Hard-to-find jazz fusion recordings from the respected Muse Records catalog are back in print thanks to a coordinated effort involving Craft Recordings, The Jazz Dispensary, Time Traveler series curated by Zev Feldman, and Virgin Music Group.

Founded by veteran executive Joe Fields, Muse Records was established to carry forward the independent jazz ethos of the 1950s and 1960s, following in the footsteps of influential labels like Prestige Records and Milestone Records—with an emphasis on artist-driven releases and forward-leaning jazz that didn’t fit neatly into the mainstream.

Acclaimed producer Zev Feldman’s Time Traveler series of audiophile-oriented Muse Records reissues are limited-run 180-gram vinyl LPs pressed at Germany’s respected Optimal Media. Featuring analog disc mastering from the original tapes by Matthew Lutthans at The Mastering Lab, these releases are housed in high-gloss laminated Stoughton Printing tip-on jackets.

The Jazz Dispensary releases follow a similar audiophile approach, with AAA lacquers cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and vinyl pressed at RTI. Each LP is housed in an audiophile-grade plastic-lined inner sleeve, and to date the pressings have been consistently quiet, flat, and well-centered.

Catalyst, Perception

I have to admit that the press release describing Catalyst as the “funkiest band you’ve never heard” is probably spot on. Growing up in the 1970s, I was deeply immersed in the progressive jazz-fusion movement and still managed to miss this group entirely. Hailing from Philadelphia, the regionally acclaimed but short-lived quartet was part of the early wave of fusion innovators, operating in the same ecosystem as Return to Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Weather Report. Competition at that level was fierce, so it’s not entirely surprising that Catalyst ended up overshadowed despite its obvious chops and forward momentum.

The 10-piece Catalyst were clearly an excellent band featuring power players like Odean Pope (Max Roach), Eddie Green and Norman Harris (MFSB, Salsoul Orchestra), Billy Hart (Herbie Hancock) and synth pioneer Pat Gleason (also Herbie Hancock). Perception is a fine ‘n funky jazz fusion listening experience though I admit it is a “grower” album — that is, there is not the immediacy of composition and hooks you’ll find on many of the cornerstone LPs of jazz fusion.  But if you like the form, this is some good stuff for sure from the relative early days (recorded in 1972).

Where to buy: $32.99 at Amazon

Carlos Garnett, Cosmo Nucleus 

Another artist I somehow missed along the way, Carlos Garnett’s fourth Muse release from 1976 is a big-band fusion journey with real ambition. Featuring a lineup that includes Kenny Kirkland on piano and Cecil McBee on bass, the album leans heavily toward jazz-rock fusion, recalling the brassy, high-energy approach explored by Maynard Fergusonand Woody Herman, as well as rock-adjacent outfits like Chase, Ambergris, and Chicago.

Stylistically, parts of the record also bring to mind Frank Zappa’s The Grand Wazoo and Waka/Jawaka, particularly in the dense horn voicings and layered harmonies that blur the line between jazz complexity and rock-era excess—in a good way.

Some of this feels a little schmaltzy at points, notably opening track “Saxy” which I assume was geared for radio play on soul jazz leaning stations of the times. Like Catalyst, Garnett’s music has been growing on me after repeated listens.

Where to buy: $39.98 at Amazon

Mark Smotroff is a deep music enthusiast / collector who has also worked in entertainment oriented marketing communications for decades supporting the likes of DTS, Sega and many others. He reviews vinyl for Analog Planet and has written for Audiophile Review, Sound+Vision, Mix, EQ, etc.  You can learn more about him at LinkedIn.

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I knew the DXRacer Martian Pro would be one of the best gaming chairs I’ve ever sat in, and three months with it have only confirmed my suspicions.

Why did I know this?

A newly discovered toolkit called DKnife has been used since 2019 to hijack traffic at the edge-device level and deliver malware in espionage campaigns.

The framework serves as a post-compromise framework for traffic monitoring and adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) activities. It is designed to intercept and manipulate traffic destined for endpoints (computers, mobile devices, IoTs) on the network.

Researchers at Cisco Talos say that DKnife is an ELF framework with seven Linux-based components designed for deep packet inspection (DPI), traffic manipulation, credential harvesting, and malware delivery.

