The gaming headset and wireless earbuds category has exploded over the past decade, growing into a multi billion dollar market fueled by competitive gaming, streaming, and the rise of cross platform play across PCs, consoles, and mobile devices. Brands that once focused solely on traditional PC hardware have expanded aggressively into gaming audio, and ASUS sits firmly in the deep end of that pool.

Best known for its laptops, gaming PCs, and high performance monitors, ASUS has steadily built out its audio lineup through its Republic of Gamers (ROG) division, targeting PC gamers who want the same level of engineering and performance from their headsets and earbuds. After recently introducing the ROG Kithara Open-back Planar Gaming Headset, ASUS is expanding the concept with something far more portable: the ROG Cetra Open Wireless Gaming Earbuds, designed for players and listeners who want immersive audio without completely shutting out the world around them.

Designed to combine immersive sound with real world situational awareness, the Cetra Open Wireless targets gamers, music listeners, and active users who want premium audio performance in a form factor better suited to life away from the desk.

ASUS ROG Cetra Open Wireless Features

Open Ear Design: The open ear earhook construction is ultra lightweight and designed for a comfortable, stable fit. This allows users to hear music, voice chat, and game audio while remaining aware of their surroundings.

Controls: Physical control buttons provide tactile feedback and remain responsive in rain or during intense activity. Unlike touch controls, they reduce accidental inputs and offer more consistent operation.

Drivers: The Cetra Open Wireless uses large 14.2 mm diamond like carbon coated drivers designed to deliver high resolution audio with crisp highs, clear mids, and solid bass impact. The diamond like carbon coating helps reduce distortion while improving clarity and soundstage, making the earbuds suitable for both gaming and music playback.

Dual Mode Connectivity: Supports seamless switching between Bluetooth and ultra low latency 2.4 GHz ROG SpeedNova wireless technology for synchronized in game audio and responsive gameplay.

Wireless Dongle: The included USB C 2.4 GHz wireless dongle supports passthrough charging, allowing users to power their device while the earbuds remain connected. This ensures uninterrupted gameplay, streaming, or voice chat.

Sound Modes: Built in sound modes let users tailor the listening experience. Phantom Bass enhances perceived low end response for more impact, while Immersion Mode reduces ambient noise to help maintain focus during gameplay or listening sessions.

Customization: Gear Link and Gear Link apps (iOS, Android) enable EQ fine-tuning, lighting options, and more to create personalized listening experiences.

IPX Rating: With an IPX5 splash resistance rating, the Cetra Open Wireless is designed to handle sweat, light rain, and everyday outdoor use.

Battery Life: On a full charge, the earbuds provide up to 16 hours of playback in Bluetooth mode with RGB lighting and sound modes disabled and the microphone muted. A quick 15 minute charge delivers up to 3 hours of listening time.

Quad Mic with AI Noise Cancellation: Four integrated microphones with an omnidirectional pickup pattern work alongside AI noise cancellation to capture voice communication with improved clarity during gaming, calls, or streaming.

Active Lifestyle Support: Designed for extended wear, the Cetra Open Wireless features ergonomic liquid silicone ear hooks and includes a detachable reflective neck strap for added stability during workouts and outdoor activities.

ASUS ROG Cetra Open Wireless Gaming Earbuds Specifications

The Bottom Line

The ASUS ROG Cetra Open Wireless stands out by targeting a very specific intersection of users: gamers who want low latency wireless audio but also prefer the comfort and situational awareness of an open ear design. The inclusion of ASUS’ ROG SpeedNova 2.4 GHz wireless connection alongside standard Bluetooth makes these more versatile than most open earbuds, especially for players who move between PC, consoles, and mobile devices.

That flexibility is what makes the Cetra Open Wireless unique. Many open fit earbuds are designed primarily for fitness or casual listening, while ASUS is clearly aiming at cross platform gaming and everyday mobility in a single product.

