Tech
Queensland and NT reject Australia’s data centre energy rules
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s proposed national environmental and energy controls for the country’s A$150 billion data centre pipeline hit their first obstacle on Tuesday, when two jurisdictions declined to back them. Federal, state and territory energy ministers met virtually to discuss the plan, and Queensland and the Northern Territory opposed most of the measures, including the idea of a national rulebook at all.
The structural problem is that the policy requires unanimity. Every state and territory must support the federal framework for it to proceed, which gives any single jurisdiction an effective veto.
What the rules would require
New data centres would have to add at least as much electricity generation to the grid as they consume, a requirement Albanese set out in a policy speech earlier in July. He described bringing these issues into a single national framework as a global first.
Operators would also be expected to build renewable generation, minimise water use, maximise energy efficiency, and fund any additional water infrastructure they need. Albanese offered few details on how any of it would work in practice.
Why Queensland objects
Queensland Premier David Crisafulli had signalled his position before the announcement, saying the state does not support imposing renewable power requirements because it wants to stay attractive to investors. That is precisely the behaviour the national framework was designed to prevent.
“The policy the PM has announced doesn’t work unless there’s buy-in from all the states and territories,” said Rob Nicholls, a senior researcher at the University of Sydney’s Centre for AI, Trust and Governance. “Part of the reason you have a policy is to avoid a race to the bottom from the states.”
The industry is broadly onside, with conditions
Belinda Dennett, chief executive of industry group Data Centres Australia, whose members include Google, AirTrunk, and Microsoft, said the group supports the principle that new electricity demand should be backed by new supply. Many operators and customers already underwrite renewable energy, she noted.
The industry wants clarity on three points. Whether the compliance obligation sits with the operator or the tenant, when it takes effect, and whether the offset is measured against actual electricity consumption or nameplate capacity.
That third question is not a technicality. Nameplate capacity is typically far higher than real-world draw, so the answer could change the size of the obligation by a wide margin.
The public is well ahead of the politics
A YouGov survey commissioned by Australia’s Climate Council found 82% of respondents agreed that new data centres should pay for the extra renewable energy and storage infrastructure needed to meet their power demand. The measure is not short of popular support.
The economics also cut both ways. Data centre investment could reach A$150 billion by 2030 with six gigawatts of planned capacity, according to Commonwealth Bank associate economist Lucinda Jerogin, and the construction boom is helping prop up a slowing economy.
Why Australia is a target market
Australia was second only to the United States in dollars invested in data centres in 2024, according to Knight Frank. Bloomberg Intelligence analysts led by Matt Ingram flagged the country in June as one of Asia’s top build locations, citing renewable potential, political stability, and low-latency submarine cables to the rest of the region.
Demand is coming from hyperscalers including Microsoft and Meta, alongside opposition from community and environmental groups. Both pressures are intensifying at once.
Everyone is grappling with the same problem
Australia is not alone in trying to attach conditions to compute. Brussels has told Big Tech to align AI data centres with climate goals or stay away, insisting operators support clean power and recycle waste heat.
Where regulators hesitate, grids are imposing their own limits. Denmark paused all new grid connection agreements after a 60-gigawatt queue overwhelmed the cleanest power system in Europe, a physical constraint no policy framework can negotiate away.
Ambitious clean-power targets have proved hard to hit. China wants renewables to supply roughly four-fifths of its AI data centre power by 2030, up from about 11% in 2023, a target its own grid is struggling to accommodate.
The default alternative is worse. The AI buildout has triggered the largest construction boom in gas-fired power plants on record, which is the outcome Australia’s additionality rule is designed to avoid.
What happens next
The federal government will work with states, territories, and market bodies on detailed policy design, with the possibility of more stringent local requirements layered on top. Energy ministers meet again in September.
National Cabinet is expected to consider the approach in August, with legislation anticipated in early 2027. Whether it arrives intact depends on whether Queensland and the Northern Territory can be persuaded that a national floor beats competing on who asks the least.
Single sign on (SSO) simplifies access by letting users log into multiple systems with one set of credentials. While this delivers clear benefits to the authentication process, that convenience can also concentrate risk, as the 2025 University of Pennsylvania breach showed.
According to reports, attackers compromised a PennKey SSO account and used that access to reach internal systems including VPN, Salesforce, Qlik, SAP, and SharePoint. The attack also resulted in the theft of data on 1.2 million individuals.
That does not mean SSO is insecure. When it is configured and protected properly, SSO can improve security by reducing password sprawl, centralizing access policies, and making it easier to enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA).
However, organizations can only enjoy those benefits when SSO is treated as a critical security control. If one login opens the door to multiple systems, that login needs robust protection.
So, is your SSO login protected enough? To answer that, organizations need to look beyond whether SSO is switched on, and focus on how it is secured.
Start with strong SSO passwords
‘Implement strong passwords’ isn’t new advice, but it is especially crucial if one credential can unlock multiple systems. However, strong doesn’t have to mean frustrating; after all, SSO is designed to reduce friction during authentication.
The latest guidance from NIST puts the emphasis on length and usability, alongside screening for weak or compromised passwords. For scenarios where single-factor passwords are still acceptable, NIST recommends at least 15 characters.
