Your Local Area Network (LAN) is vital to your home and office. It's what handles all internal and outbound traffic, ensuring all clients on your side can communicate with one another, as well as billions of devices worldwide, so long as you have a router and external link. But how does one go about securing their LAN? Here are some pointers on how to not make your LAN vulnerable to outside attacks. Some involve common sense and others require you to do a little work.

I've made it no secret that I really like the M4 Mac Mini ever since I wrote my initial review of it back in November. It has become my primary desktop unless I'm reviewing another device, and I absolutely love this hardware, even if macOS has some problems.

Okay, I'm not going to lie. When I heard down the news grapevines that Microsoft was asking people to sign into an account to use Notepad, I believed it immediately. I mean, it felt incredulous, but it also had that feeling of "Yeah, Microsoft would probably do something like that." Fortunately, the truth isn't that dire just yet, although it's setting a bit of a worrying precedent.

It’s been nearly four years since Spotify announced a HiFi tier for its music streaming service that would support lossless audio. That wait could end this year, Bloomberg reports, as the company works to finalize details, including streaming rights.Spotify could charge as much as $5 or $6 extra per month for the new tier — said to be named “Music Pro” — which is in line with estimates CEO Daniel Ek shared last year. Spotify’s Premium tier currently starts at $11.99 per month before family or student discounts, the result of two price hikes in as many years.Competitors like Apple Music include lossless streaming in their services’ base price, but Spotify reportedly plans to justify the extra charge by including more features in Music Pro, including song remixing and concert ticket sales that would grant subscribers exclusive deals and early access.Earlier this month, Spotify signed a new multi-year licensing agreement with Warner Music Group to secure future streaming rights and help “shape the future of audio-visual streaming,” with HiFi presumably included in that vision. It inked a similar deal with Universal Music Group in late January, with UMG specifically teasing HiFi streaming and offering further ideas of what a “superfan” music service could offer. Notable suggestions included priority access to deluxe edition content and early music releases, as well as exclusive listening party invites and artist Q&A sessions.It’s taken a little longer than expected, but it looks like the world’s biggest music streaming service may finally be ready to turn up the volume on HiFi in 2025.

We all know that SSDs are better than HDDs, most notably because of their speed. However, there are a bunch of ways that SSDs are better than HDDs and make them completely obsolete, and some of those ways are ones that you may never have even thought of. We'll break down some of them, just in case you're still on the fence about getting a new SSD in place of an HDD.

The New York Times has reportedly approved artificial intelligence tools that newsroom staff can use for editing copy, summarizing information, coding, and writing. The publication announced in an internal email that product and editorial staff will receive AI training, according to Semafor, and introduced a new internal AI tool called Echo for summarizing articles, briefings, and other company activity.Staff were reportedly sent new editorial guidelines detailing permitted uses for Echo and other AI tools, which encourage newsroom employees to use them to suggest edits and revisions for their work, and generate summaries, promotional copy for social media, and SEO headlines.Other examples mentioned in a mandatory training video shared with staff include using AI to develop news quizzes, quote cards, and FAQs, or suggesting what questions reporters should ask a start-up’s CEO during an interview. There are restrictions, however — the company told editorial staff that AI shouldn’t be used to draft or significantly alter an article, circumvent paywalls, input third-party copyrighted materials, or publish AI-generated images or videos without explicit labeling.It isn’t clear how much AI-edited copy The Times will allow in published articles. The outlet promised that “Times journalism will always be reported, written and edited by our expert journalists,” in a memo it released last year, and it reaffirmed that commitment to human involvement a few months later.“Generative A.I. can sometimes help with parts of our process, but the work should always be managed by and accountable to journalists,” read The Times’ generative AI principles, adopted in May 2024. “We are always responsible for what we report, however the report is created. Any use of generative A.I. in the newsroom must begin with factual information vetted by our journalists and, as with everything else we produce, must be reviewed by editors.”Alongside Echo, other AI tools apparently greenlit for use by The Times include GitHub Copilot as a programming assistant, Google Vertex AI for product development, NotebookLM, the NYT’s ChatExplorer, OpenAI’s non-ChatGPT API, and some of Amazon’s AI products. These AI tools and training guidelines are rolling out as The Times remains embroiled in a legal battle with OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that ChatGPT was trained on Times content without permission. Many other publications have also introduced AI into their newsrooms at varying scales, ranging from tools for spelling and grammar to generating entire articles.

Right out of the box, any Steam Deck you buy, whether it's a certified refurbished model or brand new, is an excellent piece of kit. In many ways, Valve outdid itself with the Steam Deck, and realistically, you'd never need to change anything about it if you didn't want to.

When deciding on software to run on a hardware firewall, there are currently two main contenders: pfSense, which has been around for a long time, and OPNsense, which started out as a fork of pfSense. Both are fairly similar in scope and how they function underneath the GUI, so you might be wondering why you would choose one or the other. After all, if two things perform similarly, isn't it a coin toss between them? Well, strictly speaking, yes, but there are some reasons why you would want to choose one ahead of the other, especially if you have strong feelings about open-source software.

Home labs are perfect for honing your skills while not destroying your home network in the process. But while you're building out your home lab's network capabilities, how do you actually ensure that the two stay separate? A dedicated firewall is what you need, whether a dedicated hardware device or a virtual one. With the right rules in place, you can keep your home network safe from your home lab experiments and still have access to the internet at large.

While there are tons of great tablets to choose from, the iPad Air is our top choice for 2025. Not only is the iPad Air sleek, but it also packs tons of power thanks to Apple's M2 SoC. Furthermore, you also get the choice of two sizes, with 11 and 13-inch models.

In a world where many students use AI to cheat their way through assignments and exams, there are still students looking for tools that merely make studying a little easier and help them work smarter, not harder. I was one of them as well, which is why I tried ChatGPT, and while it helped, it wasn’t quite enough.

Illustrator is one of the best vector illustration tools, but with its hefty Adobe price tag, you might want an alternative. Most Adobe alternatives focus on raster graphics rather than vector graphics, with less opportunity for free or open-source vector design tools. Vectorpea comes from the same place as Photopea — a favorite of Photoshop alternative users — but it’s not open-source but rather ad-based and free to use from anywhere. With promising development in the tool, Vectorpea might be the next best thing for vector designs and artwork.