YouTube is experiencing an outage across the United States, with users in other countries like Canada, India, the Philippines, Australia and Russia also having problems with accessing the website. The issue seems to have started at around 8 PM Eastern time and reached 338,000 reports on Downdetector before starting to taper down. More users reported having issues accessing the app, but I personally lost access to the web homepage first.

As of 9:22 PM, users are still reporting being unable to access YouTube on Reddit. As of 9:33 PM, users are complaining that they still can’t access the service, though others say it’s back up for them. Some people are reporting partial restoration of service, with the homepage now being accessible but not seeing any recommended videos.

Downdetector also got thousands of reports of Google being down at around 8 PM Eastern time. As of 9:53 PM, Engadget Managing Editor Cherlynn Low reports that both YouTube and Google Home Assistant are still inaccessible for her. As of 10:12PM Eastern, Team YouTube posted on X that the issue has been completely fixed. While it didn’t say why YouTube went down, the team acknowledged the problem before 9PM and posted an update 20 minutes later that its recommendation system was having issues, even though its homepage was back.

Update, February 17, 2026, 10:27 PM ET: YouTube says the issue has been completely fixed.

Update, February 17, 2026, 10:08 PM ET: Updated with reports that certain Google services are also down for some users.

Update, February 17, 2026, 9:34 PM ET: Updated with reports from users.

Update, February 17, 2026, 9:26 PM ET: Updated to correct time of outage, added new countries where it’s out and added new reports of YouTube still being inaccessible.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/youtube-was-down-for-thousands-of-users-in-the-us-020718788.html?src=rss

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Texas is suing Wi-Fi router maker TP-Link for deceptively marketing the security of its products and allowing Chinese hacking groups to access Americans' devices, Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced. Paxton originally started looking into TP-Link in October 2025. Texas Governor Greg Abbott later prohibited state employees from using TP-Link products in January of this year.

TP-Link is no longer owned by a Chinese company and its products are assembled in Vietnam, but Paxton's lawsuit claims that because the company's "ownership and supply-chain are tied to China" it's subject to the country's data laws, which require companies to comply with requests from Chinese intelligence agencies. The lawsuit also says that firmware vulnerabilities in TP-Link's hardware have already "exposed millions of consumers to severe cybersecurity risks."

TP-Link provided the following statement to Engadget in response to the lawsuit:

The claims made by the Texas Attorney General’s office are without merit and will be proven false. TP-Link Systems Inc. is an independent American company. Neither the Chinese government nor the CCP exercises any form of ownership or control over TP-Link, its products, or its user data. TP-Link’s founder and CEO, Jeffrey Chao, resides in Irvine, CA, and is not and never has been a member of the CCP. To ensure the highest level of security, our core operations and infrastructure are located entirely within the United States, and all U.S. users' networking data is stored securely on Amazon Web Services servers. We will continue to vigorously defend our reputation as a trusted provider of secure connectivity for American families.

TP-Link was reportedly being investigated at the federal level in 2024 after its devices were connected to the massive "Salt Typhoon" hack that accessed data from multiple US telecom companies. Despite all signs pointing to the federal government getting ready to ban TP-Link in 2025, Reuters reports that the Trump administration paused plans to ban the company’s routers in early February, ahead of a meeting between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping.

Update, February 17, 3:38PM ET: Added statement from TP-Link.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/texas-ag-sues-tp-link-over-purported-connection-to-china-193802258.html?src=rss

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X is facing yet another investigation into Grok's reported creation of nonconsensual sexual images on the platform. Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced an inquiry into X regarding the harmful, intimate images and processing of EU and EEA individuals' personal data — including children.

In an 11-day period, X generated about three million sexualized images, an estimated 23,000 of which were of children. British nonprofit, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) announced the results of its December 29 to January 9 review last month.  

Critically, the investigation will determine whether X has broken GDPR laws. "The DPC has been engaging with XIUC since media reports first emerged a number of weeks ago concerning the alleged ability of X users to prompt the @Grok account on X to generate sexualised images of real people, including children," DPC deputy commissioner Graham Doyle said, referring to X using the full title X Internet Unlimited Company (XIUC). 

Doyle continued: "As the Lead Supervisory Authority for XIUC across the EU/EEA, the DPC has commenced a large-scale inquiry which will examine XIUC’s compliance with some of their fundamental obligations under the GDPR in relation to the matters at hand."

The DPC's probe could have repercussions for X across the EU, while also building on similar probes in the bloc. In January, the European Commission launched an investigation into whether X has violated the Digital Services Act. It's looking into if X has properly "assessed and mitigated" Grok's risks on X, including the spread of illegal content such as the AI-generation nonconsensual sexually explicit images. Once again this includes those of children — this disturbing point can't be emphasized too much. 

X claimed in mid-January that it was preventing Grok from editing photos of real people to give them revealing clothing. However, this seems far from the truth. Earlier this month, a male reporter found Grok would still put him in revealing clothing and even added visible genitalia. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/eu-launches-second-investigation-into-groks-nonconsensual-image-generation-113239967.html?src=rss

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© Reuters / Reuters

Surfshark’s One plan is heavily discounted right now, with an 87-percent discount on the two-year package, plus three extra months. The promo price comes out to $2.29 per month, or $62 for the first 27 months.

We’ve generally liked Surfshark as a straightforward, speedy service for everyday use, and it’s one of the picks in our guide to the best VPNs. In our Surfshark review, we found it delivered excellent speeds overall and reliably unblocked Netflix across most of our test servers, which makes this long-term deal worth a look if you want a VPN deal that also includes extras like antivirus, breach alerts and private search.

In our Surfshark review, the VPN stood out for its excellent performance and approachable design, especially for people who want strong protection without constantly tweaking settings. During testing, it delivered some of the fastest speeds we’ve seen from a major VPN, with average download speeds dropping by just over five percent worldwide. Upload speeds also held up well, making it a solid option for streaming, browsing and everyday use. We gave Surfshark an overall score of 87 out of 100 and called it one of the best VPNs for casual users.

This deal focuses on the Surfshark One plan, which bundles the VPN with a suite of extra security tools. In addition to the VPN itself, you get Alternative ID for masking your email and personal details, antivirus protection, breach monitoring through Surfshark Alert and a private search engine. It also supports unlimited simultaneous device connections, so you can protect all of your devices with a single subscription.

Right now, the Surfshark One plan is discounted by 86 percent, bringing the price down to $67 total for two years plus three extra months. That works out to $2.49 per month for the first 27 months, billed upfront, with a 30-day money-back guarantee if you change your mind. 

If you want to compare it against other top services before committing, you can also check out our full Surfshark VPN review and our best VPN guide to see how it stacks up. We’ll be keeping our best VPN deals roundup updated regularly, too.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/surfshark-vpn-is-offering-up-to-87-percent-off-two-year-plans-123000279.html?src=rss

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Mullvad, a virtual private network (VPN) named after the Swedish word for "mole," is often recognized as one of the best VPNs for privacy. I put it on my best VPN list for exactly that reason. I've got huge respect for the extra lengths Mullvad goes to in order to ensure its user's privacy.

To give you a preview, Mullvad is one of the few VPNs — other than my normal privacy recommendation, Proton VPN — that lets users pay entirely in cash. But even Proton VPN asks for an email address to make an account and uses a few marketing cookies on its own website. Mullvad represents every account as a randomly generated 16-digit code and uses no marketing cookies whatsoever.

That's just one example of how Mullvad goes beyond the call of duty to keep users private. But while privacy is the most important aspect of a VPN alongside security, it's not the only thing that matters. For this review, I set out to investigate whether Mullvad pairs its rights-protecting bonafides with versatile, convenient and enjoyable VPN apps. Using our rigorous VPN testing procedure, I'll rate Mullvad in 11 areas. You can find a summary of my results in the table below, skip to the sections that matter most to you or just read my final advice in the conclusion.

Editor's note (2/11/26): We've overhauled our VPN coverage to provide more detailed, actionable buying advice. Going forward, we'll continue to update both our best VPN list and individual reviews (like this one) as circumstances change. Most recently, we added official scores to all of our VPN reviews. Check out how we test VPNs to learn more about the new standards we're using.

Findings at a glance

Category	Notes
Installation and UI	All apps share roughly the same user interface Apps are responsive and easy to navigate, with no design choices that would threaten beginners Lack of "fastest server" button is an issue Browser extension is only available on Firefox and still in beta
Speed	Reasonably good average latency Reduces download speeds by 26 percent and upload speeds by 17 percent Speed declines are consistent and chartable All speed metrics are quite good on nearby servers
Security	Only uses WireGuard protocol No IP address leaks, even when switching servers Packet test showed successful encryption
Pricing	Always costs 5 Euro per month, though prices outside Europe depend on exchange rates No auto-renewal — membership lasts until money runs out Can pay using cash or by purchasing scratch-off vouchers on Amazon 14 day money-back guarantee, except on cash payments
Bundles	Only app besides the VPN is the free Mullvad Browser, which removes the tracking habits of typical web browsers Allows several smaller VPNs to use its servers in their networks
Privacy policy	No vague lines or loopholes in privacy policy Only saves account numbers and expiration dates for each user Uses an extremely limited range of cookies with no marketing trackers Has undergone a total of 17 audits of different aspects of its service Swedish police demanded customer information in 2023; Mullvad couldn't comply because the data wasn't logged
Virtual location change	Unblocked Netflix 13 out of 15 times When it failed, virtual location was still changed
Server network	90 locations in 50 countries, majority in North America and Europe No virtual servers whatsoever
Features	DAITA conceals traffic patterns that might let an AI identify what sites you visit Uses quantum-resistant encryption on WireGuard Can choose your own multihop entry and exit points Several options for getting around nation-level firewalls Can block ads, trackers, malware and other unwanted content using predetermined DNS block lists Supports IPv6 traffic Kill switch and stronger lockdown mode Split tunneling by app
Customer support	Help center includes useful filters to find the topic Well-written articles with good internal linking No live chat support, but staff answers emails quickly Can view app logs at any time
Background check	Founded in 2009 in Sweden; still owned and operated by initial founders User account numbers were exposed in a 2023 incident, but Mullvad quickly closed the leak

Installing, configuring and using Mullvad

Let's start by examining how Mullvad feels as a piece of software. In this section, I'll be testing its desktop apps for Windows and Mac, its mobile apps for Android and iOS and its browser extension for Firefox. To start with the installation process, Mullvad downloads and installs in a snap on mobile. On desktop, installation requires a few more steps than is typical, but the app guides you quickly through everything.

