Windows 8 is remembered most for its oddball touchscreen-focused full-screen Start menu , but it also introduced a number of under-the-hood enhancements to Windows. One of those was UEFI Secure Boot, a mechanism for verifying PC bootloaders to ensure that unverified software can't be loaded at startup. Secure Boot was enabled but technically optional for Windows 8 and Windows 10, but it became a formal system requirement for installing Windows starting with Windows 11 in 2021 .

Secure Boot has relied on the same security certificates to verify bootloaders since 2011, during the development cycle for Windows 8. But those original certificates are set to expire in June and October of this year, something Microsoft is highlighting in a post today.

This certificate expiration date isn't news—Microsoft and most major PC makers have been talking about it for months or years, and behind-the-scenes work to get the Windows ecosystem ready has been happening for some time. And renewing security certificates is a routine occurrence that most users only notice when something goes wrong .

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Do you feel popular? There are people on the Internet who want to know all about you! Unfortunately, they don't have the best of intentions, but Google has some handy tools to address that , and they've gotten an upgrade today. The "Results About You" tool can now detect and remove more of your personal information. Plus, the tool for removing non-consensual explicit imagery (NCEI) is faster to use. All you have to do is tell Google your personal details first—that seems safe, right?

With today's upgrade , Results About You gains the ability to find and remove pages that include ID numbers like your passport, driver's license, and Social Security. You can access the option to add these to Google's ongoing scans from the settings in Results About You . Just click in the ID numbers section to enable detection.

Naturally, Google has to know what it's looking for to remove it. So you need to provide at least part of those numbers. Google asks for the full driver's license number, which is fine, as it's not as sensitive. For your passport and SSN, you only need the last four digits, which is enough for Google to find the full numbers on webpages.

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Vans are something most of us don’t think about much, since we rarely interact with them directly in our day-to-day lives. But the van is an unseen hero that keeps the world moving, delivering packages all over the country and transporting food from farm to stores. They haven't changed much in decades, though. A van is generally a big box with a gas or diesel engine (depending on where you are in the world), and that’s… kinda it, bar a dent or two in the bodywork. Kia's engineers, riding high on the success of their recent electric vehicles, took notice and did some new things with the PV5, the company's first electric van.

You can spec your PV5 in a number of configurations, and the company already has conversion partners lined up to turn them into just about anything . Of course, camper converters are eyeing them as well, eager to create electric "vanlife" setups. Off the shelf, you can choose between a PV5 Passenger for moving people, a PV5 Cargo for moving things, a PV5 Crew for moving things and people, and a PV5 Chassis Cab to do with as you please.

Beneath its modular cabin is the Electric Global Modular For Service, which is part of Kia’s rather fancy-sounding "PBV" strategy . "PBV" means "Platform Beyond Vehicle," a potential hint at where the brand sees itself going. In this case, it can house a range of battery sizes.

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Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year.

The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google’s parent company, said people familiar with the matter.

Alphabet was also selling $20 billion of dollar bonds on Monday and lining up a Swiss franc bond sale, the people said. The dollar portion of the deal was upsized from $15 billion because of strong demand, they added.

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On Friday, a body that advises US judges revised the document it created to help judges grapple with scientific issues. The move came after a group of Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to complain about the document's chapter on climate change, with one of the letter's criticisms being that it treated human influence on climate as a fact. In response to the letter, the Federal Judicial Center has now deleted the entire chapter.

The Federal Judicial Center has been established by statute as the "research and education agency of the judicial branch of the United States Government." As part of that role, it prepares documents that can serve as reference material for judges unfamiliar with topics that find their way into the courtroom. Among those projects is the " Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence ," now in its fourth edition. Prepared in collaboration with the National Academies of Science, the document covers the process of science and specific topics that regularly appear before the courts, like statistical techniques, DNA-based identification, and chemical exposures.

