actually targeting companies with poor security. It's targeting basically every robovac company, regardless of their security practices — because basically every robovac is manufactured outside the US.

[...] But again, the government isn't asking these companies any questions about security — not one — to get the waiver that lets them through. The FCC only wants to know where they're designed and made and assembled and tested and influenced, and get a specific commitment to start manufacturing them in the US instead.

Even then, it appears the FCC will simply preference US companies without any new commitments to security or US manufacturing, like it did when it almost immediately let Netgear off the hook — even though Netgear's routers were among those targeted in the Volt Typhoon incident that helped justify the router ban to begin with. Four unnamed sources told Reuters that "the FCC is expected to exempt many non-Chinese suppliers from the restrictions."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Optimus remains 'very complex' and Robotaxis will try not to flatten your cat:

Tesla's investment bill ballooned in calendar Q2 as Elon Musk's biz entered what it calls its "largest and most exciting period of investment.

The company has poured resources into AI silicon and robotics, with capex [PDF] more than doubling from $2.5 billion in the previous quarter to $5.8 billion.

That left Tesla with negative free cash flow of $1.1 billion, down 848 percent year-on-year. It expects spending to keep rising and exceed $25 billion for the year.

During the earnings call, Musk talked up Tesla's Terafab ambitions but gave little detail other than calling it an "amazing initiative" and confirming that equipment orders had been placed for the development fab in Austin.

"It's intended to have lithography mask production, and then logic, memory and packaging, and chip testing all under one roof," he said. "So you can have a very fast iterative cycle." Musk acknowledged it was a "high-risk, high-payoff bet on AI chips."

Musk said Terafab was essential to scaling Optimus because Tesla would otherwise be unable to secure enough AI chips, hence the prodigious expenditure.

As for Tesla's automaker business, vehicle deliveries were up 25 percent year-on-year in Q2 to 480,126, and total automotive revenues surpassed $20 billion. However, operating margin fell to 1.4 percent from 4.1 percent a year ago.

According to Tesla, it is "in its largest and most exciting period of investment" as it builds out the infrastructure needed to make good on Musk's many promises.

"I think Optimus [Tesla's humanoid robot] will be the biggest product," Musk reiterated during the earnings call, before cautioning that "it is a very complex problem to solve."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2227720/eu-right-to-repair-directive-kicks-in-today/

July 31, 2026 marks the start of a new era for the Right to Repair movement, at least for citizens in the European Union. It's the deadline for when the bloc's directive on repairs goes live for its 27 member nations. And while today is more of a political and procedural milestone than a practical one, it opens the door for major changes in how people maintain their hardware. It's all part of the bloc's push for a fairer, and more sustainable economy.

Essentially, the directive requires manufacturers to offer repairs for faulty products within a "reasonable time" and "at a reasonable price." Manufacturers will also need to publish repair manuals — for free — and offer clear pricing for spare parts. If a piece of equipment is repaired, then buyers will also be able to have their legal warranty period extended for an additional year.

At present, the rules cover repairs for major household appliances, such as washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and refrigerators. On the technology side, the rules apply to smartphones, tablets, server equipment, as well as e-bikes and e-scooters. A notable admission from the list is vacuum cleaners, which will get its own separate framework at some point down the line.

At the time of publication, there are still plenty of member states that haven't yet incorporated the directive into their domestic law. It's likely we'll still be waiting several months before we start seeing meaningful changes in how repairs are handled. Not to mention that this is a separate initiative from the removable battery laws — which will see the sale of a more repairable version of the Switch 2 — which are due to kick in next year.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Posisbly cracked mud, therefore more evidence Red Planet was once less horrible:

NASA has shared new snaps captured by its Curiosity rover that show a large "field of honeycomb textures" on Mars.

NASA doesn't know how the honeycomb formed, but The Register is willing to rule out space bees because Curiosity has seen this sort of thing before and scientists are pretty sure the patterns are the result of mud drying and cracking during some unknowably distant Martian event.

Curiosity spotted the polygonal features after starting its climb up a Martian valley that mission scientists have nicknamed "Valle Grande." NASA's post about the find says the rover has seen "small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande."

The Rover snapped the honeycomb field on June 19 and 20, the 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days of its very extended mission. Curiosity reached Martian soil on August 5, 2012, and was the first probe to land under a "sky crane" – a hovering craft that lowers rovers to the ground. Previous Mars landings relied on bouncing airbags that space agencies hoped would protect probes as they landed at speeds exceeding 70 km/h.

Curiosity has travelled about 35 kilometers since arriving on Mars and has made myriad fascinating observations along the way, some of which suggest Mars was once home to intermittent oases or even a large lake. The journey was hard, with damaged tires a persistent problem. The rover's drill got stuck in a Martian rock. NASA took a leaf from the Taylor Swift playbook and found a way to shake it off. The space agency has also remotely reprogrammed the rover to conduct different experiments and uploaded major software upgrades to keep it rolling.

The rover is currently carrying out its fifth extended mission. NASA typically extends missions for as long as its robots gather enough data to justify the cost of operating them. Curiosity continues to meet those criteria very comfortably!

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/07/30/americans-give-all-day-school-phone-bans-a-ringing-endorsement/5281186

Americans are warming to the idea that schools should be for learning rather than doomscrolling, with support for all-day smartphone bans now outweighing opposition for the first time.

A new Pew Research Center survey of 9,750 US adults found that 77 percent support banning smartphones during middle and high school classes, up from 68 percent in 2024. More significantly, support for so-called "bell-to-bell" bans now stands at 48 percent, compared with 43 percent who oppose the idea.

Back in 2024, opponents held the advantage.

The shift coincides with a rush of state legislation. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 42 states have enacted measures addressing cellphone use in schools, many of which require districts to adopt restrictions during the school day.

There's little argument over whether phones belong in class anymore, but the sticking point is whether students should get them back between lessons or keep them tucked away until the final bell.

Age plays a predictable role. Adults under 30 remain the least enthusiastic about bell-to-bell restrictions, with just 28 percent supporting them. Older Americans, meanwhile, appear increasingly comfortable with the notion that teenagers can survive a school day without immediate access to social media, group chats, or whatever crisis is currently unfolding on Snapchat.

The partisan divide is smaller than on most US policy questions. Republicans are more likely to support both classroom and all-day bans, but Democrats also back classroom restrictions by a comfortable margin.

The trend echoes developments elsewhere. In the UK, ministers spent much of this year promising to get tougher on phones in schools, only for it to emerge that most schools already had restrictions in place. The government's reforms mostly gave existing policies more bite, saving ministers the trouble of inventing anything new.

Whether today's students see their phones as indispensable learning tools or portable oxygen tanks is another matter. Pew's latest numbers suggest more American adults are willing to let them find out for six or seven hours a day.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.slashgear.com/2225771/solar-farm-uk-devon-derril-water-shut-down-reason-grid-overload-worry/

As technology within the energy space evolves, solar farms have become a key production source across the world. For example, solar farms in the United States produce energy and a whole lot more, and solar farms in Britain have expanded to deliver impressive amounts of energy in their own right. Unfortunately, one solar farm — the largest in the region — and the energy it produces have supposedly proven too much for what the area's power grid can safely handle. Thus, the North Devon-based Derril Water solar park has been temporarily shut down until September, without any warning or input from those behind it, in the hope of keeping the local grid intact.

Per The Guardian, the order to shut down the Derril Water solar park came from the National Energy System Operator, which ordered National Grid to pull the plug for the remainder of the summer. Concerns of a possible thermal grid overload, involving the movement of excessive energy through a system that generates too much heat and can damage key components, backed the order. This comes after issues with the North Devon power grid were highlighted back in 2023, though the necessary improvements scheduled for installation at the end of 2025 have been pushed out to this September at the earliest.