Passwords used alongside MFA must be at least eight characters, and systems should allow users to create passwords up to 64 characters. NIST also says organizations should check new passwords against blocklists of commonly used, expected, or previously compromised passwords.
Just as importantly, NIST advises against some legacy password rules that still appear in many organizations. Mandatory complexity requirements and routine password resets can push users toward predictable patterns, such as changing one digit or adding a symbol at the end.
Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Report found stolen credentials are involved in 44.7% of breaches.
Effortlessly secure Active Directory with compliant password policies, blocking 6+ billion compromised passwords, boosting security, and slashing support hassles!
Add MFA, but make sure it can stand up to modern attacks
A strong SSO password shouldn’t be the only thing standing between an attacker and your applications. Infostealers have made it easier than ever for attackers to scrape passwords and other authentication information, and even passwords that meet regulatory requirements appear regularly in these logs.
MFA adds another layer of protection, making it harder for an attacker to turn a compromised password into a successful login. For SSO, MFA should be enforced consistently. That means applying it across users, apps, and access scenarios, rather than only enabling it for a handful of “high-risk” accounts.
It is also worth looking at the type of MFA in place. SMS codes and basic one-time passwords are better than passwords alone, but they are not the strongest option.
Where possible, organizations should move toward phishing-resistant methods such as FIDO2 security keys, WebAuthn, or passkeys, especially for privileged users and access to sensitive systems.
Implement secure MFA with Specops
Solutions like Specops Secure Access help organizations defend against password attacks and includes support for SSO for SaaS applications via OIDC and SAML.
Alongside adding MFA to Windows Logon, RDP and VPN authentications, Specops Secure Access helps organizations manage user access from a single place, reducing the identity attack surface while satisfying regulatory audits and cyber insurance conditions.
Secure the assets behind the SSO login
Organizations also need to secure the assets that sit behind SSO and control how identity is issued, trusted, and delegated.
Start with IdP administrator accounts. These accounts can change authentication policies, add applications, add and reset users, and approve integrations. They should be protected with phishing-resistant MFA, separate admin accounts, just-in-time access, and close monitoring.
Signing certificates and keys also need strict control. SAML certificates and token-signing keys are what allow applications to trust the identity provider. If they are exposed or misused, attackers may be able to impersonate users or abuse trusted sessions. Access should be tightly limited, changes should trigger alerts, and certificates should be rotated before they expire.
OAuth secrets and credentials deserve the same attention. Client secrets, app credentials, and refresh tokens can give attackers long-lived access, sometimes without another interactive login. Store them in a secrets vault, rotate them regularly, and review app registrations for excessive permissions.
Finally, review consent grants and delegated permissions. Attackers often look for ways to maintain access after the initial compromise, and risky third-party app permissions can give them that route. Restrict user consent, require admin approval for sensitive permissions, and remove stale or overprivileged grants.
Is SSO secure?
SSO is still worth using, provided it is implemented and protected properly. The benefit for users is simple: access becomes easier. They don’t have to remember separate passwords for every application or keep resetting forgotten credentials.
In most cases, SSO lets them sign in once and move between connected resources without unnecessary friction.
That also helps the service desk, as fewer forgotten passwords and account lockouts mean fewer support tickets, giving IT teams more time to focus on higher-value work.
From a security perspective, SSO gives organizations a central place to manage authentication. Applications do not need to handle the user’s password directly, instead relying on trusted authentication tokens from the identity provider. This reduces password exposure across different services and gives security teams one place to enforce controls such as MFA, conditional access, logging, and account revocation.
SSO can also speed up access to business-critical resources. When users do not need to enter credentials for every tool, they can get to the systems they need faster and with less disruption.
There are compliance benefits too. Centralized access management makes it easier to support reporting, auditing, strong authentication requirements, and rapid access removal when users leave or roles change.
SSO will not cover every sign-in scenario, and it is not secure by default. But when it is hardened properly, it can improve the user experience, reduce helpdesk pressure, strengthen security, and make access easier to govern.
Ensure your SSO is secure with Specops
The security of SSO environments currently depends heavily on credential strength, so it’s crucial that policies enforce strong passwords. Specops helps here with Specops Password Policy, helping organizations simplify policy management and continuously block over 6 billion unique compromised passwords.
Specops Secure Access then extends that protection by applying MFA to SAML and OIDC-based applications, including those federated through third-party identity providers.
If you’re interested in seeing how we can help strengthen the security of your SSO environment, contact us today or book a demo.
Sponsored and written by Specops Software.
Amkor Technology reported record second quarter results on Monday. Revenue reached $1.9bn, up 26% on a year earlier, and net income more than tripled.
Operating income roughly doubled to $200m. Earnings came in at $0.70 a diluted share, against $0.22. EBITDA reached $400m.
The numbers matter less than what the company plans to do next. Amkor guided to capital spending of $2.5bn to $3bn for 2026. Set against first half revenue of $3.58bn, that budget runs to between 35% and 42% of annualised sales.
Packaging stopped being the cheap part
Amkor is an OSAT, which means it packages and tests chips that other companies design and fabricate. The work sat at the low-margin end of the industry for decades.
Gross margin now tells a different story. It reached 16.8%, against 12.0% a year earlier, a gain of 480 basis points. Third quarter guidance calls for 18.5% to 19.5%.
