Apple finally has touchscreen laptops. At an event in Los Angeles, the company detailed its new MacBook Pros featuring OLED XDR displays that you can control with your fingers.

The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are available for pre-order now and will ship on Nov. 6. The 14-incher will start at $2,899, while the 16-incher will start at $3,399. The systems use Apple's existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and go up to 16TB of storage and 128GB of memory.

These systems also feature the first redesigns for the MacBook Pro since 2021, when the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched in what has become a familiar design with a notch. These new models include the Dynamic Island around the webcam, similar to the iPhone, which can be used for real-time notifications. They also have light-up Apple logos, which we haven't seen on a MacBook Pro since 2016.

The PROLED XDR display comes in 14.2-and 16.3-inch sizes, with ProMotion allowing for refresh rates between 10 Hz and 120 Hz. Apple claims 2,000 nits of peak brightness and a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio for intensely deep blacks.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro is 3 pounds, about half a pound less than the existing version, while the 16-inch MacBook Pro is 4 pounds, or 0.7 pounds lighter than it was before. Apple's bezels are also less noticeable than before. The hinge seems to be a point of pride (that's the second time this month, after the iPhone Duo). In this case, it's that the screen is less prone to wobble when you touch it.

The new laptops are only slightly thinner than their predecessor. Apple claims that the 16-inch model is "nearly a millimeter thinner" and the 14-incher is "half a millimeter thinner." Apple attributes those shavings to OLED's display stack.

Apple's own apps are already set to work with touch out of the box, and the company says many other apps will already work right away, including Notion, Canva, Zoom, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, and more.

Apple already had the best speakers in a laptop, and now it's promising improvements: 50% deeper bass and new tweeters for clearer sound. There's even dedicated audio tuning for people who want to use the speakers with their laptop lid closed.

The significant change to the Mac is another in a flurry of launches for new CEO John Ternus, who also recently introduced the iPhone 18 Pro; the foldable iPhone Duo; Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4; HomeView; and a new iPad Mini, also with an OLED panel.

The devices follow a long resistance to touchscreen laptops from Apple. Former CEO Steve Jobs, at an event introducing Mac OS X Lion in 2010, called laptops with touchscreens "ergonomically terrible", claiming that "after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off." (HomeView, Apple's smart home manager, has a vertical touchscreen and no one has made a peep about that. The iPad, too, has been vertical on Apple's keyboards, though some of those include touchpads as well).

The Mac resisted a touchscreen throughout former CEO Tim Cook's tenure, as well, though these new laptops definitely were developed under his leadership. In the last decade, touchscreens have become a common feature on laptops running Windows, and Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 11, was designed to be slightly more touch-friendly than its predecessors.

Malaysian customs have seized over $12 million (49.5 million Malaysian ringgit) worth of advanced AI chips in a single bust, as the country clamps down on a suspected semiconductor smuggling syndicate. According to a Reuters report on October 28, officials found 30 servers containing the chips at Kuala Lumpur International Airport’s free trade zone on October 15th. Initial investigations revealed that the shipment originated in an Asian country and was bound for another undisclosed Asian country.

The airport’s customs director, Aspalila Ag Tuah, confirmed that the servers were falsely declared as ordinary electronic goods, saying the suspected scheme used Malaysia as a transit point to avoid restrictions on the goods’ onward movement. The Malaysian company involved in the shipment has been summoned to assist in the investigation.

Authorities suspect that the foiled smuggling attempt was carried out by the same group responsible for a similar attempt last June. On June 5, customs officers discovered 72 server units containing advanced AI chips at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, valued at approximately $13 million. This shipment had also been falsely declared as computer components and was meant to be reshipped without the required permit. Aspalila said the network has been linked to seizures worth over $25 million so far across at least five cases. She declined to provide further information on the network or the current case, citing ongoing investigations.

Several key facts remain unknown, including the chip type, country of manufacture, final destination, and intended recipient — whether a company or a military organization. The U.S. had placed export controls on the movement of advanced Nvidia and other U.S.-origin AI chips to China, the most likely destination for the seized chips. Smuggling networks began using Malaysia, a U.S. ally not affected by the controls, as a hub, exporting the banned chips to the country before re-exporting them to China.

While the country’s geographic location and mature logistics infrastructure make it important for legitimate international trade, these characteristics also make it ideal for smuggling sensitive technology. To restrict this avenue, Malaysia subsequently imposed export controls on the ​movement of advanced AI chips of U.S. origin, at Washington’s request. Other Asian U.S. allies, such as Singapore and Taiwan, have implemented similar controls. Demand for powerful Nvidia GPUs remains high in China, fueling a booming market for smuggled hardware.

HP, Asus, and Acer have reportedly moved some of their manufacturing capacity back into China as increasing component costs — driven by AI — bite into their margins. According to Nikkei Asia, increasing bill-of-materials costs have made China’s experienced workforce, relatively lower prices, and established supply chain ecosystem a more attractive option. However, they are not going back to traditional suppliers like Foxconn, who have focused their production capacity on AI data centers. Instead, they’re signing contracts with smaller Chinese contract manufacturers, like Luxshare, Huaqin Technology, and Longcheer Technology, that are trying to establish themselves in PC manufacturing.

Many PC brands slowly moved out of China in 2024 and 2025 as the U.S.’s sanctions and tariffs on China have increased prices and forced them to find friendlier nations. While these nations do not have established supply chains and expertise like China, it at least spreads the risk as manufacturers avoid getting caught up in geopolitical tensions.

However, it seems that rising component prices have forced them to move back some of their capacity into China. The biggest culprit is the AI-induced memory and storage chip shortage, which has caused memory prices to climb an unprecedented 500% in 12 months. More than that, other parts like PCBs and fiberglass cloth used in motherboard manufacturing are seeing increasing prices, which Acer chairperson and CEO Jason Chen bemoaned as suppliers hyping shortage fears to protect margins.

While tech companies aren’t abandoning their “China+1” diversification strategy, the mature industry in China is helping offset increased component costs. Aside from that, the Chinese contract manufacturers often have better access to memory chips from domestic manufacturers like CXMT. "These Chinese contract manufacturers have been telling potential clients and computer makers that working with them could be a good option for securing better access to Chinese-made memory chips," a supply chain manager in the computer ecosystem told Nikkei Asia. "They are marketing themselves as a good alternative to even help sort out the supply chain."

Moving back some manufacturing capacity into China is easing some of PC manufacturers’ cost concerns, but it’s also negatively impacting the newly established supply chains in Southeast Asia. "We built two new production lines in Thailand for the PC clients, and now they are moving substantial orders back to China,” one manager at a PC component supplier told the publication. “Those two lines have not yet turned profitable, and I don't know when they will add the orders back."

Unfortunately, building an entire supply chain for PC manufacturing is slow and expensive. The U.S. has been trying to accomplish this for years, and, so far, only Anduril has attempted to build laptops with 90% of its component costs coming from the U.S. and other allied countries. Even then, it expects its devices to be around 20% more expensive than the competition, which it could afford by offering them mostly to critical industries that demand supply chain security, like the government and the military. But if you’re a PC manufacturer vying for customers in the consumer market, you’re likely incentivized to find the lowest possible costs to be able to compete in pricing.

Amazon wants its engineers to quit chasing token counts, warning that heavy AI usage does not automatically mean better work. In updated engineering guidelines published on October 27, the company laid out how developers and managers should gauge AI’s real impact — and the takeaway is blunt: consuming more tokens is not the same as delivering more value. Amazon is not backing away from the technology, though. “We are certain that whatever future best practices are, AI will be at the center of software engineering practice,” the company wrote.

