The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Tuesday added foreign-produced power inverters and advanced robotic devices to its Covered List, generally making new models ineligible for FCC equipment authorization after U.S. national security agencies determined the products pose unacceptable risks to America’s critical infrastructure and supply chains.

The move comes as federal officials focus on securing the electric grid while electricity demand and reliance on inverter-based resources continue to grow.

The FCC said Tuesday’s action follows national security determinations by a White House-convened executive branch interagency body concluding foreign-produced power inverters and advanced robotic devices create unacceptable cybersecurity and supply chain risks.

Power inverters convert direct current electricity into alternating current and are critical components in solar power systems, battery storage facilities and other distributed energy resources. The national security determination warned that the devices’ remote connectivity could enable foreign firms to turn off inverters, collect and exfiltrate data, facilitate remote access and surveillance, or otherwise exploit the equipment through cyberattacks as inverter-based resources become more widespread across the U.S. grid.

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The FCC also added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices—including mobile robots such as humanoids and quadrupeds—to the Covered List after national security officials warned their networking capabilities and onboard sensors could expose critical infrastructure and sensitive data to foreign adversaries or allow the machines to be remotely commandeered.

Under the FCC’s rules, equipment placed on the Covered List generally cannot receive new equipment authorizations required for importation, marketing and sale in the United States. The restrictions apply only to new product models seeking FCC authorization and do not affect devices consumers already own or products previously approved by the commission, according to the FCC.

Manufacturers may seek exemptions through a new “Conditional Approval” process if the Department of War—or, in the case of power inverters, the Department of Homeland Security—determines a specific device or class of devices does not pose national security risks.

US BANS NEW FOREIGN-MADE CONSUMER INTERNET ROUTERS OVER SECURITY CONCERNS

“I welcome these Executive Branch national security determinations, and I am pleased that the FCC has now added foreign produced advanced robotics and power inverters to the FCC’s Covered List,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement.

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“Following President Trump’s leadership, the FCC will continue to do our part to secure America’s critical supply chains and, with today’s action, the FCC is acting in lock step with our national security agencies to do just that.”

The additions expand the FCC’s Covered List, which already includes equipment and services from Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, Dahua, Kaspersky, several Chinese telecommunications providers, foreign-produced routers and certain foreign-produced drones. The agency said the new equipment categories are identified by where the products are manufactured rather than by specific companies.

Back in the day, traditional network security relied heavily on a trusted internal perimeter. So, when users entered that perimeter, they mostly received broad access to applications, files, and infrastructure.

However, that approach no longer fits –

• Distributed systems
• Cloud workloads
• Remote employees
• Constantly changing endpoints.

So, what is Zero Trust? It is a security model that treats every access request as potentially risky. Hence, it is important to adequately verify identity, device condition, context, and authorization.

What Zero Trust Really Means

Obviously, Zero Trust does not mean distrusting employees or blocking normal business activity. Instead, it removes automatic technical trust. For instance, a user may have valid credentials. Still, those credentials alone should not unlock everything.

Likewise, a familiar device may connect from an unusual location. Also, it might display signs of compromise. Meanwhile, the context might keep changing.

Put positively, it is important to understand what is Zero Trust security. This way,  organizations will have a practical way to replace vague assumptions with measurable controls.

In this case, every request receives scrutiny based on –

1. Identity
2. Device health
3. Requested resource
4. Location
5. Behavior
6. Current risk.

Consequently, trust becomes temporary and specific rather than permanent and network-wide.

However, Zero Trust is not a single product. Buying an identity platform, firewall, or endpoint tool does not complete the job. Basically, Zero Trust works as an operating model that connects –

1. Identity management
2. Network segmentation
3. Endpoint security
4. Application controls
5. Logging
6. Governance.

Basically, the pieces must exchange useful information. Otherwise, security teams merely create another stack of disconnected tools.

Core Principles of Zero Trust

At the outset, several principles shape a functional Zero Trust architecture. Although their implementation varies across environments, the underlying logic remains fairly stable.

