If we care to cast an eye over the history of ubiquitous personal computing as we know it today, we might immediately point at the original IBM PC. After all, for most of us our machines share backward compatibility in some form through multiple generations back to that original box from 1981.
But if we look at the things we use today and take for granted, from laser printers to graphics cards to the routers which power most of the Internet, they’re not from IBM at all. At the recent Vintage Computing Festival Berlin, [Michael Engel] delivered a talk naming a surprising progenitor for much of that technology, none other than Sun Microsystems.
It all starts with [Andy Bechtolsheim], famously Sun’s co-founder, when at the end of the 1970s he was a postgraduate at Stanford University. Working on the Stanford University Network — SUN — project he designed a computer to be used as a workstation on the network. The processor of choice then was Motorola’s 68000, but it lacked the MMU that would be required to run UNIX. His design had an MMU implemented externally to the 68000, with a bank of SRAM serving as the page table. This design would form the CPU board of the first Sun workstation.
The story might end there, were it not that many other companies had the same requirement, and Sun could supply them a CPU board. Silicon Graphics, the distant ancestral progenitor of your GPU, was one of them, so the first SGI workstation also had the same CPU as the first Sun. It appeared in the early Imagen laser printers too, as well as commercial AppleTalk to Ethernet bridges. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that because the original Stanford board had also been used as a router, the software for that became part of Cisco’s first product.
The video is below the break, and it’s a fascinating watch.
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.
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.
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.
What is CAIRN
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.
Setting Up
We start by copying the repository and installing the python libraries.
kali > 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.
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 10
Next, 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 summarize
We can then open the map.
kali > cairn explore
Source: Cisco Talos
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.
Source: Cisco Talos
Malware That Uses AI
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.
Source: Cisco Talos
You see the providers, models and prompts.
Source: Cisco Talos
Hackers also may give detailed technical prompt templates. Here TARGET: %s is substituted at runtime.
Source: Cisco Talos
The response is then deserialized into a Go struct.
Source: Cisco Talos
Structure of the returned model’s decision.
Summary
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.
Historian Margaret O’Mara, journalist Jonathan Weber, and GeekWire’s John Cook at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, recording a joint episode of the GeekWire and Blue City Blues podcasts with David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Tech remade Seattle and San Francisco over the past three decades, bringing jobs and wealth along with soaring housing costs and a political backlash. Now the AI boom is hitting both cities, before either has resolved the tensions that have repeatedly divided their communities.
That’s the subject of this week’s GeekWire Podcast, a live joint taping with the Blue City Blues podcast at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle. GeekWire co-founder John Cook joins historian Margaret O’Mara, author of “The Code,” and San Francisco journalist Jonathan Weber, author of “City on the Edge,” with Blue City Blues hosts David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the conversation.
The tech industry’s conflicts in Seattle and San Francisco began when the industry moved out of the suburbs and into the middle of both cities.
Silicon Valley grew up 30 to 40 miles south of San Francisco, and Microsoft built a suburban campus in Redmond that O’Mara called “its own kind of bubble far away from the city.”
When Weber arrived in San Francisco in 1990 to cover Silicon Valley for the Los Angeles Times, he said, “there was essentially no tech in the city at all.” That changed with the dot-com boom, which brought the first backlash in San Francisco’s Mission District in the late 1990s.
In Seattle, a similar shift happened with Amazon’s move to South Lake Union, starting in 2010. John said Amazon was “most perfectly positioned” at its earlier headquarters on Beacon Hill, southeast of downtown Seattle, “completely isolated from the rest of the city.”
“When things really shifted for Amazon is when they decided to plant themselves in the middle of the city,” John said. “Then things accelerate, and then these problems start to come in, and Amazon starts to get blamed.”
From left: Blue City Blues hosts David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik, historian Margaret O’Mara, journalist Jonathan Weber and GeekWire co-founder John Cook during the live podcast taping at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
The tech industry grew up in an era of low taxes and light regulation, and that’s baked into its business model.