The guidance targets ‘tokenmaxxing,’ a practice where employees deliberately inflate their AI usage to look productive on internal dashboards. According to the memo, metrics such as AI adoption rates, token consumption, code changes, and code reviews become ‘deeply flawed’ when they are disconnected from actual results. Turning them into targets, Amazon says, encourages wasteful behavior that clashes with its emphasis on ‘frugality and simplicity’ and can raise both compute bills and software complexity.

The company’s preferred yardstick is long-term results. “We believe that it is best to measure, and be measured by, long-term outcomes,” Amazon wrote. That does not mean managers should ignore usage data altogether, as input metrics remain useful when examined ‘with care and judgment’ alongside other indicators. Amazon suggests looking at both the teams using AI the least and those using it the most to determine whether adoption is translating into better delivery.

The push comes as Amazon, under CEO Andy Jassy, has been weaving AI deeply into its sprawling operations. Jassy said earlier this year that the technology will ‘change the scope and speed’ of everyday work, and he has suggested that automation could shrink the company’s corporate workforce over the next few years — though he also expects it to create ‘other jobs.’

The memo also pushes back on the idea that every task needs an AI tool. If current tooling does not benefit someone’s work, Amazon says, that is ‘a finding, not a failing.’ Engineers who can explain where today’s tools fall short are demonstrating judgment rather than reluctance to adopt AI.

In May, it emerged that Amazon employees were using AI unnecessarily to boost internal usage scores, amid pressure to use the company's tools. Workers reportedly used MeshClaw, an internal AI agent capable of handling tasks such as deploying code and interacting with Slack, to inflate their token counts.

Notably, Amazon is not the only company rethinking how it spends on AI. Uber president and COO Andrew Macdonald said in May that higher token usage has yet to translate into useful consumer features. “That link is not there yet,” he said. The remark stands out because Uber’s CTO previously revealed that the company had burned through its entire 2026 Claude Code budget by April.

Accenture appears to also be wrestling with the same problem on behalf of its clients. Leaked audio obtained by 404 Media in June captures executives acknowledging that token spending is climbing fast as companies move from simple chatbots to agentic workflows, and that nobody can reliably predict what a given task will cost or whether it was worth the money. Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead described it as ‘not a niche problem,’ and the firm is reportedly building an advisory tool called ‘Token IQ’ to help customers manage the bill. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously acknowledged that AI token costs had become 'a huge issue', as companies faced mounting bills from heavy AI use.

Amazon, however, says it has not imposed token caps on its employees. According to CNBC, however, it shut down an internal leaderboard in May after workers were found gaming it to climb the rankings — an early example of the behavior the new guidelines are meant to discourage.

TP-Link has been trying everything in its power to gain conditional approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). According to a new Bloomberg report, the FCC is citing discrepancies in power levels in TP-Link routers as the latest roadblock on its path to selling new Wi-Fi 8 products stateside.

In letters dated October 15, 2026, the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology made some damning claims about TP-Link's reporting practices. Specifically, the FCC alleged that TP-Link "included false or incorrect information in its applications” related to equipment authorizations for four individual router models (including high-end Archer models).

For a company that truly needs to dot every "i" and cross every "t" when it comes to a Trump administration that is increasingly skeptical of TP-Link's past ties and motives, any perceived missteps are even more magnified. However, in addition to the alleged wonky product information provided to the FCC, perhaps more troubling is that three of the four routers under scrutiny also had higher-than-allowed power usage levels.

In addition to power limits, the FCC's testing regimen for routers includes evaluations of electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), radio frequency (RF) emissions, and national security compliance. The latter has been a big sticking point with the FCC and the U.S. Department of Defense given the proliferation of TP-Link networking gear in civilian and governmental capacities.

We reached out to TP-Link about the FCC’s findings and were provided with the following statement:

"Routine spot checks have been a standard FCC practice across the consumer electronics industry for many years, and individual product test results can occasionally vary.

TP-Link Systems fully supports the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology and its role of ensuring that all manufacturers adhere to prescribed specifications for their certified products. We remain fully committed to working collaboratively with the FCC to resolve any technical questions that arise — and if necessary, address any confirmed technical issues as swiftly as possible."

It will likely take a lot more convincing to appease the FCC, which has so far given TP-Link the cold shoulder. And it’s not just the FCC; members of Congress and multiple state attorneys general have filed their grievances with TP-Link over alleged consumer privacy violations and Chinese ties.

For its part, TP-Link has made some significant moves to get in the good graces of the U.S. government, even while competitors like Amazon, Asus, and Netgear have sailed through compliance checks to gain conditional approval to sell wireless products in the U.S. Besides moving its U.S. headquarters to California, the company earlier this month announced a $1 billion joint venture with Key Tronic to manufacture Wi-Fi 8 routers in the U.S.

Fractal arguably kicked off the wood accent PC trend with the North line, and the company says its new Summit case is built for “...expressive, high-performance systems combining distinctive Scandinavian design and advanced cooling potential.” The chassis sports FSC-certified wood (timber verified to come from responsibly managed, socially beneficial, and economically viable forests) for details like the front surround and solid wood feet. There’s no doubt it’s a good-looking case, but if you want to show off the wood, you’ll want to stick to the Chalk White or Black versions, as it blends in with the Blackout SKU we tested.

Corsair’s latest case, the Warthog, is a military-inspired chassis that resembles a fuel canister (jerry can) you’d see on military vehicles. Based loosely on the Vengeance C70 case from 2012, which looked more like an ammunition container, the new Warthog evolved into a much better-looking, more functional chassis for today’s hardware in either of the two colorways.

The Warthog does resemble its predecessor, and Corsair borrowed some features from the C70 while updating the design with “...even more rugged exterior, significantly more expansion options, and an emphasis on excellent airflow throughout the chassis,” and the company largely succeeded.

The Warthog updates include the InfiniRail Fan Mounting System for flexible fan mounting, a pegboard motherboard tray for custom cable management, room for today’s massive video cards (plus built-in GPU support), and three mounting locations for 360mm radiators and 13 120mm fans. It even has bump guards on the front I/O for that all-in military aesthetic. The fighter jet-style front IO includes USB ports, one fast USB 3.2 Gen2x2 (20 Gbps) Type-C port, plus an on/off button for a unique integrated light on the back of the case that illuminates the rear IO area and down.

If you’re into the military look, the Corsair Warthog ($179) and Warthog RS ($199 with fans) absolutely nails it, with plenty of other features that make it a compelling mid-tower chassis. We'll cover more details inside and outside the chassis, showcasing the features and any issues we encounter during the build. We'll also run the case through thermal and noise testing to show how it performs compared to others and whether it could make our best PC cases list. Below are the case's specifications from Corsair.

Corsair Warthog Product Specifications

Features of the Warthog

▶️ External Features

Externally, the Warthog doesn’t look like many other cases. Sure, it has the general shape of a classic mid-tower, but the front and windowed panel break up the monotony we’re used to, with bars resembling a fuel tank breaking up the window pane and front of the chassis. The front and side panels also use Corsair’s steel 3D-Y perforations (also found on the 4000) for increased airflow, and they look different from most other cases. It also has a military-inspired front I/O, sturdy built-in steel handles, and the familiar army olive drab color (it also comes in black). It just screams military industrial design.

Looking more closely at the front of the case, we get a better view of the door that covers the front panel fans. We get a close-up of the contrasting black 3D-Y perforations, which not only look better than the typical circular holes, but are said (by Corsair) to allow 12% better airflow. Next to the red handle, Corsair stamps the model WX-01 in white on a thin crossmember in the upper-right corner (it’s WX-02 for the black SKU). Pull the red tab on the left, and it opens via two hinges on the right, revealing the magnetically attached dust filter.

