Axon is putting $1.2B in cash and stock into U.S. drone maker Skydio at a $5.2B pre-money valuation, lifting its non-voting stake by about 20% and locking in exclusive U.S. and Canada public-safety distribution. Skydio says it expects roughly $1B in bookings this fiscal year and stayed independent after weighing a full sale so it can keep expanding across energy, construction, transportation and defense. Closing is expected in stages across Q4 2026 and Q1 2027.
After attackers changed supermarket refrigeration setpoints across Europe, including a Swedish store that found its freezers at 50 C, Erik Huisman wrote a nine-step checklist where most checks cost nothing and avoid scanning live OT gear. The walkdown starts with checking cabinets for undocumented vendor 4G or 5G routers, looking up site public IPs in Shodan, auditing NAT rules and contractor logins, and testing manual operation plus an independent alarm. He also links an early open-source Shodan and questionnaire script called otcheck that has only been tested on simulated sites.
For plant, facilities and OT teams: a nine-step walkdown to find internet-exposed controllers and contractor routers without probing live equipment.
SemaPLC is an MIT-licensed localhost web IDE and 16-tool MCP server from Midea AI that turns plain-language control specs into IEC 61131-3 Structured Text, compiles and runs it on OpenPLC Runtime v4 in Docker, forces inputs and traces variables to verify behavior, and renders a live ladder and process simulation. Everything runs locally apart from the model API you configure. Because it targets OpenPLC rather than proprietary vendor runtimes out of the box, treat it as a verification and prototyping harness before porting logic to plant hardware.
For controls engineers and OT teams: generating and behavior-testing IEC 61131-3 Structured Text against a local OpenPLC runtime before touching hardware.
Built in C# on .NET Framework 4.8 with a companion CLI, this open-source MCP server wraps Siemens TIA Portal Openness over stdio so an AI agent can open projects, manage hardware catalogs, blocks, UDTs, ProDiag and tag tables, import CSV or Excel lists, validate HMI targets, and compile software. It requires a Windows machine with a licensed Siemens TIA Portal V20 install and Openness user permissions, and the repo carries no open-source license file yet. Check licensing and run against offline project copies before letting an agent edit live station files.
For Siemens automation engineers: letting an MCP-capable coding agent inspect blocks, manage tag tables and run compiles in TIA Portal V20.