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The company’s own risk factors, printed in the same release, still warn investors about “the historical downward pressure on the prices of our packaging and test services”. That warning now describes the past.
Advanced products carried the quarter. The category, which covers flip chip and wafer-level processing, brought in $1,557m, or 82% of sales.
The spending is already committed
Amkor paid $688m for property and equipment during the first half. Reaching the full year target requires $1.8bn to $2.3bn more, roughly three times the first half rate.
Some of it is locked in. Capital expenditure payable, money owed on equipment already ordered, rose from $243m in December to $621m in June.
The balance sheet moved to match. Long-term debt climbed from $1.28bn to $2.33bn after the company raised $1.15bn during the half. Cash and short-term investments stand at $2.5bn, level with total debt.
Who pays for the capacity
Customers are funding part of it. Nvidia committed $1.5bn to expand Amkor’s American packaging capacity, structured as a prepayment.
TSMC signed a ten year agreement in June covering advanced packaging in Arizona. Amkor’s Peoria plant separately received $407m under the CHIPS Act.
The logic is geographic. Advanced packaging has concentrated in a handful of Asian sites for years, which leaves the AI supply chain with a single point of failure.
Read the comparison carefully
One figure needs unpicking. Last year’s second quarter included a $32m benefit from a contingency payment tied to the Nanium acquisition.
Strip that out and the prior year base falls to about $60m of operating income. Underlying growth then looks larger than the headline, at roughly 233%.
The real risk sits elsewhere. Amkor tells investors it has an “absence of backlog”, and that customer commitments are short term. It is committing $3bn against orders nobody has to keep.
Markets have punished that pattern before. TSMC posted record revenue and watched its shares fall on capex fears, and chip stocks swing on every read of AI demand.
One number cuts the other way. Amkor’s top ten customers supplied 66% of sales, down from 72% a year earlier. Growth is broadening rather than narrowing.
Where the revenue comes from
Communications, mostly smartphones and tablets, still provides 42% of revenue. Computing accounts for 22%, and automotive and industrial another 22%. Consumer has slipped to 14% from 18%.
Kevin Engel, president and chief executive, said the company set revenue records in computing and in automotive and industrial. He pointed to customer programmes in AI and high performance computing.
What happens next
Third quarter guidance points to revenue of $1.95bn to $2.05bn. Net income should land between $180m and $205m, or $0.72 to $0.82 a share.
The wider question is whether packaging capacity stays scarce. TSMC is building its own at Chiayi, and has raised prices across advanced manufacturing.
Margins like Amkor’s tend to attract company. The next few quarters will show whether the bottleneck holds, or whether the industry builds its way out of it and prices drift back down.
Framework spent years showing that a laptop does not have to be sealed shut forever. With the Framework 13 Pro, the company delivers a machine that finally matches the ambition of that idea. The chassis is cut from solid blocks of aluminum rather than assembled from thinner stamped pieces. The result is a rigid body that feels dense and quiet when you pick it up. Weight sits at 1.4 kilograms and thickness stays at 15.85 millimeters, the same outer size as earlier 13-inch models so existing bags and stands still work.
The screen is the first thing you see on this Framework system, a custom-built panel designed exclusively for this chassis. It has a 13.5-inch screen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, making it better suited for papers and coding than widescreen video. We’re looking at a resolution of 2880 by 1920 pixels, 700 nits of brightness, and an impressive 1800:1 contrast ratio, as well as a lovely matte anti-glare surface to keep the image from washing out. The refresh rate is more adjustable, ranging from 30 to 120 Hz depending on the system requirements, and the touch feature is built in, however a stylus is not included in the package.
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The keyboard has the same 1.5 millimeter travel distance as its predecessor, which is deep enough to keep your hand from getting sore after typing for hours at a time. The trackpad has been upgraded with a haptic feedback technology that uses four piezo components to produce a smooth, consistent click. No more fumbling with mechanical buttons, and you can click wherever on the trackpad. The speakers are side-firing this time and Dolby Atmos certified, which means you’ll get clearer sound than prior Framework versions, but don’t expect to outperform the competition in terms of volume and bass.
Internally, things have changed slightly with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, known as Panther Lake. You may start with the Core Ultra 5 325 and work your way up to the X7 358H and X9 388H, or if you prefer AMD, the Ryzen AI 300 boards are still available. Memory has also changed; it now uses LPCAMM2 modules, which give those wonderful LPDDR5X speeds, and it is upgradeable, as previously. It comes in three capacities: 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB. In terms of storage, the full PCIe 5.0 slot is back, allowing you to plug in drives up to 8 TB and achieve sequential speeds of over 14,000 MB/s.
The battery now holds 74 watt-hours of power. Framework’s own research revealed that you can watch more than 20 hours of 4K Netflix on a single charge, a 12-hour improvement over the previous version. In a real-world office situation, you can expect 15 to 18 hours of mixed usage, depending on how bright the screen is and what the processor is performing, and a 100-watt GaN charger recharges the battery at a reasonable rate. Plus, replacing the battery is simple; simply unclip it after releasing the three captive fasteners.
Then there are the expansion card slots, four in total, which allow you to organize all of your external connections. Each one includes Thunderbolt 4, DisplayPort 2.1, and high-wattage charging, as well as the option to use specific USB-C, HDMI, Ethernet, SD, or other modules and configure them as needed. The webcam is mounted behind a real shutter and can shoot 1080p at 30 frames per second. Not to mention the fingerprint reader, which is nicely built into the power button and works as well on Windows and Linux.
Modularity is still very much at the heart of Framework, since the mainboard and display kit can be dropped into the older 13 chassis with no effort. The opposite is also true: older boards can still fit into the new aluminum shell, assuming you slap on the larger battery and that extra input cover. Here’s where things get interesting: input covers, bottom cases, and batteries are all available separately, so you can upgrade a part at a time. The Ubuntu configuration that comes pre-installed on all of them is fully certified by Canonical, and Frameworks hardware receives regular firmware updates via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service. Windows is still an option for anyone who believes they require it.
The DIY kit is priced at $1,199, but keep in mind that you will need to purchase RAM, storage, and your operating system separately. The fully assembled ones start a little higher, but they quickly rise when you start talking about higher-end processors, larger memory modules, and more storage. To be fair, recent pressure on LPCAMM2 modules has really driven up memory costs, so your final numbers can easily end up a fair bit higher than the entry price point. As it happens, shipping on the first batches has just begun.
Rideshare micromobility vehicles are a common sight in major cities around the world, whether that’s a bicycle program or electric scooters. Now, a company called Veo is introducing electric tricycles into the mix.
Announced Tuesday at an event in Denver, the company showed off the Rover, a three-wheeled, sit-down electric vehicle designed for anyone to ride on the streets. They are available in Denver for now, but Veo plans to expand the vehicle to cities across the US.
The Rover works like a shared bike or e-scooter. Sign up for the Veo app, pay a fee to unlock the trike, and then ride it around. It’s 2.5 feet wide, which means it can legally fit within bike lanes that are usually three feet wide. The trike has a max speed of 10 miles per hour. Cities tend to cap these kinds of rental bikes and scooters at 15 mph, but Veo chose to go with a slower speed for safety reasons. The Rover uses the same batteries as Veo’s other EV offerings, giving it a range of roughly 45 miles per charge; on the rear is a cargo basket that can hold up to 100 pounds of luggage or groceries.
Veo is a smaller player in the micromobility space, operating in about 60 smaller cities in the US. In May, the city of Denver signed an exclusive contract with Veo to replace the city’s scooters and ebikes made by rival companies Lime and Bird. Now the sole supplier of shared bikes and scooters in Denver, Veo wanted to use the city to show off the newest addition to its micromobility collection.
Courtesy of Veo
The Rover is primarily an accessibility play, as three-wheeled vehicles tend to stand on their own and self-balance better than two-wheeled bikes and scooters. City governments sometimes require micromobility companies to provide options for people who need more accessible vehicles. Lime has deployed a free accessible vehicle rental program called Lime Assist that lets users in need rent accessible vehicles for the day. Bird launched its own accessible rentals program in April. Veo offers similar options but wants to make those kinds of vehicles more widely available.
“The expectation is that your local bus or transit provider will offer accessible options for those who are in wheelchairs or can’t use certain products,” Alexander Keating, Veo’s vice president of policy and partnerships, tells WIRED. “There’s also an expectation for us, from the cities who permit our kinds of programs, to do everything they can to make them accessible.”
Veo says it worked with disability advocates, including the Disability Mobility Initiative, Parkinson’s Foundation, and Capitol Hill Village, to design the Rover, along with organizations like the AARP to make something that would appeal to older users, too. The trike’s three-wheeled design means it is self-balancing, so people can hop on without dealing with it falling over or fiddling with a kickstand.
You can now get the Ninja Luxe Premier espresso, cold brew, and filter machine and save £133.99 off its usual £549.99 price tag.
That works out to a 24% discount, dropping the machine to £416, and the listing’s countdown clock is currently ticking down from just over fourteen hours before that price disappears and reverts to full for good.
This Ninja 3-in-1 espresso and cold brew machine deal ends today — here’s how much you can save
This Ninja 3-in-1 espresso and cold brew machine deal ends today, so here’s exactly how much you can save before it disappears for good.
What makes that saving count for more is that the Luxe Premier replaces three separate machines, brewing espresso, cold brew and filter coffee from the same unit alongside a built-in burr grinder, milk frother and portafilter.
That frother does more of the work than most kitchen gadgets manage, since its automated wand steams and whisks dairy or plant-based milk into micro foam at the same time, with four presets covering steamed, thin, thick and cold froth.
Getting the grind right no longer means guesswork either, with 25 individual grind settings and a built-in scale that lets you weigh beans directly on the machine before an intuitive control panel walks you through the rest.
None of that requires buying extra kit afterwards, since the Luxe Premier arrives with a double basket, single basket and dedicated luxe basket, plus a funnel, assisted tamper, cleaning kit and even a water hardness test.
There’s a recipe guide included too, aimed squarely at anyone who wants to move beyond instant coffee without having to learn proper barista technique entirely from scratch through repeated trial and error on their own at home.
Build quality holds up its end of the bargain as well, with a metal and stainless steel body, dishwasher-safe removable parts, and a two-year guarantee once you register the machine directly with Ninja.
If that reputation has you weighing up whether it’s worth it, £416 down from the usual £549.99 makes a strong case, especially next to the picks in our Best Coffee Machine 2026 guide, before the countdown clock runs out for good.
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Samsung’s midrange lineup has long delivered solid phones that handle daily tasks without forcing people into flagship prices. The Galaxy A57 5G (2026), priced at $425 (was $550), continues that approach while shrinking the body and sharpening a few key details that make the phone feel more refined in the hand.
This device measures 161.5 by 76.8 by 6.9 mm and weighs 179 grams, making it surprisingly lightweight and easy to fit into a pocket, even for those who have spent years carrying larger screens. Gorilla Glass Victus+ protects the front and rear of the phone, and the metal frame adds to its robustness. With an IP68 classification, you may be a little casual with it, since it will shrug off dust and even get wet for a while without complaining.
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A 6.7-inch Super AMOLED Plus screen dominates the front. It has a 1080 by 2340 pixel resolution and a refresh rate of 120 Hz, so everything on the screen feels silky smooth. You can increase the brightness to 1900 nits, which is ideal for keeping the screen visible even while you’re outside, and it also supports HDR10+, so you can watch all that rich color content you’ve grown accustomed to on larger monitors and TVs.
This phone is powered by the Exynos 1680 chip, which is manufactured on a 4-nanometer technology, which means it’s a high-performance chip that should keep it running smoothly. The octa-core configuration includes a 2.9 GHz core that serves as the operation’s brain, as well as a slew of other cores that help with day-to-day programs and light multitasking without slowing down. You can get this phone with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB of storage. It ships with Android 16 and One UI 8.5, and Samsung promises to keep it up to date with six major OS upgrades and frequent security fixes, making it about as good as it gets at this pricing point.
So that’s the camera system, which is the standard triple-camera configuration we’ve come to expect these days on flagships. This time around, you’ll receive a 50-megapixel main sensor with optical image stabilisation, as well as a 12-megapixel ultrawide and a 5-megapixel macro camera. The front camera features a 12-megapixel sensor. Daytime images from the main camera are crisp and clear, and when it goes dark, the processing does an excellent job of minimizing noise while maintaining vibrant colors. You can even capture 4K video on both the front and rear cameras. The camera app also has functions like Best Face, Object Eraser, and Instant Slow-Mo.
The 5000 mAh battery will power this device for a full day of normal use, with some users getting a second day if they reduce their usage to a minimum. When it runs low, you simply plug it into a 45-watt charger and it will be ready to go in approximately 30 minutes. A pair of good stereo speakers provide audio, and connection includes all of the usual modern features, such as 5G, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 6.0, and more.
from the ‘these-are-not-serious-people’ dept
Last year the Trump administration announced it would ban Chinese-made drones from the U.S. As I noted at the time, the plan had several problems, not least of which being the Trump administration is a racist, corrupt, dysfunctional mess filled with weirdos and lazy incompetents, primarily interested in assorted personal investment grifts and protecting less popular U.S. companies from having to compete.
Many of the banned drones from companies like DJI are better, cheaper, and more popular among consumers, resulting in a 70 percent market share. Given Trump’s sons are personally invested in drone manufacturing, this has less to do with national security and privacy than it does grift.
The Trump administration has made numerous claims of security risks related to products by companies like DJI, but offered absolutely no hard evidence at any point supporting the claims. We’ve repeatedly seen similar factually challenged policy rhetoric surrounding electric cars, AI, and telecom more broadly (remember how we had to do everything AT&T wanted or risk losing the “race to 5G?”).
As expected, the Trump admin’s plan to ban popular overseas drones isn’t going that well. Consumers are incredibly annoyed that they’ve been cut off from the best and cheapest products on the market. And numerous companies have just changed the labels on Chinese drones and cameras to sneak by the ban in a U.S. market absolutely swimming in Chinese tech imports of all kinds.
It’s created a complicated game of whac-a-mole at the FCC, who first tried to fine offenders, and is now eyeing a broader retroactive ban of these companies as well:
“Two Fridays ago, the FCC had already proposed a $25,000 fine on eight of those “front companies,” including the ones behind the Skyrover drones and Xtra cameras. But now, the FCC is proposing a lot more than a slap on the wrist — it’s planning to ban those same companies from continuing to import, distribute, market, and sell their existing drones and cameras.”
While folks like FCC boss Brendan Carr are saying they’re doing this to protect U.S. consumer privacy and national security (something often parroted by lazy press outlets), none of these folks have any credibility on these subjects, and have actively, repeatedly, made both issues indisputably worse.
The U.S. is too corrupt to pass a meaningful privacy law, which threatens both privacy and national security. I’d also argue that Trump administration corruption is every bit as bad, if not worse, than anything China could do to us at this point. And you’ve seen for yourself how most of the Trump administration’s cybersecurity policies are indistinguishable from a foreign attack.
There’s the added irony that the Trump admin likes to dismantle governance and lobotomize regulators, then try to impose massive new policy plans that require competent governance and regulatory oversight. The press generally adds to the dysfunction by lending the administration policy credibility it didn’t earn in policy areas it clearly doesn’t understand.
In this case, DJI urged lawmakers to conduct audits of its devices for years, and was ignored. The normal comment period for public input was ignored. Folks in the aerospace industry say they were neither consulted, nor given any advance notice of the quick ban. Drone and RC hobbyist organizations are annoyed and dismayed, and state the ban was shadow dropped last Christmas to lessen scrutiny.
