#firmware-testing

#firmware-testing

Finding the right desk and office chair combo can have lasting effects on the quality of your spinal health, and in my case, landing on just the right pairing has boosted my productivity big time.

Microsoft is removing trust for kernel drivers that haven't been through the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program, targeting those signed by the long-deprecated cross-signed root program. This change will take effect with the April 2026 Windows Update.

Lydia noticed the machine's battery was running low and told two other team members. The more senior went to fetch the backup battery, while the junior team member suggested a quicker method that Lydia firmly rejected.

All smart homes are at risk of being hacked, but it's not a likely event. The type of bad actors that target smart homes and devices, such as security cameras, are opportunistic. They search randomly for easy targets -- they don't tend to choose a particular home to attack and then try to circumvent that specific system.

As vehicles become platforms for software and subscriptions, their longevity is increasingly tied to the survival of the companies behind their code. When those companies fail, the consequences ripple far beyond a bad app update and into the basic question of whether a car still functions as a car. Over the years, automotive software has expanded from performing rudimentary engine management and onboard diagnostics to powering today's interconnected, software-defined vehicles.

This extends to the software development community, which is seeing a near-ubiquitous presence of AI-coding assistants as teams face pressures to generate more output in less time. While the huge spike in efficiencies greatly helps them, these teams too often fail to incorporate adequate safety controls and practices into AI deployments. The resulting risks leave their organizations exposed, and developers will struggle to backtrack in tracing and identifying where - and how - a security gap occurred.

Company CEO David Mytton said the release of v1.0 of its Arcjet JavaScript SDK makes it possible for developers to address many of the issues as applications are being developed that DevOps teams would otherwise need to address later in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Additionally, Arcjet is beta testing a similar SDK for Python developers, who often have even less application security expertise, added Mytton.

1. What Are the Key Features Every Modern Business Website Should Have Today? Perfect for UX, performance, and custom web development discussion.

Your coding apprentice can build, at your direction, pretty much anything now. The task becomes more like conducting an orchestra than playing in it. Not all members of the orchestra want to conduct, but given that is where things are headed, I think we all need to consider it at least.

According to CISA, Gardyn products were affected by two critical and two high-severity vulnerabilities. One of the critical flaws, tracked as CVE-2025-29631, is a command injection issue that can be exploited to execute arbitrary OS commands on the targeted device. The second critical vulnerability, CVE-2025-1242, is related to the exposure of hardcoded admin credentials that can be used to gain full control of the Gardyn IoT Hub.

We build production platforms with AI every day, and we work with teams doing the same with their own stack -Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot. The difference shows up fast. By day two, some codebases are already harder to change than they were yesterday. Others keep getting easier. The difference is never the model. It's what the code lands in. The teams we work with that hit a wall? It's always the same story.

AI systems continued to advance rapidly over the past year, but the methods used to test and manage their risks did not keep pace, according to the International AI Safety Report 2026. The report, produced with inputs from more than 100 experts across over 30 countries, said that pre-deployment testing was increasingly failing to reflect how AI systems behaved once deployed in real-world environments, creating challenges for organisations that had expanded their use of AI across software development, cybersecurity, research, and business operations.

Ring has launched a new tool that can tell you if a video clip captured by its camera has been altered or not. The company says that every video downloaded from Ring starting in December 2025 going forward will come with a digital security seal. "Think of it like the tamper-evident seal on a medicine bottle," it explained. Its new tool, called Ring Verify, can tell you if a video has been altered in any way.

Retail point-of-sale systems today offer a wide range of options for peripherals and hardware. Their technical specifications play a major role in selection, and big retailers often choose multiple vendors to reduce a single point of failure. This gives them an advantage to negotiate price or support as well. Technically, these peripherals also require updating with new models and may have new feature sets. This necessitates the redevelopment of point-of-sale applications, increasing development costs.

Siemens has published eight new advisories. The company has released patches and mitigations for high-severity issues in Desigo CC, Sentron Powermanager, Simcenter Femap and Nastran, NX, Sinec NMS, Solid Edge, and Polarion products. A medium-severity flaw has been found in Siveillance Video Management Servers. Exploitation of the vulnerabilities can lead to unauthorized access, XSS, DoS, code execution, and privilege escalation.

A secure software development life cycle means baking security into plan, design, build, test, and maintenance, rather than sprinkling it on at the end, Sara Martinez said in her talk Ensuring Software Security at Online TestConf. Testers aren't bug finders but early defenders, building security and quality in from the first sprint. Culture first, automation second, continuous testing and monitoring all the way; that's how you make security a habit instead of a fire drill, she argued.

To find the typical example, just observe an average stand-up meeting. The ones who talk more get all the attention. In her article, software engineer Priyanka Jain tells the story of two colleagues assigned the same task. One posted updates, asked questions, and collaborated loudly. The other stayed silent and shipped clean code. Both delivered. Yet only one was praised as a "great team player."

Multiple critical vulnerabilities in the popular n8n open-source workflow automation platform allow escaping the confines of the environment and taking complete control of the host server. Collectively tracked as CVE-2026-25049, the issues can be exploited by any authenticated user who can create or edit workflows on the platform to perform unrestricted remote code execution on the n8n server. Researchers at several cybersecurity companies reported the problems, which stem from n8n's sanitization mechanism and bypass the patch for CVE-2025-68613, another critical flaw addressed on December 20.

"A floor manager responsible for production asked me to fix his PC, which was so slow he could literally make a coffee in the time between double-clicking an icon and having the program open," Parker told On Call. The manager's PC was only a year old and ran Windows XP, a combo that at the time of this tale should have made for decent performance.