O’Mara pointed to 1978, when California voters passed Proposition 13, which capped property taxes and “essentially starved localities of revenue,” she said. Personal computers and video games were taking off in that same era. “Silicon Valley’s kind of grown up in that world,” she said.
In Seattle, John said, Amazon’s view was that it was doing enough by bringing jobs to the city, while the city’s progressive leaders wanted more as prices rose. “Those two philosophies just collided in Seattle in real time,” he said.
Cities have limited leverage, Weber said. “A company can move two miles and avoid whatever taxes the city wants to impose.”
Seattle’s tech and business leaders, unhappy with the city’s political leadership, are organizing to fill the gap themselves.
Asked whether tech leaders think they’ve been getting good leadership from Seattle’s mayors, John said, “Short answer: No.” Businesses feel they’re paying a growing list of new taxes, he said, without seeing results on basics like potholes and clean streets.
In recent months, business figures including Microsoft’s Brad Smith, former Gov. Chris Gregoire and Joe Nguyen of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce have started forming coalitions and pooling their resources. “They’re going on offense,” John said. “They feel there’s a vacuum and a gap here based on this lack of political leadership.”
John said one of a mayor’s big jobs is to be “the chief cheerleader of the region and the city,” and Seattle’s recent mayors haven’t done it.
Weber said San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has made that role a big part of his success: “Even though he’s a billionaire, he comes across as kind of a regular San Francisco guy.”
“That’s kind of a regular San Francisco guy these days,” O’Mara quipped.
The audience at the National Nordic Museum for the joint taping of the GeekWire Podcast and Blue City Blues. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
San Francisco is the center of the AI boom, but Seattle and the Bay Area have always depended on each other more than they’ve competed.
Weber called San Francisco the undisputed capital of AI, as the home of OpenAI and Anthropic. The boom has brought so much wealth to the city, he said, that “there’s a mansion shortage.”
John said the gap between the two regions in venture funding for AI is “an astronomical difference.” But OpenAI and Anthropic have both opened engineering centers in the Seattle area, he said, hiring people who don’t want to leave.
Microsoft and Amazon both raised early money from Bay Area venture capitalists, O’Mara said.
John cited the longtime advice for Seattle founders: “Start your company and build your company in Seattle, raise your money in the Bay Area.” But Seattle has always run second to the Bay Area, John said, and that’s OK. “Who cares?” he said. “They are their own thing. We’re our own thing.”
The Gilded Age offers a precedent for putting guardrails on AI.
O’Mara compared the moment to the era of Carnegie and Rockefeller, when fast-growing industries overwhelmed a small U.S. government, and the regulation that followed still left room to make a lot of money.
Overemphasizing the novelty of AI, she said, “becomes a very convenient excuse not to regulate it.”
Weber said the AI debate is hard to read because most of the people in it are “talking their book,” with a business interest in the positions they take. The issue is arising, he said, at a time when “we essentially don’t have any national political leadership that’s able to deal with it.”
“So many things are indeed new,” O’Mara said, “but it doesn’t mean that nothing can be done.”
Both cities need to protect their quality of place, and tech itself can undermine it.
O’Mara said building a tech hub comes down to three things: capital, institutions such as research universities, and quality of place. Asked what Seattle and San Francisco should do differently over the next decade, she picked the third.
“This is not just making things nice for Amazon engineers getting paid $300,000 a year,” O’Mara said. “It is making the city safe, vital and fun.”
Weber said tech threatens that sense of place, because people who can shop, meet and find entertainment online don’t need the city in the same way. In San Francisco’s traditional nightlife districts, he said, there’s little going on after 9 p.m., while the city’s caterers and party planners are busy. “A lot of social life has moved indoors into private spaces,” he said.
To which John joked, “I just want to enjoy San Francisco in the metaverse.”