I think there’s something to be said for allowing Chinese competitors (in EVs, drones, AI, and everything else) into the country, but also properly funding and staffing your regulators to police labor, competition, NatSec (when they actually arise), and consumer rights abuses.
Greedy zealots in corporate America and the Trump administration don’t want to do that, because it would result in competition and accountability, eroding precious quarterly returns.
So instead you get this sort of incoherent and xenophobic game of whac-a-mole, run by bad faith weirdos like Brendan Carr. Fully supported by many U.S. corporations — whose execs will talk your ear off over cocktails about their love of free market competition and competitive entrepreneurial innovation — right up until better overseas tech arrives and they’re forced to actually try.
Expect more and more of this dumb, xenophobic, pointless protectionist bullshit, especially in AI as the biggest U.S. tech companies, slowly drowning in debt and enshittification, begin to struggle with cheaper and better overseas alternatives in a country now waging open war on science and sound policy.
Filed Under: ban, brendan carr, china, drone ban, drones, fcc, incompetent, protectionism, xenophobia
Companies: dji
Why can’t I just wear my AirPods in the pool?
With so many headphones on the market, most of which claim some kind of unique features, it could be easy to dismiss ones marketed as “swimming headphones” as just another gimmick. However, there are actually important distinctions that set this type of headphones apart from other devices, both in how they access your music and transmit it to your ears. In essence, it all comes down to how the physics of water impact audio.
Some of the differences between swimming headphones and regular ones are obvious — it’s a given that they come with more waterproofing than a typical pair, for example. Other distinctions, like sound conduction and Bluetooth signals are less overt. Let’s dive into what makes underwater headphones special, and what you should look for when picking out a pair.
What makes swimming headphones different?
Ironically, a music-loving swimmer’s biggest enemy when it comes to listening to tunes is the water itself. For one, Bluetooth signals can’t transmit through the water, meaning that as soon as you dive under any connection to your phone is severed. Though they often also come with a Bluetooth mode, swimming headphones set themselves apart by coming with built-in storage, which is somewhat of a rarity for regular headphones.
Water also means that typical headphones, which conduct sound through vibrations in the air, can’t be heard nearly as well. Swimming headphones almost exclusively utilize bone conduction, which transmits via vibrations directly into your head. To do this, the headphones rest on your cheekbones instead of inside the ear canal, bypassing the eardrum and going straight to the cochlea in the inner ear. Though there are some swimming headphones outliers that don’t utilize bone conduction, a vast majority of them do.
What to look for in swimming headphones
It’s important to make sure your swimming headphones boast a robust enough IP rating — short for Ingress Protection — to stay protected in the water. These can be a bit confusing, as some manufacturers list two numbers while others list just one (e.g., IP56 versus IPX7). When shopping, you mostly need to pay attention to the second number in the rating, which reflects how well they’re equipped to handle water (the first number refers to dust, which isn’t as relevant; a rating with a X generally means manufacturers only tested for water resistance). Ratings of 6 and below can only handle things like sweat and rain, while IPX7 and IPX8 can handle different levels of actual submersion.
For audiophiles, the bone conduction itself as well as auxiliary features like adjustable EQs are also important to look at. As manufacturer Shockz points out, the water sealing your ear naturally causes an occlusion effect, amplifying lower frequency sounds in a way that can be overpowering, and headphones resting on your cheekbones instead of in your ears means outside noise is much more of an issue. To combat this, some swimming headphones offer special swimming EQs that naturally amplify harder-to-hear tones and help block other sounds.
Bone conduction’s reliance on vibration can also be the downfall of some swimming headphones, especially at higher volumes, which can mean intense amounts of buzzing. Different brands boast various strategies to combat this: some swimming headphones allow listeners to manually adjust the transducers, others claim to have transducers at angles optimized for buzz reduction. It’s definitely something that’s worth looking into when shopping around, especially if you like to blast your music. With the right research, you can enjoy the most tech-savvy swim of your life — maybe next you can pick up a pair of smart goggles.
Copenhagen Loudspeaker Company is now shipping the CLC65 loudspeakers for €9,490 per pair, with the company’s U.S. storefront currently listing them at $10,853 per pair. Worldwide shipping, duties and taxes are included, along with a 30 day home trial. That is not inexpensive, but at least the price should not develop several mysterious growths while crossing the Atlantic.
The CLC65 made its U.S. debut at AXPONA 2026, where pricing had not yet been announced. The Danish company describes it as the first commercially available three way loudspeaker built exclusively with Purifi drivers. Plenty of manufacturers use Purifi woofers, but CLC has handed the tweeter, midrange, woofer and both passive radiators to the same Danish driver specialist.
Purifi Everywhere
The front baffle contains a 33mm Purifi PTT1.3 tweeter mounted within a substantial 147mm waveguide, a 6.5-inch PTT6.5M midrange driver and a 10-inch PTT10.0X long stroke woofer.
Around the back are two more 10-inch Purifi PTT10.0PR passive radiators. Those replace a conventional bass reflex port and are intended to extend low frequency output without introducing port noise. CLC rates the system from 28Hz to 20kHz, which would give the CLC65 genuine full range aspirations in most rooms.
