President Donald Trump’s sudden order comes after the Defense Department pressured Anthropic to drop restrictions on how its AI can be used by the military.

At first glance, the Aria EV looks not much different than any other student-built electric prototype—no different than the battery-powered cars built by engineering students from dozens of universities every year. Beneath its panels, however, is a challenge to the modern auto industry: What if electric vehicles were designed to be repaired by their owners? The Aria project began in 2024, when roughly 20 students assembled at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands under the university’s Ecomotive team structure, which operates like a small startup. Students apply, are selected, and spend a year developing a vehicle in a setting meant to mirror industry practice. The goal, says team spokesperson Sarp Gurel, “was to make the car as accessible and repairable as possible.” Gurel, who graduated last July with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and is currently working toward a master’s degree at Eindhoven, says the Aria EV is not yet road legal. Its purpose is to demonstrate that repairability can be embedded into EV architecture from the outset. With that objective in mind, the team focused first on the most challenging and expensive component in almost any EV: the battery.Modular Battery Design in EVs Aria’s total battery capacity is 13 kilowatt-hours (kWh), which is far below the 50 to 80 kWh packs common in mass-market electric sedans and SUVs. The scale is closer to that of a lightweight urban vehicle or neighborhood EV, which is more appropriate for a student-built prototype focused on concept validation rather than long-range highway travel. What distinguishes Aria is not the battery’s size, but its structure. Rather than housing the 13 kWh in a single sealed pack, the team divided the total capacity into six smaller modules. Each module weighs about 12 kilograms—much easier to handle than the 400 kilograms or more that’s typical of a conventional EV’s monolithic battery pack. This makes it feasible for a single person to remove, swap, and replace modules. The modules sit in reinforced compartments beneath the vehicle floor and are secured using a bottom-latch system. When the vehicle is fully powered down, a latch can be made to mechanically release a module. Integrated interlocks isolate the high-voltage connection before a module can be lowered. This combination of hardware and software ensures that component-level replacement is straightforward and relatively safe, bringing the idea of “repairability by design” into a tangible, hands-on form. Even with this careful design, modular batteries introduce technical considerations that must be managed, particularly when integrating different modules over the vehicle’s lifespan. Joe Borgerson, a laboratory research operations coordinator at Ohio State University’s Center for Automotive Research in Columbus, notes one complication: Mixing new and aged battery modules can create challenges. Borgerson has spent the past three years designing and building a battery pack from scratch as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Battery Workforce Challenge. “Our team is integrating a student-designed pack into a Stellantis vehicle platform,” he says, “which has given me deep exposure to both automaker design philosophy and high-voltage EV architecture,.” To complement the their car’s hardware, the Aria team developed a diagnostic app that can be accessed via a dedicated USB-C port. When the user connects their smartphone, the app presents a 3D visualization on the phone screen that points out faults, locates problems, identifies the necessary tools to fix them, and provides step-by-step repair instructions. The tools themselves are stored in the vehicle. The system aims to reduce as many barriers as possible for users to maintain and extend a vehicle’s service life. Students at Eindhoven University of Technology unveiled their Aria EV prototype in November.Sarp Gürel Challenges of EV Modularity While Aria prioritizes modularity, the broader EV industry trend is toward integrated, interdependent systems that simplify manufacturing processes and cut costs. This trend is true for the structural battery packs for EVs as well. Unlike mainstream EVs, Aria treats energy storage as a replaceable subsystem. Whether it scales economically and structurally to larger, highway-capable EVs remains an open question. But designing a vehicle for repairability involves tradeoffs that ripple across every system in the car. Borgerson says that dividing systems into removable units adds interfaces—mechanical fasteners, electrical connectors, seals, and safety interlocks. Each interface must survive vibration, temperature swings, and crash forces. More interfaces can mean added mass and complexity compared with tightly integrated battery structures. And these components take up space that would otherwise be used for energy storage. Matilde D’Arpino, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State whose research focuses on electrified powertrains and advanced vehicle architectures, notes that EV batteries are already modular internally—cells form modules, and modules form packs—but making modules externally replaceable changes validation requirements. High-voltage isolation, thermal performance, and crash integrity must remain robust even when energy storage is divided into removable segments. In other words, what seems like a simple way to make batteries user-friendly actually cascades into system-level design decisions influencing safety, thermal management, and vehicle structure.Impact of Right-to-Repair Laws Right-to-repair legislation in Europe and the United States could push automakers to reconsider sealed architectures for batteries and other components. Economic incentives could also emerge from fleet operators or long-term owners who benefit from replacing a fraction of a battery system rather than an entire pack. But adopting this approach would require changes across supply chains, certification processes, and service models. The Aria prototype isn’t ready to go toe-to-toe with production EVs, but it demonstrates some proof-of-concept ideas about repairability.Sarp Gürel Consumer expectations are also shaping the boundaries of what designs like Aria’s can become. In the mainstream market, buyers consistently prioritize longer driving range and lower sticker prices—two factors that have defined competition among models such as the Chevrolet Bolt EV, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, and the the Tesla Model 3. Range anxiety remains a powerful psychological factor, even as charging infrastructure expands, and price sensitivity has intensified as government incentives fluctuate. Designing for modularity and repairability, as Aria does, must ultimately contend with these consumer priorities. Any added cost, weight, or complexity must be weighed against a market that still rewards vehicles that go farther for less money. Ultimately, however, Aria inserts a different priority into the equation: repair as a core design requirement. Whether that priority becomes mainstream will depend less on whether it can be engineered—and more on whether regulators, manufacturers, and consumers decide it should be.

