about/

WarFi Labs is a one-person workshop for networking, information security, cryptography, and resilient radio, run from Palawan, Philippines. The name joins two words, Wardriving and WiFi, an idea from 2005 given a home at warfi.net in 2006.

It began far from computers. Arman grew up in Bohol in a family of modest means, his mother a homemaker and barangay health worker, his father a driver. There was no working television in the house, only a broken one from the 1980s that he kept tinkering with, teaching himself from the inside how things worked.

When high school ended, computer courses were almost unknown in the province, and most of his batch took the familiar roads, to the sea or to the usual professions, where the money was. He wanted something else. He carried the question to the beach at sunset, where he prayed and thought it through, and came to a conviction: the future belonged to computers. A computer was electronics and far more, a screen, a radio, a hundred appliances in one. In 2001 he enrolled in Computer Systems and Network Technology at AMA Computer Learning Center in Tagbilaran, a fast two-year course built on hardware and Cisco networking.

A year in, with the internet newly at his fingertips, he found the wider world through IRC and email, even a penpal a continent away in Romania. It was there he first learned of the ILOVEYOU worm, a small piece of code, written here in the Philippines, that had crossed every continent and touched billions of machines. On another sunset he marveled that something so small could travel so far, and that wonder became the question that has driven him since: how does information move like that, and how do you defend it? He has always thanked God for placing him in a generation that could witness such things.

To learn how to protect systems, he first learned how they are attacked, studying the tools and tricks traded in the quiet corners of IRC, not to use them, but to understand the people who did. In the school laboratory he befriended the technician and helped keep the machines running, and in return he sat in on the programming classes his hardware course did not teach. The effort showed. Of the whole school, across every course, he was the only student to pass every subject of the AMA and NCC-UK international program, and at graduation in 2003 he crossed the stage twice, once for his local diploma and once for the international one.

From there the road led to Baguio, then Manila, and into two decades as a systems and network administrator. Around 2011 he returned to night classes for a degree in Computer Science at AMA University while working through the day. Information security stayed beside him through all of it.

When the pandemic came in 2021, he left the traditional office for online work and went deep into the blockchain world. He often joined networks early, through their development and testnets, serving as a genesis validator when a chain first came to life, and others trusted him to secure and run their nodes for them. That hands-on work is part of why the trustless section here is written from the inside. The same year he married, and the move carried the young family from Manila to Palawan, where they put down roots. Today he is slowly passing the same wonders on to his young son, amateur radio, the night sky, and in time, mathematics and computers.

WarFi exists to give all of it away. Everything here is free, with no ads, no trackers, no sign-ups, and no products. Knowledge like this is too often hoarded or sold; here it is simply shared, so a student in a far province or a new operator anywhere can defend what is theirs. WarFi is Christian in its motivation: to share freely, so a neighbour can stand on their own, is one way to love them. That is the whole reason this exists, and why it will stay free.

WarFi Labs was built together with Claude, Anthropic's AI, as a genuine collaboration. The vision, the experience, the callsign, and the faith behind it are Arman's, 4I1LCT; Claude helped think it through, write it, and build it, page by page.