Across the board, my only serious complaint is that there's no option for automatically choosing the fastest server. You can usually assume that the nearest one to you will be the fastest, but there's always the chance of an unusual server overload. It's a bizarre oversight for an app that otherwise goes out of its way to be usable.

Windows

Mullvad's Windows app has a slim UI that uses space efficiently without being too cramped. It doesn't give you a lot of information, such as live speed tests or data in transit, but I've mostly found that to be needless filler on VPN apps.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Speaking of needless filler, the map may be a little bigger than it needs to be, but maps on VPN clients aren't just about teaching you geography — they do a lot to make the apps more welcoming to casual users who might not otherwise fire up security software. In fact, Mullvad's UI is admirably beginner-friendly, befitting its focus on privacy for everybody rather than just the tech-savvy.

All the settings are accessed by clicking the gear in the top-right. Here, you can turn on DAITA (Mullvad's defense against AI traffic scanning), activate multihop and control Mullvad's other features. There are also some quality-of-life features for the UI itself, such as whether it remains pinned to the taskbar or operates as a standalone window. Some options, especially under the VPN settings tab, are a bit technical, but don't need to be touched for a good experience.

Mac

Mullvad's macOS app is quite similar to its Windows app, both in terms of the interface and the features offered. The big difference used to be that macOS lacked split tunneling, but that's been added in a recent update. The only serious distinction now is that the Mac client can't be unpinned from the taskbar, which is just a little bothersome.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Other than that, you'll find every setting you need under the gear, just like on Windows. Similarly, connections to VPN servers happen quickly, and selecting locations from the menu is very straightforward. While connected on either app, you can click the circular arrow by your location to swap to another server in the same location — highly convenient if you're trying to unblock Netflix.

Android

Mullvad's Android app has the same nearly-perfect design approach as all its other apps. The main page has nothing on it but the connect/disconnect button, the choice of server locations, a map and the buttons for your account information and preferences. Those preferences are a manageable set of options that are almost all managed with simple on-off switches. It's all highly responsive and annoyance-free.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

iOS

Mullvad's iOS app looks very similar to its apps on every other platform. The front page is kept simple, with large controls in the foreground and a map taking up most of the space. Everything else is located in the menu accessed through the gear icon at top right. Neither mobile app has the options for toggling the UI itself that the desktop apps have, but it's mostly free of quality-of-life problems to start with.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Browser extensions

Mullvad's browser extension is only compatible with Firefox. You can't actually connect to the VPN through this extension. Its main functions are to tell you whether you're connected to a Mullvad server and to connect to a SOCKS5 proxy in a Mullvad location. If you do this while connected to Mullvad through the desktop app, you'll get a second layer of protection, similar to the multi-hop feature.

The Firefox extension is a rare misfire for Mullvad — perhaps fair, since it's still in beta. Its only real feature is something that the desktop app already does perfectly well, and it looks like a software malfunction to boot. However, given Mullvad's track record, I'm confident they'll figure out what to do with it in time.

Mullvad speed test

A VPN almost always slows browsing speeds and increases latencies. It's unavoidable, given the extra steps a VPN protocol adds to the process of getting online. The trick is to find VPNs that keep the slowdown to a minimum, using a combination of regular maintenance, good planning and smart load balancing.

For this test, I used speedtest.net to check how six of Mullvad's server locations influenced three key speed metrics. Ping measures latency, the time in milliseconds (ms) that one data packet needs to travel between a client device and an ISP. Download speed measures the amount of data in Megabits that a web browser can download in one second. Upload speed tracks how much data can be uploaded in a second. We're looking for low latencies and high download and upload speeds.

Server location	Ping (ms)	Increase factor	Download speed (Mbps)	Percentage drop	Upload speed (Mbps)	Percentage drop
Portland, USA (unprotected)	15	—	58.96	—	5.85	—
Seattle, USA (fastest location)	23	1.5x	55.07	6.6	5.51	5.8
Montreal, Canada	165	11.0x	44.28	24.9	4.62	21.0
Fortaleza, Brazil	307	20.5x	40.96	30.5	4.65	20.5
Prague, Czechia	368	24.5x	43.17	26.8	5.47	6.5
Lagos, Nigeria	528	35.2x	37.41	36.6	4.61	21.2
Bangkok, Thailand	473	31.5x	39.76	32.6	4.13	29.4
Average	311	20.7x	43.44	26.3	4.83	17.4

I'll start with the bad news: the tests didn't exactly make Mullvad look like a speed demon. Its speeds have gone up and down in the years I've been using it, and right now they appear to be on the downswing. If you use locations all around Mullvad's server network, you can expect your download speeds to decrease by about 26 percent and your upload speeds to decline by 17 percent.

However, it's important to put those numbers in perspective. First, Mullvad's numbers aren't markedly worse than the ones I got when testing CyberGhost. Its speeds are average, but by definition, most things are average. Its average worldwide latency is actually better than Surfshark, the current champion of download and upload speeds.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

It's also nice that Mullvad's speed drops follow a predictable curve. Lots of VPNs have unexpectedly sharp declines in certain locations, frequently in Africa. By contrast, Mullvad's speed decreases pretty much as a direct function of how far from the server you are. This not only makes speed drops easier to plan around, but also means you can expect very good speeds on nearby servers.

This property of being fastest on servers near the user is another sign of Mullvad's focus on its core privacy mission. If anonymity is your main reason for using a VPN, it doesn't matter what your IP address is, so long as it's not your real one. Using a nearby Mullvad server should guarantee you an internet connection that's both fast and private.

Mullvad security test

To be secure, a VPN has to check two critical boxes. It must provide you with a secondary IP address without leaking your real one, and it must encrypt your communications with its servers so your activity can't be traced. In the sections below, I'll see whether Mullvad meets those requirements.

VPN protocols

VPNs use protocols to mediate between end devices, ISPs and their own servers. The first step is to ensure that the service you're considering uses protocols that have expert confidence. Mullvad has kindly made this step easy for me by using only WireGuard on all its apps, with no OpenVPN, IKEv2 or in-house unique protocols.

There's no question that WireGuard is a solid protocol. It uses the ChaCha20 stream cipher for symmetric encryption and Poly1305 for authentication, both uncrackable with current technology. Mullvad has even added its own fix for WireGuard's one flaw, its need to save static IP addresses — the Mullvad implementation is set up to delete the IP address if it goes 10 minutes without being used.

Even so, it's unfortunate to lose the ability to change protocols, which is one of the most common steps for troubleshooting a VPN connection. I understand Mullvad's reasoning for cutting out OpenVPN (it claims the cryptography isn't strong enough) but don't agree. It's one of this provider's few unforced errors.

Leak test

There's a straightforward test to determine if your VPN is leaking. Load up any website that shows your IP address — I personally use ipleak.net — and see what IP and location it reveals without your VPN active. Then activate the VPN and refresh the page. If you see your real IP address anywhere, your VPN is leaking.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

I ran that test on five Mullvad servers. Each time, the website showed me the IP address of the VPN server, concealing my real one. To keep things simple, I ran the initial tests with IPv6 blocked via the Mullvad client. When I turned it on and tried again, the IPv6 traffic didn't leak any more than the IPv4 did. I also saw no signs of WebRTC leaks. Unless you set up a custom DNS server, Mullvad also uses its own DNS, which remains entirely within the VPN tunnel.

I had one more leak test to try. Frequently, VPNs are leak-proof when maintaining a connection to one server but drop encryption when switching between servers. That problem is why I ultimately couldn't recommend Norton VPN. Luckily for me, Mullvad has a button that lets you shuffle to another server in the same location, so I used that to see if it stayed leak-proof.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

As you can see in the screenshot, Mullvad jumped seamlessly from one server to another without showing my real location in-between. On a practical level, that's enough for me to declare Mullvad leak-proof.

Encryption test

For one final experiment, I used the WireShark packet sniffer to see whether the data Mullvad sent from my computer to my ISP was encrypted. After capturing a few packets, I was gratified to see that they were totally unreadable to interlopers. Most established VPNs pass this test, but it's still important for due diligence.

How much does Mullvad cost?

Mullvad's pricing structure is one of the most unusual things about it. This is normally the section where I untangle 47 different Pro+ and Business- accounts that are all sold at three different durations. Mullvad couldn't be further from that. It costs 5 Euro a month — that’s it. Each 5-Euro subscription can be used on five devices at once.

It manages payments through a system inspired by parking meters. When you sign up for Mullvad, you'll buy as much time as you want. That time will count down until it expires, unless you top it up with more 5-Euro payments. If you run out of money, Mullvad won't charge you a new subscription fee because you didn't tell it not to. It'll just stop working until you pay again. Every payment also comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee, except for payments made in cash.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The only real complexity in the process is that Mullvad always figures out its prices in Euro, so outside the EU, the cost per month is affected by exchange rates. If you happen to live in a country where the government's economic policy shuttles between capricious and arbitrary, you might want to grab a few months in advance.