At the bottom of the front panel is the fighter-jet-inspired I/O panel, complete with bump guards and a flip-up cover over the reset button. On flight control panels, the guards prevent accidental activation of critical or dangerous switches. A flip-up toggle would be cool here, too. Port-wise, it has everything you could want. On the left is a 3.5mm audio jack for headphones and a microphone. Next to it is the recessed power light that glows red when powered on. Next to it is the USB 3.2 (20 Gbps) Type-C port. Between the bump guards are a square power button, the cool flip-up reset button, and the light button. All buttons feel solid under my fingers and not wobbly or cheap. On the right are two USB 3.2 (5 Gbps) Type-A ports. What’s here is typical fare, but it looks a lot cooler than most front IOs.

The tempered-glass side panel doesn’t offer a full view inside. Instead, diagonal, crossmember-like ribs break it into one main viewable area, with two smaller triangles at the ends. On military vehicles, this reinforces the weaker glass while still allowing visibility. On the Warthog, it just adds to the rugged look, and maybe lets you get away with a little less time managing cables — I kid, clean up those cables! The panel is secured to the frame with two tabs at the bottom and four ball-and-socket joints at the top, two on each side. Pull toward you at the top to release, then pull up to remove. Simple, and it felt secure.

The other side panel is solid, except for side venting. The venting matches the front and top panels with the 3D-Y pattern, but here it’s olive drab instead of the black we see everywhere else. Inside is another magnetically attached dust filter. The ‘service panel’ (stenciled in the upper-right corner) is secured the same way as the front, using tabs on the bottom and ball-and-socket joints on top.

At the top of the case, there’s not much to see—just more 3D-Y perforations for airflow. Many cases let you easily remove the top for easier access to the Infinirail fan/radiator mounts, and the Warthog does too. Loosen the thumbscrews on the back, remove both side panels, and pull the nylon strap.

Flipping the case around, we see the power supply sits at the bottom, and Corsair includes two captive screws for tooless mounting. Above it, seven vertical expansion slots offer plenty of room for large graphics cards and other expansion. The Warthog also supports vertical GPUs up to three slots wide, but you need a riser card accessory. Above that is space for up to a 140mm fan (120mm RS fan included for RS model), and to the left is the IO area. Corsair installed a small light above that shines down on the rear of the case, illuminating the rear IO area and back of the case, which is certainly useful when plugging in cables.

On the bottom of the case, there isn’t too much going. The Warthog does have a removable dust filter that slides out from the windowed side of the chassis. I prefer this location because, if the filter pulls out from the rear, you'll likely need to move your heavy case to get it out.

▶️ Internal Features

Inside the case, we see a single-chamber design with visual separation only between the power supply area at the bottom and the rest of the case. You won’t find a fancy air guide to feed the video card, but we do spy the small (but effective) adjustable GPU support strut. Beyond that, there’s nothing special at first glance.

The motherboard tray has plenty of cutouts for wiring, but there isn’t much space to route connectors through. Sometimes you need to flex the frame a bit to get larger ones through, like the ATX connector. That’s not ideal, but it isn’t a big deal, even with a motherboard already mounted. The good news is there are no rubber grommets to pull through the holes. While we’re here, we also get a better look at the pegboard feature, which lets you custom-manage cables on the back side. For those planning to build a PC with rear-connect motherboards, the Warthog supports all of them (Asus BTF, Gigabyte Stealth, MSI Project Zero).

Looking at the front of the case from the inside, we see the massive pre-installed 200mm RS fans that come with the “RS” version of the chassis. Corsair says the magnetic half-dome-bearing fans spin up to 1,000 RPM and move up to 135 CFM of air at a low 36.5 dBA. They are quiet and move a fair amount of air. The front area supports up to 3x120mm fans or radiators.

Looking up at the ceiling from below, you'll see Corsair’s Infinirail system (also on the front, but hidden by the fans), which lets you slide and position fans and radiators where you need them. Although the case fits up to 3x120mm radiators here, they will protrude into the case and can cover the top of your motherboard in many cases. Be sure to mount your motherboard and connect the EPS plugs before you install a top radiator.

At the bottom rear, you can see the power supply area, along with space to route cables for any headers along the bottom of the motherboard. The bottom chamber is also vented into the rest of the chassis. It won’t radiate much heat, since the power supply draws filtered, cool air from below.

Opening up the other side of the chassis gives a better look at the side fan/rad mounts and the default cable-routing options. There is 50mm between the motherboard tray and the outside panel, which is plenty of room to route cables, even with reckless abandon. The pegboard motherboard tray, part of Corsair’s RapidRoute 2.0 cable management system, gives you plenty of freedom to move the cable-ratcheting strap mounts.

From the back, we can see the motherboard tray mounting for your SSD and HDDs. Corsair uses a combo drive plate connected via a thumbscrew. You can install two 2.5-inch drives and one 3.5-inch drive on the combo plate, which should be enough for most users in 2026. Note that to access the back of your motherboard (to mount a cooler, for example), you need to remove this combo plate.

Overall, I do like the look of this rugged, military-themed case, particularly in the olive drab colorway. The fighter jet-inspired front IO panel and jerry can-like look stand out among the played-out designs we’re used to, without looking like a failed attempt at abstract art. Inside, there’s plenty of room for components, even multiple radiators. That said, it is polarizing. Either you like the look, or you don’t. There isn’t much in between.

Test equipment, method, and results

Our thermal tests are presented to give you more information about the product’s performance, but aren’t intended as the sole basis for judging the chassis. You should also consider a case's style, price, features, and noise levels, and we all have different preferences. What I might like in a case, you might not, and that’s OK. Our goal with these reviews is to give everyone, regardless of their preferences, enough information to decide whether a case is right for them.

To get heat into the system, we stress the CPU with Cinebench R26 (multi-threaded test) and the video card with FurMark 2 (1080p). We run the CPU and GPU tests concurrently for 30 minutes, allowing the air-cooled system to reach saturation and stabilize. We then let the system idle for 15 minutes, adjust the fans to 100%, and test again.

Noise-normalized (42dBA) Maximum thermal Performance

This set of tests is designed for those who love quiet PCs, with both system fans and the CPU fan noise normalized to 42 dBA. Consider this a measure of the case’s thermal efficiency when noise levels are set to run quietly. It is audible, but just (at least for my old ears).

Noise-normalized performance landed on the better side of our results so far, with the CPU averaging 89 degrees Celsius in our testing. The video card temperatures were the worst we’ve seen so far, by a couple of degrees, which is surprising considering the air flow out of the box. The open-air front doesn’t block much sound, so we had to run our fans a bit slower than in other cases. Obviously, the case would perform better with the full complement of fans, or at least some exhaust on top, but I'm confident it can handle high-end hardware and keep it cool while staying relatively quiet.

Maximum thermal performance - fans at full speed

Our noise-normalized results are for those who prefer silence, but what if you don’t mind extra noise and just want maximum performance, or you have to run things at high settings to keep high-powered devices cool? This testing is for you. Obviously, when you add fans or an AIO up top, things will change a bit, but this gives you a great idea of ‘out-of-the-box’ performance, noise be damned.

After turning the fans up to 100%, temperatures dropped five degrees Celsius on the CPU and a very good 12 degrees on the video card. Again, once you populate the top of the chassis with fans or an AIO to get more airflow, results will improve even more. But the GPU cooled down considerably here, and the processor temperatures were more in line with the rest.

Maximum Noise Levels

We measure noise levels with a sound meter one meter away from the computer case, with the pre-installed fans running at maximum RPM. If a case does not have enough included fans for airflow (intake and exhaust) as configured, we add a Cooler Master M120 ARGB, since we expect most users will add at least one more fan in situations like these.

