If you’ve enjoyed the egg bites at Starbucks, here’s how to make them at home! These egg bites have become a staple recipe in my kitchen. Sure, they’re not the prettiest egg recipe, but they’re wonderfully flavorful and silky tender. They’re a protein-rich snack or ready-made breakfast to keep in your refrigerator (they freeze and defrost well, too).

These egg bites are a fun cooking project with a few twists along the way. I was surprised to find cottage cheese in Starbucks’ ingredient list. It’s the secret ingredient that offers a lovely tang and extra protein. Once blended, the lumpy texture disappears, which explains why I’d never guess it was there.

Instead of Starbucks’ sous vide cooking method, we’ll bake the muffin tray on a rimmed baking sheet filled with a small amount of hot water. The steam from the water bath gives these bites a luscious, smooth texture. Without it, the eggs would brown at the bottom and taste more like frittata muffins. It’s a small detail that makes a big difference!

Continue to the recipe...

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Researchers say they have uncovered a takedown-resistant botnet of 14,000 routers and other network devices—primarily made by Asus—that have been conscripted into a proxy network that anonymously carries traffic used for cybercrime.

The malware—dubbed KadNap—takes hold by exploiting vulnerabilities that have gone unpatched by their owners, Chris Formosa, a researcher at security firm Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, told Ars. The high concentration of Asus routers is likely due to botnet operators acquiring a reliable exploit for vulnerabilities affecting those models. He said it’s unlikely that the attackers are using any zero-days in the operation.

A botnet that stands out among others

The number of infected routers averages about 14,000 per day, up from 10,000 last August, when Black Lotus discovered the botnet. Compromised devices are overwhelmingly located in the US, with smaller populations in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Russia. One of the most salient features of KadNap is a sophisticated peer-to-peer design based on Kademlia, a network structure that uses distributed hash tables to conceal the IP addresses of command-and-control servers. The design makes the botnet resistant to detection and takedowns through traditional methods.

“The KadNap botnet stands out among others that support anonymous proxies in its use of a peer-to-peer network for decentralized control,” Formosa and fellow Black Lotus researcher Steve Rudd wrote Wednesday. “Their intention is clear: avoid detection and make it difficult for defenders to protect against.”

Distributed hash tables have long been used to create hardened peer-to-peer networks, most notably BitTorrent and the Inter-Planetary File System. Rather than having one or more centralized servers that directly control nodes and provide them with the IP addresses of other nodes, DHTs allow any node to poll other nodes for the device or server it's looking for. The decentralized structure and the substitution of IP addresses with hashes give the network resilience against takedowns or denial of service attacks.

The concept of DHTs can be hard to grasp. At a simplified level, they are data structures stored on multiple network peers, as described here. This design makes the network scalable. The more network nodes, the better the distribution of elements is. DHTs also make networks fault-tolerant. When one node leaves the network, nodes go elsewhere for location lookups. In theory, the only way to take the network down is to sever all connected nodes.

Kademlia uses a 160-bit space to designate (1) keys—which are unique bitstrings derived by hashing a chunk of data—and (2) node IDs, both of which are assigned to each node. Nodes then store the keys of other nodes. The stored keys are organized by their similarity to the ID of the node storing them. Proximity is measured by XOR distance, a mathematical means of mapping a network. When a node polls another node, it uses this metric to locate other nodes with the closest distance to the key it’s looking for until it finally finds a match. KadNap, a variant of Kademlia, obtains the key to be searched through a BitTorrent node.

Formosa explained:

DHT helps you get closer and closer to a target. You first reach out to some entry bittorrent nodes and basically say “hey I have this secret passphrase. I’m looking for who to give it to.” So you give it to a couple of nearby “neighbors” and they say “ah ok I don’t fully understand this passphrase but it’s kind of familiar and here are some people who may know what that means. So now you go to those neighbors and the process continues. Eventually you reach someone who says “Yes! This is my passphrase, welcome in.” In our case, when we reach this person they say here is a file to firewall port 22 and then here is a second file containing the C2 address you want to connect to.

Despite the resistance to normal takedown methods, Black Lotus says it has devised a means to block all network traffic to or from the control infrastructure.” The lab is also distributing the indicators of compromise to public feeds to help other parties block access.

Infected devices are being used to carry traffic for Doppelganger, a fee-based proxy service that tunnels customers’ Internet traffic through the Internet connections—primarily residential—of unsuspecting people. With high bandwidth and IP addresses with clean reputations, the service provides customers with a reliable way to efficiently and anonymously visit sites that might otherwise not be accessible.

People who are concerned their devices are infected can check this page for IP addresses and a file hash found in device logs. To disinfect devices, they must be factory reset. Because KadNap stores a shell script that runs when an infected router reboots, simply restarting the device will result in it being compromised all over again. Device owners should also ensure all available firmware updates have been installed, that administrative passwords are strong, and that remote access has been disabled unless needed.