The other most interesting thing about Mullvad's pricing is the options you can use to pay. For maximum privacy, you can pay with cash using the payment token you'll find on your account page. Note that this is not the same as your account number. To find it, log into your dashboard on Mullvad.net, click Add time to your account in the left-hand bar, then click the button labeled Cash and scroll down. Make your cash payment by writing the token on an envelope and mailing it to Sweden (full instructions here).

Sam Chapman for Engadget

You can also get untraceable Mullvad vouchers by paying cash at participating retail locations. Most of them are in Europe, but you can order them from Amazon. While your payment to Amazon won't be private, the voucher can't be linked directly to your VPN account, since the actual number is hidden behind a scratch-off panel. It's actually pretty ingenious.

Of course, you can also pay using any of the normal methods, including credit cards, cryptocurrency and bank wires (though not PayPal). But the more private methods are always there for people who need them.

Mullvad side apps and bundles

Mullvad is that rare VPN that's still content to be a VPN and not an all-inclusive security suite. No shade to NordVPN or Surfshark, whose extra features are generally quite good, but it's nice to see at least one of the top providers staying focused.

Although Mullvad doesn't have any partners that sell their products alongside its VPN, it does have several partnerships with other VPNs who use its network as the basis for their own products. MalwareBytes Privacy VPN, Mozilla VPN, Tailscale and Obscura can all be considered Mullvad side apps if you squint.

Mullvad Browser

Mullvad's only product other than the VPN is Mullvad Browser, which is free to download and works on Windows, macOS and Linux. Mullvad Browser works in the background, blocking common methods of browser fingerprinting that can be used to deduce your identity even when you have a VPN running.

For example, it automatically reports your time zone as UTC, disguises personal preferences like font and window size, scrambles information sent by APIs and conceals your browser version and computer operating system. It's also in private mode by default, which doesn't hide what your ISP sees but is useful for concealing your activity from other people that might use your computer.

Close-reading Mullvad's privacy policy

Since privacy is Mullvad's main selling point, this section is even more important than usual. Loopholes in the privacy policy of the privacy VPN would be deeply ironic. Fortunately, Mullvad's privacy policy backs up its high-flying rhetoric. It's a short, pointed and readable document with no problems I could discern. Mullvad has no parent company or subsidiary it might use as a loophole, and no clauses in its policy are left open to interpretation. It's a masterpiece of the privacy-policy genre.

The document is actually three policies: a privacy policy, a no-logging policy and a cookie policy. The privacy policy lists all the times Mullvad might collect data about a user. That's exactly two situations — using financial information to process payments (which will be entirely anonymous if you use cash or a voucher) and using your email address to track support tickets you open. That's it.

The no-logging policy is a bit longer, but mostly because it's explaining exactly how Mullvad manages to run a VPN service with so little information on individual users. For each account, it stores a number and an expiration date, plus public keys and tunnel addresses if you're using WireGuard (deleted at most 10 minutes after your session ends). Everything else is completely anonymized. Mullvad even claims that its 500,000 or so user accounts could have been created by the same user 500,000 times, which I suppose is one way to spend 2.5 million Euro.

The cookie policy is the shortest because Mullvad uses exactly five cookies. One saves your login status in your browser, one saves your language preferences, one protects its site from being used in a specific kind of forgery hack and the other two are for handling Stripe payments.

Independent privacy audits

Mullvad corroborates its privacy policy with regular audits of various aspects of its service. Currently, there are 17 audits listed on its website, including four infrastructure audits by Cure53. All of its apps have been separately audited and found to be solid. It has been a couple of years since the last full infrastructure audit in 2024, but given how many other targeted reviews Mullvad has gone through since then, it's hard to be too upset about the pause.

In 2023, Mullvad achieved the holy grail of VPN privacy: being ordered by subpoena to turn over customer information and not being able to comply because that information didn't exist. Nothing compares to a VPN's privacy being tested in the wild like this.

Can Mullvad change your virtual location?

Sometimes, a VPN appears to be working, but still reveals your real location to websites. Netflix is a useful proxy for this. To unblock a streaming site like Netflix, a VPN needs to change your virtual location while not appearing to do so — if Netflix sees any hint of VPN traffic, you'll get blocked with the hated proxy error. I used five different locations to check whether Mullvad is up to the streaming task.

Server location	Unblocked Netflix?	Changed content?
Vancouver, Canada	3/3	3/3
Gothenberg, Sweden	2/3	2/3
Istanbul, Turkey	3/3	3/3
Johannesburg, South Africa	3/3	3/3
Singapore, Singapore	2/3	2/3

Mullvad did well for streaming, but it didn't manage a perfect score like its fellow anti-establishment VPN Windscribe did. Two of the 15 servers I tested failed to unblock Netflix, one in Singapore and one in Mullvad's hometown of Gothenburg. I also had trouble logging into Netflix while connected to a Vancouver server, though that server did unblock the site consistently once I got inside.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

In Mullvad's defense, no location failed more than once. It's completely possible to get good streaming performance out of this VPN; you just have to be willing to click the server refresh button a few times. Privacy is still the main use case for Mullvad, but it's fine for streaming too.

Investigating Mullvad's server network

Mullvad has 90 server locations in 50 countries and territories. Unusually for a VPN, users can choose between all 590 of its total servers, including several in each location. There's even a list on its website that shows you the status of every server.

Mullvad does not use virtual server locations, so every server is physically located in the place where it claims to be. Here's how they're distributed.

Region	Countries with servers	Total server locations
North America	3	25
South America	5	6
Europe	29	41
Africa	2	2
Middle East	2	2
Asia	7	8
Oceania	2	6
Total	50	90

Over half the countries with servers are in Europe and over two-thirds of the cities with servers are in either Europe or North America. That lopsided network is a limitation of Mullvad's refusal to use virtual server locations, since its real servers have to be concentrated in nations developed enough to host data centers. With an all-real network, it's easier to tell which servers will give you the fastest performance, but you can't simulate as much of the world as you can with larger services like ExpressVPN.

The good news is that there's at least two real server locations on every continent. Mullvad has a surprisingly robust presence in South America and two bare-metal servers in Africa, which is more than some other VPNs have. In the end, though, the best application of Mullvad is to protect the online privacy of users in North America, Europe and eastern Asia.

Extra features of Mullvad

Most of Mullvad's features are augmentations to the VPN itself, rather than side options that do other things. Some of them are bread-and-butter, like the kill switch and split tunneling, but a few you won't find anywhere else. Note beforehand that Mullvad does not support port forwarding, so if you depend on that for your torrenting, try another VPN.

DAITA AI defenses

Mullvad's most novel feature is a recent one. DAITA, which stands for Defense against AI-guided Traffic Analysis, can be toggled on and off in the Mullvad app. According to Mullvad, certain patterns in how browsers communicate with websites can be analyzed by AI to reveal the truth behind encrypted internet history. DAITA hides those packets by filling communications with background noise so the AI won't know what's real.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

DAITA is a laudably forward-looking feature, but as Mullvad itself admits, it will make your browsing speeds slower and drain your battery. I recommend only using it for activities you really want to hide.

Quantum resistance

Mullvad's desktop apps establish quantum-proof WireGuard tunnels by default. Quantum computing isn't yet a threat to WireGuard, but it may become dangerous in the future, so Mullvad is getting ahead of the problem (along with a few other services like NordVPN). When quantum resistance is active, Mullvad encapsulates its keys using the current standard mechanism, ML-KEM.

Anti-censorship

If you find yourself in a country where government censorship makes it hard to access the internet, Mullvad has options that might help. These anti-censorship features can be used to get around firewalls that block visible VPN traffic. You have several options, including changing your WireGuard port, randomizing your port number, disguising your VPN traffic as an ordinary HTTPS connection or using an obfuscated Shadowsocks proxy.

Mullvad's anti-censorship involves more features than most VPNs have in this area. This makes it a bit less user-friendly, but a lot more likely to work. If you're new to getting around censorship, Mullvad's help center has a helpful page about using its anti-censor settings.

Multihop

Many VPNs offer a double-hop connection that routes your traffic through two servers instead of one, adding a redundant layer of encryption in case one server malfunctions. Mullvad pulls ahead of the competition (except Surfshark, which also does this) by allowing you to choose your entry and exit servers. When you activate the multihop option and open the server list, you'll be prompted to pick two locations instead of one.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

This means you can select an entry server that's close to you and an exit server in any country whose location you want to spoof, letting you fine-tune your own performance. It's way nicer than being railroaded into certain paths.

DNS content blockers

Mullvad includes six blocklists that can keep you or your family members from looking at unwanted content: ads, trackers, malware, gambling, adult content and social media. These lists can't be customized like Windscribe's R.O.B.E.R.T. blocks can, so you're limited to just turning them on and off.

IPv6 support

The internet is gradually transitioning from the old IPv4 standard over to IPv6, which will allow many more addresses to be shared out. Mullvad is one of a few VPNs looking ahead to the IPv6 era. You can leave it to block all IPv6 traffic, but if you do need IPv6 for any reason, you can enable it while still being connected to a Mullvad server.

Kill switch and lockdown mode

Mullvad comes with two features that protect against unexpectedly losing your VPN defenses. The first is a kill switch, a common VPN option that cuts off internet access if the VPN tunnel ever fails. This simple measure helps guard against accidental leaks.

Lockdown mode is the stronger option. While it's active, you will be unable to get on the internet unless you connect to a Mullvad server first. This will remain true if you turn the connection off yourself and even if you quit the app.

