Pi-hole is one of my favorite services that solves an everyday problem without requiring expensive hardware. Install it on a Raspberry Pi, configure your devices to use it for DNS, and you can block unwanted domains while monitoring DNS activity across your network.
Every time a new Wi-Fi standard comes out, there’s pressure from every side to upgrade. Wi-Fi 8 is on the horizon, and I feel that Wi-Fi 7 has barely had time to settle. But, do you really need to upgrade to Wi-Fi 7 or Wi-Fi 8? There’s a good chance your old Wi-Fi router is still perfectly fine.
There's nothing worse than a fluctuating network signal when you're trying to work or stream a movie. The solution is a powerful router like TP-Link's BE9700, which delivers wide coverage and fast speeds, so you won't deal with timeouts or buffering.
Singapore's SIMBA faces potential licence suspension after alleged spectrum violations. Here's what the investigation means for mobile customers.
The post SIMBA Could Lose Singapore Telecom Licence: What Customers Should Know appeared first on TechRepublic.
Singapore's SIMBA faces potential licence suspension after alleged spectrum violations. Here's what the investigation means for mobile customers.
The post SIMBA Could Lose Singapore Telecom Licence: What Customers Should Know appeared first on TechRepublic.
Microsoft's October Windows 11 update left an Always On VPN issue unresolved. Here's the temporary workaround for affected enterprise connections.
The post Windows 11 VPN Issues Persist After October Update — Here’s Microsoft’s Workaround appeared first on TechRepublic.
Windows 11 is testing a browser-free internet speed test in Quick Settings. Here's how to use it, what it measures, and who can try it first.
The post Windows 11’s New Speed Test Skips the Browser — Here’s How It Works appeared first on TechRepublic.
Microsoft's October Windows 11 update left an Always On VPN issue unresolved. Here's the temporary workaround for affected enterprise connections.
The post Windows 11 VPN Issues Persist After October Update — Here’s Microsoft’s Workaround appeared first on TechRepublic.
Windows 11 is testing a browser-free internet speed test in Quick Settings. Here's how to use it, what it measures, and who can try it first.
The post Windows 11’s New Speed Test Skips the Browser — Here’s How It Works appeared first on TechRepublic.
Telephony is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, being able to talk to people in far off places is kind of neat, at least in theory. On the other hand, you’re usually reliant on a centralized network, which isn’t ideal to the mindset of most hackers.[Gautam]’s MeshLive project deals with that last one, offering a decentralized mesh network solution based on Bluetooth for Android phones that can handle both voice and video.
Rather than relying on dedicated hardware, this particular mesh piggybacks on your phone, and exists only as an Android application. Calls are end-to-end encrypted for both voice and video — though two-way video calling is still experimental. More testing has gone into video broadcasting, where a stream goes out one-way. The capability is available for voice, as well.
Each user has a unique identifier that can be scanned to create contacts, but it isn’t otherwise clearly identifiable to everybody. You’ll only appear with a random name that changes every 15 minutes to other users in range who aren’t your contacts. Range is of course the Achilles heel of this project, since it’s using the Bluetooth hardware of ordinary smartphones. It’s possible to extend the range of Bluetooth significantly with the right hardware, but we imagine most folks aren’t carrying directional antennas around with them. While every phone does forward the signal to as many others as it can, it can only do so for about 20 meters.
Of course LoRa remains the protocol of choice for mesh networking, though it’s normally used for text messages only. We have seen voice packets over LoRa, but anything LoRa requires dedicated hardware while this only requires an app.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Oct. 19–23.
The post This Week in Tech: AI Agents Clock In as Apple Buyers Wait and IT Scrambles appeared first on TechRepublic.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Oct. 19–23.
The post This Week in Tech: AI Agents Clock In as Apple Buyers Wait and IT Scrambles appeared first on TechRepublic.
Buying a new router feels like a sure-fire way to fix a bad internet connection (even though a router that's new to you may not be new at all). But if your internet was alright before and you bought a new router and it's all gone downhill, you're not imagining it. It's completely possible for a new router to mess up your connection despite all that money you just spent on trying to improve it.
Wi-Fi is one of the best inventions in history, but also one of the worst. I have spent so many hours of my life troubleshooting Wi-Fi dead zones or spotty performance that the only devices in my home that use Wi-Fi are those that absolutely need to.
UniFi hardware earns loyalty from people who want control over their networks. Yet your gateway, switches, and access points may be talking to Ubiquiti’s servers more often than you’d expect. Here’s what gets sent, why, and how to rein it in.
At the 2026 OCP Global Summit, Nvidia opened up its Vera Rubin rack designs, released open-source AI factory software, and announced plans with Cisco for a new pluggable-optics specification. Here's why openness has become a scaling requirement, and what IT pros should do about it.