Taara started as a Google X moonshot spinoff aimed at connecting rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa with beams of light. Its newest product, debuting this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, aims at a different kind of connectivity problem: getting internet access into buildings in cities that already have plenty of fiber—just not where it’s needed. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company transmits data via infrared lasers, of the typically used in fiber optic lines. However, Taara’s systems beam gigabits across kilometers over open air. “Every one of our Taara terminals is like a digital camera with a laser pointer,” says Mahesh Krishnaswamy, Taara’s CEO. “The laser pointer is the one that’s shining the light on and off, and the digital camera is on the [receiving] side.” Taara’s new system—Taara Beam, being demoed at MWC’s “Game Changers” platform—prioritizes efficiency and a compact size. Each Beam unit is the size of a shoebox and weighs just 7 kilograms, and can be mounted on a utility pole or the side of a building. According to the company, Beam will deliver fiber-competitive speeds of up to 25 gigabits per second with low, 50-microsecond latency. Taara’s former parent company, Krishnaswamy says, is also these days a prominent client. The search engine giant’s main campus in Mountain View, Calif. is near a landing point for a major submarine fiber optic cable. “One of the Google buildings was literally a few hundred meters away from the landing spot in California,” he says. “Yet they couldn’t connect the two points because of land rights and right of way issues. … Without digging and trenching into federal land, we are able to connect the two points at tens of gigabits per second. And so many Googlers are actually using our technology today.”A Fingernail-sized Chip Shrinks Taara’s Tech The laser pointer and digital camera analogy, Krishnaswamy adds, doesn’t quite do justice to the engineering problems the company had to tackle to fit all the gigabit-per-second photonics into a weather-hardened, shoebox-sized device. The Taara Beam, for one, needs to steer its laser link across kilometers of open air—so that its laser can be received by the Beam device on the other end of the line. Effectively, that means the device’s laser can only be off target by no more than a few degrees. Beam approaches the steering problem by physically shaping the laser pulse itself. Taara’s photonics chip splits the laser beam carrying the data into more than a thousand separate streams, delaying each one by a closely-controlled amount. The result is a laser wavefront that can be pointed anywhere the system directs. Krishnaswamy makes an analogy to pebbles tossed into a pond. Dropping pebbles in a careful sequence, he says, can create interference patterns in the waves that ripple outwards. “These thousand emitters are equivalent to a thousand stones,” he says. “And I’m able to delay the phase of each of them. That allows me to steer [the wavefront] whichever direction I want it to go.” The idea behind this technology—called a phased array—is not new. But turning it into a commercial optical communications device, at Taara Beam’s scale and range, is where others have so far fallen short. “Radio frequency phased arrays like Starlink antennas are well known,” Krishaswamy says. “But to do this with optics, and in a commercial way, not just an experimental way, is hard.” This isn’t how the company started out, however. Krishnaswamy says in 2020, when the company was still a Google X subsidiary, Taara launched its first commercial product, the traffic light-sized Lightbridge. Like Beam, Lightbridge boasts fiber-like connection speeds, and it has to date been deployed in more than 20 countries around the world—including the Google campus, described above. Taara’s upgraded model, Lightbridge Pro, launched last month and is also on display this week at MWC. Lightbridge Pro adds one crucial capability Lightbridge lacked, an automatic backup. When fog or rain disrupts Lightbridge’s optical link, the system switches traffic over to a paired radio connection. When conditions clear, Lightbridge Pro switches traffic back to the faster laser data connection. The company says that combination keeps the link up 99.999 percent of the time—less than five minutes of downtime in a year. Both Lightbridge and Lightbridge Pro mechanically position their mirrors, achieving three degrees of pointing accuracy. An onboard tracking system inside the unit also re-locks the beams automatically whenever the unit gets shifted or jostled.The Future of Taara Beam Deployment Krishaswamy says while the company continues to install and support Lightbridge and Lightbridge Pro, he hopes the company can also begin installing Taara Beam units for select early customers as soon as later this year. According to Mohamed-Slim Alouini—distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia—the bandwidth of free-space optical (FSO) technologies like Taara Beam and Lightbridge still leaves plenty of room to grow. “Like any physical medium, free-space optics has a capacity limit,” Alouini says. “But laboratory experiments have already demonstrated fiber-like performance with terabits-per-second data rates over FSO links. The real gap is not in raw capacity but in practical deployment.” Atul Bhatnagar, formerly of Nortel and Cambium Networks, and currently serving as advisor to Taara, sees room for optimism even when it comes to practical deployment. “Current Taara architecture is capable of delivering hundreds of gigabits per second over the next several years,” he says. Krishnaswamy adds that Beam’s compact form factor makes it suitable not just for terrestrial applications either. “We’ll continue to do the work that we’re doing on the ground, but to the extent that space solutions are taking off we would love to be part of that,” he says. “Data-center-to-data-center in space is something we are really looking at using for this technology. “Because when you have multiple servers up in space, you can’t run fiber from one to the other,” he adds. “But these photonics modules will be able to point and track and transmit gigabits and gigabits of data to each other.” For now, the company’s ambitions are closer to Earth—specifically to the buildings, utility poles, and city blocks where fiber still hasn’t arrived. Which is, after all, where the company’s whole story began.