More importantly, each principle limits the damage that an attacker, compromised account, or unmanaged device might cause.

1. Verify Every Access Attempt

Authentication should not become a one-time doorway. Instead, systems should continuously evaluate access requests using multiple signals. These may include –

Therefore, a valid password becomes one signal among many, not the final verdict.

2. Apply Least-Privilege Access

Users, services, and applications should receive only the permissions required for a particular task. In addition, access should last only as long as necessary. The following aspects help reduce persistent administrative access:

• Just-in-time privileges
• Role-based controls
• Regular permission reviews

This matters because excessive permissions quietly turn minor incidents into much larger ones.

3. Assume a Breach Can Occur

Essentially, Zero Trust planning accepts that attackers may already have credentials or access to one endpoint. As a result, defenders concentrate on –

1. Restricting lateral movement
2. Protecting valuable resources
3. Detecting unusual activity.

Admittedly, the assumption sounds bleak. Still, it produces stronger controls. This is because the architecture does not depend on perfect prevention.

4. Segment Resources Carefully

Traditional segmentation mostly divides networks into broad zones. In fact, Zero Trust goes further by separating the following according to risk –

• Applications
• Workloads
• Databases
• Administrative services.

Consequently, compromising a general user device should not provide a clear route to sensitive infrastructure. To be honest, smaller access boundaries mean smaller blast radii.

Zero Trust Compared With Perimeter Security

Old perimeter models focus mainly on where a request originates. By contrast, Zero Trust focuses on –

• Who or what requests access
• The condition of that requester
• Whether the requested action makes sense.

Security Area	Traditional Perimeter Model	Zero Trust Model
Trust decision	Internal traffic receives greater trust	Every request requires evaluation
Access scope	Users may receive broad network access	Access stays limited to specific resources
Authentication	Often performed once per session	Rechecked when context or risk changes
Network design	Large trusted zones	Segmented applications and workloads
Breach response	Focuses on blocking entry	Also limits movement after entry
Device handling	Managed devices may gain automatic trust	Device posture remains one risk signal

Benefits of a Zero Trust Architecture

When it comes to modern business security, Zero Trust is absolutely necessary. The following are the major benefits of Zero Trust architecture.

1. Containment

If attackers steal an employee’s credentials, least-privilege policies prevent those credentials from opening unrelated systems. Meanwhile, segmentation interrupts lateral movement.

Moreover, strong identity checks also challenge suspicious requests before attackers reach sensitive applications.

2. Suits Hybrid Infrastructure

In general, Zero Trust suits hybrid infrastructure. For instance, employees may work from –

• Homes
• Branch offices
• Customer locations
• Temporary networks.

Moreover, applications may run in –

• Private data centers
• Public clouds
• Software-as-a-service platforms.

Therefore, location becomes a weak foundation for security. To be honest, identity and resource-level policies travel more effectively across these environments.0

3. Improves Visibility

The Zero Trust model improves visibility. In fact, teams gain clearer records of –

• Who accessed a resource
• Which device they used
• What policy allowed the request
• Whether the session changed risk levels.

That context supports incident investigation and access reviews. It might also expose stale accounts and oversized permission groups that nobody noticed earlier.

Still, what is Zero Trust in operational terms? Basically, it is a disciplined way to reduce implicit access. Meanwhile, it improves control over

• Identities
• Endpoints
• Data

Ultimately, the value comes from consistent enforcement rather than aggressive restrictions that interrupt legitimate work.

Best Practices for Implementing Zero Trust

At the outset, a rushed rollout usually creates friction. Instead, organizations should begin with critical assets and map how identities, applications, services, and data interact. From there, teams must do the following:

• Introduce controls gradually
• Measure the results
• Correct policies before expanding the model.

Zero Trust Implementation

A practical zero trust implementation sequence may include the following steps:

1. Before selecting controls, identify –

• Sensitive data
• Applications
• Workloads
• Administrative interfaces.