Split tunneling

Split tunneling is available on Mullvad's apps for every system except iOS. It lets you send some apps outside the VPN tunnel so they get online with your normal IP address. It's helpful if you have some apps that don't work with the VPN active — this is common with online banking, as an example. Another common application is to protect a torrenting client in the background while using your browser unprotected for better speeds.

Mullvad customer support options

Mullvad makes two forms of support available in the app. You can report a problem by going to Settings -> Support -> Report a problem, typing your question (requested to be in either English or Swedish, though they'd probably be able to read a question run through Google Translate) and optionally providing your email. You can also view the app's logs at any time, which can be useful to help a technician diagnose your problem.

If you'd rather search for a solution at your own pace, you can go to that same page and click FAQs and Guides instead. This opens the help center in a browser.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

I love Mullvad's approach to laying out its FAQs. Instead of crowding topics into five or six categories and making you guess whether your problem falls under setup, usage or troubleshooting, Mullvad gives you a set of dropdown filters to narrow down the articles which might relate to your problem.

By the time you've named which device, OS and protocol you're dealing with, you won’t have many articles left to sift through. There is an annoying tendency for certain sets of filters to reduce the number of surfaced links to zero, but for those cases, there's a search bar that also works well.

The articles themselves are good enough that I referred to them several times while writing this review. Some of them are a bit overlong, but they're diligent about including both internal and external links to get you where you're going fast.

Live support experience

This is normally where I cover how it feels to get live chat support from the VPN I'm reviewing. However, Mullvad doesn't have live chat support. That's unfortunate, although it's still better than Windscribe's approach of forcing you to banter with a sarcastic robot. Instead, I sent a question via email to Mullvad's support team, and got a response within 24 hours.

Mullvad background check

Mullvad was founded in 2009 in Sweden. It's still owned and operated by its original founders. According to a detailed timeline on its website, its 16-year history has been as uneventful as any user could ask for, with not much changing except updates to stay on the technological leading edge. The only controversy mentioned in Mullvad's own materials is the 2023 police raid of its headquarters, which (as I covered in the privacy section) only makes them look better.

So as not to take Mullvad at its word, I scoured the last 16 years of news items and user reports to search for any other blemishes on its record. Based on that research, I found no reason to doubt Mullvad's honesty about its location, owners or team.

I found just one leak that wasn't noted on Mullvad's own site. In 2023, a security research group called ZATAZ alleged that it found anonymized information on Mullvad users saved on an Internet Archive page, including account numbers (linked article is in French). According to ZATAZ, Mullvad contacted the Archive and got the page deleted.

To my mind, the only mistake Mullvad made in response to the ZATAZ allegations was not making a public statement about the incident. I can see why they didn't think it was a big deal, since even logging into someone else's Mullvad account wouldn't show you their browsing history, but it's always better to communicate about these things.

Final verdict

Mullvad is a VPN that knows what it wants to be and achieves that goal with flying colors. It's not trying to be an everything app — it does privacy and does it well. That's not to say it has nothing going on outside the VPN itself, as its DNS blockers, AI defenses and split tunneling all work smoothly. But if you want a VPN that's not ashamed to be a VPN, Mullvad is the right choice.

Of course, it has its own compromises. It's solidly in the middle of the speed pack and occasionally trips up when unblocking streaming sites. The lack of any protocols other than WireGuard grates on me a bit, since it reduces the user's options for troubleshooting. With all that said, those are minor hiccups on a VPN that does such a thorough job keeping you anonymous online.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/mullvad-vpn-review-near-total-privacy-with-a-few-sacrifices-130000056.html?src=rss

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Netflix's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery isn't quite a done deal yet. As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, the US Department of Justice has started its probe of Netflix's proposed purchase, but is notably interested in whether the streaming giant was involved in any anticompetitive practices. According to the civil subpoena seen by WSJ, the Justice Department is looking into any "exclusionary conduct on the part of Netflix that would reasonably appear capable of entrenching market or monopoly power."

While Netflix announced plans to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in December at a value of $82.7 billion, the deal was expected to close in 12 to 18 months, subject to required regulatory approvals. The DOJ has the power to block the transaction and this investigation could hint at the agency's approach, which may involve proving that Netflix put its competition at an unfair advantage.

Netflix's attorney, Steven Sunshine, told WSJ that this probe was standard practice and that, "we have not been given any notice or seen any other sign that the DOJ is conducting a separate monopolization investigation." Netflix also said in a statement that it's "constructively engaging with the Department of Justice as part of the standard review of our proposed acquisition of Warner Bros." According to WSJ, the investigation is still in its early stages and could take up to a year to complete.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/doj-is-investigating-if-netflix-used-anticompetitive-tactics-as-part-of-its-merger-probe-210940856.html?src=rss

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© Reuters / Reuters

Disney+ subscribers in some European countries have lost access to advanced HDR features like Dolby Vision, TechRadar and FlatpanelsHD report. The issue was first spotted by German Disney+ subscribers on Reddit, but currently also impacts subscribers in Portugal, Poland, France and the Netherlands, according to FlatpanelsHD.

"Dolby Vision support for content on Disney+ is currently unavailable in several European countries due to technical challenges," Disney said in a statement. "We are actively working to restore access to Dolby Vision and will provide an update as soon as possible. 4K UHD and HDR support remain available on supported devices."

If the issue is in fact a technical one, it seems like it could be around for the long-term. Disney has removed any reference to Dolby Vision from its Disney+ video quality support page in Germany. As of now, the company lists HDR10 as its default HDR format, despite Dolby Vision support being a feature of Disney+ for several years now. 

FlatpanelsHD writes that the real issue might be legal, rather than technological. A company called InterDigital won an injunction in a German court against Disney in November 2025 because it violated at least one of the company's patents on streaming video technology. The injunction specifically requires Disney to stop violating InterDigital's patent on "a method for dynamically overlaying a first video stream with a second video stream comprising, for example, subtitles." It's not entirely clear how that plays into the company offering Dolby Vision in Europe, but it would explain why subscribers in Germany were some of the first people to notice Dolby Vision's absence.

Engadget has contacted Disney for more information about Disney+'s missing HDR support and whether InterDigital's injunction played a role. We'll update this article if we hear back.

Mentions of Dolby Vision were also stripped out of the US version of Disney+'s video quality support page. InterDigital hasn't won an injunction in the US, but the company is pursuing a patent case against Disney in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. That doesn't necessarily mean Dolby Vision support will be taken from US subscribers next, but it does suggest there's more happening here than just technical challenges.

Update, February 6, 3:44PM ET: The original version of this article included mention of Disney+ losing HDR10+ support in Europe, but Disney says it never offered HDR10+ in that region. The article has been updated accordingly.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/disney-loses-access-to-dolby-vision-in-some-european-countries-193930702.html?src=rss

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TikTok’s signature features that hooked users around the world are its algorithm and endless scroll. Now, though, the European Union has called those aspects of the app illegal and may order the company to alter them.

“Today, the European Commission preliminarily found TikTok in breach of the Digital Services Act for its addictive design,” the EU’s regulator said in a press release. “This includes features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and its highly personalized recommender system.” It said that TikTok failed to put up safeguards to ensure that those “addictive” features don’t “harm the physical and mental wellbeing of users,” including minors.

“For example, by constantly ‘rewarding' users with new content, certain design features of TikTok fuel the urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain of users into ‘autopilot mode'. Scientific research shows that this may lead to compulsive behaviour and reduce users' self-control,” the regulators stated.

TikTok’s current parental controls and features to limit screen time are insufficient, the Commission added, and TikTok may need to modify them. The platform may also be required to limit its infinite scroll and adjust its recommendation algorithms.

The EU Commission will give TikTok an opportunity to rebut the findings and the company said would use “any means available” to challenge them. “The commission’s preliminary findings present a categorically false and entirely meritless depiction of our platform,” the company told The New York Times in a statement.

Europe opened its wide-ranging investigation against TikTok in February 2024 and has already found the company at fault for its data sharing practices and advertising transparency. If found guilty of violating the DSA, TikTok faces a fine up to six percent of its annual worldwide turnover.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/eu-says-tiktok-uses-addictive-design-and-must-change-131738425.html?src=rss

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A free trial to a virtual private network (VPN) can mean a few different things. Several of the best VPNs let you try them out without paying. A rare few, and only one on this list, let you try them without submitting payment information at all. Some VPNs have forever free plans that let you use them indefinitely without paying, as long as you're OK with some limits.

For the most part, though, your best chance to test a VPN for free is to pay for a subscription. Then, if you don't like the service, you can get your money back before the refund guarantee expires. This takes a bit more work, and some services have very tight turnarounds. However, it'll get you the most time with the most complete version of the VPN.

With that out of the way, let's talk about the best VPN free trials for each definition of "free trial." I'll start with VPNs that actually have free trials, most of which require a payment method and only work on mobile devices. The next section lists the best forever free plans. Finally, I'll share instructions for how to use a VPN money-back guarantee as a free trial.

Best VPNs with free trials

Best VPN forever free plans

Using VPN money-back guarantees as free trials

Although VPN free trials are great when you can get them, you'll enjoy a lot more flexibility by taking advantage of refund guarantees. Almost every provider has a money-back guarantee that doesn't require you to prove a specific problem. You'll probably have to deflect some upselling attempts before you actually get the refund, but most policies do promise you all your money back, with no pro-rating.

