This week, the US Army used a high-energy multipurpose laser to shoot down three drones near the US-Mexico border, which official reports claimed were “posing a physical threat to US military personnel and CBP partners,” referring to Customs and Border Patrol.

The operation took place between the night of August 25 and the early morning of August 26 in the vicinity of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and was led by the Joint Task Force Southern Border (JTF-SB), which operates under US Northern Command. Authorities confirmed that, during the operation, agents used technology derived from the Army’s High-Energy Multipurpose Laser (AMP-HEL) system, a military program focused on implementing high-energy lasers for new defense capabilities.

Available information suggests that this initiative began in September 2025, when AeroVironment, a company specializing in defense technology, delivered the first two functional prototypes of these laser-based weapons to the US Armed Forces. Two new, improved systems were delivered as the program was expanded in December of the same year. According to the manufacturer, this particular platform, called the Locust Laser Weapon System, is designed to be mounted on military vehicles, as the Army has done with the versions it has received.

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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/the-army-just-used-a-20-kilowatt-laser-to-take-out-three-drones/

Let’s be frank: Some of Google’s recent Android feature Drops have been duds, offering little more than an expansion of Gemini summaries and chat functions. The new September Drop does have some Gemini flavor, but there are non-AI goodies, too. Your messaging threads are getting prettier and more useful, and those nifty Motion Assist dots that began appearing last week are rolling out widely. And even the Gemini expansion is not without utility.

Since this is an Android Drop rather than a Pixel Drop, these features are coming to a wider range of devices. The OS version does matter, though. If you’re on Android 16 or higher, you can now tell Gemini to log the location of items that don’t have a tracker tag attached. Just tell the AI where you put something, and include a photo if you like.

This information will be logged in Find Hub, which has thus far been used for locating phones, earbuds, and tracker tags. You can ask Gemini to recall that information or simply check Find Hub yourself the next time you forget where you put that item.

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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/latest-android-drop-connects-gemini-to-find-hub-adds-keep-notes-and-themes-to-messages/

The incident has already spurred Roderich Kiesewetter, a lawmaker and member of the German parliament’s intelligence committee, to more directly describe Russia as being responsible for the “attempted act of terrorism.”

As a major hub for air cargo, Leipzig/Halle airport frequently oversees the transit of shipments for NATO and the German military. It is also the current home base for Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines, which operates a charter cargo service fleet that includes the world’s largest operational cargo aircraft, the Antonov An-124 Ruslan.

The incident also evoked a potentially telling reaction from Alexander Sosnowski, a pro-Kremlin propagandist who regularly appears as a guest on Russian state television. In a short video posted on Telegram, Sosnowski clearly assumed the attempted attack was a Russian operation targeting the Ukrainian aircraft and expressed disappointment that it had failed, according to The Bild, a German tabloid newspaper.

Repeated drone incursions and missing defenses

These latest incidents follow dozens of drone sightings over other European airports, along with military bases, ports, energy and industrial facilities, since 2024. In May, Munich airport in Germany closed twice within 24 hours following possible drone sightings.

Drone incursions have become especially more frequent in Northern and Eastern Europe, given their closer proximity to Russia and the ongoing war in Ukraine. Those incursions have forced fighter jets to scramble repeatedly in response, along with leading to a building fire and injuries in Romania following a Russian drone crash.

But the long-promised European Drone Defence Initiative that was supposed to create the equivalent of a “drone wall” to provide counter-drone surveillance and defenses has yet to materialize in any meaningful way, said Ulrike Franke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, in an article for World Politics Review. Instead, individual European countries such as Poland have been building their own national counter-drone systems.

Germany has already provided about $118 billion to support Ukraine since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, according to Deutsche Welle. Beyond supplying weapons and humanitarian aid, Germany has also trained more than 24,000 Ukrainian soldiers and is hosting more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees.

Some of Germany’s latest cooperative ventures with Ukraine have involved joint production of new military drones. Ars recently covered a $100 million deal—reportedly funded by Germany—that is equipping the Ukrainian military with drones capable of performing AI target tracking.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/germany-disarms-explosive-drone-found-at-airport-hunts-possible-second-drone/

Governments around the world are suddenly very keen on online age verification requirements. In some places, this takes the form of ID requirements to access adult content, but several US states have also focused on app stores. With these laws now going into effect, Google has announced an expansion of its beta Play Age Signals API, which it claims will allow developers to confirm user ages without impinging on privacy.

Google’s system doesn’t require an ID or selfie verification—it’s connected to the company’s existing Family Link app. The idea is that parents will set age ranges for their kids’ managed accounts. For example, you might set a range like 16–17, allowing apps to tailor experiences and content for teenagers.

Google notes that the ranges are dynamic and may change as young users get older. So a kid who’s 13 may be in the same app content bracket for a few years before hitting the next level. Parents have the option to set and share these ranges if they want that additional level of control over what their children can access in Google Play. However, it’s not mandatory for child accounts—it’s fully opt-in and can be turned off at any time.

Google began testing the Play Age Signals API late last year as it became apparent that multiple states were going to put the onus of age verification on app stores. The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which lobbies on behalf of tech firms, has opposed these laws. However, the US Supreme Court recently paused a lower court injunction, allowing the Texas law to take effect. Louisiana and Utah also have similar laws going into effect.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/google-begins-global-rollout-of-age-verification-api-in-google-play/

“Although there is issues around memory that we have to manage, [the RAM shortage] is generally great for our business because of our bill of materials cost advantage, which allows us to just have a lower cost than … all the competing products. That gap is just widening right now by a pretty wide margin,” Wood said, per a transcript of the call.

The executive also noted that the low costs associated with running Roku OS have helped the company win over TV OEMs and retailers.

Many tech companies have hiked prices recently due to the memory shortage. On the streaming hardware side, for example, Apple last month raised prices for Apple TV boxes from $129 to $199 for the 64GB version and from $149 to $249 for 128GB.

Apple has a reputation for selling high-end devices at a premium, though. Roku, on the other hand, has built a name for itself through affordability. The company may have a harder time getting people to accept higher prices for what have traditionally been viewed as budget products.

A Roku representative told The Desk that the company still thinks its devices are competitively priced.

“We are doing our best to have great deals like what we have going on right now,” the executive told the publication.

Roku’s price hikes come weeks after Fox announced it is buying Roku for an enterprise value of $22 billion. The deal remains subject to regulatory and shareholder approval and is expected to close in 2027.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/roku-raises-streaming-stick-prices-by-up-to-60-percent/

I wanted a clock that, annoyingly, didn’t seem to exist.

Since childhood, my bedside clocks have been a series of red, seven-segment LED clock-radio specials from Walmart or Target. They are invariably cheap, simple, and long-lived—but they require manual intervention at the start and end of Daylight Saving Time and whenever the power flickers. After a recent power flicker, as I found myself standing by the sideboard holding down “TIME” and mashing the “HOUR” button, frustration boiled over, and I thought to myself, “We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century. There has to be a better way!”

My perfect clock would be self-setting. It would offer auto-DST adjustment (or not, depending on how this bill fares!). It would manage drift and always show the exact sub-second time. It would show that time on a red seven-segment display—not blue, not green, not yellow, and absolutely not white. And I shouldn’t have to install any privacy-destroying garbage apps to make it work.

Simple? No. While many bedside clocks meet one or perhaps two of these requirements, I couldn’t find anything that meets them all. Battery-backed self-setting “atomic” clocks that get their updates via the cosmic ether have been a thing for years and get me most of the way there, but damned if I could find one with a red seven-segment display that I liked (maybe someone else’s search kung-fu is better than mine?).

For a time, despair won out. But as I closed dozens of browser tabs featuring fruitless searches and close-but-no-cigar product pages, I thought to myself, “Wait a second. I’ve got a 3D printer. I’m, like, smart and stuff. Why not buy a seven-segment display and make my own clock?”

And so, standing on the shoulders of giants stacked up so high that I could practically touch the Moon, I did.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/i-wanted-a-clock-that-never-needed-setting-things-escalated/

The price hikes this year aren’t that much in the grand scheme, but Samsung’s foldables were already very expensive. The Ultra and Flip are only $100 more than their 2025 counterparts, but foldables were already seeing price bumps even before the RAMpocalypse. A $1,200 price tag will make the Flip 8 a tough sell when Motorola has Razr phones for hundreds less, even if they aren’t as fast.

At $2,100, the Z Fold 8 Ultra will be the most spendy foldable in most markets, but anyone who’s going to spend $2,000 on one can probably justify another $100. Preorders are live today, and Samsung has enhanced trade-in values to help take the sting out of the prices. The phones ship on August 7.

Plus some new wearables

Samsung also has some new wearables to pair with its foldable trio. Like the phones, Samsung’s new watches have substantial feature sets and price tags. The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 will cost a whopping $700, and the Galaxy Watch 9 will start at $380. Both are running on the Snapdragon Wear Elite platform.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2.

Credit: Samsung

The Ultra 2 is, naturally, Samsung’s updated take on the Apple Watch Ultra. The device is larger than the Watch 9 at 47 mm, and it has a more rugged look. It has a titanium case, more battery capacity, and a brighter display, and it’s rated IP69K for water and dust. That equates to 10ATM water protection versus just 5ATM (IP68) for the Watch 9. Samsung says it expects to release a diving app for the Ultra 2 later this year.

The Galaxy Watch 9 comes in 40 mm and 44 mm case sizes. This watch is aluminum, featuring the squircle case design Samsung first debuted on the first Ultra watch. There will be LTE and Bluetooth versions of the watch—the version with mobile data starts at $430.