1. Strengthen identity systems with –

• Multifactor authentication
• Conditional access
• Separate privileged accounts.

1. Inventory managed, unmanaged, and service-owned devices. After that, define minimum security requirements.
2. Replace broad network access with application-specific connections. Do it wherever the architecture allows it.
3. Make sure to centralize useful logs. Also, investigate unusual access patterns rather than collecting events without purpose.
4. Review privileges regularly. Moreover, remove the following:

• Abandoned accounts
• Obsolete roles
• Unnecessary service permissions

Factors to Keep in Mind During Zero Trust Implementation

In general, automation requires restraint. For instance, a poorly designed automated policy might lock out legitimate users. Also, it might repeatedly interrupt routine work.

Therefore, teams should –

1. Begin with monitoring
2. Test policies against real activity
3. Enforce them in stages.

Moreover, exceptions must remain documented and time-limited. Also, someone accountable must own them.

Meanwhile, it is important to look at service accounts and machine identities. For instance, human authentication receives plenty of focus. Meanwhile, API keys, certificates, containers, and automated workloads sometimes retain broad privileges for years.

Still, compromised machine credentials move through infrastructure quickly. Therefore, organizations should –

• Rotate secrets
• Verify workload identity
• Restrict service-to-service communication.

Finally, measure outcomes rather than tool deployment. In this case, useful indicators include –

1. Reduced standing privileges
2. Fewer unmanaged endpoints reaching sensitive resources
3. Shorter investigation times
4. Tighter segmentation between critical services.

Basically, a long product list proves very little. In fact, better control over access proves much more.

Zero Trust Replaces Assumptions With Evidence

Zero Trust is neither a silver bullet nor a fashionable firewall setting. Rather, it is a long-term security model. It is built around verification, least privilege, segmentation, visibility, and breach containment.

So, when someone asks what is Zero Trust, the most practical answer is that “access should follow evidence and current risk, never location or familiarity alone”. So, if implemented carefully, the model strengthens security without turning everyday work into a maze of unnecessary obstacles.

Sebi has proposed reducing the minimum investment required for a mutual fund-only portfolio management service (MF-PMS) to Rs 25 lakh from the existing Rs 50 lakh. Unlike an equity PMS, which invests in individual stocks, a mutual fund PMS invests in a mix of active mutual fund schemes, ETFs, debt, international equity and precious metals, allowing the portfolio manager to shift allocations across asset classes.

WHAT IS A PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT SERVICE (PMS) OF MUTUAL FUND SCHEMES?

A mutual fund PMS is a professionally managed investment portfolio that invests primarily in mutual fund schemes, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and Specialised Investment Funds (SIFs), instead of individual stocks. Unlike an equity PMS, where the portfolio consists of shares selected by the manager, a mutual fund PMS builds a portfolio using schemes from one or more asset management companies. The portfolio manager decides the allocation across different asset classes such as equity, debt, gold, silver and international funds, and continuously monitors and rebalances the portfolio based on market conditions, valuations and the investor’s objectives. For instance, a multi-asset PMS may invest in active equity funds, equity ETFs, debt funds or debt ETFs, gold and silver ETFs, REITs, InvITs and international funds.
Read more: HUL upside maybe limited as margins face cost pressure

WHAT HAS SEBI PROPOSED FOR THIS SEGMENT?
Sebi has proposed a separate regulatory framework for mutual fund-only PMS providers in a consultation paper released last week. It has proposed reducing the minimum investment amount to Rs 25 lakh from the current Rs 50 lakh. The regulator has also proposed lowering the minimum net-worth requirement for portfolio managers to Rs 2 crore from Rs 5 crore, simplifying certification requirements, making dedicated dealing rooms optional and waiving exit loads while switching between mutual fund schemes within the PMS portfolio