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IVALO, Finland—In 1987, fictional superspy James Bond careened around a frozen lake in an Aston Martin in the movie The Living Daylights. Bond’s tires were carrying a secret—retractable tire studs that operated with the touch of a button. After cutting a circle in the ice with a wheel to sink the bad guys, Bond deployed his outriggers for balance and his on-demand studs for an impressive getaway.

Nokian Tires played with that idea, presenting a concept in 2014 with similar functionality. However, as Nokian development manager Mikko Liukkula remembers wryly, each tire was so complex that a production set would have cost more than the vehicle itself. Fast-forward to 2026, and Nokian has debuted a giant step forward in studded-tire engineering: a studded winter tire that automatically adjusts to changes in temperature and surface pressure.

I put these new Hakkapeliitta 01 tires through the wringer in and around a frozen-over Lake Tammijärvi at Nokian’s 1,700-acre testing center. After drifting, slaloming, hard braking, and swooshing along snowy trails, I can attest to the quality of the gripping power.

Testing the studs at White Hell

Roughly 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland, the trees and ground are blanketed with bluish-white snow roughly 180 days per year. Santa lives nearby, apparently. What better place to test winter tires? That’s what Nokian Tires figured when it established its testing center in this white wonderland, hundreds of miles north of its headquarters in Nokia.

It's not just supercars that use frozen lakes in Lapland, tire companies like testing here too. Credit: Kristin Shaw

The tire manufacturer opened this facility—called White Hell, a nod to the Nürburgring (nicknamed Green Hell) track in Germany—in 1986. At the time, a few employees from the testing department trailered dozens of Nokian tires to the outpost on a frozen lake to test them in extreme conditions. That was two years before it split from parent company Nokia. Today, it’s the site where Nokian launched its newest creation, the Hakkapeliitta 01.

The new tire is built on the success of Nokian’s already-established Hakkapeliitta line, which originated 90 years ago in 1936. Before the 01, the Hakkapeliitta 10 set the standard for winter tires and is still highly regarded. Since this is such a significant leap for Nokian, it’s starting over again at 01, a practice that has happened only two other times in nearly a century in business.

Here's how it works

Three layers of the Hakkapeliitta 01 work together to enable the stud movement. The rubber tread (made partly of renewable materials like natural rubber, plus bio resin and bio-based oils partially derived from pine resin and canola oil) meets the road, cushioning a thin lock compound layer and an adaptive base that holds the studs in place. The adaptive base layer is the key to the system, as it stiffens in cold temperatures and becomes softer and stickier as the air and surface temperatures rise. Roughly 220 studs dot each, hitting the road 14 times per second at 62 mph (100 km/h). Nokian’s 2,300-foot (700 m) ice runway—which is smoothed out with water and a custom machine with wide wings, like a crop harvester—has been used thousands of times to prove the adaptive base transitions quickly from the ice to the air outside the covered runway and vice versa.

While the adaptive base is new, the studs themselves are not.

“If you look at the stud itself, the pin is the same as that we used in the Hakkapeliitta 10,” says Nokian director of marketing Hans Dyhrman. “We took a little bit of a change on the collar to increase the biting edge that comes with each one of those studs.”

One thing that makes the tires unique, Dyhrman says, is that a robot inserts each stud to ensure it's optimally oriented for each position. Center studs offer strong support and performance, while the shoulder studs are rotated horizontally for better biting edges and steering precision.

“After each one of these studs is installed, each one is then scanned and recorded in our database so that we can make sure that each Nokian Tires Hakkapeliitta 01 that comes off the assembly line has just the right amount of stud protrusion, measured through and through,” Dyhrman says.

Climate change requires changing tires

As the climate shifts, Nokian says, road surfaces are different from those of 10 or 20 years ago. Sudden freeze and thaw cycles replace longer, more consistent winter weather patterns. Studded tires are still the most effective option for driving on ice. However, studs present two issues: road noise and road wear. The studs chip into the asphalt when snow and ice are absent, causing holes in the road.

In Texas, where I live, studded tires are prohibited. That’s no big deal, since we see ice maybe once a year. It’s the same story for other Southern states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. Even in Michigan, perhaps surprisingly, the state says “in practical terms, no” when asked if studded tires are legal. Most other states in the US allow studded tires during specified months of the year.

Next thing you know, someone will make a car invisible, too. Credit: Nokian

Nokian says its new winter tires represent up to a 30 percent reduction in road wear, as the ice grip improved by as much as 10 percent. On top of that, the Hakkapeliitta 01 represents noise levels reduced by as much as 1 decibel from the Hakkapeliitta 10. Some, but not all, of the new tires include another layer, called SilentDrive technology, that reduces interior noise even further.

The new Hakkapeliitta 01 tires will be available to consumers in autumn 2026, in the Nordic countries and North America.

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, left, moderator Judge Paul L. Friedman, center, and Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Monday, where the two justices differed over how the court is handling emergency requests.

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