In security research, Claude Opus 5 helped chain forum and login flaws to take over OpenAI staff accounts and reach an internal repository.

Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are big business, and some Big Tech employees are testing boundaries by making trades based on insider knowledge.

Jade Sleet compromised an Indian IT services provider through a DevOps engineer’s MacBook, where FLATROOF and ROOFDECK were detected.

ClickFix lures deliver the ChainScript RAT, which uses a Polygon smart contract to locate active WebSocket command-and-control servers.

TASK#STOMP deploys a PowerShell backdoor that steals documents and Wi-Fi passwords, monitors files, and executes remote commands.

This week’s recap covers AI agent risks, supply-chain attacks, exposed systems, returning malware, weak defaults, and fast-moving exploit paths.

Ireland's DPC fined Google €403 million over GDPR violations in how three features handled location data from 2018 to 2020.

U.S. authorities seized two NightmareStresser domains tied to a DDoS-for-hire service used in hundreds of thousands of attacks and attempts.

North Korean Contagious Interview campaign compromised 30,000 devices and stole at least $10.71 million in cryptocurrency.

Cisco ISE CVE-2026-76460 is under active exploitation; successful exploitation may yield root command execution.

A fake LastPass Authenticator installer uses a signed kernel driver to kill security tools before a stealer collects passwords and wallet files.

Gyazo says a breach exposed 23.62 million user records and 490 million image metadata records, including IDs used to build image links.

ISC fixes 14 BIND 9 flaws, including an unauthenticated DoH request that can crash named; ISC reports no active exploits.

OpenAI discloses six model misalignment incidents and introduces a framework for tracking and reporting them.

A “thought experiment” about the impacts of AI sent stocks tumbling earlier this week. It’s probably going to keep happening.

FamousSparrow deploys SparroWocky against government entities across Latin America, enabling command execution and file exfiltration.

Attackers exploit flaws in about five days; autonomous AI agents exploited 87% of one-day flaws unaided in peer-reviewed tests.