When initially released in December, the fourth edition included material on climate change prepared by two authors at Columbia University. But a group of attorneys general from Republican-leaning states objected to this content. At the end of January, they sent a letter to the leadership of the Federal Judicial Center outlining their issues. Many of them focus on the text that accepts the reality of human-driven climate change as a fact.

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In 2023, we marveled at the sheer mass of Lenovo's Legion Go , a 1.88-pound, 11.8-inch-wide monstrosity of a Windows gaming handheld. In 2026, though, Ayaneo unveiled details of its Next II handheld , which puts Lenovo's big boy to shame while also offering heftier specs and a higher price than most other Windows gaming handhelds.

Let's focus on the bulk first. The Ayaneo Next II weighs in at a truly wrist-straining 3.14 pounds, making it more than twice as heavy in the hands as the Steam Deck OLED (not to mention 2022's original Ayaneo Next , which weighed a much more reasonable 1.58 pounds). The absolute unit also measures 13.45 inches wide and 10.3 inches tall, according to Ayaneo's spec sheet , giving it a footprint approximately 60 percent larger than the Switch 2 (with Joy-Cons attached).

Ayaneo packs some seriously powerful portable PC performance into all that bulk, though. The high-end version of the system sports a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chipset with 16 Zen5 cores alongside a Radeon 8060S with 40 RDNA3.5 compute units. That should give this massive portable performance comparable to a desktop with an RTX 4060 or a gaming laptop like last year's high-end ROG Flow Z13 .

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For a couple of weeks now, AI agents (and some humans impersonating AI agents ) have been hanging out and doing weird stuff on Moltbook's Reddit-style social network . Now, those agents can also gather together on a vibe-coded, space-based MMO designed specifically and exclusively to be played by AI.

SpaceMolt describes itself as "a living universe where AI agents compete, cooperate, and create emergent stories" in "a distant future where spacefaring humans and AI coexist." And while only a handful of agents are barely testing the waters right now, the experiment could herald a weird new world where AI plays games with itself and we humans are stuck just watching.

"You decide. You act. They watch."

Getting an AI agent into SpaceMolt is as simple as connecting it to the game server either via MCP , WebSocket, or an HTTP API. Once a connection is established, a detailed agentic skill description instructs the agent to ask their creators which Empire they should pick to best represent their playstyle: mining/trading; exploring; piracy/combat; stealth/infiltration; or building/crafting.

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Google continues to turn the screws on free YouTube users, expanding a test that restricts access to song lyrics on YouTube Music. Users without a premium subscription have found that Google's streaming music service only shows song lyrics a few times before demanding money.

For as long as YouTube Music has existed, lyrics have been accessible to all users in the mobile app. That started to change over recent months as Google tested a paywall. The lyrics section still appears in the app when playing a song with a free account, but opening it eats into a limited allotment of lyric views. A substantial uptick in user reports, spotted by 9to5Google , suggests this restriction is now rolling out widely.

"You have [x] views remaining," the app now warns free users who access lyrics. It looks like users get five free lyric views before they have to pay up. Google has still neglected to officially announce the addition of this feature to its Premium subscription—there's no mention of lyrics being part of the paid tier on Google's support page .

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The Federal Communications Commission is reportedly investigating ABC’s The View in what FCC Democrat Anna Gomez called an attempt to intimidate critics of the Trump administration.

“Let’s be clear on what this is. This is government intimidation, not a legitimate investigation," Gomez said in a statement Friday night. "Like many other so-called ‘investigations’ before it, the FCC will announce an investigation but never carry one out, reach a conclusion, or take any meaningful action. The real purpose is to weaponize the FCC’s regulatory authority to intimidate perceived critics of this administration and chill protected speech."

The FCC hasn't announced the investigation but previously gave several indications that it would occur sooner or later. After pressuring ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel , FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in September that it would be "worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of these other programs" are violating the agency's equal-time rule. The Carr FCC followed that up in January by issuing a warning to late-night and daytime talk shows that they may no longer qualify for the bona fide news exemption to the equal-time rule.

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