The loudest this case gets in our configuration was only 51 dBA, nine dBA above our baseline threshold, a middling result among our current data points, and matching the Corsair 3200D and Fractal Summit. The huge RS200 fans produced no harsh tones or vibrations and stayed quiet across the RPM range. The RS120 rear fan was the loudest of the included fans, but that’s expected compared to larger, slower-running devices anyway.

In short, we don’t see anything wrong with stuffing this case full of high-end hardware and pushing it. It may not be the quietest case around, but it has plenty of airflow potential, along with flexibility and room for almost any hardware.

Conclusion

Corsair’s Warthog case is one of the more unique-looking mid-tower chassis we’ve seen, while still fitting the general shape of a tower-style case. The military aesthetic really stands out in the olive drab sample we tested, but the black is a bit more subtle. The fighter-jet front IO panel, with bump guards and a flip-up reset button, is a nifty addition that really sells the military theme. The Warthog starts at $179, and the RS version with three included fans is $199; it’s not cheap. But if you like the rugged military look, it’s worth the price.

As for thermal and acoustic performance, it’s not the coolest-running or quietest with the open-style front, but the case moves a fair amount of air with the included 200mm RS series fans populating the front of the chassis. As always, we recommend filling more available fan slots to increase airflow and cooling potential. Even with the pre-installed fans cranked, the noise wasn’t unbearable. Noise-normalized performance wasn’t the best, especially for the video card, but it won't hinder high-power systems that need lots of airflow to stay cool.

Overall, the Corsair Warthog is a bold and well-built case. Its rugged military look and fighter-jet-style IO make it stand out in a sea of boring cases, while offering plenty of room for fans and radiators. The Infinirail system and pegboard motherboard tray make installing fans and routing cables a lot easier. Just be aware that you can’t mount radiators in the front and side at the same time, and any radiator mounted in the side location will cover some of the front 200mm fans. Still, if the military aesthetic speaks to you, the Warthog is easy to recommend.

A team of around four dozen U.S. Marines is joining a NATO-led operation in the Baltic Sea to help protect undersea internet cables and gas pipelines in the area. In a press release, the U.S. Marine Corps shared its plans to deploy a "specialized team" to support NATO's Enhanced Vigilance Activity Baltic Sentry operation. The move comes amid a backdrop of growing undersea cable interest, movements of Russia's shadow fleet, and fears of sabotage.

The U.S. Marines are being sent from Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina to provide "advanced expeditionary surveillance and tactical reconnaissance capabilities" to the region in support of Finnish and other NATO allies. Marines from 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, and the II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group are joining the mission.

Capt. Johan Tillander, Chief of Operations for the Finnish Navy, explained that the "experience, skills, and systems of the U.S. Marine Corps are perfectly suited" for the operation, including "monitoring of the Baltic Sea."

While the press release stresses that the Marines are serving in a "supportive, enabling capacity," with European nations taking the lead, the Marines are there to provide "highly specialized, agile force multipliers."

Maj. Gen. Daniel Shipley, Commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Europe and Africa, shared that its participation shows its ability to "rapidly project specialized capabilities where they are most effective," and as a result, "ensuring we can operate seamlessly as a cohesive, lethal team to deter hybrid threats" in the area.

The U.S. deployment means that the operation will be able to "leverage... unique capabilities of Reconnaissance Marines, including small Unmanned Aerial Systems and littoral sensors, to feed vital data directly" to NATO.

The Baltic Sea is the frontline in potential assaults against European undersea infrastructure. Several attempts have been made to sabotage cables in the area, and two cables were cut between Finland, Sweden and Europe back in 2024. Meanwhile, Finland's own concerns about shadow fleet operations led it to set up a dedicated maritime surveillance center earlier this year to monitor activity in the Baltic Sea.

Russia isn't mentioned in the U.S. press release, but the authoritarian nation is one of Europe's biggest threats in the region, and has had worsening relations with European nations for several years, particularly since it went to war with Ukraine in 2022. Over 500 incidents of Russian fishing boats loitering near undersea cables in Europe have been seen in the last four and a half years, showing a persistence in mapping and identifying, if not directly interfering, with global data links in the area.

Solidigm, an American subsidiary of SK hynix, one of the biggest flash chip makers on the planet, is reportedly in talks with the Commerce Department over plans to invest $45 billion in a new plant to be built in the United States. But, Bloomberg reports, there's a catch — Solidigm wants to be given the go-ahead to export equipment to upgrade its existing plant in Dalian, China. The company has purportedly told officials that the upgrades would allow the Chinese plant to then help finance the cost of its U.S.-based counterpart, according to unnamed sources. It's as-yet unclear how the proposal was received, or whether the Commerce Department is inclined to agree to the deal.

The U.S. government has been keen to drive at-home manufacturing wherever possible, including for chips used in its computers and data centers. National security is regularly cited as a key reason behind the move. It's also the reason for the government's stance on exporting technologies to China, including the equipment that Solidigm says will help upgrade its Dalian plant. Similar export restrictions are in place for high-end AI data center components, with a black market having sprung up to take the place of sanctioned sales. Earlier this month, it was reported that some of Nvidia's powerful Blackwell Ultra B300 GPUs are being used in China Telecom data centers, with no explanation of how they got there. A 2025 report claimed that a cool $1 billion worth of Nvidia AI chips had been smuggled into China, a figure that is sure to have increased significantly as 2026 draws to a close.

In this case, Solidigm's planned Chinese factory upgrades could be mutually beneficial, allowing funds to be transferred to the new U.S. plant. But that requires the U.S. government to give it permission to ship the machinery in the first place, something that is far from guaranteed. The Dalian factory produces NAND flash memory, the likes of which are used in everything from relatively simple devices to full-blown data centers. It also comes at a time when global NAND production is a hot-button topic. Samsung and SK hynix are upgrading their Chinese factories to produce more of the chips used in AI data centers in an attempt to meet growing demand. Manufacturers have already slashed production of consumer-focused memory in favor of the more lucrative data center-grade components, causing prices to spike globally. This volatility in the market as a whole was given as one of the reasons SK hynix chose to cancel a planned Solidigm IPO earlier this week.

Beyond dangling a $45 billion plant, Solidigm has also allegedly told the Commerce Department that its total investment in U.S. manufacturing could reach $100 billion eventually, with construction in New York penciled in for 2027. The company is fresh from its latest earnings call, where it announced revenues of $75 billion with $60 billion in operating profit, and $28 billion in net. The company made no mention of its Dalian plant or a planned US investment, but did warn that memory shortages are set to last through 2030.

Spotting any kind of discount on storage as of late has been a bit of a monumental task, as the prices of HDDs and SSDs have only been going one way, and that's up. Seagate's 16TB Expansion Desktop External HDD is reduced to $399.99 at Newegg, a reduction of $150 from its $549.99 list price and $50 cheaper than its Prime Day price. Not only is that a bit of relief during turbulent storage times, but the price on this HDD is actually better than we saw during Prime Day earlier this month.

● Grab this external HDD deal at Newegg

The Seagate Expansion Desktop 16TB HDD is an all-in-one HDD and enclosure that offers a highly versatile plug-and-play solution for storing or backing up your precious data. Seagate ships the drive formatted to ExFAT, so it'll work with virtually any platform out of the box. Of course, you can reformat the drive to any other file system that suits your use case. This external drive has also been a popular choice for those looking to shuck the Hard Disk out of the enclosure and grab a cheaper HDD for use in a NAS or PC.

The Seagate enclosure has its own power supply, which you'll need to connect to a nearby mains socket, while using a USB 3.0 cable to connect the drive to your PC or laptop for easy drag-and-drop file transfers. Should anything happen to your drive causing it to fail, each purchase comes with Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery service included, just in case you need help to recover your data.