There is no shortage of competition. Cleer Audio’s Arc 3 Gaming Edition targets gamers with a similar open ear concept, while Shokz OpenFit focuses more heavily on comfort and fitness use. Clip style alternatives such as TCL’s Crystal Clip and Sony’s LinkBuds Clip offer another take on the open ear category for users who want minimal ear fatigue during long listening sessions.

The ROG Cetra Open Wireless makes the most sense for mobile gamers, PC players who want a lightweight alternative to traditional headsets, and active users who prefer open ear awareness while listening to music or chatting online. If ASUS can deliver on its promises of low latency performance and solid sound quality, the Cetra Open could carve out a meaningful niche in one of the fastest growing segments of personal audio.

Price & Availability

The ASUS ROG Cetra Open Wireless Earbuds are available now for $229.99 at Amazon in black.

Tip: For those looking for an earbud that fits deeper in the ear, the ASUS ROG Cetra True Wireless Earbuds are available for $219.99 at Amazon in black or white.

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The Department of Defense is putting more pressure on employees to volunteer to support the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown.

In a February 19 memo sent to civilians across the DOD, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth wrote that he expects “every supervisor to encourage their civilian employees to volunteer. Leadership must continue to promote this detail program and educate their civilian employees on its importance.” The memo, which was titled “Department of War Guidance to Encourage Support to the Department of Homeland Security Southern Border and Internal Immigration Enforcement Missions,” was sent to thousands of civilian DOD employees. The memo was first reported by GovExec and was also viewed by WIRED.

The instructions follow a June 2025 memo in which Hegseth authorized civilian employees to be detailed to DHS. But an Army civilian employee who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation says that there is “definitely more pressure” now, “at least on the supervisory chain.”

The DOD and DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

“I received the obligatory announcement email with the first memo when it came out, and no one has talked about it at all, so much so that I had forgotten about it entirely,” says the Army civilian employee. “I don’t know anyone who has taken the job.” In a statement from August 2025, the DOD claims that “nearly 500 DoD civilians have signed up to participate and bring their skill sets to the border security and immigration enforcement mission at the participating DHS agencies.”

“While details and other short-term professional development opportunities are common for Army civilians, I have never heard of supervisors being REQUIRED to approve such details,” they say.

The employee noted that, as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to cut back on government jobs in the name of “efficiency,” Hegseth has sought to cut the department’s workforce. “I have taken up the duties of three departed colleagues on top of the job I was hired for as a result,” they say. This means it would be difficult for the department to lose anymore staff or for workers to step away from existing projects. The employee described this kind of request to volunteer for another federal agency as “very not common.” It’s not like the Defense Department has any spare time at the moment, either: Hegseth and DOD leadership are currently engaged in directing the US’s role in conflict with Iran.

DOD employees who want to volunteer to be detailed to DHS need to apply through USAJobs. According to the job posting, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is part of DHS, will be reviewing applications. Volunteers will not only be sent to the southern border, but to “several ICE and CBP facilities throughout the interior of the United States.”

While some volunteer roles appear to be mundane tasks like “data entry,” others appear to be in the thick of immigration enforcement operations. These include assisting ICE and CBP in “developing concepts of operation and campaign plans to execute internal arrests and raids as well as patrols along the Southwest Border”; assisting ICE and CBP in “managing the physical flow of detained illegal aliens from arrest to deportation, as well as manage associated data”; and “managing the logistical planning to move law enforcement personnel, operational capabilities, and support equipment across the United States.”

The memo is just the latest in a series of changes across the federal government meant to enforce president Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a new rule would bar families with immigrant members from receiving certain forms of support from the agency, and at the General Services Administration, staff have been asked to assist ICE in procuring new physical spaces across the country.

For more than a year, a Russian-speaking threat actor targeted human resource (HR) departments with malware that delivers a new EDR killer named BlackSanta.

Described as “sophisticated,” the campaign mixes social engineering with advanced evasion techniques to steal sensitive information from compromised systems.

It is unclear how the attack begins, but researchers at Aryaka, a network and security solutions provider, suspect that the malware is distributed via spear-phishing emails.

