Apple’s first smart display is the 7-inch HomeView for $299
Apple opened preorders for the HomeView smart home hub today.
The HomeView is a 7-inch smart display and speaker that aims to be a central access point for up to six members of a family to access and control Apple’s ecosystem of devices, apps, and the Siri generative AI chatbot that’s currently in beta.
Users can speak to HomeView to control smart home devices, such as, for example, telling Siri to close the smart blinds or activate smart locks. HomeView can also show a livestream for up to nine video feeds simultaneously.
Russia was not ready for the data center war it started with Ukraine
When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days.
Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started, according to poststranslated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia’s system if the countries continue trading such blows.
Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine’s power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks.
Google announces the Fitbit Edge, a middle ground between Pixel Watch 5 and Fitbit Air
Google is releasing its second Fitbit tracker of 2026, offering fans of the aging Charge 6 a more refined option. The new Fitbit Edge slots right in between the Pixel Watch 5 and the Fitbit Air, featuring a compact screen and more health sensors than the Air. You won’t get all the apps and features of the Pixel Watch 5, but the Edge is only about half as expensive.
The Fitbit Edge is essentially a new Charge 6, but it has more of a Pixel Watch aesthetic. Squish Google’s smartwatch from the sides, and you’ve got the Edge. It has a pill-shaped 1.34-inch OLED touch display inside a slender aluminum frame that is rated IP68 (5 ATM) for water and dust protection. Google says the screen has 46 percent more viewable area compared to the Charge 6. It’s very close in overall size to the Fitbit Air and uses the same magnetic charging puck.
Left to right: Fitbit Air (with new metal mesh band), Fitbit Edge, and Pixel Watch 5. Credit: Google
The Edge works with Android or iPhones via the Google Health app, and it can run for about seven days on a charge. If the tracker is away from your phone, it can still follow your activity all week with support for seven days of full health data storage (or 30 days of basic data). However, the generous weeklong battery life does not include always-on display mode. If you turn it on, battery life drops to about two days, barely longer than the Pixel Watch 5.
Amazon has over 1 million robot workers. What’s next for human employees?
No organization in the world operates more robots than Amazon. The company already has more than 1 million robots working in warehouses around the clock to make tens of millions of same-day and one-day package deliveries happen on a daily basis—and Amazon is poised to significantly grow that robotic fleet in the coming years as it establishes new factories to churn out increasingly more capable robot workers.
Despite deploying so many robots, Amazon is also the second-largest corporate employer in the world, with more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time human workers, according to its 2025 annual report. Amazon executives say that the growing robot fleet has eased the burden on its human workforce by taking on the toughest fulfillment center tasks that carry the greatest risks of physical fatigue and injury. But labor advocacy groups and independent researchers point to evidence suggesting that warehouse automation driven by AI is not all upside for the humans who work alongside robots.
“For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we’ve seen usually happens away from workers—you’re taking that high-risk task away from the worker, and you’re doing so in a way that is not physically proximate,” Brian Greenwood, professor of business at George Mason University, told Ars. “The rise of collaborative robots really changes that dynamic for two reasons: one is that it is physically proximate, and two, the robot has the ability to dictate the pace of work.”
Review: 4-hour Musk documentary feels like two different films
Elon Musk is a very familiar figure to Ars readers, given his massive influence (for better and worse) on the technology sector over the last 20 years. Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s latest biographical documentary—simply titled Musk—covers a lot of well-known ground and challenges the carefully crafted public image of Musk as a visionary tech titan.
Gibney’s documentary presents Musk as more of a Gilded Age confidence man, rejiggered for the 21st century: an investor cosplaying as an inventor whose real genius is pumping stocks and dazzling investors and the public alike with visions of a high-tech utopian future. The film is bound to push all the right outrage buttons, whether one is a Musk fan or a detractor—which makes it very much a product of the peculiar social media-driven era in which we live.
Gibney has been making documentaries since the 1980s, covering such varied subjects as Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, WikiLeaks, Scientology, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes (the subject of another forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything, featuring comedian Nathan Fielder), Boris Becker, The Sopranos creator David Chase, alleged Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election, the opioid epidemic, and cyclist Lance Armstrong. He snagged his first Oscar nomination for 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side.
PC shipments fall 20.1 percent in “sharpest decline” since Q1 2023
PC shipments saw a steep drop of about 20 percent in Q3 2026, analysts reported this week.
The industry saw its “sharpest decline since “Q1 2023,” Omdia said in an announcement toady. Global shipments of laptops, desktops, and workstations fell 21.2 percent year over year (YoY) to 58.1 million devices, the analyst said.