Shucking this drive comes with risks. There's no way to guarantee what version of Seagate HDD is inside; it might be an EXOS, or it might not. But what is guaranteed is that once you open the enclosure and start pulling drives out, your warranty becomes invalid.

If you're looking for 16TB of storage at prices cheaper than the last Prime Day, then today's Newegg deal on this Seagate Expansion Desktop HDD is one of the best storage deals currently on offer.

Over the past weeks and months, it's increasingly commonplace to encounter native PC ports of previously console-exclusive video games, developed with the help of frontier AI models and a new tool named Reverse Engineer Anything (REA). With dozens of titles ported to PC over the past few months, the big questions are: why is this now possible, and what changed?

The better-known conversions like Super Mario Galaxy and Modern Warfare 2 use AI agents, but their handlers mostly still had to interpret results and direct each step of the process. That's now much easier with Reverse Engineer Anything. Although it shows up in many conversations, REA doesn't do the heavy lifting by itself. It's actually a mix between a toolkit and agent harness, wiring together previously disparate tools under one ceiling.

REA analyzes and manages collected information tools: binary analyzers, decompilers, metadata tools, firmware images, database readers, and so on end up linked via agents. Those tools are made available to your AI agent of choice, along with skill files with additional instructions.

Simplistic as it may sound, it's the glue that once again significantly cuts down the time spent on "chores" that a developer would otherwise have to do while reverse-engineering code, which started with emulating consoles themselves.

Emulation of video game consoles on PC is nothing new, having emerged in the 90s in the 2D era, and gradually transitioning to 3D consoles such as the PlayStation 1, and Nintendo 64. Throughout the early 2020s, emulators and toolkits evolved at a rapid pace, covering more systems than ever — even the PlayStation 3 and its notorious Cell processor. Physical hardware is taken apart and inspected more easily and at deeper levels than ever, as tools like the Raspberry Pi become cheaper and more powerful. These elements set the stage for the ultimate task: to fully decompile and recompile a game and convert it to run on native PC instructions, rather than relying on software emulation. Only one barrier remained: dedicated development time.

To reverse-engineer a game, you need dozens of different tools, analyze the game's executable, run it, inspect which files it reads, which calls it makes to the operating system, what memory it allocates, and so on and so forth. This is exceedingly tedious, and yet can't be done half-heartedly: one errant byte is a bug. It's like undoing a machine with a million cogs and keeping track exactly where each one was, its size, and orientation. Modern games grew, too, and can have millions of lines of code.

But that kind of nitpicky, repetitive work is just what computers excel at — even non-deterministic ones like LLMs. 2026's AI models like GPT-6 Astra and Claude 5.5 families are "smarter" in the sense that they follow complicated instructions more closely and can better keep track of their tasks, granting them a higher degree of autonomy. The high token efficiency of lower-grade variants like Claude Sonnet also makes them somewhat affordable, if not cheap, to use on a humongous project like taking apart an entire game.

Given how AI bots can hallucinate and make up strange replies and code, you may wonder how a project of this scale ever gets accomplished. It's simple: your agent hands you decompiled source code, and it compiles it again to see if it matches the original byte-for-byte. Even if they hallucinate, the bots can try over and over until they get it right, and developers can correct them if needed.

Reverse-engineering needs multiple tools, all with their own technical terms and idiosyncrasies. Whereas before developers had to wrangle them across terminal windows, now you can get your agent to twiddle bits and talk between programs on your behalf, so long as you issue the right orders. They don't have to stop for breaks, either.

With relatively simple prompts, you can poke around and break down a game or application — provided you have one of the pricier agent subscriptions, or can absorb high token bills, as for example the Modern Warfare 2 decomp took three months and up to 700 billion tokens to accomplish. Had its developer used REA, he may have cut down on time and tokens both.

Palit released an official statement denying recent speculation that it has closed its Galax factory — where it makes Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs — because it cannot guarantee a sufficient supply of Nvidia chips. According to the company’s press release, its operations continue as usual, it has not shut down any factories, and customers are able to purchase Galax GPUs through existing distributors and retailers for both domestic and international markets.

“We are aware of recent reports and speculation regarding Galax’s business operations. We would like to clarify that these claims are inaccurate,” the company said. “Galax continues to operate as usual. No manufacturing facilities have been shut down, and Galax products remain available through our sales channels in both domestic and international markets.” It also mentioned that Galax and Palit share the same factories, and that production and business operations continue as normal. Nvidia was not immediately available for comment regarding speculation about the availability of chips.

The initial news of a possible Galax closure came as a shock to many, especially as the brand had just launched its latest flagship model, the Galax GeForce RTX 5080 HOF Extreme. The rumors stemmed from an exclusive news report by a Spanish outlet (expand the post above) claiming that Palit could no longer supply Nvidia GPU chips to Galax, meaning it could no longer build graphics cards at that facility, and keeping it operational was no longer viable for the company. Thankfully, the sources were wrong, so we are not going to see another major consumer GPU brand like EVGA leave the market. Still, the speculation that Galax would stop GPU production was not implausible, especially as we’ve been seeing reports that Nvidia was ending RTX 5090 production in favor of more expensive AI data center and professional GPUs.

This wasn’t the first time this year that Galax was rumored to have ended production. Palit Group restructured its operations earlier this year, which brought similar reports of closure for the GPU brand. This was further reinforced after Palit announced that it would consolidate Galax operations at its headquarters in Taiwan. Thankfully, the speculation both then and today is false, and we will continue seeing Galax GPUs on retail shelves. However, it still doesn’t solve the skyrocketing GPU prices brought by the AI-driven memory chip shortage.

If you want to start building a new gaming PC without paying huge prices, you'll want to look at this Newegg combo deal. Right now, you can pick up the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, along with an MSI motherboard and 32GB of DDR5 RAM for $1,094.99, saving you $248.99 in total.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is one of the best CPUs you can buy for gaming, thanks to AMD's impressive 3D V-cache tech. Alongside the powerhouse 9800X3D is the budget-friendly MSI MAG X870E Tomahawk Wifi and the 32GB of G.Skill Trident X5 NeoX RAM, and you're also getting an MSI MAG Coreliquid A13 240mm AIO liquid cooler thrown in for free.

As deals go, this kit will get you part of the way towards building a 4K-capable gaming PC, although you'll need to source a GPU, SSD, case, power supply, and peripherals, not to mention a monitor. Still, the $248.99 saving isn't one to dismiss, given how expensive PC components have become in the last year, and you can put those savings towards the pricier components left to buy on your shopping list.

There are very few processors able to compete with the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. This processor, as our CPU benchmark data will show, delivers seriously good performance for gamers. AMD'S 3D V-cache technology can take much of the glory here, boosting the L3 cache capacity to 96MB. That boost means that the chip doesn't have to drop back to the slower system RAM, giving higher, more stable frame rates for longer in-game.

Specs-wise, you're getting a Zen 5 CPU with eight cores. All eight of them use the full 96MB L3 cache, with clock speeds of 4.7 GHz that can boost to 5.2 GHz. As the Bench data below confirms, at 1080p and better, the 9800X3D is a CPU that sits very, very close to the top, far ahead of Intel rivals.

You need a motherboard with an AMD AM5 socket to run this CPU, which Newegg is providing with the MSI MAG X870E Tomahawk Wifi. This is a budget-friendly board with EZ DIY features for gamers, along with three USB-C ports offering speeds of 40 Gbps. This is a gaming board with four M.2 drive slots, two offering Gen 5 speeds, along with four SATA ports. It has fast networking, with support for Wi-Fi 7 and 6Gb Ethernet. It's black, too, so it won't look out of place in a typical gaming PC build.