The Doolan-Larson House and Storefronts in San Francisco, a potential future KEXP location. (SF Heritage Photo / Alvis E. Hendley)
Seattle independent radio station KEXP is exploring the possibility of building out a second physical home — far from its beloved base at Seattle Center — in San Francisco.
Three years after expanding its broadcast footprint to the Bay Area with the acquisition of 92.7 KREV FM, the non-profit music institution has set its sights on the city’s historic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for a potential site.
The early-stage plan for the landmark property envisions radio broadcast facilities, a roof venue for live performances and community events, space for group and individual music lessons, and a public “third space” intended for year-round daily gathering.
The proposed hub adds another twist to the long-standing cross-pollination between the two tech capitals. While Silicon Valley giants have routinely set up major engineering outposts in Seattle, and founders and workers migrate between the regions, KEXP’s expansion represents a rare cultural export heading in the opposite direction.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie cheered the proposal as a win for both the neighborhood and the city’s broader economic recovery.
“Art and music have been part of what makes San Francisco special for generations,” Lurie said in a statement. “Innovative partnerships like this one help us reimagine what’s possible and find new ways to activate our neighborhoods. Our artists and cultural spaces make our city stronger, and this new home for music and culture at Haight and Ashbury will inspire generations to come.”
Located at the epicenter of the 1960s counterculture movement, the Colonial Revival-style Doolan-Larson House was originally constructed in 1903 and raised after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to add ground-floor storefronts.
The property — designated San Francisco Landmark No. 253 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places — housed groundbreaking hippie-era boutiques during the Summer of Love. It was gifted to SF Heritage in 2017 by its long-time owner, the late Norman Larson, specifically to ensure the landmark would be preserved and activated for public and cultural use.
Bay Area band the Osees play a live show in the Gathering Space at KEXP in Seattle on Sept. 4. (KEXP Photo / Greg Chow)
Founded in 1972 as KCMU — a small, student-run station at the University of Washington — KEXP has spent over five decades building a global reputation for human-curated music discovery, famously becoming one of the first stations to champion the “Seattle sound” in the late 1980s.
The station’s Bay Area presence officially materialized in late 2023 when KEXP placed the winning $3.75 million bid at a bankruptcy auction to acquire commercial frequency 92.7 KREV FM (now KEXC). Funded by a portion of a $10 million bequest left by a anonymous long-time donor, the station began retransmitting its broadcast signal to Northern California in March 2024 as part of a strategy to ground its growing digital and streaming audience in key cultural markets.
In Seattle, KEXP’s physical hub at Seattle Center — itself a civic landmark — features a public Gathering Space that combines a coffee shop, record store, and live performance venue alongside its open-view DJ booth.
Translating a high-touch, human-centered physical experience into new markets is a core priority for the station: KEXP recently hired its first chief product and technology officer, former SiriusXM and Nordstrom executive Jyoti Shukla, to build digital products and physical spaces that intentionally prioritize human music curation over AI algorithms.
In a post on LinkedIn, KEXP CEO Ethan Raup said the response to the station’s arrival in the Bay Area “has been nothing short of remarkable” and that it gave KEXP “the confidence to start planning for our next big step.”
In its post on Thursday, KEXP stressed the plans are “not a done deal yet.” Over the coming months, SF Heritage, KEXP, and Blue Bear School of Music will focus on gathering community feedback, finalizing an adaptive reuse plan, and determining construction feasibility and project financing.
KEXP and Blue Bear representatives will make their first public outreach push at the Haight Ashbury Street Fair on Sunday to share more about the proposed project.
Frank X. Shaw addresses the media at Microsoft on May 18, 2025, in advance of the Build conference. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
It’s the end of an era at Microsoft: Frank X. Shaw, the executive who oversaw the tech giant’s communications for nearly three decades, first at an external agency and for the last 17 years as one of its senior leaders, is leaving at the end of the year.