I like to download VPNs on their one-month plans so I can put the full service through my usual battery of tests. A 30-day money-back guarantee grants you enough time to learn whether you can use the VPN long-term. If you don't like the service, the standard method for getting a refund is to get in touch with customer support on the VPN provider's help page.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/best-vpns-with-free-trials-130000435.html?src=rss

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When we say that NordVPN is a good VPN that's not quite great, it's important to put that in perspective. Building a good VPN is hard, as evidenced by all the shovelware VPNs flooding the market. NordVPN may not be perfect, but it's easily top-five caliber and excels in certain use cases.

First, the bad: NordVPN's apps could all stand to undergo a little more quality control, with elements distracting from other elements and inconsistent designs from platform to platform. At least one of its FAQ pages directly contradicts itself. And while all the server locations could unblock Netflix, the one in Nigeria still showed U.S. content, indicating that our real location might have leaked.

However, there's a lot of good to balance that out. Speeds are fantastic and we saw no other hint of any kind of leak. Its server network is expansive and not overly reliant on virtual locations. The vast majority of servers are ideal for unblocking foreign websites. The real draw, though, is the extra features, including the innovative and flexible Meshnet, plus a malware blocker that acts more like a full antivirus and forward-looking quantum resistant encryption.

Editor's note (9/24/25): We've overhauled our VPN coverage to provide more detailed, actionable buying advice. Going forward, we'll continue to update both our best VPN list and individual reviews (like this one) as circumstances change. Most recently, we added official scores to all of our VPN reviews. Check out how we test VPNs to learn more about the new standards we're using.

Table of contents

• Findings at a glance

• Installing, configuring and using NordVPN

• NordVPN speed test

• NordVPN security test

• How much does NordVPN cost?

• NordVPN side apps and bundles

• Close-reading NordVPN's privacy policy

• Can NordVPN change your virtual location?

• Investigating NordVPN's server network

• Extra features of NordVPN

• NordVPN customer support options

• NordVPN background check

• Final verdict

Findings at a glance

Check out a summary of our NordVPN review in the table below.

Category	Notes
Installation and UI	Connections happen quickly and features are easy to use on all platforms UI sometimes gets in the way; map screens can be clunky and apps come with unnecessary notifications Surprisingly, the best UI may be in the browser extension
Speed	Extremely fast download speeds with only a 6.4-percent average drop Good latencies on nearby servers, but farther ones have some lag Fast upload speeds, but losses spiked in a few locations
Security	Uses acceptable protocols with uncracked encryption NordWhisper obfuscated protocol recently implemented on Windows, Android and Linux No DNS, WebRTC or IPv6 leaks on five test servers
Pricing	Best plan is the 2-year Basic for $81.36, or $3.39 per month Basic gives you the complete VPN If you get a multi-year plan, be sure to manually renew in order to keep the promotional rates
Bundles	Plus tier adds advanced malware protection and NordPass password manager Complete plan adds NordLocker cloud storage Prime tier adds ID theft protection and insurance features
Privacy policy	NordVPN does not log user activity on the VPN, a policy backed up by several third-party audits However, it does log potentially identifiable device information unless you opt out in settings Some concerning liberties taken in the overall Nord policy, but no documented malfeasance
Virtual location change	Four out of five test servers unblocked Netflix three times running, including virtual India location Location in Nigeria got into Netflix, but didn't change available titles
Server network	153 server locations in 117 countries and territories Server network is about 40 percent virtual, including all locations in Africa
Features	Extra servers grant additional privacy (double VPN, Onion over VPN, obfuscation) or specific optimizations (P2P, dedicated IP) Threat Protection blocks dangerous domains and the Pro upgrade has some antivirus capability Dark Web Monitor reports to you when any sensitive information has appeared on clandestine leak sites Presets let you activate several settings with one click Post-quantum encryption is nice, but not necessary yet Kill switch is a useful safety feature on all apps Split tunneling by app on Windows and Android, and by URL on browser extensions
Customer support	Written FAQs, live chat and email support Live chat connected to an expert human within a minute FAQs are poorly organized and contain some conflicts, but well-written on average
Background check	NordVPN is headquartered in Panama, while its parent company Nord Security is based in the Netherlands 2018 theft of public keys was a mistake, but NordVPN did almost everything right in response Claims of law enforcement collaboration are overblown — NordVPN will comply with requests, but that doesn't mean they'll have information to provide

Installing, configuring and using NordVPN

NordVPN's biggest strengths are its speeds and the range of options it puts at your fingertips. User experience is important, but it's not quite as front-and-center as it is with ExpressVPN and Proton VPN. Here's how the apps run on all the major platforms.

Windows

The Windows app is the first instance of NordVPN's UI being not bad enough to complain about, but not good enough to be considered excellent. The initial connection process is a little slow, and it's far easier to connect than it is to disconnect (click the power button while connected to shut the VPN off). The map takes up space that would have been better allocated to the server list.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The minor problems continue in the settings list, which makes the mistake of not keeping all its tabs visible in the window — if you open one, you have to click back to the main menu to reach another page. The pages themselves are easy to use; it's just a bit clunkier than it could have been.

Mac

Setup is swift and easy on Mac, but the full NordVPN interface is a little awkward. The vast majority of the main window is taken up by a large map, which is mostly useless. There's no way to zoom out to see the whole world, and you can't choose between servers in each country unless you zoom way in. The server list on the left-hand side is almost always more useful.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The preferences panel is better. All the tabs come with clear explanations of their function, and are laid out so the menu is always visible, unlike the Windows app. The gear icon at the bottom includes its own set of tabs that encompass most of the common functions, including changing your VPN protocol, activating the kill switch and setting the VPN to automatically connect on untrusted networks.

Android

NordVPN on mobile can be described in much the same way as its desktop apps: generally great, occasionally getting in its own way. On Android, the map screen is much more helpful. It's expandable to the entire world and allows you to choose between servers within a country. On the other hand, the important settings are buried in the Profile tab, and the app notifies you about your "security score" to pressure you into activating certain settings.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

To find the general settings page on Android, tap the bottom-right Profile tab and scroll down. Except for Threat Protection, which has its own tab on the main window, every feature is located here. It's probably necessary to keep the main app from getting cluttered, but still mildly frustrating.

iOS

The NordVPN iOS app resembles a compressed version of the macOS client, for better or worse. As with Android, most of its features are in the bottom-right Profile tab. It works well most of the time, but often feels slightly cumbersome. There's a bit too much on the screen, and a bit too much of the stuff has nothing to do with the VPN's core function.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

As an example, you can't log into your account within the app — you have to load your Nord account page in a web browser. Forced app switching is a design choice that truly needs to die. That said, VPN connections happen quickly. If you tend to simply leave your VPN active, you probably won't notice any of this stuff.

Browser extensions

Most VPN browser extensions consist of the same features on a smaller scale, and NordVPN's — on Chrome, Firefox and Edge — are no exception. They are important for one reason, though: they're the only way to split tunnels by URL and the only split tunneling at all on macOS and iOS. Despite being more compact, they're also easy to use, making for an excellent quick-start VPN solution.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

NordVPN speed test

All VPNs slow down your average browsing speeds by adding extra steps into the connection process. When we test speed, we're looking for the VPN to drag as little as possible on your unprotected speeds. Download speed will be the most important stat for most users, since that determines how fast web pages load and how quickly videos can buffer.

Latency is important for live connections like video chats, games and live streaming. Latency increases with distance — in the test below, data packets were sent to the remote server, then back to our home network. Upload speeds likewise influence your live two-way communications and are also vital for torrenting. Let's see how NordVPN performs on all three metrics.

Server location	Latency (ms)	Increase factor	Download speed (Mbps)	Percentage drop	Upload speed (Mbps)	Percentage drop
Unprotected (Portland, OR, USA)	22	--	59.20	--	5.86	--
Seattle, WA, USA (Fastest)	44	2x	57.21	3.4	5.62	4.1
New York, NY, USA	177	8x	56.90	3.9	5.60	4.4
Stockholm, Sweden	371	16.9x	55.94	5.5	5.63	3.9
Istanbul, Turkey	411	18.7x	53.02	10.4	5.78	5.9
Hong Kong	350	15.9x	56.18	5.1	5.72	2.4
Johannesburg, South Africa	602	27.4x	53.26	10.0	5.67	3.3
Average	326	14.8x	55.42	6.4	5.54	4.0

To summarize: NordVPN's download speeds are the fastest we've seen and its upload speeds and latency tie with the best. Downloads only dropped by an average of 6.4 percent across the globe and readings were mostly consistent — the servers in question performed much the same in each test. We even threw in Turkey and South Africa, two locations that commonly cause problems, but NordVPN still kept the drop to 10 percent.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Latency is more a product of physical distance than VPN infrastructure, but you can still see differences between services. When tested on a similar range of locations, ExpressVPN and Proton VPN both kept average latencies under 300 ms. NordVPN's average came out to 326 milliseconds, though we should note that its latency increased less than Proton's on the closest server.

Upload speeds declined an average of four percent, but there were a few anomalously high readings in Istanbul that skewed those numbers up. Without that location, NordVPN's upload rates would also have been the industry's current best.

NordVPN security test

No matter how well-built a VPN looks from the outside, there are several ways its security can fail. The most common problems are outdated protocols with weak encryption, failing to block IPv6 traffic or inadvertent leaks from sending DNS requests outside the encrypted tunnel. We'll start by looking for those common leak sources, then check whether NordVPN's encryption might be failing in less traceable ways.

VPN protocols

A VPN protocol is a set of rules used to get data quickly and safely from your device to a VPN server and back, even while that data is encrypted. Different protocols are connected with different encryption algorithms and can impact the speed, security and stability of your connection.

When testing VPN security, the first step is to see if it's using any protocols like PPTP that are outdated and crackable, or homebrewed protocols with unclear security. NordVPN users have four options for protocols: OpenVPN, IKEv2 (not available on Mac or iOS), NordLynx and NordWhisper (available on Windows, Android and Linux only). 

