Ever mindful of security, the US has announced a ban on new foreign-made drones and components key to their manufacture. The Federal Communication Commission’s public notice says that uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) “pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons”.

The ban only applies to new devices and components, so anything which has already made its way into the US is unaffected. In implementing a blanket ban on all foreign-produced drones, there has been no need to publish a list of affected models.

There can be few people who have not interacted with ChatGPT over the last year, and you may be wondering how you have used the artificial intelligence tool.

In line with so many other online tools and services, as we approach the end of the year, ChatGPT is giving users the chance to look back over the previous 12 months in a review of the year. The predictably named “Your Year with ChatGPT” is available now.

Wondershare has announced a collaboration with Topaz Labs that adds the company's AI-based video cleanup and upscaling features to its creative software. UniConverter 17 is the first Wondershare product to include Topaz's model, offering creators a way to improve low-quality footage inside the program.

Topaz's Starlight model appears as a processing option in UniConverter V17 and it will be added to Filmora, SelfyzAI, and Repairit at some point too, although there's no word on exactly when that will happen.

Foxit has released Foxit PDF Editor v2025.3 for Windows and Mac, adding new controls for shared documents along with security and AI updates. The release is aimed at people and organizations that depend on PDFs for daily work, especially where privacy rules and controlled access matter.

The new releases focuses on how shared document collaboration works, and the way users join collaborative sessions has also been improved, with clearer consent steps built into the process. Before accessing a shared file, users will now see a region-specific consent message explaining that their details could be visible to others. Access only continues once consent has been given.

Chinese software developer EaseUS has announced a new version of its data recovery software that fixes on a long standing problem with fragmented files on heavily used storage devices. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard 20.1.0 gains a new recovery engine that can improve results on USB drives, SD cards, and external hard drives that have seen years of repeated use.

SmartSector Rebuild (or SSR for short) can reconstruct files that have been split across storage sectors over time, a condition that often prevents standard recovery tools from restoring usable data.

NordProtect, an identity theft protection service from Nord Security, has expanded its monitoring features to give users earlier notice of potential fraudulent activity. The changes add extended credit monitoring, loan tracking, and financial account alerts, with the goal of helping users respond before financial damage occurs.

The service now monitors credit activity across all three major credit bureaus. Users receive alerts when changes appear on their credit file, including new accounts opened in their name, shifts in credit score, or hard inquiries made by lenders or other organizations.

The very nature of cybersecurity makes it a constant arms race between attackers and defenders and recently that’s meant both sides utilizing AI.

This seems unlikely to change in 2026 but what else might we expect? Some industry experts give us their views.

Artificial intelligence has been driving much of the technical agenda for the last couple of years and is still evolving rapidly, finding its way into more and more areas.

Here some industry experts look at what we can expect to see from the AI space in 2026.

Microsoft has released Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7523 (KB5072043) to the Dev and Beta Channels, bringing with it a number of important changes and additions. As is the case with so many updates to Windows 11 at the moment, this is heavy on the AI.

The difference this time is that Microsoft is starting to focus more on business users – starting by introducing Ask Copilot on the taskbar with Microsoft 365 Copilot. The taskbar is also now adorned with Agents, but not everything is related to artificial intelligence.

The end of the year means endless round ups of the best products, services and more. It also means that lookbacks such as Spotify Unwrapped are made available, and now X has decided to get in on the action by taking a look back at what the past year was like on Elon Musk’s social platform.

What does this look like? Number. Numbers and statistics. So, if stats are not your thing, look away not. Otherwise, let’s delve in and see what has been happening on X throughout 2025.

As we approach the end of 2025, you may be one of the many Android users expecting Google Assistant to be completely replaced by Gemini. Indeed, this was very much the plan that Google announced earlier in the year.

But as year end creeps up on us, the company has had a change of heart and is slowing down the pace of things. The precise new timescale is not really very clear at the moment, but Google has shared an update about how things will proceed.

The recent AyySSHush botnet campaign compromised over 9,000 ASUS routers worldwide via SSH key injection. Unlike traditional botnets, this campaign flips the C2 model -- routers silently await inbound contact from the attacker, making detection incredibly difficult.

And since SSH key authentication happens after encryption is established, key usage remains invisible to most monitoring tools. Combine that with the fact that routers are critical, often unmonitored devices, and it’s easy to see why this attack is a sweet spot for adversaries.

Netflix has acquired Ready Player Me, a platform for creating avatars. It comes as the company moves deeper and deeper into the gaming arena.

The acquisition will give Netflix subscribers the chance to create customized avatars that can be used across gaming titles. It is a similar system to that found on other gaming networks.

There are some sites which are famous and others which are notorious; Anna’s Archive falls into the latter category. Ostensibly a pirate site from which ebooks can be downloaded, the site has billed itself as an archivist, preserving data and documents for the future.

The latest move by “the largest truly open library in human history” see the site “back[ing] up Spotify”. More than this, Spotify’s entire library of content is being released in a series of colossal torrents – and we mean huge.

It’s been four months since the Kodi Foundation released the first build of Kodi 22 “Piers,” the long-awaited next generation of its widely used home theater software.

Following close on the heels of Kodi 21.3 “Omega,” which was released a few days ago, a new build of Kodi 22 has arrived in the form of Alpha 2.