Desktop PC shipments (including desktop workstations) decreased 23.5 percent to 11.7 million units, and laptop shipments (including laptop workstations) declined 20.6 percent to 46.4 million, per Omdia.
Your artwork could be featured in the next Debian release
The Debian Linux project has opened a call for community artwork submissions ahead of the release of the upcoming Forky (Debian 14). If you think you’ve got the artistic chops, your art could appear on the boot screens, login prompts, and desktop wallpapers of millions of users. The submission deadline is November 26.
Continuing Debian’s community-driven ethos, the artwork submission process mirrors that of previous releases. The artwork must feel distinctively “Debian,” integrate cleanly without the need for core software patching, and remain visually appealing for the long term.
Elise Couper’s “Ceratopsian” theme was chosen as the winning default for Debian 13 Trixie. For anyone who might not be up on the latest from the Toy Story franchise, the release names echo character names from the animated films. Trixie was a triceratops introduced in Toy Story 3, hence the “Ceratopsian” wink in the winning submission. It makes sense that the next version of Debian continues this trend with Forky, a character introduced in the franchise’s fourth entry. The Debian team cautions against overly busy designs that may cause user fatigue, but if anyone can successfully incorporate Forky’s googly eyes into the design somehow, know that you’d at least win the contest for my Debian desktop wallpaper.
Let’s Encrypt cuts certificate lifetimes to 64 days starting February 2027
Let’s Encrypt is continuing a push toward tighter security by reducing free SSL/TLS certificate lifetimes from 90 days to 64 days, starting February 10, 2027. For administrators already implementing modern ACME clients that support ARI (ACME Renewal Information), the change should be seamless. For those still relying on hardcoded renewal schedules or manual processes, February will be the deadline to update before certificates start expiring unexpectedly.
Starting on October 14, Let’s Encrypt will begin testing the 64-day certificates, and interested users can opt in to test their setups before production goes live.
Prior to Let’s Encrypt’s launch in early 2016, certificates were often issued for as long as one to three years. The service started with 90-day certificates to force renewal automation that didn’t previously exist. Shorter certificate validity periods limited vulnerabilities from private key thefts and encouraged accelerated HTTPS adoption across the web.
Microsoft event debuts new AI-friendly hardware and Windows changes
More AI is coming to Windows Search, too.
Credit: Microsoft
More AI is coming to Windows Search, too. Credit: Microsoft
Microsoft Execution Containers
For those who might still feel a little trepidation about turning over their entire digital lives and files to AI bots, Microsoft announced the availability of Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), a security framework designed to keep agent activities confined to a sandbox. Available to developers today, the framework allows system admins and organizations to monitor active agents working within their systems and to specifically set guardrails for each, ensuring control over exactly what each agent is able to access.
MXC acts as a policy layer that directs compute traffic to the appropriate isolation backend. Depending on the workload, MXC can shift to a process container, session container, WSL container, or even an experimental hardware-backed isolation called MicroVM.
Put your work inside a Microsoft Execution Container! Which is hopefully way less scary than it sounds.
Credit: Microsoft
Put your work inside a Microsoft Execution Container! Which is hopefully way less scary than it sounds. Credit: Microsoft
The hybrid approach
Bringing all of this new agentic workflow together with traditional Windows is a concept that Microsoft calls “Hybrid Intelligence,” which is a move away from cloud-backed AI solutions and a move toward local ones. Hybrid Intelligence will allow Surface Laptop Ultra or RTX Spark Dev Box users to allocate memory as they see fit for any specific application, as well as offer native support for local frameworks like llama.cpp and models from the Deepseek and Nvidia Nemotron families.
AI everywhere!
Credit: Microsoft
AI everywhere! Credit: Microsoft
We’ll see if it works soon enough
Microsoft is betting big on local AI with the changes announced today, but questions about security and user acceptance still remain, especially in light of their past missteps and other recent AI agent mishaps. The Surface Laptop Ultra hits shelves next week—keep an eye out for our review, and we’ll try to figure out whether it’s worth the $2,599 entry price and what this local AI capability buys you.
Soon, Reddit won’t let people use Old.Reddit.com unless they have used the site while logged in within the previous six months.
In July, Reddit started requiring that users be logged in to access Old Reddit. This new requirement is an effort to reduce Reddit’s biggest source of scraping and automated traffic, the company says.
Today, the social media platform announced additional upcoming restrictions on Old Reddit. A Reddit post from an employee, known as “judy-funnie” on the platform, says that “in the next few months, we’ll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users).”
Left to right: Fitbit Air (with new metal mesh band), Fitbit Edge, and Pixel Watch 5. Credit: Google 