Sam Chapman for Engadget

OpenVPN and IKEv2 are both standard protocols you'll find on most VPN providers. Both use various strengths of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), with OpenVPN defaulting to AES-256 and IKEv2 to AES-128. OpenVPN can be set to UDP (faster but less stable) or TCP (more reliable but slower). So far, so secure.

NordLynx is unique to NordVPN, but it's not that far off the beaten track — it's just WireGuard with extra security. WireGuard normally works by saving a stable IP address for each connection, which raises the very slight risk of exposing a user. NordLynx adds a second layer of abstraction that means those stable addresses are never revealed. Since NordVPN strongly recommends it for most situations, we used it for all our tests in this review.

Finally, there's NordWhisper, a new protocol introduced in early 2025 that disguises your VPN traffic as normal web traffic to evade blanket web blocks. It's likely to be slower than the other protocols, so don't use it unless everything else has been blocked. We also don't recommend counting on it too much in general — large-scale censorship technology, like the Great Firewall of China, tends to rely on blocklists of known VPN servers, whose identity NordWhisper can't disguise.

Leak test

Our first order of business was to check five test servers to see if they leaked our real IP address — staying away from the ones in the speed test in order to get as comprehensive a picture of NordVPN's security as possible. With help from ipleak.net, we found all five to be free of the three major types of leaks.

• DNS leaks occur when a VPN sends DNS requests (in short, how your browser knows which websites to show you) outside its encrypted tunnel. By default, NordVPN uses its own private DNS servers, which our tests showed to effectively prevent leaks.

• WebRTC leaks are caused by real-time communication protocols sending information outside the VPN, which may reveal your real IP address. NordVPN is consistently successful at keeping WebRTC inside the tunnel, but you can have your browser block it if you're still worried.

• IPv6 leaks happen when a VPN only blocks IPv4 traffic and lets v6 through. NordVPN automatically blocks IPv6 traffic while it's active, so an IPv6 leak is all but impossible.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Although that's all great news, it is still possible for leaks to occur without a clear explanation, so we ran one final test on NordVPN.

Encryption test

Wireshark is a program that captures detailed images of information sent over a device's internet connection. Even though our tests showed NordVPN to be free of leaks, we wanted to inspect it at the most granular level. Using WireShark, we recorded the traffic sent to an unencrypted HTTP site, before and after connecting to each NordVPN test server.

Every server showed the same pattern: readable plaintext before, encrypted ciphertext after. If there is a security flaw remaining in NordVPN, it's unlikely to be relevant to the overwhelming majority of users.

How much does NordVPN cost?

NordVPN's pricing structure looks convoluted at first, but it's much simpler than it appears. A Basic subscription gets you full VPN functionality, and all the other tiers just add more features. If all you need is a VPN, you only need to concern yourself with the left side of the table below.

The best deal for a Basic NordVPN subscription, which lets you connect to NordVPN with up to 10 devices at once, costs $81.36 for two years when you pay upfront ($3.39 per month). One year of the same plan costs $59.88 in advance ($4.99 per month) or $12.99 for one month at a time. The table below shows the complete cost; for more information on plans above Basic, see "side apps and bundles" in the next section.

Plan	1-month cost	1-year cost	2-year cost
Basic	$12.99	$59.88 ($4.99/month)	$81.36 ($3.39/month)
Plus	$13.99	$71.88 ($5.99/month)	$105.36 ($4.39/month)
Complete	$14.99	$83.88 ($6.99/month)	$129.36 ($5.39/month)
Prime	$17.99	$107.88 ($8.99/month)	$177.36 ($7.39/month)

The longer plans save money, but be careful: if you let them expire, you'll automatically renew at the more expensive one-year plan. Enough customers claim to have been auto-renewed at the higher rate that they've launched a class-action lawsuit against NordVPN, accusing the company of deceptive pricing practices and making renewals too difficult to cancel. A NordVPN PR rep said they could not comment on ongoing legal action, "other than to state that we are and always have been very clear about the recurring nature of our services." No court date has been set so far.

That said, there's a fairly straightforward workaround in the meantime: To prevent the auto renewal, log out of your NordVPN account, then sign up for a discounted plan again using the same email. As long as you do this before your subscription expires, your new account should link to your old one, keeping you subscribed at the introductory rate.

Free trials and refunds

Every NordVPN plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you cancel and request a refund before 30 days are up, you'll get the full cost back. The only way to try it for free without paying is to get the app on Android, where there's a seven-day trial through the Google Play Store.

NordVPN side apps and bundles

NordVPN is part of a larger family of Nord Security products, which you can save money on if you need more than one. We won't review all of them here, but for reference, here's everything you'll get from the higher subscription tiers. 

• Basic: VPN on 10 devices, specialty servers, DNS ad-blocking, Meshnet

• Plus: All Basic features, plus malware scanning, extra scam blocking, tracker blocking, NordPass password manager, data breach scanner

• Complete: All Plus features, along with 1TB of NordLocker encrypted cloud storage

• Prime: All Complete features, plus NordProtect features like dark web monitoring, credit monitoring, ID theft insurance and extortion insurance

Another tier called Ultra includes a subscription to Incogni, a data removal service run by Nord's partner Surfshark. The Ultra bundle is only available in certain countries, since NordVPN is still testing it; users outside the test countries can still add Incogni service at checkout. There also used to be a NordVPN family plan, but it seems to have been eliminated after Nord expanded the devices per subscription to 10.

You can get a dedicated IP address on NordVPN to ensure you have the same IP every time you connect. This lets you configure remote firewalls to let you through while you're connected to the VPN. A dedicated IP costs $8.99 per month, $70.68 for a year ($5.89 per month) or $100.56 for two years ($4.19 per month).

The NordVPN pricing page lists access to a Saily eSIM plan as a perk, though mysteriously, none of the existing plans seem to include it yet. A lot of VPNs are expanding into the eSIM space, so this may change soon.

Close-reading NordVPN's privacy policy

A VPN privacy policy isn't just empty words — it's a contract between the provider and its users. If a service openly defied its own policy, it could be sued for false advertising. VPNs tend to sneak loopholes into their privacy policies instead of flouting them outright; these loopholes can shed light on how the provider actually views your privacy.

We combed through NordVPN's privacy policy to see whether it tries to take any such liberties. The policy has two parts: the general Nord Security policy and an addendum specific to NordVPN.

General Nord privacy policy

This policy applies to all Nord Security apps. It's impossible to create an account without a valid email address, but you can use a separate email masking service to make that anonymous. The policy also explicitly says that your email address will be added to a marketing mailing list, though you can opt out. Irritating, but not a privacy risk in itself.

We're more concerned about the later statement that it may process data without the user's consent "under the legal basis of our or third parties' legitimate interest." This clause covers some cases we'd agree are legitimate, such as identifying people who launch cyberattacks from NordVPN servers. But Nord also considers it "legitimate interest" to process your personal data "to improve or maintain our services and provide new products and features."

Reached for comment, a NordVPN representative said that using personal data in this way "generally involves aggregated, depersonalized or technical information." That's somewhat reassuring, but the "generally" leaves a bit too much wiggle room. Ideally, we'd prefer that personal data exist wholly in the "consent only" section.

The section on sharing your data with third parties only lists "some of" the service providers who may receive your information. Among these are Google Analytics, which is known to store personal data on U.S. servers — all of which are potential security risks in the age of DOGE. Other unnamed "third parties" are involved in targeting ads at users of Nord websites.

The NordVPN representative said that "since some partners, such as payment processors, can vary by region or specific service and may change over time depending on our operational needs, we do not publish a fixed list." They added that all third parties are "contractually required to handle personal data in accordance with applicable laws and industry standards."

We aren't using this to condemn Nord; many of these practices are fairly standard in the VPN industry. But it's important to know about all the potential leakage points before trusting your deepest secrets to any company.

NordVPN specific policies

The NordVPN privacy policy doesn't add much atop the general Nord notice. It does track session activity connected to your username to make sure you're staying within the 10-device limit, but it automatically deletes these logs 15 minutes after you disconnect. The logs also don't include your IP address or the addresses of VPN servers you used.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The only real problem we found is that NordVPN apps collect information about your activity on the app by default. This doesn't include information about your browsing habits, but it does include unique traits that could conceivably be used for "device fingerprinting" — in which a third party can deduce a user's identity through clues about their device. You can turn this off in the General settings.

A NordVPN spokesperson told us that the data collected is "not personally identifiable," and that the company takes "deliberate steps to strip out anything that could be linked back to a specific person." This presumably means the data is aggregated so it only shows general trends, not any one device's activity. That's a lot less risky, but we still recommend switching the setting off.

Third-party privacy audits

NordVPN has passed five independent audits of its privacy policy so far, most recently from Deloitte in late 2024. Annoyingly, you can only read the entire report by logging into a Nord account, but it at least doesn't have to be a paid account.

The audit found that NordVPN was following its own no-logs policy. Specifically, the Deloitte Lithuania investigators concluded that "the configuration of IT systems and management of the supporting IT operations is properly prepared, in all material respects in accordance with the NordVPN's description set out in the Appendix I." (Appendix I of the report is identical to NordVPN's privacy policy.)

Can NordVPN change your virtual location?

You'll be most interested in this section if you mainly use a VPN to change their location for streaming. To see if NordVPN could unlock new streaming libraries, we picked a new batch of five test servers, then logged onto Netflix. Since Netflix tries to block all VPN servers to prevent copyright issues, our first question was whether we'd get through at all.