The post Nvidia’s OCP Moves Highlight How Openness Can Help Scale AI appeared first on TechRepublic.
At the 2026 OCP Global Summit, Nvidia opened up its Vera Rubin rack designs, released open-source AI factory software, and announced plans with Cisco for a new pluggable-optics specification. Here's why openness has become a scaling requirement, and what IT pros should do about it.
The post Nvidia’s OCP Moves Highlight How Openness Can Help Scale AI appeared first on TechRepublic.
Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!
Some of you have already seen the headlines about malware calling out to AI APIs. Recently, Talos found a Windows implant called CLOSEDQUORUM that leaves its tactical command and control decisions to a panel of commercial LLMs while the operator sleeps. Malware like that doesn’t leave the traces we’re used to hunting. Now you find prompt templates, provider endpoints, API key prefixes, jailbreak wording and sometimes text written to talk an AI sandbox out of flagging the file. Talos calls these cognitive artifacts and developers who wire an LLM into their tooling leave some behind.
Cisco Talos built a free research tool called CAIRN. The name is a metaphor. A cairn is a pile of stones hikers leave on a trail so the next person can see where to go. CAIRN looks for the same kind of marker inside malware that talks to AI. It works from metadata, which means you never download the sample and you never run it. Keep in mind, it needs a VirusTotal API. It sorts what it finds into three tiers, from a simple AI string match, to behavior and families. It also clusters samples that look alike even when they don’t share an obvious string.
CAIRN is a research tool and not a live threat feed. It shows us where hackers are heading.
Let’s set it up and cover some basic commands.
We start by copying the repository and installing the python libraries.
Loginkali > git clone https://github.com/Cisco-Talos/Cognitive-Artifact-Intelligence-Research-Network.git
kali > cd Cognitive-Artifact-Intelligence-Research-Network
kali > python -m venv .venv
kali > source .venv/bin/activate
kali > pip install -e ".[dev]"
The env file needs VirusTotal API.
kali > cp .env.example .env
kali > nano .env
Once it’s there, you can start with some basic commands.
The first thing we do is open the YARA file that ships with CAIRN and check that it is readable and put together the way the tool expects. If it prints a rule count and says the pack is valid, the rulers are loaded. You run it after install or after you edit a rule, so you know the next hunt will not fail because the rule file is broken.
kali > cairn validate-rules
Next we print the list of saved VirusTotal searches that come with CAIRN. We will use these names in the following command. The command only reads a config file on disk.
kali > cairn filters
Each name on that list is a hunt idea you can use, like Python files that mention an LLM library, or files that mention a hosted API.
kali > cairn pull --filter python-ai-scripts --limit 10Next, you can summarize the findings. It reads only your database and tells you how many files you got and what rules were in use.
kali > cairn summarizeWe can then open the map.
kali > cairn explore
Here is how the clusters look like. Samples are grouped into clusters even when they share no obvious string overlap. These are semantic discoveries that analyze the meaning.
Let’s take a look at the new developments in malware that were published by Cisco Talos. Their team was analyzing CLOSEDQUORUM.
They say it’s the first publicly documented Windows implant to apply this model to tactical command and control (C2). After it’s deployed, it uses AI models to decide what to do next and then executes their collective decision to harvest user credentials and crypto wallets. It doesn’t need a human to be ruling over the process, as the AI does everything.
Traditional C2 architecture needs the hackers to have server infrastructure. That infrastructure is attributable and blockable. Instead of this, CLOSEDQUORUM calls up to four commercial LLM provider endpoints used by thousands of legitimate applications daily.
Here is how it looks decompiled.
You see the providers, models and prompts.
Hackers also may give detailed technical prompt templates. Here TARGET: %s is substituted at runtime.
The response is then deserialized into a Go struct.
Structure of the returned model’s decision.
Malware that calls out to AI is already here. There’s no server to attribute or block, since the traffic goes to provider endpoints that legitimate apps hit all day. Now we also hunt for cognitive artifacts like prompt templates, provider endpoints, API key prefixes and jailbreak wording. CAIRN helps with that by working from VirusTotal metadata, so you never download or run the sample. It groups findings by AI strings, behavior and families and clusters similar samples by meaning. It shows us where hackers are heading, and they’re heading toward AI doing the thinking for them.
If you like Malware Analysis and want to improve your skills in this field, sign up for our Reverse Engineering Malware training.
The post Malware Analysis: Analyzing AI-Backed Malware with CAIRN first appeared on Hackers Arise.
Inside a sprawling former industrial building just a chip shot from the Lake Washington Ship Canal, a Seattle tech veteran and his longtime friend are building the kind of golf and social sanctuary that they feel modern Seattle is missing.