The malware features Simplified Chinese language artifacts in component names and code comments, and explicitly targets Chinese services such as email providers, mobile apps, media domains, and WeChat users.

Talos researchers assess with high confidence that the operator of DKnife is a China-nexus threat actor.

Researchers couldn’t determine how the network equipment is compromised, but found that DKnife delivers and interacts with the ShadowPad and DarkNimbus backdoors, both associated with Chinese threat actors.

DKnife consists of seven modules, each responsible for specific activities related to communication with the C2 servers, relaying or altering traffic, and hiding the malicious traffic origin:

• dknife.bin – responible for packet inspection and attack logics, it also reports attack status, user activities, and sends collected data
• postapi.bin – relay component between DKnife.bin and C2 servers
• sslmm.bin – custom reverse proxy server derived from HAProxy
• yitiji.bin – creates a virtual Ethernet interface (TAP) on the router and bridges it into the LAN to route the attacker’s traffic
• remote.bin – peer-to-peer VPN client using the n2n VPN software
• mmdown.bin – malware downloader and updater for Android APK files
• dkupdate.bin – DKnife download, deploy, and update component

“Its [DKnife’s] key capabilities include serving update C2 for the backdoors, DNS hijacking, hijacking Android application updates and binary downloads, delivering ShadowPad and DarkNimbus backdoors, selectively disrupting security-product traffic and exfiltrating user activity to remote C2 servers,” the researchers said in a report this week.

Once installed, DKnife uses its yitiji.bin component to create a bridged TAP interface (virtual network device) on the router at the private IP address 10.3.3.3. This allows the threat actor to intercept and rewrite network packets in their transit to the intended host.

This way, DKnife can be used to deliver malicious APK files to mobile devices or Windows systems on the network.

Cisco researchers observed DKnife dropping the ShadowPad backdoor for Windows signed with a Chinese firm’s certificate. This action was followed by the deployment of the DarkNimbus backdoor. On Android devices, the backdoor is delivered directly by DKnife.

On the same infrastructure associated with the DKnife framework activity, the researchers also found that it was hosting the WizardNet backdoor, which ESET researchers previously linked to the Spellbinder AitM framework.

Apart from payload delivery, DKnife is also capable of:

• DNS hijacking
• hijacking Android app updates
• hijacking Windows binaries
• Credential harvesting via POP3/IMAP decryption
• Phishing page hosting
• Anti-virus traffic disruption
• monitoring user activity, including messaging app use (WeChat and Signal), maps app use, news consumption, calling activity, ride-hailing, and shopping

WeChat activities are tracked more analytically, Cisco Talos says, with DKnife monitoring for voice and video calls, text messages, images sent and received, and articles read on the platform.

The user’s activity events are first routed internally between DKnife’s components and then exfiltrated via HTTP POST requests to specific command-and-control (C2) API endpoints.

Because DKnife sits on gateway devices and reports events as packets pass through, it allows monitoring user activity and collecting data in real time.

As of January 2026, the DKnife C2 servers are still active, the researchers say. Cisco Talos has published the full set of indicators of compromise (IoCs) associated with this activity.

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This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced that it raised $1 billion in fresh capital at a valuation of $23 billion — a nearly threefold increase from the $8.1 billion valuation the Nvidia rival had reached just six months earlier.

While the round was led by Tiger Global, a huge part of the new capital came from one of the company’s earliest backers: Benchmark Capital. The prominent Silicon Valley firm invested at least $225 million in Cerebras’ latest round, according to a person familiar with the deal.

Benchmark first bet on 10-year-old Cerebras when it led the startup’s $27 million Series A in 2016. Since Benchmark deliberately keeps its funds under $450 million, the firm raised two separate vehicles, both called ‘Benchmark Infrastructure,’ according to regulatory filings. According to the person familiar with the deal, these vehicles were created specifically to fund the Cerebras investment.

Benchmark declined to comment.

What sets Cerebras apart is the sheer physical scale of its processors. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship chip announced in 2024, measures approximately 8.5 inches on each side and packs 4 trillion transistors into a single piece of silicon. To put that in perspective, the chip is manufactured from nearly an entire 300-millimeter silicon wafer, the circular discs that serve as the foundation for all semiconductor production. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized fragments cut from these wafers; Cerebras instead uses almost the whole circle.

This architecture delivers 900,000 specialized cores working in parallel, allowing the system to process AI calculations without shuffling data between multiple separate chips (a major bottleneck in conventional GPU clusters). The company says the design enables AI inference tasks to run more than 20 times faster than competing systems.

The funding comes as Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., gains momentum in the AI infrastructure race. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year agreement worth more than $10 billion to provide 750 megawatts of computing power to OpenAI. The partnership, which extends through 2028, aims to help OpenAI deliver faster response times for complex AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras.)

Cerebras claims its systems, built with its proprietary chips designed for AI use, are faster than Nvidia’s chips.

The company’s path to going public has been complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based AI firm that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue as of the first half of 2024. G42’s historical ties to Chinese technology companies triggered a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, bumping back Cerebras’ initial IPO plans and even prompting the outfit to withdraw an earlier filing in early 2025. By late last year, G42 had been removed from Cerebras’ investor list, clearing the way for a fresh IPO attempt.

Cerebras is now preparing for a public debut in the second quarter of 2026, according to Reuters.

Parents grapple with the modern day question of whether to give their kids phones for staying in contact and keeping tabs on their whereabouts, while also navigating the realities of too much screen time and shielding them from the corrosive effects of social media. 

AT&T just introduced its own answer, the AmiGo Jr. Phone, a Samsung smartphone with an AmiGo app that applies parental controls at the device level. Parents use an AT&T AmiGo app on their iOS or Android phone to manage apps, settings and screentime limits on the kid’s phone; the AmiGo software works only with this AmiGo Jr. Phone.

The AmiGo Jr. is a Samsung Galaxy A16 phone with a 6.7-inch display, 128GB of storage and a 5,000 mAh battery. It has a trio of cameras on the back: a 50-megapixel main camera, 5-megapixel ultrawide camera and 2-megapixel macro camera. The phone is available only in black.

The phone is available now online at AT&T, in AT&T stores and via the MyAT&T app, and priced at $3 a month for a 36-month contract. Parents also need to purchase an unlimited data line on their phone plan for the phone starting at $61 a month, plus pay a $35 activation fee.

Offering an inexpensive older camera for a child’s use isn’t new — it’s how parents often set up devices for kids. The Galaxy A16 was released in January 2025. What makes the AmiGo Jr. different is the AmiGo app implementing parental controls at the device level under Android 16, according to an AT&T spokesperson. Beyond the parental control features offered in Android, the AmiGo software adds Safe Zones that generate alerts when the phone has entered or exited them and a School Mode for restricting features during times when their attention should be focused away from the screen.

“After extensive, candid conversations with parents, we heard a clear message: This isn’t just a device decision — it’s a deeply personal one about trust, safety and staying connected,” said Erin Scarborough, AT&T senior vice president of revenue management and commercialization, in a statement. “Creating a kid’s phone was the natural and overdue next step for us.”

The company cited the fact that 40% of its current customers are parents as incentive to develop the AmiGo Jr. Phone. And based on its own research, 60% of parents of kids up to age 12 consider a smartphone to be a safety essential.

Building phones for kids is not a novel concept; CNET’s Katie Collins looked at the HMD Fusion X1 at last year’s Mobile World Congress, for example. And system-based parental controls have also become more robust in recent years, even as a recent study suggests that parents should wait until the age of 13 to give their kids a phone.

Also available now is the AT&T AmiGo Jr. Watch 2, a more durable smartwatch that ties into AT&T’s AmiGo system.

Philips Hue bulbs and lamps are among the best smart lights around, and there’s a dizzying array to choose from. As TechRadar’s smart home tech editor, I’ve had my hands (and eyes) on all of the main products, and have put together this guide to help you decide which ones are right for you.

If you’re new to the world of smart lights and just want to try replacing a few of your existing bulbs, I recommend the Philips Hue Essential series. These are entry-level versions of the brand’s standard color-shifting smart bulbs, and are much more affordable. If you want to add ambience to a room or create an Ambilight-style home-theater effect without the hassle of fitting light strips behind your TV, I recommend the Philips Hue Wall Washer, and if you want string lights that will be fun and functional throughout the holidays and beyond, Philips Hue Festavia gets my seal of approval.