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Currently, SSL/TLS certificates may be issued for a maximum period of 398 days, before renewal is required. The CA/Browser Forum recently voted to reduce this life span period in steps over the next four years. From 15th March 2026, life span is reduced to 200 days. From 15th March 2027, life span is reduced to 100 days. From 15th March 2029, life span is reduced to 47 days, but only 10 days for domain control validated certificates, such as most free certificates. These reduced life times reduce the effort needed to block compromised certificates, but also make manually updating server certificates more onerous. The Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) developed by Let's Encrypt and used by many web servers, is now supported by other certificate vendors to issue free and commercial certificates automatically, and will hopefully be fully integrated with all major web servers by 2029. Let's Encrypt is adding a certificate profile to the ordering process, allowing alternate certificate types to be ordered, including six day life certificates later this year. It has also added a ACME command to get recommended renewal information, which is currently 30 days before a 90 day certificate expires. Applications are recommended to check renewal information regularly, currently every six hours, to check if certificates have been revoked. This will be important this summer when Let's Encrypt closes down the Online Certificate Status Protocol currently used to check if certificates are validly issued. A new version of the ICS TSslX509Certs component is currently being tested with these new ACME features, it will also attempt to support ordering certificates from Bypass, ZeroSSL, Google, DigiCert and ssl.com, although these most of these need accounts to be opened at the issuer before the ACME protocol can be used, so testing will not be quick and not all may be available initially. The main difference from Let's Encrypt is external accounting fields to link to the supplier's account, instead of just a public key. Minor changes to IcsHosts are needed for the ICS web server to handle certificate profiles and alternate suppliers, and to regularly update renewal information. These changes are already done in the OverbyteIcsX509CertsTst sample that is used to create ACME accounts and place certificate orders, that can be validated by an internal web server, external web servers such as Windows IIS and Windows Apache, and by Windows DNS server for wild card certificates. The sample supports multiple accounts for different suppliers, listing the status of all orders for those suppliers, and allowing ordering and renewals with a few clicks. I'll update this topic when the ICS web server is updated, hopefully within a week or two, meanwhile could anyone that has looked at alternate ACME suppliers let me know, to help with testing. Angus

Hi everyone, (Oops, I made a mistake posting in the VCL section when it's more appropriate here) For more than six months, I’ve been developing turnkey solutions for the Delphi developer community in the form of API wrappers that harness the full range of models and features offered by leading providers (OpenAI, Deepseek, Anthropic, Gemini, MistralAI, Groq Cloud, Hugging Face, and Stability AI). Each README file is written as a tutorial to help users get started. Natively, these libraries support both synchronous and asynchronous workflows and some even offer parallel execution to optimize performance. In addition, I’ve published two projects demonstrating the use of the Promise pattern to orchestrate asynchronous requests (notably with OpenAI, but also compatible with other wrappers), as well as a pipeline-based project that simplifies the processing chain for model calls. Coming soon, I will introduce a module dedicated to OpenAI’s new file_search feature (endpoint v1/response), which, thanks to an expanded semantic surface, enables querying vector stores with unprecedented precision and temporarily enriches models without the need for fine-tuning. If you’re new to AI integration or looking to accelerate your development, feel free to check out my projects on GitHub. Additionally, all of these tools are available via GetIt. Your feedback is welcome and will be incredibly helpful in improving these tools. https://github.com/MaxiDonkey As a point of clarification regarding my background, I am a mathematician by training rather than a professional software developer. I returned to Delphi just over a year ago—if you’d like to understand my motivations, please consult this document. My core expertise lies in using formal proof tools such as Lean and Coq, rather than in Delphi-specific development.

Hi everyone, For more than six months, I’ve been developing turnkey solutions for the Delphi developer community in the form of API wrappers that harness the full range of models and features offered by leading providers (OpenAI, Deepseek, Anthropic, Gemini, MistralAI, Groq Cloud, Hugging Face, and Stability AI). Each of these libraries supports both synchronous and asynchronous workflows, and some even offer parallel execution to optimize performance. In addition, I’ve published two projects demonstrating the use of the Promise pattern to orchestrate asynchronous requests (notably with OpenAI, but also compatible with other wrappers), as well as a pipeline-based project that simplifies the processing chain for model calls. Coming soon, I will introduce a module dedicated to OpenAI’s new file_search feature (endpoint v1/response), which, thanks to an expanded semantic surface, enables querying vector stores with unprecedented precision and temporarily enriches models without the need for fine-tuning. f you’re new to AI integration or looking to accelerate your development, feel free to check out my projects on GitHub. Please note that I only provide the entry point to my GitHub page, from which you can navigate to the repositories that interest you. Additionally, all of these tools are available via GetIt. If you’d like me to share direct links to each repository, I can do so in this thread. Your feedback is welcome and will be incredibly helpful in improving these tools. https://github.com/MaxiDonkey

The winnner was announced - https://ideasawakened.com/post/rad-programmer-challenge-number-one-winner-announcement Jaques Nascimento Congrats! A serial number for a free license of Pascal Expert from Peganza was emailed earlier today and am currently arranging his $500 prize delivery for his Minesweeper build in RAD Studio. There were 18 contestants with a variety of game features implemented. Two of the games are available on the Google Play store and one user made a video tutorial of his build: - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.com.imperium.MineSweeper - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.abrito.Minesweeper - I hope it was fun for those involved! I am writing up the next one to hopefully start soon.

On the use of the community license, my advice is to be very careful about what you do. I bring them my case. At home, on my personal notebook I had installed the community version of Delphi, it was the Rio, to work on an open-source project, GLSCENE. Since I have little time at home to develop I, unhappily, thought of taking advantage of the hour and a half of free time for lunch break I have at the office, to continue development on my personal notebook BUT attached to the company WIFI network to access the sources, do push and everything else. Well after a month or so I got a tethered notification from Embarcadero, that according to their logs, Community sends logs of what files you compile, when you compile, what network and domain you are working on, my company was not using Community intebitually for application development while earning over 5000E. The email came directly to the company by going back to the company's internet domain data. There was no way to make it clear, even after sending the project report I worked on, that it was not of company interest but personal, about it being my personal laptop, etc. Moral of the story, they gave me a number of days to purchase the full Architect product (the most expensive formula) or legal action would start. The company covered the cost, thankfully. Be careful where you connect with terminals.... Since then never again a Community product and since I personally cannot buy Licensed products at those prices, I now participate in open-source projects with other environments and languages.