The Dell Laptop Buying Guide UK: Which Dell Laptop Should You Buy? When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Your PC could lose Windows Update access in 2027. Microsoft's Windows Update certificates expire in May and June 2027. Fortunately, replacement certificates are available.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable @Home Look Up Trending Now Mashable Selects Say More Top creators, ranked Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Creator Playbook In My Bag AI at School Safety Net All Series Stop wing ing it with Claude -- this bundle has 4 professional courses for just $19.99 Take AI into real workflows. The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. Pay $19.99 once and learn how to use Claude at work Credit: ExpertEase Global Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. This $19.99 Claude AI Professional Skills bundle includes lifetime access to four courses, 9+ hours of practical training, and a CPD certificate for each course plus one for completing the full track.

The IRGC-linked Strait of Hormuz toll authority regained secure web access for four days via Shanghai-based certificate authority TrustAsia, briefly circumventing U.S. sanctions.

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen From AI fundamentals to data analysis and app building, Google's certificate covers quite a lot. And there's a way to avoid paying anything to earn your credential. Google's course builds practical AI skills from basics to app building. The hands-on Gemini training is broad, useful, and well-built. Move fast to beat the trial clock and avoid Coursera's fee.

Florent Delgrange won the Best Blue Sky Paper Award at AAMAS 2026 for his work Foundation World Models for Agents that Learn, Verify, and Adapt Reliably Beyond Static Environments . We caught up with him to find out more about his vision for agent learning. What is the topic of your Blue Sky Ideas paper and why is it an interesting area for study? My Blue Sky Ideas paper asks a simple but difficult question: how can an autonomous agent keep learning as its world changes without quietly losing the guarantees that made its behavior trustworthy? Reinforcement learning and formal methods address complementary parts of this problem.

An Ebike Company Was Sued Over Alleged Safety Misinformation. Several Chinese businesses associated with the ebike brand Aipas settled a lawsuit with Amazon and the safety certification company UL in July. Amazon and UL, a company that tests and certifies that products meet safety standards, settled a lawsuit in July with several Chinese companies that manufacture ebikes under the Aipas brand name. The US companies accused the Chinese firms in January of claiming in Amazon listings and on Aipas' website that the ebikes had been certified by UL, giving recognizable, brand-name assurance to online shoppers worried about risks like ebike lithium-ion battery fires . On July 15, a federal judge signed off on a permanent injunction in which the companies agreed that they would no longer use the UL mark.

PCWorld reports that Microsoft has confirmed Secure Boot certificate update failures on certain PCs, particularly affecting HP models after certificates expired on June 24th. While PCs continue operating normally, outdated certificates gradually reduce security protection against new threats over time for Windows 10/11 users. Microsoft temporarily paused new certificate issuance for affected devices, requiring users to wait for firmware updates from their PC manufacturers. On June 24th, several older Microsoft certificates expired, meaning that many Windows 10 and 11 users need to update their computers. Without properly updated certificates, Windows Secure Boot will stop working and can no longer guarantee secure startups. However, it's now confirmed that Microsoft has temporarily suspended the issuance of new certificates for certain PCs, including a number of HP models.

PCWorld explains Windows Secure Boot as a critical security feature that acts like a checkpoint, verifying software before Windows loads to prevent bootkit malware infections. The 2011 Secure Boot certificates are expiring by 2026, requiring updates to 2023 certificates for continued protection against startup attacks and future Windows compatibility. Users should check the Windows Security app's Device Security section for warning indicators and update UEFI/BIOS if needed to maintain robust system security. Most people don't spend time thinking about Secure Boot.

Speculative decoding accelerates language model inference by using a fast drafter to propose candidate tokens that are then verified by a larger target model. Existing theory largely studies the stochastic, distribution-preserving setting, where the goal is to exactly sample from the target distribution. In contrast, many practical systems use greedy decoding, relaxed acceptance rules, or tree-based candidate sets, where success is governed by local ranking and threshold events rather than exact distributional equality. We develop a theory for these regimes. We identify that many common acceptance criteria have rejection regions that can be characterized as lower level sets of the target distribution. For these, we characterize the exact KL divergence required for rejection yielding exact certificates and sharp margin-based bounds for strict greedy decoding, additive and multiplicative relaxed acceptance, top-(m) relaxed criteria, and entropy-thresholded acceptance. We then extend the framework to greedy tree decoding, deriving exact and margin-only certificates for when the target greedy token remains covered by the drafter's top-(m) candidates. Finally, we evaluate the resulting certificates on Qwen3 models, showing that relaxed and tree-based criteria substantially enlarge the region of certified acceptance, especially on decoding steps with low target model distribution margin. These results complement existing distribution-preserving analyses of speculative decoding by characterizing the deterministic local acceptance events common in practical inference systems.

We develop finite-sample certificates for local population-risk increments \(Pδ_v=R(θ_0+v)-R(θ_0)\), \(v\in\mathcal D\). The primitive object is an expected-valid upper endpoint \(\widehat{\mathsf U}_{\mathcal D}\) satisfying \(\mathbb E\sup_{v\in\mathcal D} \{Pδ_v-\widehat{\mathsf U}_{\mathcal D}(v)\}\le0\). This uniform criterion certifies any measurable update selected from the same sample and allows penalties to depend on empirical geometry. The main construction is a cross-fitted ridge calibration for linear feature classes. A pilot fold learns the ridge metric, the complementary fold calibrates the squared mean error in that metric, and complete split averaging recovers the full empirical covariance in the directional quadratic form \(\widehat q_{X,λ}\). The optimized diagnostic scale is \(\{\widehat q_{X,λ}(h) \widehat r_{X,n_{\rm p},λ}^{\rm cf}/n\}^{1/2}\), and the calibrated trace factor \(\widehat r_{X,n_{\rm p},λ}^{\rm cf}\) is compared with the ordinary ridge effective dimension \(\widehat r_{X,λ}\). For nonsmooth losses, an exact fixed-mask decomposition \(δ_v=J_v^0+R_v^\circ+C_v\) separates frozen Taylor fluctuations, good-path remainders, and interface crossings. Applying the linear and composite certificates componentwise yields endpoints for same-sample expected local search and concentrated release rules.