Coupled with the Tomahawk is 32GB of memory from G.Skill. This G.Skill Trident Z5 NeoX DDR5 RAM ships with two 16GB modules, in black but with configurable RGB lighting at the top, and offering speeds of 6,000 MT/s. It has CAS and memory timings of 36-36-36-76. Don't forget the MSI MAG Coreliquid A13 240mm AIO cooler worth $72.49 that you're getting, totally free, with this bundle to help keep your CPU nice and cool.

We've seen these Newegg combo deals sell out or get pulled quickly. If you want to take advantage of the $1,094.99 sale price for this 9800X3D bundle with an MSI motherboard and 32GB of DDR5 RAM, then you'll need to be quick. The parts will suit a high-end build for 4K gaming, and the savings you make here can be put towards a new GPU to match.

Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council is working on an autonomous system that would allow drone fleets to coordinate and execute missions without human intervention in response to "grey-zone" activities carried out by China. According to the South China Morning Post, the council is working with the National Cheng Kung University, which has already completed simultaneous flight simulations of two drone fleets, with each fleet comprising 10 units. This is already the second step of the process, which has shifted from individual aircraft control to the coordination of two drone detachments.

This project is designed to help Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration (CGA) to counter Beijing’s grey-zone tactics in the waters surrounding the island nation. There have already been instances of civilian Chinese ships damaging undersea cables that Taipei relies on, with the CGA increasing its defensive patrols around 24 undersea cables and closely monitoring nearly a hundred China-linked boats. Despite that, Chinese “research vessels” continue to loiter over Taiwan-U.S. undersea cables, mimicking the activities of Russian trawlers in the Atlantic.

“The next stage will involve hardware-in-the-loop testing, prototype integration and flight trials over actual maritime areas to assess reliability under different sea and weather conditions,” the council said. The researchers programmed the drones to have a minimum separation of 100 feet in 3D space, and they’re also incorporating leader-follower formation flying and dynamic obstacle avoidance. This should allow them to respond to quickly changing conditions out in the open sea and even deal with unexpected hazards.

More than that, the autonomous system Taipei is working on would let different types of drones coordinate their movements, divide tasks, and plan routes, primarily for maritime surveillance. This is especially important as it would allow them to use different types of drones to accomplish various missions, much like how different air forces use different aircraft types.

The project is currently focusing on three Western-made drones — the Jump 20, V-BAT, and Flexrotor. In fact, the Ocean Affairs Council just received the V-BAT, a VTOL drone built by U.S. defense firm Shield AI. This unit can take off vertically from the relatively constrained deck space of non-aircraft carrier ships and offers an endurance of over 12 hours for extended missions, making it ideal for the CGA, as it would not need to make major renovations to its ships to accommodate these drones while extending their reach.

Nvidia and Oracle have announced general availability of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 rack and Vera CPUs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Superclusters at Oracle AI World on Tuesday. The announcement comes hot on the heels of Google Cloud announcing general availability for Vera Rubin last week, putting two major hyperscaler feathers in Nvidia’s cap. However, Oracle’s announcement is interesting, specifically calling out standalone Vera instances on OCI Superclusters. We've included a few benchmarks we've performed on a Vera server for a forthcoming review to highlight some of the chip's performance characteristics, but do note that these tests were not conducted on OCI infrastructure.

Neoclouds have been banging the drum of Vera for the past several weeks, with instances under way at Nscale, CoreWeave, and Nebius, among others, so it makes sense to see Vera in the GPU-dominant and AI-focused neoclouds. A standalone deployment at a hyperscaler like Oracle sends a different signal, however.

Although hyperscalers maintain large fleets of hardware, sometimes even renting from the neoclouds, the CPU focus is primarily on x86, with OCI Superclusters otherwise offering the Ampere Altra for an Arm-based instance. It’s Nvidia’s first standalone CPU push into the hyperscale data center, placing Vera alongside the x86 competition regardless of the GPU compute.

Vera is not meant to upend the x86 guard, at least in isolation. Ian Buck, Nvidia’s mind behind CUDA and the face of Nvidia’s AI infrastructure buildout, said in March — when the chip was revealed — that the world couldn’t be served by a single, 88-core SKU. However, Vera is opening the door at hyperscalers like Oracle to expand in future CPU generations.

AMD and Intel maintain the lead when it comes to single-socket density, which is only set to expand in the next generation, as AMD’s upcoming EPYC Venice CPUs can pack up to 512 threads in a single socket. However, Vera offers some distinct advantages due to its topology depending on the workload, many of which are becoming increasingly relevant in the agentic AI era.

Memory bandwidth, for instance, is one of Vera’s strong suits, and that’s not just a marketing claim. Nvidia has said the memory system is capable of 1.2 TB/s of bandwidth, but we can see Nvidia’s lead outside of theoretical numbers in our testing below.

Take the industry-standard Stream benchmark as an example. Nvidia’s use of LPDDR5X-9600, along with a monolithic die and distributed mesh for caching, allows it to more than double the bandwidth available on a dual Intel Xeon 6980P system, even when it’s paired with MRDIMMs sporting speeds of 8,800 MT/s. We’re showing triad here, as it’s the most “demanding” of Stream’s operations, but the leads for Vera are similar across add, copy, and scale as well.

This bandwidth is critical for some types of agentic loops, particularly those dealing with large database queries or extensive documentation. You can see the OpenMP “spread” policy offers a massive boost to Vera’s memory bandwidth, as well. Both AMD and Intel maintain centralized memory control and system-level cache, while Vera distributes it in a mesh across the die. The result, at least in OpenMP set properly, is much higher memory bandwidth by binding processes as far away from each other as possible.

Another critical performance vector for agentic AI is Python. The agentic world is expanding, but much of the foundation of the AI software ecosystem is built on Python. Common agentic frameworks like CrewAI and LangGraph are written in Python, and although we’re seeing more frameworks built in languages like Rust and TypeScript, Python performance is still critical to agentic loops.

And, unsurprisingly, it’s an area where Vera is also strong, beating out CPUs that are much more powerful on paper. Popular agentic harnesses are built on Python, but so are many of the applications that also run on Python, including foundational AI libraries like PyTorch and TensorFlow.

Nvidia’s focus on agentic AI makes sense given the times we’re living in, but it can miss the forest for the trees. Oracle bringing Vera standalone instances online shifts the focus onto the broader implications of Vera’s entrance into the data center. There are some aspects of performance that characterize agentic AI workloads, but many agent workloads are regular data center workloads in the first place, just under high concurrency.

For instance, SQLite performance is important for any server querying a large database, regardless of its written by logic, a person, or an AI agent. Nvidia’s second-gen Scalable Coherency Fabric (SCF), which we saw at play in Stream, shows up in a real workload here, with these database queries largely bound by data movement across the system.

And that is what makes Vera so interesting in the context of Oracle’s announcement. It’s a CPU built for agentic AI, says Nvidia, but the crosstalk with general data center workloads is strong. It’s not just a CPU to use because you need access to Nvidia’s accelerators. Depending on the workload, it may even be a better choice than the x86 guard.

Ultimately, we have to see how customers of these hyperscalers use (or don’t use) Vera in production. It’s demonstrated its usefulness in agentic AI loops, but it’s also showing early promise in certain general-purpose workloads. Oracle’s standalone deployment is a sign that there’s some demand for Vera that isn't exclusively tied at the hip of a Rubin GPU.

Oracle is approaching cautiously, however, as any hyperscaler should be when bringing up a multi-gigawatt deployment. The company said it will also offer Nvidia’s HGX NVL8, bringing eight Rubin GPUs together in a cluster, connected to a dual, 64-core Intel Xeon 6 host with 4TB of DDR5 memory.