As reasonable as the rationale for temporarily shutting down the Derril Water community solar farm may seem, it comes with major consequences. Energy production and the livelihoods of those involved monetarily with the solar farm are at stake.

Even though the reason for the Derril Water solar farm's shutdown is tied to grid issues, the consequences of its stoppage fall on those with no responsibility for the grid itself. The first issue the shutdown presents is a lack of solar energy production. Not only is this a negative due to a loss of clean energy accumulation, but this translates to a serious dip in revenue, with estimates placing the lost funds at around two million pounds.

With that amount of money lost, those invested in the solar farm will feel the effects of the shutdown in their wallets. Roughly 9,500 individuals will likely lose out on dividends paid to them for their financial investment into the solar farm in the near future. The Derril Water volunteer board of directors told The Guardian that most of those individuals are understanding of the situation and know that the issue lies with the power grid and not the farm itself. Still, there is plenty of frustration going around, especially since grid operators and insurance companies aren't expected to pitch in over the lost revenue.

As effective as they can be, solar farm shutdowns of some kind are occasionally deemed necessary. Sometimes it comes down to solar energy technology, like in the case of California's $2 billion solar plant shutdown, or it can be a connected grid infrastructure issue. In this situation, the North Devon grid seemingly couldn't handle what the Derril Water solar farm could provide.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/space-force-backed-mission-does-its-best-impression-of-top-gun-in-orbit/

An ongoing military exercise happening hundreds of miles above Earth has—for the first time in an unclassified setting—demonstrated how future satellites might evade and pursue one another in a future conflict.

That was the announcement Wednesday from True Anomaly, one of the companies involved in the exercise. True Anomaly's Jackal satellite, also known as Panther, played the cat-and-mouse game with another spacecraft named Puma, based on Rocket Lab's Pioneer satellite platform.

"This is what we've really been building towards for the past four years," said Even Rogers, True Anomaly's co-founder and CEO.

The two satellites, each somewhere between the size of a dishwasher and a refrigerator, are part of the Victus Haze mission managed by the US Space Force. Victus Haze is the latest in a series of "responsive" Space Force missions aimed at demonstrating how the military and its commercial contractors can rapidly launch and deploy new satellites in reaction to an emerging threat or need.

The scenario for Victus Haze, set in motion earlier this year, involved the launch of True Anomaly's Jackal satellite in May. Rocket Lab's Puma satellite, already built and in storage, was on standby to quickly launch when it was time to start the exercise. Rocket Lab was on call to launch its Puma spacecraft within 24 hours of call-up by the Space Force.

That happened last month, when military officials informed Rocket Lab it was time to go. The company quickly rolled its Electron rocket and Puma satellite to a launch pad in New Zealand and launched them June 19, less than 17 hours after receiving the call-up. Within 38 hours, Rocket Lab had fully activated and prepared the Puma satellite for its first orbital maneuver, beating the Space Force's requirement of 72 hours.

The launch set up Puma for a series of burns to move in close to True Anomaly's satellite. The Space Force's criteria for success was to complete the rendezvous and photograph the target satellite in less than 84 hours. Rocket Lab reported it did the job in less than 59 hours, culminating in a head-to-head inspection and survey, with each satellite snapping pictures of the other.

One of the images, released by Rocket Lab, shows its satellite's view of True Anomaly's Jackal.

"You can see that we are actively tracking them," Rogers told Ars. "Our solar arrays are deflected, tracking the sun, and we are staring right down their boresight, which is just a really cool demonstration of our capability. We were tracking them while they were tracking us, and maintaining power-positive status."

It's easy to see the military utility for this type of capability. Imagine a mysterious military satellite launched by Russia or another space power. It suddenly starts approaching a multibillion-dollar US spy satellite with unknown intentions. To some degree, this is already happening in the real world. If US forces had a satellite on the shelf, they could quickly launch it directly into the same orbit as the adversary's satellite to take a closer look, and perhaps in the future, take action.