Like the new phones, Samsung’s watches are available for preorder today and will ship on August 7.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/samsung-unveils-new-galaxy-z8-foldables-and-galaxy-watches-available-august-7/

In the latest twist on battlefield innovations, Ukraine has used both flying drone carriers and drone boats to send ground robots armed with weapons or explosives into battle.

The drone-assisted deployments have enabled slower wheeled robots to bypass tough terrain and Russian defenses, and to carry out an unusual robotic amphibious assault on a contested position. Such tactics also showcase the Ukrainian military’s ongoing experimentation with using drones and robots to offset a Russian military advantage in manpower while also sparing Ukrainian soldiers from making dangerous assaults.

On July 19, a Russian military Telegram channel posted a video showing a Ukrainian hexacopter drone carrying a ground robot suspended below by a cable, according to the Ukrainian government-run news platform United24. The Russian Telegram channel described the Ukrainian heavy bomber drone as deploying a four-wheeled ARK-1 robot armed with explosive anti-tank mines on the ground where it continued toward Russian military positions—and apparently generated plenty of outraged comments from pro-Kremlin social media users.

It’s unclear how successful that particular mission was. But the tactic could improve the survivability of ground robots by helping them evade Russian aerial surveillance and drone strikes while closing with their targets more quickly. The ARK-1 robot can roll along at a top speed of nearly 28 miles per hour, although some robots are considerably slower.

Ukrainian ground robots also joined a Ukrainian military operation on June 25 that targeted the Kinburn Spit, a sandy and narrow peninsula that extends westward into the Black Sea and is connected to the Russian-occupied left bank of the Kherson Oblast.

Russian military forces captured the Kinburn Spit in June 2022 and set up positions there to help control southern Ukraine’s port access to the Black Sea, although they began withdrawing from the peninsula in early June as Ukraine’s mid- and long-range drone strike campaigns strained Russian supply lines.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/ukrainian-drones-deliver-robots-directly-into-battle-by-sea-and-air/

Drones capable of spraying water and fire retardants have been practicing how to snuff out wildfires early in California and Alaska this summer—demonstrating a possible rapid-response tool for firefighting as climate change transforms wildfire season into a nearly year-round risk for much of the United States.

Most drones are significantly smaller than crewed aircraft and have shorter flight ranges, meaning they cannot replace large airtankers in delivering massive payloads of water or other fire-suppressing payloads to remote wildfires. But companies and fire agencies—along with organizers of the $11 million XPRIZE competition—are testing whether drones can help firefighting crews respond more quickly to small fires and put them out before they become more destructive.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as CAL FIRE, ran its own field test involving five autonomous drones that worked together to deploy between 500 and 1,000 gallons of foam combined for suppressing fires on July 15, according to the TV station KPMH. The demonstration was organized with the help of the nonprofit FireWERX and the California-based company Seneca, which is making the drones commercially available starting in 2026.

Each of Seneca’s Argo-1 drones can carry about 100 pounds of water or fire retardant while working together in swarms of four to six drones. Once a human operator uploads a GPS waypoint, the autonomous drones fly toward their target and use onboard sensors to spot the heat signature of a fire, HeliOps Magazine reported. The drones then find the best hovering altitude before each lining up to spray the fire, one after the other.

The fully loaded drones are limited to a round trip of 10 miles while flying at about 30 miles per hour on average, which means they would ideally need to be prepositioned in fire-prone areas or first transported by ground vehicle. But each drone can fit in the back of a pickup truck with the tailgate down, and two people can even manually carry the empty drones.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/firefighting-drones-in-the-works-as-wildfires-plague-us-nearly-year-round/

The agency also fined 21 HP resellers 35.2 million rupees (about $365,335).

In a separate order, the CCI said that WhatsApp records showed that HP and 16 of its Tier-2 reseller partners operated “in a collusive arrangement” and that the messages show the companies engaging in “bid rigging, including cover bidding, price fixation, and customer allocation during 2017–2020.” HP India played a central role, the regulator said.

Per the order, HP India said that high printing supply prices led some resellers to threaten to “shift to low-cost counterfeit products to compete on price.”

“HP India was commercially forced into a position where it had to support the collusive arrangement adopted by the Tier-2 resellers,” the order reads.

For its part, the order said that HP India “humbly objects to HP India’s role being characterized as a ‘kingpin’ of the entire collusive arrangement.”

Still, the revelation that some HP resellers are struggling with the exorbitant price of printer ink and toner underscores a problem many printer users face. The economic challenge is exacerbated by HP’s tendency to block third-party ink in already-purchased printers through firmware updates. At the same time, with even its own partners threatening to take their ink business elsewhere, HP is pressured to get more HP printer users to only use HP-brand ink and toner.

The CCI also ordered HP India and its channel partners to “cease and desist from anti-competitive conduct” and to hold competition compliance training programs within 60 days.

HP hasn’t publicly commented on the fines.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/hp-fined-1-4-billion-rupees-for-cartelization-of-ink-cartridges-toner-pcs/