Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily look at what matters in technology.
A cybersecurity warning worth paying attention to today — researchers are flagging how popular free VPN and streaming apps are quietly turning consumer devices into residential proxies, allowing criminals to route malicious traffic through ordinary home networks and blend it into normal internet noise. Businesses are particularly exposed, and awareness remains dangerously low.
On a lighter note for creative professionals, Microsoft has bundled Affinity Photo and its suite of tools with its flagship Surface laptops and tablets, giving Adobe's long-standing dominance a meaningful nudge. The partnership hints at something deeper than a distribution deal, and for anyone who has balked at Adobe's subscription pricing, this is a development worth watching closely.
And from the world of software craft, a sixteen-year-old essay by Sandi Metz is making the rounds again on Hacker News, drawing nearly two hundred comments. Her argument is simple but counterintuitive — duplicating code is often better than committing to the wrong abstraction. In an era of AI-generated code and rapid scaffolding, that idea feels more relevant than ever.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