Our second question: would connecting to a NordVPN server actually change what Netflix library we saw? It should, given that NordVPN seems leak-proof, but thoroughness demands we check anyway. Here's what we found.

Server location	Netflix unblocked?	Content changed?
Canada	Yes	Yes
Argentina	Yes	Yes
Germany	Yes	Yes
India	Yes	Yes
Nigeria	Yes	No

Four out of five locations worked perfectly. On a Canadian server, we were able to stream Star Trek: The Next Generation, which left American Netflix years ago. The Argentine server gave us access to something called Pasion de Gavilanes, which we'd never heard of but sounds great.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The only problem was Nigeria. We tested it several times, connected to multiple different Nigerian locations, but saw our American Netflix library every time. We then ran a leak test on Nigeria, which wasn't one of our security test locations, and found it to be working normally. It's hard to say what happened, especially since the Nigeria server doesn't appear to be virtual, but we can confirm that it wasn't working.

Investigating NordVPN's server network

NordVPN has servers in 153 cities in 117 countries. Out of all total options, 62 are virtual locations (about 40 percent), where the server is really located somewhere else. This makes it possible to get servers into more places, but depending on your actual location relative to the server, it may perform differently than you expect.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Virtual locations have allowed NordVPN's server network to grow quite extensive, with lots more locations in South America, Africa and Asia than the industry standard. Check out the distribution in the table.

Region	Countries and territories with servers	Total server locations	Total virtual server locations
North America	15	36	12
South America	10	10	6
Europe	48	57	11
Africa	10	10	10
Middle East	7	7	4
Asia	24	26	18
Oceania	3	7	1
Total	117	153	62 (40.5 percent)

The relatively low proportion of virtual locations (nearly identical to that of ExpressVPN) is a good sign, as it means NordVPN has been growing its server network thoughtfully. Some VPNs — looking at you, HMA — inflate their server lists as a marketing point without seriously considering what it takes to maintain such a large network. That thankfully doesn't seem to be the case here.

Extra features of NordVPN

Here's everything you get with a NordVPN app other than the VPN itself. There's a lot going on here, so we'll limit ourselves to a sketch of each feature.

Specialty servers

As soon as you load NordVPN, you'll see a list of special servers near the top of the right-hand column. We'll go over each of them in order.

• Dedicated IP: As discussed in the bundles section, a dedicated IP address costs extra. With this, you'll always connect with the same IP, which is private to you alone. It may be worth the price if you find yourself getting asked for CAPTCHAs a lot more while connected to NordVPN — though for what it's worth, that didn't happen to us.

• Double VPN: This sends your connection through a second VPN server before it reaches your ISP. The second server is your apparent location. There are 10 endpoints to choose from. As you might imagine, your internet will run slower with two VPN servers in the mix, so only use this if you seriously need security.

• Obfuscated servers: These are only available on OpenVPN. Obfuscation can help you get around firewalls that seek out and block VPN traffic. If you can't get online with NordVPN when you're on a certain network, obfuscated servers might work.

• Onion Over VPN: After encrypting your data as normal, these servers send it through several nodes of the Tor network, granting you the total anonymity of onion routing while keeping you safe from malicious relays. It's available in two locations, Netherlands and Switzerland, and — like double VPN — is best used only when you need the utmost privacy.

• P2P: NordVPN only allows torrenting on its peer-to-peer servers, but fortunately, it's got P2P servers in 114 countries — only three fewer than it has in total. NordVPN keeps your download and upload speeds very fast on average, so you shouldn't have trouble torrenting from any location.

Meshnet

Meshnet is NordVPN's most unique and exciting feature by a long shot. By logging into the same NordVPN account on multiple devices, you can connect those devices directly through a NordLynx tunnel without needing a NordVPN server in between.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Essentially, you're using your own devices as VPN servers — obviously not great for privacy, but amazing for accessing web services in other countries. While two devices are connected, you can transfer files between them through the NordLynx tunnel. You can even invite friends and use their devices.

Threat Protection

NordVPN has two levels of antivirus: Threat Protection and Threat Protection Pro. The former is a simple DNS filter that stops your browsing from loading unsafe web pages while NordVPN is active. It's the highest level available on Android, iOS and Linux, or on any Basic subscription.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Threat Protection Pro, which Plus subscribers or higher can set up on Windows and Mac, can work even when you aren't connected to a NordVPN server. It acts more like a standalone antivirus by scanning downloaded files for malware, and can even block trackers. Basic Threat Protection (without Pro) can block some trackers by filtering out domains known to use them, but doesn't block the trackers directly.

Dark Web Monitor

While active, Dark Web Monitor continually searches known data breach dump sites on the dark web and notifies you if it ever finds your account email address. If you get that notification, change any passwords associated with the address. With a Prime subscription, you can also have it search for your phone number, social security number or other financial information.

Presets

Presets let you set up one-click VPN connections with a desired group of settings, a lot like Proton VPN's Profiles. NordVPN comes pre-loaded with presets that optimize for "Downloads," "Speed" and "Browsing," which sounds to us like the same thing three times.

More usefully, you can create presets for particular countries, then add website shortcuts that will appear once you've connected. You could, for example, set one that connects to a specific location, then add a shortcut to a streaming site available in that location.

Post-Quantum encryption

Experts widely believe that quantum computers will eventually make our current encryption algorithms obsolete, but there's almost no consensus on when that will actually happen — except that it hasn't happened yet. Knowing that, NordVPN's "post-quantum encryption" feature comes across as a bit premature, but it's reassuring that someone is thinking about it.

Having said that, we don't recommend using post-quantum encryption yet. It works by layering one of the known quantum-proof encryption standards on top of a standard NordLynx session, which makes your VPN connection slower and more erratic. Until we can verify a real quantum cyberattack, post-quantum encryption is a needless precaution.

Kill switch

A kill switch cuts off your internet the instant you lose your connection to a NordVPN server. This protects you in case a server unexpectedly fails, and as a side benefit, prevents you from connecting to any fake VPN servers. You should keep the kill switch on at all times.

Split tunneling

Split tunneling is available on NordVPN's Windows and Android apps (and Android TV by extension), along with its browser extensions. On Windows and Android, it splits by app: you can determine which apps get online through the VPN and which go unprotected. The browser extensions let you split by URL, so the VPN only protects certain sites.

NordVPN customer support options

NordVPN's apps link directly to its online help center. As always, we went in with a specific question in mind: whether the basic level of Threat Protection could block trackers, and if so, what kind. We found the categories on the written support page difficult to parse, especially the troubleshooting section — would the average user appreciate the difference between "app issues," "connection issues" and "errors"?

We correctly guessed that our question would be under "Using NordVPN -> Features," but the introductory article on Threat Protection and Threat Protection Pro was buried at the bottom of the list. Unfortunately, that made things more confusing, as this article says that Threat Protection (not Pro) both does and doesn't block trackers. In NordVPN's favor, however, using the search bar brought us instantly back to that article without any confusion.

The live support experience

Using NordVPN's live chat was a smooth and reassuring experience. From the time we decided to ask directly, it took us less than a minute to connect with a real person, who quickly cleared up the confusion and promised to update the confusing support page (we'll check back to see if they actually do).

Sam Chapman for Engadget

One other option is an email support form, which can be found both on the website and in the help sections of NordVPN apps. This is best for complex problems that require screenshots to explain, and promises a response within 24 hours.

NordVPN background check

NordVPN was founded in 2012. Launching with its desktop apps, it moved to iOS and Android in 2016, then added apps for browser extensions and smart TVs. Its developer, Nord Security, has no parent company, and its history is relatively uncontroversial. We've documented two notable incidents below, plus more about Nord Security's operations.

Headquarters and ownership

Nord Security was founded in Lithuania, and maintains offices there. Although Nord Security is registered in Amsterdam, NordVPN operates under a separate license in Panama, which makes any data requests subject to Panama's courts.

Finland server breach

The first serious incident in NordVPN's history began in March 2018, when unidentified hackers managed to steal three private keys from one of Nord's data centers in Finland. Researchers didn't notice the leak until October 2019, well after the stolen keys had expired, but NordVPN's encryption was still technically vulnerable for several months.

We say "technically," because it was really only the outer layer of encryption — and even if they'd broken through it all, the hackers would only have seen browsing activity, not usernames, passwords or anything else sensitive. If anything, NordVPN's response actually makes us trust it more. It ended its relationship with the contractor who ran the Finnish data center and revamped its policies to eliminate the kind of negligence that led to the breach.

Arguably, its only real error was not immediately disclosing the breach. NordVPN learned about the leak and started addressing it in May 2018, but the news didn't break until more than a year later. That timing probably made it look more suspicious than any actual mishandling did.

Law enforcement compliance

Another minor controversy erupted in 2022, when PCMag and other outlets reported that NordVPN had edited its website to say that it would comply with data requests from law enforcement. NordVPN responded with a new post that said nothing had changed: their policy was always to comply with lawful requests, which — provided the requests were lawfully submitted through a Panamanian court — is literally their only option.

We're inclined to agree. VPNs are legal companies. They wouldn't last long if they openly declared their intent to break the law. The key is that when law enforcement comes calling, there shouldn't be anything to show them, as with the Turkish seizure of ExpressVPN. That's why verifiable no-logging policies are so important.

Final verdict

NordVPN is a great service on its own merits. It only suffers from having to be compared with the likes of ExpressVPN and Proton VPN. For example, its P2P servers are good for torrenting, but not as useful without Proton's port forwarding. It's fast, but speed tests fluctuated just a little more than Express.

