Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily look at the stories shaping our digital world.
Wired is out with a practical guide to home networking that cuts through a lot of marketing noise. The core question is simple: do you need a single router or a mesh system? For smaller homes, one good router usually does the job. But if you have dead zones, thick walls, or multiple floors, a mesh setup distributes the signal more evenly across your space. The trade-off is cost and complexity versus coverage.
On the software security front, a developer has released an open-source tool called mitmwall, an egress web application firewall built on mitmproxy. The idea is to monitor and restrict outbound traffic from AI coding agents and potentially malicious packages in the Node ecosystem. As AI agents get more autonomous, controlling what they can reach on the internet becomes a genuinely serious concern, and tools like this are early attempts to draw that boundary.
And if you are watching your monthly bills, Wired has updated its roundup of the best prepaid phone plans heading into two thousand twenty six. Options from Tello, Boost, Google Fi, and US Mobile all made the list. The takeaway is that prepaid has quietly matured into a legitimate alternative to traditional contracts, often at a fraction of the price.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