The rapid launch and initial rendezvous and inspections were only the opening salvo in the Victus Haze exercise. On July 14, True Anomaly and Rocket Lab received orders for Mission 2 of Victus Haze. The task? Pursue and evade one another over and over again. True Anomaly's Jackal, or Panther, satellite was commanded to move in on Rocket Lab's Puma vehicle, which sensed the threat and fired thrusters to "vanish into the dark."

"Jackal's crew produced a validated mission plan in under 30 minutes from tasking," True Anomaly said in a statement. "Jackal executed ingress and a burn sequence over 23 minutes to close on Puma. When Puma maneuvered away during the approach, Jackal downlinked what it saw, and our team replanned, revalidated, and implemented a new mission plan in rapid succession."

As Rocket Lab's Puma backed away, True Anomaly's Jackal executed more burns to reengage and image its prey. Military and company officials haven't released any photos from the most recent Victus Haze demo, and they declined to disclose exactly how close the satellites came to one another.

"Due to operational security, further details involving sensor suites for characterization, phenomenology, payloads, distances, or docking will not be shared," a spokesperson for Space Systems Command said in response to questions from Ars.

True Anomaly's ground controllers, working out of an operations center in Colorado, managed the maneuvers with the help of an algorithm generating "hyper-accurate" targeting estimates from measurements onboard the Jackal satellite. All of this was done without coordination between True Anomaly and Rocket Lab. "No scripted target behavior," True Anomaly said.

"Puma wasn't playing a role," the company continued. "It was maneuvering to lose us, and we didn't know how in advance. That's the entire reason to do this on orbit instead of in a lab: the human decisions, the unexpected conditions, and the adversary's freedom to act are all real, and integration that hasn't held up against them hasn't been tested at all."

This cat-and-mouse game sounds a lot like dogfighting in space, something Rogers, who started True Anomaly in 2022, has discussed with Ars in the past. Rogers previously served in a space aggressors unit in the US Air Force, taking up against US space operators in war game and military exercises.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-vows-to-make-windows-11-fly-on-8gb-ram-amid-memory-shortage-optimizations-to-reduce-os-memory-footprint-have-begun

Optimizations To Reduce OS Memory Footprint Have Begun

While the official minimum specifications for Windows 11 sit at just 4GB of RAM, most PC builders advise getting at least 16GB if you want to have a smooth experience. In fact, Microsoft has previously recommended 32GB of RAM for Windows 11 for gamers, especially if they want a system that can handle games in the near future. Unfortunately, the RAMpocalypse has forced both users and manufacturers to stick with slower DDR4 memory and lower capacities. Some experts predict that the entry-level PC will disappear by 2028, and we’ve even seen some manufacturers, including Apple, reintroduce 8GB laptops just to hit a specific price point.

The RAM shortage crisis, alongside increasing competition, is forcing Microsoft to do better with Windows 11. Hopefully, these optimizations arrive sooner and don’t introduce new bugs, allowing both new and existing users to get more out of their systems.

The Windows blog post also gave an update on what improvements the company has made to Windows 11 so far. This includes a better Windows Search experience, more Taskbar and Start customizations, a more responsive and reliable File Explorer, among others. Many of these changes are still in preview, though, so unless you’re part of the Windows Insider Program, you’ll have to wait a few more weeks to months before you can start enjoying these changes.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

State power, open-weight models, and a 'low human rights advantage' are letting China catch up — and scale — faster than America:

China's rapid rise in artificial intelligence has caught the world's attention — and given America's AI leaders good reason to lose sleep.

China was a latecomer to the current wave of generative artificial intelligence. The leading large language models, advanced AI chips, and much of the underlying research infrastructure were initially dominated by American firms. Yet within a remarkably short period, Chinese firms have emerged as serious competitors. Models from DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen series, Moonshot AI's Kimi, and others have reached near-parity with leading U.S. systems on many benchmarks for coding, reasoning, and other tasks.

The speed of China's catch-up has surprised many observers. It should not. We have seen this pattern before in solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, telecommunications, and other industries. AI increasingly looks like another application of what I call "China Inc."