As data-center developers frantically seek to secure power for their operations, one startup is proposing a novel solution: Build them into floating offshore wind turbines. San Francisco–based offshore wind-power developer Aikido Technologies today announced its plans to start housing data centers in the underwater tanks that keep its turbine platforms afloat. The turbines will supply the power for the servers, and onboard batteries and grid connection will provide backup. The company’s first prototype, a 100-kilowatt unit, is scheduled to launch in the North Sea off the coast of Norway by the end of this year. A 15-to-18-megawatt project off the coast of the United Kingdom may follow in 2028. Aikido is one of several companies planning data centers in unusual places—underwater, on floating buoys, in coal mines and now on offshore wind turbines. The creativity stems from the forces of several trends: rapidly rising energy demand from data centers, the need for domestic renewable power production, and limited real estate. The North Sea serves as an ideal first spot for floating, wind-powered data centers because European policymakers and companies are looking to regain domestic control over energy production. They’re also looking to host an AI economy on servers within the continent’s boundaries. Floating wind platforms keep the compute out of sight while tapping the stronger, more consistent air streams that blow over deep waters, where traditional, seabed-mounted turbine monopiles can’t go. “A lot of energy in the clean-energy space is focused on powering AI data centers quickly, reliably, and cleanly in a way that does not upset neighbors and remains safe, fast, and cheap,” says Ramez Naam, an independent clean-energy investor who does not have a stake in Aikido. “Aikido has that, and a smart team,” he says.Floating Wind-Power Designs Evolve Aikido’s design builds on many iterations tested by the growing floating wind industry. When Norwegian energy giant Equinor finished construction on the world’s first floating wind farm in 2017, it kept the turbines upright with ballasted steel columns extending 78 meters into the water—a design called a spar platform. This gave it a dense mass like the keel of a boat. Since then, the floating wind industry has largely coalesced around a semisubmersible design based on oil and gas platforms. Semisubmersibles don’t go as deep as spar platforms; instead, they extend buoyancy horizontally. Anchors, chains, and ropes keep the platform floating within a certain radius. Aikido is taking the semisubmersible approach. Its football-field-size platform holds the turbine in the center, and three legs extend tripod-like outward, like a Christmas-tree stand. At the end of each leg is a ballast that reaches 20 meters deep. This holds tanks largely filled with fresh water to maintain the platform’s buoyancy in the salty ocean. The data centers will go in the upper part of each ballast tank. There’s room for a 3- to 4-MW data hall in each tank, giving the platform a combined compute of 10 to 12 MW. Below the data halls is an open chamber used as a safety barrier, and below that sit the freshwater tanks. The water is piped up to the data center for liquid cooling of the servers. The warmed water is then funneled back down the ballast into the tank. There, proximity to the cold ocean water cools it again as the heat is conducted out through the tank’s steel walls. “We have this power from the wind. We have free cooling. We think we can be quite cost competitive compared to conventional data-center solutions,” says Aikido CEO Sam Kanner. “This crunch in the next five years is an opportunity for us to prove this out and supply AI compute where it’s needed.” One challenge, he says, is that liquid cooling can’t cover all the data center’s needs. For example, heat generated from Ethernet switches that connect the GPUs can’t be liquid-cooled with commercially available technology. So Aikido installed an air-conditioning method for that. Another challenge is the marine environment, which is “pretty brutal to engineer around because there’s the increased salinity, there’s debris, and there’s various kinds of corrosion and fouling of metal piping that you wouldn’t have in a freshwater environment,” says Daniel King, a research fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation in Washington who focuses on AI infrastructure. Offshore Data Centers Face Challenges Aikido’s