The crossover is fundamentally a second order design with transition points at 250Hz and 2kHz. CLC uses air core inductors, ClarityCap ESA capacitors, copper foil bypass capacitors and a Jantzen C core inductor in the bass section. WBT Nextgen copper binding posts support banana plugs, spades, bare cable, biwiring and biamping.
That collection of components will appeal to listeners who spend their evenings studying crossover photographs. The rest of us are more interested in whether the drivers behave like one loudspeaker rather than five highly accomplished engineers talking over one another.
This Is Not a Bookshelf Speaker
The CLC65 measures 28.3 inches tall, 13 inches wide and 16 inches deep, with each cabinet weighing 88 pounds. Calling it a bookshelf loudspeaker would be technically convenient and structurally reckless.
Dedicated CLC65 stands cost €990 per pair, while the curved magnetic grilles add another €290. Without the grilles, the large exposed drivers give the speaker a distinctly retro studio monitor appearance. Add them and the design becomes more domestically acceptable, assuming nobody notices the pair of 88 pound Danish refrigerators sitting beside the equipment rack.
Satin black and satin white versions are available. The satin walnut finish is currently sold out, with additional inventory expected in December and a €500 preorder discount being offered for that version.
Your Amplifier Needs Some Muscle
Sensitivity is rated at 86dB, with a nominal impedance of 4 ohms and a minimum of 3 ohms. CLC recommends at least 100 watts of amplification.
That does not automatically rule out every tube amplifier, but this is clearly a loudspeaker designed for an amplifier with meaningful current delivery and control. A lightweight 25 watt integrated amplifier purchased because the faceplate looked charming on Instagram is probably not getting invited to this particular smørrebrød party.
The large woofer and two passive radiators also suggest that room placement will require some experimentation. CLC says the passive radiator design reduces sensitivity to placement compared with a traditional port, but two rear firing 10 inch surfaces still need room to interact with the wall behind them. Physics may not write marketing copy, but it remains annoyingly involved in the final result.
Key Specifications
- Design: 3-way passive stand-mount loudspeaker
- Tweeter: 33mm Purifi PTT1.3 with 147mm waveguide
- Midrange: 6.5-inch Purifi PTT6.5M
- Woofer: 10-inch Purifi PTT10.0X
- Passive Radiators: Two rear firing 10-inch Purifi PTT10.0PR
- Frequency Response: 28Hz to 20kHz
- Crossover Points: 250Hz and 2kHz
- Sensitivity: 86dB
- Nominal Impedance: 4 ohms (minimum 3 ohms)
- Recommended Amplifier Power: 100 watts or more
- Dimensions: 28.3 x 13 x 16 inches
- Weight: 88 lbs each
Who Is It For?
The CLC65 is aimed at listeners who want the low distortion and controlled behavior associated with Purifi technology but do not want another compact two-way monitor that requires subwoofer assistance.
Its closest conceptual rivals include the MoFi Sourcepoint 10, JBL L100 Classic MKII and considerably more expensive TAD CE1TX. All approach the large standmount category differently, but each attempts to deliver floorstanding scale without committing to a conventional tower cabinet.
Direct worldwide sales may also appeal to buyers who are comfortable auditioning at home. The included 30 day trial matters at this price, although returning 176 pounds of loudspeakers will provide a memorable test of both the policy and your relationship with the delivery driver.
Who Should Avoid It?
Anyone with a small room, limited amplifier power or furniture that already trembles when someone places a coffee mug on it should look elsewhere.
The CLC65 also makes less sense for listeners who prefer a forgiving, overtly warm loudspeaker. Purifi drivers have built their reputation around low distortion, linearity and revealing behavior. That does not guarantee a cold presentation, but poorly recorded albums are unlikely to receive a complimentary spa treatment.
The Bottom Line
Copenhagen Loudspeaker Company is entering a crowded premium category with a product that is genuinely different.
The CLC65 does not merely use a Purifi woofer as a line on the specification sheet. It builds the entire loudspeaker around Purifi technology, adds two enormous passive radiators and packages everything inside a cabinet that weighs more than many floorstanders.
At €9,490 or approximately $10,853 per pair, the CLC65 faces accomplished competition. But five Purifi drivers per cabinet, worldwide delivered pricing and a 30-day home trial give this new Danish heavyweight a legitimate reason to exist.
Just do not call it a bookshelf speaker unless your shelves were designed by the people who built the Øresund Bridge.
For more information: gato-audio.com
Related Reading
New research puts a hard number on something a lot of IT leaders already suspected. Most AI pilots never make it into production, and the spend behind them isn’t disappearing, it’s just sitting in limbo. Jon Bitz, chief relationship officer and co-founder at KloudStax, says that limbo isn’t the failure it looks like from the outside.
The numbers keep landing in the same neighborhood no matter who’s counting. Forrester’s latest research on agentic AI found that three-quarters of enterprise leaders say they’re adopting it, but only a small minority have it running in anything beyond limited pilots. Gartner predicts that through 2026, organizations will abandon 60 percent of AI projects that aren’t backed by AI-ready data and integration infrastructure. And Deloitte’s own enterprise survey found that more than a third of companies are still using AI at a surface level, with little real change to how they actually work day to day.