They believe that targets are directed to download ISO image files that appear as resumes and are hosted on cloud storage services, such as Dropbox.

One malicious ISO analyzed contained four files: a Windows shortcut (.LNK) disguised as a PDF file, a PowerShell script, an image, and a .ICO file.

The shortcut launches PowerShell and executes the script, which extracts data hidden in the image file using steganography and executes it in system memory.

The code also downloads a ZIP archive containing a legitimate SumatraPDF executable and a malicious DLL (DWrite.dll) to load using the DLL sideloading technique.

The malware performs system fingerprinting and sends the information to the command-and-control (C2) server, and then performs extensive environment checks to stop execution if sandboxes, virtual machines, or debugging tools are detected.

It also modifies Windows Defender settings to weaken security at the host, performs disk-write tests, and then downloads additional payloads from the C2, which are executed via process hollowing, inside legitimate processes.

BlackSanta EDR killer

A key component delivered in the campaign is an executable identified as the BlackSanta EDR killer, a module that silences endpoint security solutions before deploying malicious payloads.

BlackSanta adds Microsoft Defender exclusions for ‘.dls’ and ‘.sys’ files, and modifies a Registry value to reduce telemetry and automatic sample submission to Microsoft security cloud endpoints.

The researchers’ report (PDF) notes that BlackSanta can also suppress Windows notifications to minimize or completely silence user alerts. The core function of BlackSanta is to terminate security processes, which it does by:

1. enumerating running processes
2. comparing the names against a large hardcoded list of antivirus, EDR, SIEM, and forensic tools
3. retrieving the matching process IDs
4. using the loaded drivers to unlock and terminate those processes at the kernel level

Aryaka did not share details about the target organizations or the threat actors behind the campaign, and couldn’t retrieve the final payload used in the observed case, as the C2 server was unavailable at the time of their examination.

The researchers were able to identify additional infrastructure used by the same threat actor and discovered multiple IP addresses related to the same campaign. This is how they learned that the operation had been running unnoticed for the past year.

Looking at the IP addresses, the researchers uncovered that the malware also downloaded Bring Your Own Driver (BYOD) components that included the RogueKiller Antirootkit driver v3.1.0 from Adlice Software, and IObitUnlocker.sys v1.2.0.1 from IObit.

These drivers have been used in malware operations (1, 2) to gain elevated privileges on the compromised machine and suppress security tools.

RogueKiller (truesight.sys) allows manipulation of kernel hooks and memory monitoring, while IObitUnlocker.sys allows bypassing file and process locks. This combination provides the malware with low-level access to system memory and processes.

Aryaka researchers say the threat actor behind the campaign shows strong operational security and uses context-aware, stealthy infection chains to deploy components such as BlackSanta EDR.

Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.

Download our analysis of 1.1 million malicious samples to uncover the top 10 techniques and see if your security stack is blinded.

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from the the-death-of-informed-consensus dept

Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input.

Of course, it doesn’t really work that way: For years we’ve noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings are full of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, and make shitty policy (giant mergers, mindless deregulation, the elimination of consumer protection) seem like it has broad public support (remember when dead people opposed net neutrality?).

Unsurprisingly the U.S. hasn’t done anything to seriously rein in this problem. And when officials do act, it tends to be largely toothless, resulting in the problem getting steadily worse.

And that was before AI made it significantly easier for bad actors to quickly automate this sort of gamesmanship. Washington State has been exploring the RADICAL SOCIALIST ANTIFA EXTREMIST idea of having the state’s rich actually pay their taxes. That’s not been received particularly well by the extraction class, which has been making empty promises about leaving the state.

Recently the state opened up the public comment system to input, and not too surprisingly it was immediately flooded with upwards of 37,000 fake comments opposing the idea of taxing the rich:

“Beyond those individual cases, organizers said they identified 37,824 additional opposition sign-ins generated through thousands of duplicate name submissions across House and Senate hearings combined. In more than 15,000 instances, they said, identical names were entered repeatedly — sometimes 50 to 100 times. Many of the submissions were filed late at night or in rapid succession.”

The state’s wealthy (and the lawmakers paid to love them) are still trying to claim that the flood of provably false opposition to the bill only supports their claims that nobody wants the state’s wealthiest to actually pay a little more for regional societal improvements:

“Opponents of the tax, including state Republican leaders and hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, have leaned on the wave of opposition sign-ins as proof the proposal lacks public support.

“More than 60,000 people signed in against SB 6346 when it received a rushed hearing in the Senate,” Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, said in a Feb. 16 statement. “That is so impressive that Democrats have tried to say bots are responsible, even though the Legislature blocks bots.”

(The legislature did not effectively block bots).

These are, it might go without saying, generally the same kinds of folks waging an all out war on U.S. journalism. More broadly this is a war on informed consensus, and it doesn’t take too much time looking around to see which side of this particular war is winning. Regardless of what policy you support, we’re supposed to, at the very least, be capable of a useful, honest conversation about policy.

But as we noted way back when the telecom industry was caught stuffing the FCC comment system with fake comments by fake and dead people opposing net neutrality (they even used my name, if you recall), you just know your position is a winner when you have to create entirely fake people to support it.

Filed Under: fake comments, law, public input, tax the rich, washington state

The report also indicated that among the 20 countries surveyed, Ireland was shown to be most in anticipation of a ‘heightened pace of change’.

Multinational technology company Accenture has released new research exploring the attitudes of business leaders and employees, across a range of countries. The Pulse of Change report collected data from 3,650 leaders and 3,350 employees across 20 industries and 20 countries. 

What was discovered is that, in Ireland, 94pc of leaders who contributed their data expect to increase AI investment in 2026. An additional 90pc of Irish organisations believe that their hiring plans will grow throughout the year, compared to 71pc of businesses across wider Europe. 95pc of Irish leaders were found to be in anticipation of a heightened pace of change in 2026, the highest among all surveyed regions. 

The jury is still out, however, in relation to how employees and business leaders view workplace GenAI. While 91pc of leaders in Ireland said that their experience with the tech over the course of the past year has changed the way they view technology for the better, only 51pc of participating Irish employees said the same.

The report said: “Confidence remains low among employees more broadly. Just over one-in-five (23pc) say they can use AI tools confidently and explain them to others, compared with 33pc in the UK and 25pc across Europe. 

“Only 27pc feel very prepared to respond to technological disruption in 2026, including emerging technologies and AI, compared with 34pc in Europe. This stands in contrast to Irish leaders, 57pc of whom say they are well prepared to respond.”

Commenting on the findings of the report, Hilary O’Meara, the country managing director for Accenture in Ireland said: “Irish business leaders are demonstrating remarkable ambition when it comes to AI investment and reinvention. However, this research shows that for organisations to fully unlock the value of AI, they need to bring their people with them. 

“Employees are asking for clearer communication and clarity in how AI will change their roles and skills. The companies that succeed in 2026 won’t just scale AI technologies, they’ll scale trust, transparency and capability, resulting in greater employee confidence. That is how Ireland will sustain its competitive edge and ensure AI becomes a driver of shared growth for both leaders and employees.”

Future skills

In line with the need for greater investment into workplace AI, as indicated by the report, Accenture’s data shows that more than half (56pc) of leaders are planning to upskill and reskill the workforce for “AI-enhanced work” in 2026. However, this too was an area in which there was an obvious disparity in opinions between business leaders and employees. 

100pc of Irish leaders who shared their information said that their organisation’s workforce has the appropriate training to work with AI, yet only 55pc of contributing employees agreed. Only 3pc of Irish employees actually reported significant change in their role due to AI, compared to 7pc in wider Europe.  

“Communication appears to be a major contributing factor,” stated the report. “Only 17pc of Irish employees strongly agree that leadership has very clearly communicated how AI agents and agentic AI will impact the workforce, including changes to roles and required skills.”