Our testing of Vera shared in this article is part of a larger benchmarking session we had with the chip, and we'll share the technical details of the test setup in our forthcoming review. We’ll be publishing our full results shortly on Tom’s Hardware.

If you ever wanted to own your own supercomputer or data center while earning eBay cashback, Core 4 Solutions has the perfect opportunity. The company is selling a 300-rack AI supercomputer on eBay for $59.7 million, complete with $50 overnight shipping, or free shipping if you're willing to go with FedEx Ground. The cluster packs 9,600 Nvidia A100 accelerators and 4,200 AMD EPYC Rome 64-core processors, enough to jump-start your own sovereign AI nation.

Nvidia and AMD have moved to newer architectures like Blackwell, Vera Rubin, and EPYC Turin. Nonetheless, A100 (codenamed Ampere) accelerators and EPYC Rome processors remain highly relevant for many computing tasks, including AI, machine learning, and scientific research. With the modern Blackwell and Vera Rubin racks from Nvidia, like the GB300 NVL72 and VR200 NVL72, costing up to $6.5 million and $7.8 million per unit, respectively, the A100 has turned into a legitimate budget alternative that can also circumvent the long waitlists and supply chain delays on Nvidia's newer AI hardware.

The cluster's sheer specifications are truly jaw-dropping. Each rack has four compute nodes and three management nodes. Each compute node has two AMD EPYC Rome 64-core processors, eight Nvidia A100 40GB SXM4 accelerators, and 1TB of DDR4-2933 memory. The management nodes are no less impressive. Each features two EPYC 64-core chips and 192GB of DDR4 memory.

When you sum it all up, the cluster comprises up to 9,600 A100 accelerators and 4,200 AMD EPYC Rome processors. With 64 Zen 2 execution cores per chip, the entire cluster boasts 268,800 cores. Memory capacity is equally impressive, with up to 1,401.6 TB or 1.4 petabytes for the entire cluster.

At first glance, $59.7 million sounds like a fortune, and it certainly is, but it seems like a reasonable valuation for the cluster. A rough estimate would be about $24 million for the A100S, $3 million for the EPYC Rome chips, and about $1.1 million for the DDR4 memory. That is about $28.1 million in crucial components, before factoring in other hardware like racks, cooling, power supplies, Nvidia Mellanox ConnectX-6 SmartNICs, etc.

Listing a 300-rack supercomputing cluster on eBay sounds absurd, but given today's AI-driven world, it is not as surprising as it may seem. After all, a broker once sold a 405-foot luxury Gigayacht for $168 million on eBay, so there is no reason why Core 4 Solutions cannot move a $59.7 million cluster. As AI farms and data centers expand, some enterprise clients out there will recognize the value and opportunity in the listing.

Shipping that many racks will be a logistics nightmare, and as funny as it sounds, Core 4 Solutions offers free local pickup or FedEx Ground delivery directly to your home. There is even an option to pay for a $25 two-day or $50 overnight delivery. Imagine FedEx casually dropping off 300 server racks at your front porch.

The cluster seems to have already drawn attention, with 11 people reportedly watching the eBay listing and one prospective buyer already letting it sit in their cart. I guess the real question is not whether it will sell, but whether the buyer will choose $50 overnight shipping.

There are a lot of salesman sayings, and, chances are, most were inspired by audiophiles. The eternal sufferers of audiophilia nervosa keep coming up with novel ways to attribute sonic and emotional characteristics to any piece of equipment — even when discussing things purely in the digital realm. One of the current fads is audiophile-grade network switches, like the Aurender NH10 Network Hub, coming in at a mere $4,700.

This piece of gear —which we presume is actually a network switch, rather than a hub — comes fitted with eight gigabit ports. Six of those are standard copper inputs, while the other two are SFP ports where audiophiles can plug in a transceiver for either fiber or copper. The product page remarks that, naturally, a fiber connection is electrically isolated. I was teeing up a joke about the existence of audiophile-grade SFP transceivers when, while proofreading, I found that life does truly imitate art. Oh, and that $4,700 doesn't even get you 10 GbE capabilities.

Four of the six copper ports on the Aurender switch have a total of seven electrical filtering stages behind them, while the remaining pair "only" has two. According to an article at Headphonesty, Aurender's designer said the team experimented with using over 10 stages, but eventually settled on seven "from listening comparisons." That's an interesting feature considering that the Ethernet standard already mandates electrical isolation for standard twisted-pair connections.

Aurender also says that it's using an OXCO (Oven-Controlled Crystal Oscillator) controlled by an FPGA for clock synchronization, and there's a BNC input on the back for an external source. From what we can tell from the board picture, the main chips include: a Realtek RT8370N switch controller ($5.5 at LCSC, an MV85 oscillator ($39 on eBay), and an AMD/Xilinx Spartan 6 FGPA ($8-15 depending on model). There are, no doubt, more manufacturing and materials costs to go from a collection of chips to an assembled switch, but presumably not enough to get anywhere close to the $4,700 asking price of the NH10.

This is all adorable, but the fact of the matter is that the hardware here cannot, by any reasonable definition, make any difference to the sound. TCP connections have built-in error correction. The Ethernet protocol includes Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), and there are several similar layers, up to the point where the data turns into an actual analog signal.

It's also up to whichever equipment is handling the playback to electrically isolate the actual DAC output stage, not at the network or switch level. And even affordable audio interfaces have signal-to-noise ratios that 1970s recording engineers would happily give up their LSD for.

Likewise, the whole conversation about jitter is pointless, though much like any audiophile myth, it's grounded in a piece of truth — just one that's completely irrelevant in this scenario. In a recording studio, you occasionally need to sync the clock across multiple pieces of gear, just like matching tape machines back in the day. For just the one piece of playback gear, however, it's pointless, and it's downright nonsensical at the network level.

Yet logic has never stopped some self-described audiophiles. One can but wonder what folks seriously looking at these pieces of gear would feel knowing that the studios where their precious music is being made use, for example, one bog-standard Ethernet cable to carry 4 balanced analog lines. Or how their favorite guitarist's pedals and amplifier in a famous recording session were held together with lamp cord, duct tape, hopes, and dreams.

A scary-looking humanoid robot with a chainsaw arm was shown in action on Japan's ANN News recently. The rail truck-mounted mech was being used by Japanese railway firm JR East to clear tree branches that had begun to impede rail tracks. The unnamed heavy machinery robot’s chainsaw and grabber arms are remotely controlled by a human in this instance. However, JR East is broadly integrating AI and robotic technologies across its operations to enhance safety, efficiency, and round-the-clock maintenance.

In the future, this robot could become autonomous with AI-based image analysis for recognizing rail obstructions that need to be addressed. While they’re at it, why not dispose of the wheeled vehicle and add some legs and a jet pack?

JR East is the largest passenger railway operator in Japan. It is famous for operating the northern Shinkansen (bullet train) routes, but also has business interests/revenue from shopping centers, hotels, smart cards, and more. The firm has a reputation for quite aggressive AI adoption, including company-wide AI tools, designing AI programs for disaster recovery, and it is even using drones equipped with AI image analysis for rail infrastructure inspections (PDF).

The source video and report (machine translation) indicate that the chainsaw mech you see has been available to JR East engineers since March, but the TV crew took the opportunity to catch a rare glimpse of this heavy machinery in action. JR East is turning to robots like this due to labor shortages. Apparently, operating a robot like this requires some skill, but so does chainsaw work at height.

There’s also been a recent shift in rail building and maintenance work to the daytime – despite some inconvenience to customers – to the benefit of workers and safety. Perhaps that’s why we now have a video of the chainsaw-wielding truck-mounted robot for the first time.