Founded by tech veteran Shankar Sundaram, a former Boeing engineer and enterprise sales leader, alongside co-founder Ryan Schaffer, a University of Washington grad who also worked at Boeing, East West Club aims to reimagine the traditional country club.
Inspired by the multi-generational Indian household Sundaram grew up in as well as the close-knit neighborhood clubs of his East Coast youth, the name East West is a nod to bridging those traditional cultural values of family, community, and hospitality with a modern Pacific Northwest lifestyle.
The ultimate goal is to create a “third place” centered around genuine, family-friendly connection rather than corporate networking or status.
“A lot of the clubs in Seattle are a little bit older and maybe just built for a different time, for a different demographic, and we’ve changed,” Sundaram told GeekWire during a tour of the space this week at 10 Dravus St. in the Queen Anne neighborhood. “We don’t have six hours to go spend at a country club. We also don’t have $100,000 to go join.”
The vision for East West Club is starting to take shape across multiple indoor and outdoor spaces in what used to be a metal fabrication studio run by the late artist David Gulassa.
Spread across nearly 8,000 square feet between two buildings, the space retains its industrial roots with exposed timber beams, rich wood accents, and high concrete walls. Heavy construction on the primary building hasn’t started yet as the team awaits final permits from the city, but once built out, the footprint will feature a “golf lab” with wide indoor simulator bays and 500 square feet of digital putting space, alongside a private 19-foot immersive simulator bay.
The broader plan includes a quiet library lounge, a pour-your-own-beer wall, a café area, and a back-alley wellness nook featuring dry saunas and red-light therapy.
Sundaram, who is married to Armoire founder and CEO Ambika Singh, wants the club to serve as a convenient, family-friendly extension of members’ homes — a place where people can drop in for an hour rather than committing an entire day.
“We want you to bring as many people as you want,” Sundaram said. “We want you to host meetings here. We want you to actually come here and do your work here.”
East West Club will also function as an events space, where members can come together for curated gatherings, tastings, music, workshops, speaker events and more.
Rather than building out a full commercial restaurant, the club plans to rely heavily on local neighborhood partnerships. Sundaram is leaning on friends for advice on the café and coffee setup and talking to neighborhood spots about possible daily fare, alongside monthly curated dinners hosted by guest chefs.
“A big part of the vision for East West is to use the club as a platform to bring together some of the best of Seattle — partnering with great local restaurants, chefs, wineries, breweries, golf and fitness professionals, and other people doing interesting things around the city,” Sundaram said. “We want the experience to constantly evolve and give members new reasons to come together.”
To fund the buildout, Sundaram and Schaffer are opting for a community-driven bootstrap model rather than taking on heavy debt or institutional equity. They are capping their initial “founder” cohort at 100 members, asking early adopters to buy in upfront.
For the first tier of 25 founding members, a $25,000 buy-in covers four years of all-inclusive family membership, along with a $450 quarterly food and beverage credit. The early bet appears to be paying off: after launching a simple waitlist on LinkedIn three months ago that drew 120 sign-ups, Sundaram invited an initial batch of 14 people to tour the unfinished space three weeks ago — and 13 of them committed on the spot.
“These early folks are taking the biggest risk,” Sundaram said. “Prepaying for something is not very common… but we’re funding this through getting 75 to 100 founders. The total club capacity is 250 people, so the idea is, if every founder goes and gets two people, that’s the club.”
Subsequent founder tiers will gradually increase in price, and once the club opens its doors — targeted for March 2027 — the model will shift to standard initiation fees and monthly dues.
Members won’t have to wait until 2027 to start gathering, either. The team plans to open a temporary “Founders Clubhouse” to early members by the end of September, kicking off a full calendar of social programming, tastings, and events throughout October — including an Oct. 11 open house — while construction proceeds on the other spaces.
If the Queen Anne location reaches its 250-member capacity, Sundaram and Schaffer already have eyes on scaling the concept, perhaps with an Eastside location.
While indoor simulator technology is a core anchor of the space, Sundaram noted that golf is not the sole prerequisite for joining. Roughly half of the initial 14 founding members who signed up do not even play golf, seeing value instead in having a neighborhood spot to host friends, throw parties, or watch sports.
For those who do want to hit the virtual links, the club plans to partner with local instructors for lessons and youth programs, but the broader design caters as much to casual socializing as it does to perfecting a swing.
When asked about competition, Sundaram points out that East West Club isn’t trying to compete with commercial entertainment chains like Five Iron Golf or high-end, pure-play golf training centers like Evergreen Golf Club.
“If you just want to go hit up a sim and go have a burger and fries, there’s lots of spaces for that,” Sundaram said. “In the city, there’s nothing that’s like this. Golf is the glue, but nobody else is really bringing in this modern aesthetic.”
Keep scrolling for more artist renderings of the planned spaces at East West Club:
