Lars builds and writes about AI-assisted development, web technology, SaaS, independent internet businesses, and how products reach and retain audiences. Beyond the News is his attempt to turn the important technology developments in those fields into useful, sourced explanations for people doing the work.

AI helps with research, comparison and drafting. Lars reviews, edits and makes the explicit publication decision. That role is described in more detail in the editorial approach and How we use AI.

Reviewed and published

Recent BTN dossiers

Cloudflare can now keep robots.txt aligned with AI bot policy

Bot Preference Sync turns Cloudflare’s AI crawler controls into both an enforcement policy and a published robots.txt signal. It is rolling out to every plan, with different defaults for publishers and other sites and important limits around custom per-bot rules.

Next.js will ship a critical security fix on August 26

Next.js is giving builders advance notice of a critical security patch on August 26. The affected weakness is not yet disclosed, so teams on 16.3 or 15.5 should prepare an expedited upgrade and validation path rather than wait for the advisory to land.

Gmail will stop sending as third-party addresses in January 2027

From January 2027, Gmail will no longer send mail as non-Google addresses or fetch third-party accounts through Gmailify/POP on the web. Forwarding into Gmail and third-party accounts in the mobile app remain available, so small-business and custom-domain users need to distinguish the affected desktop workflow from Gmail’s broader mail protocols.