[...] In the United States and other liberal democracies, AI development increasingly encounters concerns over privacy, data use, ethics, environmental impact, and the construction of massive data centers. In China, privacy protections and ethical objections impose weaker constraints on state-prioritized data collection and AI development, while local communities have far less ability to block data centers and related infrastructure.

Electricity may make this difference even more important. AI consumes enormous amounts of power. In democracies, new generating capacity, transmission lines, data centers, and related infrastructure can face lengthy permitting, environmental reviews, litigation, and local opposition. China can mobilize land, capital, electricity, and infrastructure much more rapidly, while expanding coal, renewable, and nuclear generation with considerably less political resistance.

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font:

If you don't want AI scrapers training themselves on your website, there's a new way to stop them that doesn't involve server-side blocking or praying they respect your instructions in robots.txt. A team of creatives have teamed up with a typography company to create a new type of font that'll trick LLM scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish.

Dubbed ShieldFont , the open-source project almost seems like magic if you're not familiar with the ins and outs of computer fonts. Look at a web page written using a ShieldFont font and it'll appear exactly as one would expect: All the content words (the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that give a sentence meaning) are the same as the writer originally wrote.

Inspect the raw HTML that a scraper reads from a ShieldFonted page, however, and you'll see a sentence that's essentially gibberish. Typing "good luck reading this, you useless robot" in the online demo version , for example, turns it into "good comfort reading this, you yellow barrier."

The goal, as outlined in the ShieldFont white paper , is not to get a scraping bot to reject the text as garbage, but to convince it that the text on the page is unusual but sensible. A noun will never be swapped for a verb, for example, and a verb will never be swapped for an adjective: Swaps only come from the same grammatical pool.

It goes even more distinct than that, The ShieldFont creators noted.

"Not just noun for noun: plural abstract noun about communication for plural abstract noun about communication," the white paper explains. "There are about 250 such pools, built by crossing part of speech with sense category, concreteness, singular or plural, verb transitivity, verb inflection and adjective degree."

Around a quarter of words in a chunk of text end up replaced, the creators noted, with the hope the copy still gets ingested. Even if it doesn't, and the group notes scrapers do sometimes reject it, that still means your writing doesn't get sucked up to train an AI – a win either way.

This all seems a bit mystical unless you're versed in the functions of fonts – specifically fonts in the OpenFont family, which ShieldFont is designed to work with.

First off, you may be familiar with typographic ligatures, which combine two letters into a single character for the sake of making text look a bit neater, or conveying meaning in some languages but not others. Æ is one classic example in Latin script used in some languages but not others; there's also fi, which combines a lower case F and I in a way that prevents the top curve of the F from bumping into the I's dot.

OpenType fonts all come with ligature tables that define how single glyphs or glyph sequences get substituted automatically by a word processor in a process known as glyph substitution, or GSUB. Even Google Docs supports user-configurable GSUB to an extent - you can fairly easily configure a substitution to automatically fill in for frequently used special words or characters.

ShieldFont works on largely the same premise, but extends GSUB to entire words instead of letters or character pairs. So for example, a word like "daughter" in raw HTML might be rendered as "journalist" when it actually shows up to human viewers on the page.

Here's what a paragraph written in the ShieldFont looks like as viewed on a web page (above), as opposed to what the raw HTML actually says (below):

Even with that extended GSUB format, the font files are still quite small.

owl writes:

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-metric-system-encodes-18th-century

Part one of this series argued that traditional units are good for daily life: human-scaled, body-derived, requiring no equipment. The metric system, I said, is for science.

I was being generous.

The metric system isn't a rational system derived from nature. It's a fossil record of what a late-18th-century laboratory could measure. Every "fundamental" SI unit encodes the instrumentation limits of the Enlightenment, wrapped in a story about universality and reason.

We covered this in part one [see below for link], but it bears repeating. The meter was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along a meridian passing through Paris. This required a years-long surveying expedition that produced a measurement nobody else could verify.

The competing proposal was the seconds pendulum: a pendulum whose half-period is exactly one second, whose length anyone with a clock and a string could reproduce. They rejected it. The meridian definition was grander, more French, and completely impractical.

The original survey was wrong. The meter we use today isn't one ten-millionth of anything. It's defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second, a number chosen specifically to match the historical platinum bar as closely as possible. The "rational" definition is a retrofitted rationalization of a measurement error from 1799. [...]

Note, the "part 1" referenced above is here: In Defense of Traditional Units.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Privacy guardian warns public trust quickly erodes when supplier access comes as a surprise:

NHS England has admitted that a data protection document inaccurately stated who could access patient information, failing to disclose that Palantir staff could view identifiable data held within part of its Federated Data Platform.

The US spy-tech firm won a £330 million contract to provide the platform in 2023 after it was awarded £60 million in COVID-era contracts without competition. The system is designed to improve data sharing across the NHS in England and help tackle the backlog in patient care.

In May, NHS England confirmed that Palantir staff can access identifiable patient information within the platform's National Data Integration Tenant, an arrangement that was not accurately reflected in its Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA).

Following a request for clarification from the National Data Guardian (NDG), an independent statutory office that advises England's health and care system, NHS England admitted the error.

"We recognize that the DPIA contained an error in how it described supplier access to data so we are correcting that error, and we apologize for any confusion this has caused," the quango said in a statement.

"Clarity around supplier access is crucial to our program and we will continue to work closely with the National Data Guardian, the [data protection regulator] Information Commissioner's Office and our governance groups to ensure our information is clear."

In an updated report, NDG Nicola Byrne said NHS England had confirmed that some external supplier staff supporting the platform can access identifiable patient information for specific technical purposes under its direction.

"NHS England states that this access is technically necessary. As an independent body not involved in the platform's operation, we are not in a position to independently verify that assessment," she said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/30/linkedin-realizes-its-users-have-been-bathing-in-ai-slop-offers-a-shower/5281436

LinkedIn has been drenching its users in AI-powered slop posts, going so far as to encourage writers to trade their own voices for a bot's by hitting the "enhance your post" button when they want to share thoughts.

Enough is enough. On Thursday, the site's Chief Product Officer has announced several changes designed to rehab the platform's reputation;

CPO Hari Srinivasan took to the Microsoft-owned social network following reports Thursday that LinkedIn had introduced a button for users to flag posts as AI slop. He confirmed not only that the reports are real, but that LinkedIn had additional plans as well.

The "Seems like AI slop" button is being added to the ellipsis menu on LinkedIn posts now, a spokesperson told us, and will be available on all posts and comments. Srinivasan said this button will not only allow users to report posts with sentences written like this – it will also help LinkedIn refine its AI-spotting AI models to help improve user feeds.

In addition, the "enhance your post" button, which used AI to tweak your wording, is being replaced by an option to have AI proofread your work while leaving your voice intact, instead of stealing it like the sea witch Ursula.

There's been no shortage of scorn from The Register and elsewhere about LinkedIn's rapid decline into a slop tank filled with faux thought leadership posts and generative drivel. As far back as 2024, reports were coming out that more than half of long-form LinkedIn posts longer than 100 words were believed to be AI generated. That hasn't changed in the past two years.

"AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this," Srinivasan wrote. "People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives," he said, adding that LinkedIn wants to keep it that way – or, more realistically, nudge the platform back toward its former state.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Do you feel like you are being watched? Constantly? Even while you drive? It might not be paranoia. Australian car makers are being investigated for customer privacy concerns. The Australian Electric Vehicle Association is pushing for increased hacking protection and local processing of data, which should also default to "off" unless customers opt in. While Australia does have privacy law in the form of the Australian Privacy Principles in practice these are merely guidance for which companies can largely ignore.

Manufacturers face fresh scrutiny from the Australian government over concerns surrounding data and customer privacy.

Toyota and Hyundai are currently under the microscope with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, which has confirmed that the manufacturers are "subject to a formal investigation examining exactly what data is collected, how it is used, and whether customers are aware of their policies"

A spokesman for the OAIC said "the investigations are anticipated to have a broader application for the Australian community".

The investigation has car makers worried.

"Australia has no vehicle-specific law governing connected car data," he said.

"It has a privacy statute written in 1988, a voluntary industry code that is not enforceable, a right-to-repair scheme that excludes the data stream in question, and three reform processes running in three portfolios with no one holding carriage."

He called on authorities to introduce a simple framework that car makers and their customers can understand.

"Instead of instigating fear and distrust in the connected vehicles we drive, policymakers have the power to make effective changes to protect drivers and consumer choice," Mr Pickering said.

The AEVA is pushing for increased hacking protection and local processing of data, which should also default to "off" unless customers opt in.

The OAIC said its ongoing investigation will examine manufacturers' data collection practices, including whether they collect more personal information than is reasonably necessary for their functions and activities, obtain valid consent for collection of any sensitive information, and collect personal information by fair means.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/who-wins-and-who-loses-after-us-bans-foreign-robots/

Humanoid robots and four-legged robots made in China fall squarely under a new ban imposed by the US Federal Communications Commission on foreign-made robots. But the sweeping prohibition covers a wide variety of robots manufactured anywhere abroad, including the newest robot vacuum cleaners.

The Trump administration's FCC justified the ban on foreign-made robots by referencing cybersecurity vulnerabilities [.PDF] previously discovered in robots specifically made by Chinese companies. On July 28, the federal agency added "foreign-produced advanced robotic devices" to its Covered List of technologies "deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the US or the safety and security of US persons."

However, the FCC cannot update the Covered List on its own initiative and is required by law to follow the direction of a "qualifying national security authority." The agency describes the White House as having "convened an executive branch interagency body" that "included appropriate national security agencies," which determined foreign-made robots as presenting a national security risk.

So what foreign-made robots are prohibited? The ban defines "advanced robotic devices" as being "a mechanical mobile device, including autonomous mobile robots, humanoid robots, and quadrupeds" that can move around on the ground and operate either autonomously on their own or remotely under the control of a human.

The definition also describes covered robots as having sensors capable of perceiving the robot's environment, network connectivity such as Bluetooth or satellite connections with speeds surpassing 200 kbps in either direction, and software or AI models running onboard the robot or remotely from cloud computing servers.

Such an import ban would apply to some of the most affordable robots primarily produced by Chinese companies, including Unitree's humanoid robots that are used by robotics labs and researchers for tasks such as experimental robot surgeries. US consumers would also likely lose access to the newest robot vacuum cleaners that are mainly manufactured by Chinese companies such as Roborock.

But the ban also broadly applies to foreign-made robots produced by countries nominally allied to the United States, including Japan, South Korea, and Germany.

There are a number of exemptions. For example, the new ban defines covered robots as being any mobile device—potentially in combination with a docking station—weighing more than 4.4 pounds. That would permit US consumers to continue buying small robots, such as robotic toys, although most robot vacuums weigh more.

The FCC ban also only covers new models of foreign-made robots. That means US consumers and businesses can continue purchasing existing robot models previously authorized by the FCC and continue to use previously purchased robots, but are blocked from purchasing newer, unauthorized models that come out from this point onward.

The agency made clear that its foreign-made robot ban does not apply to trains, drones, underwater vehicles, and "connected vehicles" that drive on roads, such as robotaxis. The FCC already enacted an import ban on foreign-made drone models in December 2025.

Similarly, it does not cover anything classified as devices by the Food and Drug Administration, including medical or surgical robots, external limb prostheses, and mobility assistive devices, such as wheelchairs.

The FCC ban also specifically exempts fixed or stationary robots. That means US businesses can continue purchasing and using foreign-made industrial robot arms and other specialized, non-mobile robots.