Shaw, 64, said he’s not retiring, although he doesn’t have another job lined up. He plans to stop working for a while, do some of the things he hasn’t had time for, and then decide what’s next.
“I have had a ringside seat at some of the biggest leadership, technology, and business transformations that have ever taken place,” Shaw said, sharing the news of his departure (under embargo) in a phone call Thursday afternoon. “I just feel incredibly fortunate.”
He said he had been discussing his potential departure for some time with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, looking for the right moment.
Microsoft has not announced a successor for his role as chief communications officer. In a LinkedIn post, Shaw said the company will consider internal and external candidates.
A statement from Shaw’s colleagues in corporate communications credited him for his many years shaping Microsoft’s “voice and reputation with intelligence, candor and wit. His leadership and contributions to the company are too extensive to list, as is the number of journalists who have, at one point or another, used his name in vain.”
A former Marine Corps public affairs officer, Shaw has worked with all three of Microsoft’s CEOs. He started on the agency side, at Waggener Edstrom — now known as We. Communications — when Bill Gates was still running the company.
He built his reputation defending and advocating for Microsoft through some of its hardest stretches: the antitrust years, the Windows Vista backlash, the scramble to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO, and the weekend in 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman.
As the company’s top communications executive, he has also told the story of Microsoft’s reinvention under CEO Satya Nadella, from the LinkedIn and Activision Blizzard deals to an AI push that has carried Azure past $100 billion in annual revenue.
Evolving with technology: Shaw has spent much of his career closely watching the tech landscape and moving Microsoft’s voice into new channels as they emerged.
“We’re always thinking about what is the art and science of communications,” Shaw told PRWeek. “How do we reach our audiences most effectively in a changing environment?” He called the arc from print to radio and TV to social media and newsletters a “constant evolution of influence.”
He turned the corporate blog into a place where the company argued its own case, writing “Microsoft by the numbers” himself in 2010 — a stat-by-stat comparison against Apple and Google that TechCrunch dubbed “fantastic passive-aggressive.”
He and his team experimented with different and risky methods of telling the company’s story, holding mass briefings under embargo and publishing documents known as the “Book of News” in advance of its major keynotes and conferences. The prospect of a reporter having to answer to “fxs” was no doubt a factor in ensuring the news (mostly) didn’t leak.
Shaw hired Steve Clayton out of a technical role at Microsoft in London, where he had been blogging about the company unofficially out of frustration with how it was perceived, and made him chief storyteller. In the middle of the AI boom, Clayton and Shaw embraced the analog undercurrents in popular culture and launched Signal, a quarterly Microsoft print magazine for business leaders.
Clayton was VP of communications strategy by the time he left in January to become chief communications officer at Cisco, making Shaw’s planned departure the second high-profile exit from Microsoft’s comms team in a year.
Adapting to AI: In recent years, Shaw made his own team a testing ground for AI, publishing what worked and what didn’t. In a 2023 post he described using Copilot in Teams to pull story ideas out of conversations with spokespeople and anticipate coverage after interviews, and asking the AI to “poke holes in a statement we’re making on a tricky topic.”
He called it his corporal, a reference to Napoleon, who was said to bring one to meetings and ask whether his generals’ war plans made sense to him. A survey of 80 people in Microsoft’s communications and marketing organization found 84% did not want to go back to working without it.
Shaw was also known to use AI as a sounding board when a story frustrated him, offering him an objective take before he called and let a particular reporter have it.
He announced his departure Friday morning in a message to Microsoft’s communications team (reminding them he’s still there for a few months yet) and his public post on LinkedIn.
“Thank you as well to all the reporters, editors, writers, influencers and analysts who have put up with me over this time, enduring my early and late night calls, my off the record ‘no comments,’ my bad story ideas and my extended commentary on headlines and positioning,” he wrote.
“You all have incredibly hard and valuable jobs,” he added, “and while I’ve not agreed with everything said about us 😊 I appreciate you anyway.”
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