plan avoids the prickly not-in-my-backyard complaints that are dogging both onshore wind and data-center projects. It might also circumvent some inquiries into water usage and power demand too, or so Aikido’s thinking goes. But it might not be that easy. “Instinctively many people reach for offshore or even orbital outer-space data centers as a way to circumvent the typical burdens of environmental reviews,” says King. “But there could be more or additional requirements around discharging heat and the effects that has on marine life that are different from the considerations of a terrestrial data center. It’s unclear to me whether this actually makes life easier or harder for a developer.” Prefabricated data halls could be installed quayside, followed by final electrical and plumbing connections to commission the data center.Aikido Aikido’s “design choice to use the fresh water in the ballast as a working fluid is a novel one” that, thanks to the closed-loop system, may “alleviate some of the engineering problems you see when a really high temperature fluid is pumping its heat directly into a marine environment,” King says. Offshore sites are also vulnerable to sabotage, King notes. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fleets of vessels directed by the Kremlin have reportedly started messing with offshore wind and communications infrastructure in northern Europe. Russian and Chinese boats have allegedly cut subsea cables in recent years. But vandalism is a risk anywhere, including at conventional data centers, Aikido CEO Kanner notes. Unlike those on land, where the local police have jurisdiction, Aikido’s data centers would enjoy protection from national coast guards, which he suggests gives an added degree of security. North Sea Hosts Clean Energy Kanner first began thinking about offshore wind turbines as a place to build data centers after a chance phone call with a cryptocurrency billionaire. The financier wanted to know whether turbines in international waters could power servers generating digital tokens at a moment when crypto-mining faced increased scrutiny from regulators. The talks fizzled. But that encounter sparked Kanner’s curiosity about how to use power generated onboard floating turbines. When ChatGPT emerged in 2022 and sparked a heated debate over how to power and cool such technology, the idea to put the data center in the floating turbine clicked for Kanner. The idea really congealed after he met with the chief executive of Portland,Ore.–based Panthalassa. The wave-energy company was proposing to enclose small, remote data centers in buoys attached to equipment that generates power from the surf. Panthalassa just completed its full-scale prototype tests off the coast of Washington state last summer. At that point, Aikido had already designed a modular platform for floating wind turbines. Each platform consists of 13 major steel components that are snapped together with pin joints—like IKEA furniture. The platforms fold up in a flat configuration that takes up roughly half the space of other designs, allowing it to be transported by a wider range of ships, according to Aikido. From there, it was a matter of figuring out how to accommodate a data center in the unused space. Aikido’s prototype will use a refurbished Vesta V-17 turbine. It will need onboard batteries for backup power and will also be connected to the grid for additional power during seasons with less wind. Aikido envisions eventually sprinkling its data centers among large arrays of offshore turbines to tap into that larger power infrastructure. Between Russia’s threat to expand its war in Ukraine to EU countries and the Trump administration’s bid to pressure Denmark into ceding sovereignty of Greenland to Washington, Europe is scrambling to build up its own energy production and AI capabilities. The North Sea, increasingly, looks like a primary theater of that effort. In January, nearly a dozen European nations banded together in a pact to transform the North Sea into a “reservoir” of clean power from offshore wind.

Picus will show how teams can validate whether a CVE is exploitable in their environment without always running live exploit code.

Unbound 1.26.1 fixes a critical DNSSEC heap overflow that malicious zones can trigger, with possible remote code execution.

Handala Hack is linked to HEAVYGRAM, a Telegram-based backdoor that can steal passwords, messaging data, screenshots, and files.