Agentic AI is, for many businesses, becoming the new frontier in which to explore and innovate, with large and small organisations alike looking to carve out their own space in the sector. It was recently announced that former AI chief of Meta Yann LeCun’s start-up Advanced Machine Intelligence raised $1.03bn in seed funding.

His platform aims to develop ‘world models’ that learn abstract representations of real-world sensor data and would allow agentic systems to predict the consequences of their actions and plan action sequences that accomplish tasks “subject to safety guardrails”.

Also announced this week, technology giant Microsoft revealed plans to launch Copilot Cowork, which is a tool based on Anthropic’s popular Claude Cowork. Reportedly, it is part of Microsoft’s long-term plan to take advantage of the growing demand for autonomous agents.

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Worried that your latest ask to a cloud-based AI reveals a bit too much about you? Want to know your genetic risk of disease without revealing it to the services that compute the answer?

There is a way to do computing on encrypted data without ever having it decrypted. It’s called fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE. But there’s a rather large catch. It can take thousands—even tens of thousands—of times longer to compute on today’s CPUs and GPUs than simply working with the decrypted data.

So universities, startups, and at least one processor giant have been working on specialized chips that could close that gap. Last month at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, Intel demonstrated its answer, Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of the-line Intel server CPU.

Startups are racing to beat Intel and each other to commercialization. But Sanu Mathew, who leads security circuits research at Intel, believes the CPU giant has a big lead, because its chip can do more computing than any other FHE accelerator yet built. “Heracles is the first hardware that works at scale,” he says.

The scale is measurable both physically and in compute performance. While other FHE research chips have been in the range of 10 square millimeters or less, Heracles is about 20 times that size and is built using Intel’s most advanced, 3-nanometer FinFET technology. And it’s flanked inside a liquid-cooled package by two 24-gigabyte high-bandwidth memory chips—a configuration usually seen only in GPUs for training AI.

RELATED: How to Compute with Data You Can’t See

In terms of scaling compute performance, Heracles showed muscle in live demonstrations at ISSCC. At its heart the demo was a simple private query to a secure server. It simulated a request by a voter to make sure that her ballot had been registered correctly. The state, in this case, has an encrypted database of voters and their votes. To maintain her privacy, the voter would not want to have her ballot information decrypted at any point; so using FHE, she encrypts her ID and vote and sends it to the government database. There, without decrypting it, the system determines if it is a match and returns an encrypted answer, which she then decrypts on her side.

On an Intel Xeon server CPU, the process took 15 milliseconds. Heracles did it in 14 microseconds. While that difference isn’t something a single human would notice, verifying 100 million voter ballots adds up to more than 17 days of CPU work versus a mere 23 minutes on Heracles.

Looking back on the five-year journey to bring the Heracles chip to life, Ro Cammarota, who led the project at Intel until last December and is now at University of California Irvine, says “we have proven and delivered everything that we promised.”

FHE Data Expansion

FHE is fundamentally a mathematical transformation, sort of like the Fourier transform. It encrypts data using a quantum-computer-proof algorithm, but, crucially, uses corollaries to the mathematical operations usually used on unencrypted data. These corollaries achieve the same ends on the encrypted data.

One of the main things holding such secure computing back is the explosion in the size of the data once it’s encrypted for FHE, Anupam Golder, a research scientist at Intel’s circuits research lab, told engineers at ISSCC. “Usually, the size of cipher text is the same as the size of plain text, but for FHE it’s orders of magnitude larger,” he said.

While the sheer volume is a big problem, the kinds of computing you need to do with that data is also an issue. FHE is all about very large numbers that must be computed with precision. While a CPU can do that, it’s very slow going—integer addition and multiplication take about 10,000 more clock cycles in FHE. Worse still, CPUs aren’t built to do such computing in parallel. Although GPUs excel at parallel operations, precision is not their strong suit. (In fact, from generation to generation, GPU designers have devoted more and more of the chip’s resources to computing less and less-precise numbers.)