HOW IS A PMS DIFFERENT FROM INVESTING IN MUTUAL FUNDS YOURSELF?
When investors build a mutual fund portfolio on their own, they have to decide their asset allocation, choose schemes, monitor performance and determine when to buy, sell or rebalance their investments. In a mutual fund PMS, these decisions are taken by a professional portfolio manager within the investment mandate agreed with the client. The manager decides the allocation across asset classes, selects schemes, switches between them when required, manages cash levels and periodically rebalances the portfolio. Investors pay a fee for these services. Those investing on their own can either choose direct plans, where no distributor commission is paid, or invest through a distributor or a registered investment adviser, depending on their needs.
WHO SHOULD USE A MUTUAL FUND PMS?
A mutual fund PMS is meant for investors who have at least Rs 25 lakh to invest and prefer to delegate investment decisions to a professional manager. It may appeal to those who want a single manager to oversee their allocation across equity, debt, gold, silver and international funds instead of managing multiple schemes on their own. It may also suit investors who are comfortable with active portfolio management and periodic rebalancing in pursuit of better risk-adjusted returns. Those who are new to investing or have smaller sums to invest may continue to find regular mutual fund schemes more suitable.

Every owner knows the moment in the marketing meeting where the plan meets the bank balance. The social posts are cheap. The email list costs next to nothing.

The blog is a weekend’s work. Then someone says the word “video”, and the room goes quiet, because everyone at the table knows what a proper thirty-second clip has always cost: a crew for a day, a location, an editor, and an invoice that makes a founder wince. For most firms the honest answer was to skip it, and then to watch better-funded competitors look more established for no reason other than the size of their production budget.

That flinch is worth writing about, because it is starting to fade, and not for the reasons the usual hype cycle gives. The story is not that “AI can make video now” in some vague futurist way. It is that one specific capability crossed a line this year, and that line happens to sit almost exactly where a small firm’s real needs begin.

The number that actually changed is thirty seconds

The tool behind most of this conversation is Seedance 2.5, the latest video model from ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, which it unveiled in June at its Volcano Engine FORCE event. Set the launch language aside and the useful fact is dull and specific. From a single written prompt or one reference image, it renders a continuous thirty-second shot at native 4K, with the sound generated in the same pass as the picture rather than added afterwards.

Thirty unbroken seconds reads like a trivial figure until you have tried to make anything usable with the earlier generation of these tools. The first wave of AI video fell apart the moment it ran past a few seconds. Faces drifted, hands rearranged themselves, backgrounds melted, and the clip collapsed before it could say anything at all. Holding a coherent scene steady for a full thirty seconds is not a cosmetic upgrade. It is the difference between a novelty you show a colleague and something you are willing to put a brand name against. Thirty seconds is a pre-roll ad. It is a product explainer. It is the establishing shot of a campaign. It is, near enough, the unit of video a small firm actually buys.

What that does to a marketing budget

Picture the video a typical SME wants across a single month and never commissions, because no one piece can justify a shoot on its own. A short spot for a new product. A looping backdrop for the website’s hero section. A fifteen-second cut to test in paid social. A seasonal teaser for the week before a launch. On their own, none of them clears the bar for hiring a crew, so most owners go quietly without and accept that their channels look thinner than the business really is.

Generating those pieces from a prompt and a handful of reference images folds that whole list into an afternoon. The saving is not only cash, though the cash is real enough. It is that the decision itself changes shape. The question stops being “can we afford to make this” and becomes “is this worth twenty minutes to try”, and a great many ideas that never survived the first question sail past the second.

There is a strategic point buried in that shift. When an attempt costs almost nothing, you can put three visual directions for the same campaign in front of the team before committing, rather than staking the budget on one and hoping. The reference handling matters here too: Seedance 2.5 accepts up to fifty inputs in a single run, so you can feed it your product, your brand palette and a location still and get output that keeps a consistent look across the whole clip, which is exactly the thing small firms usually lose when they cobble content together from whatever is to hand. Take a small homeware shop with a new autumn range. Last year that was one hero photo and a caption. Now it is a warm thirty-second sweep across the display for the site, a square cut for Instagram, and two alternative teasers run against each other to see which lands, all built from the same reference shots in a morning. None of that was affordable a year ago.

The music video is the clearest proof

If you want to see how far the floor has dropped, look at the one form of video that was always the most expensive per second anyone made: the music video. For most of its history it was a rich artist’s privilege, funded by a label that expected to recoup the cost, and independent musicians simply went without. Those musicians are, in every practical sense, small businesses. They run their own release schedule, their own marketing and their own cash flow, with no backer standing behind them.

The distance the technology has covered shows up cleanly in the version numbers, which is the kind of before-and-after a sceptic can actually check. Seedance 2.0, barely a year old, produced clips of four to fifteen seconds at up to 1080p and took twelve reference inputs. Seedance 2.5 lifts that to a single thirty-second shot at native 4K and up to fifty references, and those references can include audio. For a musician that last detail matters more than the resolution, because it means feeding in the actual track and asking for visuals that move with it, instead of describing a mood and hoping. ByteDance also reports around twenty per cent better prompt adherence than the older model, though that figure is the company’s own rather than an independent test.

The upshot is not that an unsigned artist can now summon a Hype Williams video from a laptop. It is that the visual which used to sit permanently out of reach, a proper thirty-second piece with a consistent look and a deliberate camera move, is now something they can attempt on the same afternoon they finish the mix. The logic that frees a musician frees a plumber, a bakery or a two-person software firm just as neatly.

Where it still falls over

None of this replaces a real shoot when the work genuinely calls for one. If an idea leans on a specific human performance, a presenter’s face doing something exact, a choreographed sequence, you still need people in a room and someone directing them. Emotional acting, the flicker of a real expression, is the hardest thing for any of these systems to fake, and it is precisely what a lot of the best video lives on. Anyone selling a prompt as a full stand-in for that is overreaching. The models have tells if you look closely, and hands are still where they most often give themselves away.

There is a cost discipline the demos never mention, either. Length and resolution are what burn through credits, so a full thirty-second 4K render is not free, and going for maximum quality on the first attempt is exactly how you watch a good idea come out wrong at full price. Signing in and the starter credits cost nothing, which is enough to render a first clip and learn how Seedance 2.5 behaves before any real money is involved, but the tap is not unlimited. The workflow that keeps it cheap is unglamorous: draft the shot short and at low resolution, correct one thing at a time, and only pay for the finished 4K version once the cheap draft already works.

The sensible way to file all this is not as the end of video production but as the removal of one particular barrier. The barrier was cost, and it kept the single most persuasive format in marketing out of reach of exactly the firms that most needed to persuade. It is coming down. What a business does with the room that opens up is, as ever, the part no software will do for you.

Almost half of British companies plan to increase investment over the next 12 months, according to research published by Lloyds Banking Group, with 47 per cent intending to raise spending and 7 per cent reporting that their appetite to invest had decreased.

About three quarters of those surveyed said investment was “essential for future growth and resilience”. Confidence was highest among businesses in the East Midlands, Scotland, London and the northwest, Lloyds said, with most spending directed towards technology and artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Amanda Murphy, chief executive of business and commercial banking at Lloyds, said that “while many businesses have already secured funding for investment, a significant proportion have yet to deploy it”.

She said: “Investment drives productivity, competitiveness and long-term growth. Ensuring businesses have the confidence, funding and support to move forward will be critical.”

A fall in energy prices and stable economic conditions were among the factors that would prompt businesses to invest more, the research suggested. Rising operating costs, weaker trading conditions and liquidity constraints were among the biggest deterrents to increased spending.

Lloyds said businesses were most worried about the rising cost of production, which the bank said was likely to be tied to higher energy prices triggered by the Gulf conflict, poised to enter its sixth month. Renewed attacks between the United States and Iran have triggered a resurgence in the price of Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, which is trading at about $93 a barrel. The benchmark has moved sharply with each turn in the conflict since fighting began in February.

The findings echo a separate Lloyds survey at the end of June, which found that business confidence had dipped over the month amid persistent concerns about inflationary and cost pressures. The bank’s index of sentiment among private-sector companies dropped by 3 points to 44 per cent, below the 12-month average of 47 per cent, according to figures Lloyds published on 30 June. Economic optimism fell by 4 points to 31 per cent. The June barometer was based on responses from 1,200 firms.

Andy Burnham, the prime minister, is hoping for an increase in business investment, an area of weakness in the UK economy. Office for National Statistics figures published on 30 June show whole economy investment, which covers business and public sector spending, was 18.9 per cent of GDP in the first quarter of the year, the lowest of the G7 nations.

The same ONS release put business investment up 0.9 per cent in the first quarter, though still 1.3 per cent below the level recorded in the same quarter a year earlier. Transport was the largest contributor to the quarterly increase.

Political instability has added to uncertainty for businesses in the UK, with Burnham becoming the fifth prime minister in four years. He has promised to be “a pro-business leader of the Labour Party, as I was a pro-business mayor of Greater Manchester”.

Last week he cut business rates for pubs, clubs and live music venues in England by 20 per cent, which he described as “a first step” for struggling companies. Bosses have called for the government to go further and fundamentally reform the business rates system, which was overhauled in last November’s Budget with the end of the relief scheme introduced in 2020.

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The Trump administration on Tuesday announced a ban on new foreign-made humanoid robot imports to the US over “unacceptable risks” to the country’s national security.

The move applies to advanced robots – including humanoid and four-legged machines. Many of them are made in China, which is locked in a race with the US to develop robotics and artificial intelligence (AI).

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also banned the import of power inverters – a device used in data centres and solar panels – which it said could also pose a risk to the US economy.

FCC chairman Brendan Carr said the agency was doing its part “to secure America’s critical supply chains”.

The BBC has contacted the Chinese embassy in Washington as well as major Chinese robot manufacturers Unitree, UBTech and AgiBot.

The FCC has added the items to its Covered List – a register of goods and services that are deemed a risk to US national security.

The ban applies to new foreign-produced advanced robotic devices and power inverters and does not prevent the sale or import of any existing models that had been previously authorised by the FCC.

The FCC cited concerns that the use of foreign-made inverters could allow overseas firms to turn them off, steal data, facilitate remote access and surveillance by “foreign government actors, or be otherwise exploited through a cyberattack.”

It added that the use of robots made outside the US could allow “malign actors to surveil Americans, enhance the capabilities of foreign intelligence services, or to remotely commandeer the robots.”

Chinea’s exports have come under intense scrutiny by the US as the Trump administration attempts to address trade imbalances with the world’s second largest economy.

Despite being the world’s biggest exporter of electric vehicles, China has been effectively shut out of the American market by a 100% tariff.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also warned that Chinese AI firms could face sanctions over allegations that they have stolen American intellectual property.

In response the Chinese government has said its country’s development of AI was “the result of its own dedication and effort as well as international cooperation”.

Chinese technology firms have rapidly developed humanoid robots to be used in settings including factories and homes.

Companies have also been quick to market their machines to businesses and the public ahead of US humanoid robot rivals like Elon Musk’s Tesla and Boston Dynamics.

American Airlines on Tuesday said flights are resuming after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a nationwide ground stop for all flights following a systemwide IT outage that disrupted operations across its network.

“A technology issue briefly impacted connectivity for some of our systems on Tuesday evening,” the airline said in a post on X. 

“Systems are coming back online now and flights are departing again. We put a temporary ground stop in place while our teams worked to resolve the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”

Earlier, the airline acknowledged the outage and said its IT team was working to restore affected systems as quickly as possible.

“We’re currently experiencing a systemwide IT outage. Our IT team is working to get everything restored as quickly as possible,” the company said. 

“Our team’s working hard to get everyone back on track asap, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience,” the air carrier added. 

The airline has not said what caused the outage.

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