The combination of labor shortages and advances in robotics and AI makes development of this kind of rail maintenance robot seem very timely. If the metallic humanoid can be made autonomous, it could save a lot of labor and promote safety. What could go wrong?

A University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) professor has stopped giving his students graded homework, saying that rampant AI use has made it pointless. According to the New York Post, renowned mathematician Richard Borcherds said that it’s now nearly impossible to tell the difference between a student-written submission and one that’s been created using artificial intelligence. Because of this, he now primarily uses in-person exams with no electronic devices to grade his students and see how well they are doing in his class.

“Online exams are now a waste of time as several students just use AI to answer the questions. I cannot tell which students are using AI, but I notice the average score increases a lot in online exams,” Borcherds told the publication. He also added, “Grading for correctness just adds a huge incentive for them to use AI for homework instead of doing it themselves and penalizes students for honesty. And paying to grade AI generated answers is a waste of time and money.”

This problem appeared when OpenAI released the first popular LLM, GPT-3.5, in November 2022. But while LLMs were prone to mistakes back then, making their inordinate use easy to spot, the technology has improved to the point that it’s now very hard to tell if it's been used for written work.

Various researchers have proven that students routinely get better scores when taking exams online. While they haven’t definitively proven that the students used AI to answer the questions, the difference between the scores was significant enough that the researchers concluded unmonitored online exams are no longer reflective of what the students have learned in the course.

A Brown University professor determined this earlier this year when his students scored an average of 96% for his take-home midterms — a huge jump from the historical average of 65% to 80%. Because of this, he made his students take their final exams in person, which resulted in only two students getting a score that’s within 10% of their midterm grades, with only one performing better.

However, not all AI tools are as keen to help students cheat, with Cursor AI telling one user to learn coding instead of asking it to generate code. Still, this is just one tool in a sea of many, making it next to impossible to stop students from using AI.

As for UC Berkeley, it has already looked at AI-detection software to try and deal with the situation, but determined that it wasn't reliable. Because of this, the University decided to give professors free rein on their own AI policies, as long as they spell out their AI rules in the course syllabi. As for Borcherds, he says that if the worst thing that AI can do is to make it harder for teachers to grade student homework, then he will be “very relieved."

Defense contractor Anduril, which is known for its military drones, just announced that it’s building laptops in the U.S., with the company saying that it will begin taking orders in 2027. According to its press release, it will call its laptop product line BlueChip and will use a Snapdragon X Series SoC for its core computing capabilities. It also said that it already has functional prototypes, with 90% of the procurement cost of the components used to build it coming from suppliers in the U.S. and other allied countries. However, it’s also aiming for a fully domestic supply chain in the long term.

This means that Anduril is not only sourcing domestically produced semiconductors but also uses other made-in-the-U.S. parts, like batteries, the external casing, and even the glass for its screen. “Other companies might design their computers in the U.S., Anduril makes them here,” the Anduril founder Palmer Luckey said in the Anduril YouTube video. “We’re making parts out of metals that the U.S. knows how to extract, knows how to refine, knows how to process, and knows how to mill at scale at a reasonable price; and that goes for the entire laptop. The same thing goes for the battery technology.”

Luckey has been planning to launch a fully U.S.-made laptop since last year but said that it’s going to cost 20% more than a comparable device. Still, it seems that the company is targeting critical industries — government, defense, first responders, and public safety — which might be willing to spend more to ensure the security of their computer systems. Anduril is also better placed to start building a domestically designed, built, and sourced laptop today as the White House’s efforts to bring back semiconductor manufacturing have resulted in massive fabs like TSMC Arizona and Samsung’s Taylor, Texas site. Taiwan’s plan to support smaller companies key to TSMC’s supply chain by funding industrial parks in the U.S. will also likely benefit BlueChip, as it would make it easier for the company to source needed parts it would otherwise have to order from abroad.

Anduril has acknowledged the progress in the U.S.’s efforts to bring back computer manufacturing to its shores but also acknowledged the challenges that it faces when it comes to building a 100% domestic supply chain. “…manufacturing complete computers also requires circuit boards, displays, batteries, and other components still largely produced overseas. Restoring domestic computer manufacturing requires rebuilding that broader industrial base,” it said in its press release. “BlueChip will take a phased approach, beginning with expanding domestic sourcing and manufacturing, progressing toward eliminating reliance on foreign suppliers, and ultimately establishing an end-to-end American supply chain.”

Discover-Tech, an Israeli advertising technology company, has reportedly been linked to a suspected surveillance effort aimed at Starlink users, according to Reuters. The report, which cites six people familiar with the matter, claims the firm was the top bidder for ad space tied to Starlink traffic in more than 100 countries. Researchers suspect the aggressive bidding was meant to reveal where users are located or to enable further monitoring — though the findings do not show that anyone was actually tracked.

The data comes from TrendAI, the research arm of Trend Micro. Its October 15 report referred to the activity as ‘Shadow-Earth-79’ without naming a company, but the report claims the codename belongs to Discover-Tech. TrendAI says its attribution process is designed to avoid ‘hype-driven labels’ that could mislead security teams. “Our approach reduces the risk of misattribution, hype-driven labels, and unstable actor names that can mislead defenders, distort risk prioritization, and trigger inappropriate response actions.” The report says.

The method exploits how online ads are sold with advertisers bidding in real-time auctions for space on websites and in apps, and each bid request can carry details about the person on the other end. Collected over time and combined with other data, that information could be used to identify people, follow their activity across the web, or select targets for spyware.

The geography is what raised eyebrows. Shadow-Earth-79 was reportedly the largest ad buyer in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and South Sudan, and the second largest in Afghanistan, while also claiming unusually large shares of bids in Hungary, Israel, Egypt, Azerbaijan, and Venezuela. TrendAI says the pattern points to ‘targeting and tracking infrastructure rather than a commercial advertising operation.’ That is plausible, given how little legitimate Western advertising demand exists in sanctioned or war-torn markets.

Notably, Discover-Tech was already under scrutiny. On the same day as TrendAI’s report, Citizen Lab and ad security firm Confiant separately named the company, alleging that it used ad auctions to collect data on users across sensitive networks, including those tied to media organizations, governments, and tech firms. “The malicious advertisements were purchased by Discover-Tech, an Israeli company that presents itself as a legitimate advertising company, but which we found operates as a facilitator for multiple mercenary spyware partners.” Citizen Lab wrote.

Google and Comcast have since said they removed Discover-Tech from their advertising platforms, while the report says that a major U.S. technology company and an international organization have opened internal inquiries into whether the firm’s ads targeted their employees.

For Starlink, the stakes are obvious — the service works outside conventional telecom networks, which makes it a lifeline where governments restrict internet access, and makes its users an attractive target for those same governments. In April, Iran’s nationwide internet blackout passed 1,000 hours, with authorities reportedly going after Starlink terminals and imposing severe penalties for possessing one. Earlier this month, SpaceX also limited Starlink service for Ukraine’s high-speed military drones, which Ukrainian officials say complicates logistics and operations.

Advertising and consumer tech have been abused for tracking before. A backdoor was previously found in a popular iOS ad library that could collect device-location data and capture screenshots, while Chrysaor, Android spyware linked to the Pegasus family, was discovered by Lookout and Citizen Lab on a small number of devices. More recently, a researcher claimed to have found extensive data collection, including ad-related telemetry, inside a Samsung smart TV’s Tizen operating system, though those findings are still being investigated.

That said, it is still unclear if Discover-Tech actually used Starlink-related data to single out specific subscribers remains unverified, and neither the company nor SpaceX has commented.