Put those together and a pattern starts to form. Enterprises are approving AI budgets faster than they’re converting that spend into anything resembling a repeatable, working system, and the gap between the two has become one of the more uncomfortable open questions in enterprise cloud right now.
The spend isn’t wasted, it’s parked
Jon Bitz, who spends most of his time inside these budget conversations as a Google Cloud partner, doesn’t think the story is as bleak as the abandonment numbers make it sound.
“A meaningful portion of AI cloud spend is still happening in pre-production, and that’s not a bad thing,” Bitz said. “Testing, experimentation, and validation are all critical parts of adopting AI correctly. You need that phase to understand what works and what doesn’t.”
Where he does see a real problem is how long that phase tends to drag on without anyone stepping in to move it along. “In some cases, a large amount of what’s being funded hasn’t made its way into a stable, repeatable production workflow yet,” he said.
His read on the fix isn’t to cut the experimentation budget, which is the instinct a lot of finance teams reach for once the pilot numbers get uncomfortable. It’s to get more deliberate about converting what the experimentation phase actually teaches an organization into something that ships. “Our goal isn’t necessarily to reduce experimentation, it’s to convert it,” Bitz said. “To take what’s being learned and turn it into production systems, so spend shifts from testing into workloads that are actually driving value inside the business.”
Where the money actually goes to work
Ask Bitz where cloud spend is already paying off and he points somewhere less flashy than most of the AI headlines from the last year. Not new model releases, not bigger context windows, just the unglamorous stuff that was already running a company before generative AI showed up.
“Real value is showing up in core workflow automation, taking manual, time-intensive processes and turning them into production-ready systems,” he said, pointing to support operations, engineering output, and AI embedded directly into revenue-generating workflows as the places where it’s landing.
The misallocation, in his experience, tends to follow a familiar script. Teams chase a better model or spin up more GPUs because that part is easy, while the harder work of structuring data and defining workflows gets skipped. “If the data isn’t structured and workflows aren’t clearly defined, it becomes very difficult to move anything into production,” Bitz said.
Hyperscaler bills are getting more scrutiny, not less trust
There’s also been a louder conversation lately about whether enterprises are starting to push back on hyperscaler pricing itself, especially as AI workloads make monthly bills harder to predict. Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud data backs that up from the finance side, with cost unpredictability tied to dynamic AI workloads showing up as one of the top hurdles enterprises report, and nearly half of large organizations now running a dedicated AI governance function to keep it in check. Bitz says that’s not quite adding up to pushback on the platforms themselves in what he’s hearing in practice.
“We’re starting to see more scrutiny, but not so much pushback on the hyperscalers themselves or the value of the solutions and platforms,” he said. “It’s more about how spend is structured and managed.” The questions companies are actually asking tend to be narrower than a referendum on cloud pricing: what’s actually driving the bill, what’s tied to production versus pilots and proofs of concept, and where there’s room to optimize.
That scrutiny is nudging companies toward more opinionated architecture choices, serverless and managed services and workloads sized to what they actually need, along with tighter governance over who can spin up what. Partners are picking up more of that optimization work too. “It’s less about challenging the price and more about asking how to use these platforms correctly,” Bitz said. “When the architecture, data, and usage patterns are right, the economics tend to follow.”
Inefficiency has a paper trail, and it rarely starts with compute
It’s tempting to treat runaway AI cloud bills as a compute problem, since that’s the line item everyone can see. Bitz says that’s almost never where the real story is.
“Compute is an easy thing to point to, but in most cases, inefficient spend is really a reflection of gaps in data, architecture, governance, and undefined workflows,” he said. Throwing a bigger model or more GPUs at a system that was never designed to support AI in the first place doesn’t fix the underlying mess, it just makes the same inconsistency more expensive to run. As Bitz put it, AI isn’t creating new problems inside an organization so much as it’s amplifying the ones that were already there.
The gap between big budgets and small ones isn’t really about budget
There’s a separate worry running through a lot of mid-market conversations right now, which is that cloud pricing and infrastructure complexity are quietly widening the gap between companies that can afford to experiment with AI and companies that can’t. Bitz thinks the gap is real but that people are pointing at the wrong cause.
“Complexity plays a bigger role than just a budget gap between SMB, mid-market, and enterprise, although the barrier to entry is real,” he said. Larger organizations have room to absorb a few expensive misses along the way. Smaller ones don’t get that same margin for error, so they end up needing to be more precise from the start rather than less ambitious. “The companies we see winning with AI aren’t necessarily the ones spending the most, they’re the ones implementing the cleanest systems around well-defined use cases,” Bitz said.
What happens over the next year and a half
Bitz doesn’t expect AI spend to slow down, but he does think the conversation inside enterprises is already shifting toward accountability rather than raw scale. He’s watching for organizations moving proof-of-concept work onto real production-level KPIs, more attention paid to unit economics like cost per output or per workflow, engineering teams getting measured on the AI-driven output they produce rather than how much of the tooling they’ve adopted, and more C-level visibility into what AI spend is actually buying.
“AI adoption is still early for a lot of organizations, and as teams get more comfortable, the focus naturally shifts from ‘are we using AI?’ to ‘is this actually working and driving value?‘” Bitz said. Over the next 12 to 18 months, he expects that shift to keep building, with spend continuing to grow but under a lot more pressure to show its work.
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