NordVPN's extra features are the best reason to pick it over its rivals. With Meshnet, you can theoretically set up a VPN connection anywhere in the world, and no other VPN has anything close to Meshnet's file transfer powers. Threat Protection Pro is also great if you can get it, adding file scanning to bolster the typical approach of just blocking suspicious DNS addresses. Specialty servers round out the offering, with double VPN maintaining good speeds with extra safety and Onion over VPN being among the safest ways to use Tor.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/nordvpn-review-2025-innovative-features-a-few-missteps-163000578.html?src=rss

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© NordVPN

So you've decided you need a virtual private network to hide your browsing activity from your ISP, change your virtual location, stay safe on public Wi-Fi and enjoy all the other benefits. The inevitable next question is: "Should I pay for one? If so, how much?"

All the best VPNs cost money, but it can be hard to tell an overpriced service apart from one that's priced according to its value. On this page, I'll share the costs for top VPN services, calculate the industry average and explain what makes VPNs cost as much as they do. At the end, I'll share a few tips for making a VPN fit your budget.

How much is a VPN?

I'd like to start by introducing the complexity of the problem. If you just want the numbers, you’ll find those in the sections below.

The main thing that makes VPNs so hard to budget for is that providers aren't always honest about how much they're charging. They rarely lie outright, but they often overcomplicate their pricing structures and hide increases in the fine print.

Let's take CyberGhost as an example, since I just reviewed it. A one-month subscription to CyberGhost costs $12.99 — simple enough. However, you can also get a six-month subscription by paying $41.94 upfront, though the website more prominently calls this "$6.99 per month." Finally, you can pay $56.94 for a 28-month subscription, but only once; after that, it'll be $56.94 for a year.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

As you can see in the image, the website heavily emphasizes the average monthly price, in text that dwarfs the actual price you'll pay at checkout. This gets even worse with services like NordVPN that have multiple tiers of subscription as well as multiple durations. It's not uncommon to see 10 or more prices quoted for the exact same VPN.

The best way to cut through the confusion and shop on your own terms is to compare different VPNs at the same duration and subscription tier. For example, you could find the cost of one year of the most basic available plan, since most basic subscriptions still include full VPN service. In the next two sections, I'll compare and average the basic tiers of my top seven VPNs at the monthly and yearly levels.

Average monthly cost of a VPN

Here's what the best VPNs cost per month. The numbers below are for subscribing to one month at a time, excluding any discounts and special deals.

• Proton VPN: $9.99

• ExpressVPN: $12.99

• Surfshark: $15.45

• NordVPN: $12.99

• CyberGhost: $12.99

• Mullvad: $5.98 (depends on dollar/euro exchange rate)

• hide.me: $11.99

• Average: $11.77

As you can see, $12.99 is a normal price for one month of a VPN — but the average price is somewhat lower, as several providers sell monthly plans for less. In general, expect to pay in the range between $10 and $13. Companies like Surfshark sometimes inflate their monthly prices in a bid to drive more traffic toward the longer plans.

Mullvad is also an outlier, since you can only ever subscribe to it month-by-month. There are other outliers, such as Astrill, which costs a whopping $30 per month. But the above holds true for all the best-regarded providers.

Average yearly cost of a VPN

If you choose to sign up for a year at a time, you'll probably save money but you'll have to pay more upfront. VPNs offer long-term deals to pump their cash flow and active user numbers. One-year costs for the top seven VPNs are written below as a lump sum, since several of them add extra months to the first subscription period so they can quote a lower monthly price. Since CyberGhost doesn't have a one-year plan, I've replaced it with Windscribe.

• Proton VPN: $47.88

• ExpressVPN: $52.39 for the first subscription, $99.95 afterwards

• Surfshark: $47.85

• NordVPN: $59.88 for the first subscription, $139.08 afterwards

• Windscribe: $69.00

• Mullvad: $71.82 (depends on dollar/euro exchange rate)

• hide.me: $54.99

• Average: $57.69

For one year of a VPN service, you can expect to pay somewhere between $45 and $70. Note that at least two services, ExpressVPN and NordVPN, raise prices after the first year, so account for that in your budget if you really like them.

Why do VPNs cost so much?

The length of the subscription is the biggest factor in determining how much you'll pay. Beyond that, it's all a bit fuzzy. Commercial VPNs are still a relatively new industry, so there's not a lot of standardization in the pricing.

Most of the variation in cost comes from competition: VPNs value themselves lower to offer a better deal than their rivals, or higher if they think they've got a unique differentiator. Astrill gets away with charging $30 a month because of a widespread belief that it's the best VPN for China (in truth, no VPN can be sure of working in China 100 percent of the time).

Another factor that might influence a VPN's price is the cost of maintaining its infrastructure. For each new server location, the provider has to either rent space in an existing data center, build its own physical server farm or set up a virtual server with an IP address from a particular location.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Once the locations exist, they have to be maintained, including regular changes to their IP address so firewalls don't identify and block them. Loads at locations need to be balanced between servers and technology has to be upgraded as faster solutions become available. 

Since VPNs can have hundreds of server locations, all that upkeep doesn't come cheap, and customers often eat the cost. Factor in the price of extra features outside core VPN functionality and you'll understand why these companies are so desperate for liquidity that they'll offer discounts over 80 percent — as long as you hand over a lump sum right now.

What about free VPNs?

VPNs can get pricey, especially if you want high quality. But some VPNs charge nothing at all. Is there any reason not to go with free VPNs every time?

The answer is a pretty clear yes; paying for a VPN is almost always a better idea. When we rounded up the best free VPNs, only three got our unqualified recommendation. All three were paid services with free plans, and all come with strict limitations on server locations, data usage and other privileges.

The unfortunate reality is that free VPNs come with downsides no matter which one you use. Plenty of them are hacked-together apps with little value, thrown together to make a quick buck. Others turn you into the product by selling your data to advertisers or renting out your home IP address. Some drop any pretense and plant malware directly on your device.

These risks, which are often invisible to the end user, are the reason I almost always advise going with a free VPN funded by a paid plan, like Proton VPN, hide.me or Windscribe. Those plans may be restricted, but at least the provider's motives are out in the open: they make money off the paid plan and they want you to switch to it.

How to save money on a VPN

If you've decided to pay for a VPN but want to stretch your budget as much as possible, the tips below can push your cybersecurity dollar a bit farther. To begin with, the general advice on choosing a VPN always applies: read expert opinions, check the reviews and use the free trial to test its speed and security.

Get a long-term plan. If you're confident that you'll actually use the VPN for the whole duration, there's no reason not to go with a 12-month or 24-month subscription. These are win-win deals that genuinely do save you a lot of money overall.

Cancel auto-renewal. VPN accounts are set to automatically renew by default. In some cases, this can inadvertently lock you into a higher-priced long-term plan. I recommend cancelling auto-renew right after subscribing even if you're sure you want to continue. From there, you can create a new account to get the introductory rate again — or go with a different VPN to get a better deal.

Look for resubscription deals. Another perk of cancelling immediately is that the VPN will often try to woo you back with exclusive discounts. Stay strong until your subscription is a month or two from expiring, then look for emails offering better rates.

Wait for seasonal discounts. If you can hold off until November, most VPNs offer steep discounts from Black Friday season all the way through New Year's. Check around other holidays too, as VPNs will take any excuse for marketing; CyberGhost is offering a Valentine's Day deal as I type this. We also keep track of the best VPN deals you can get at any time of the year.

Use the VPN to save money on streaming. Most streaming services are more expensive than VPNs. If you use a VPN to access more content without adding a new streaming subscription, you'll come out ahead. For example, if you only have Netflix but want to watch Schitt’s Creek, you can pay $16.99 per month for Peacock without ads — or $9.99 per month for Proton VPN to unblock Netflix Canada, which features that show.

Shop for regional discounts. Like the previous point, this won't save you money on the VPN itself, but might save you enough money on other expenses that you turn a profit. Changing your virtual location can get you discounts on purchases where prices vary by region, especially travel costs.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/how-much-do-vpns-cost-170000567.html?src=rss

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When talking about the best VPNs, I frequently warn about the dangers of trusting free VPNs without verifying them. Although there are a few free VPNs worth recommending, many other free providers are ineffective, malicious or looking to profit off their users (or sometimes all three). Even the best free VPNs work a lot better once you subscribe and access their full service.

This can be frustrating if you want to enjoy the benefits of a VPN but don't have the budget for yet another subscription. To help you out, I put together a list of the best paid VPN services you can get cheaply. Every name on the list comes with my full recommendation — I'll never recommend a VPN that doesn't protect you, no matter how affordable.

Before I get started, I want to define "cheap," since VPNs often bamboozle the customer with muddled pricing schemes. Most providers have long-term subscription plans with big discounts, and many of them compensate by making their monthly plans more expensive. On this list, I'll recommend services with cheap subscriptions for both the short and long term, plus one favorite that balances both.

Best cheap VPNs for 2026

Other VPNs we tested with good deals

A couple of VPNs have decent pricing options attached to worthy services but weren't quite strong enough to make the list. Both these services get my hearty recommendation; they're just hard to justify as "cheap."

ExpressVPN

ExpressVPN recently switched to a multi-tier pricing model. The Basic pricing tier gets you complete VPN service but doesn't include the full set of features. The best price on that is $78.18 for 28 months, which works out to $2.79 per month. Although that sounds great, it's more expensive than both Surfshark and CyberGhost at the same duration and renews at the even higher price of $99.95 per year ($8.33 per month).

Still, as I wrote in my full ExpressVPN review, it's an outstanding service overall. Thanks to its sensible app layouts and focus on doing simple tasks well, I find it especially good for introducing beginners to what a VPN can do.

NordVPN

NordVPN is another provider that I gave a relatively positive review. I really like its boundary-pushing features, especially the various types of highly specialized servers. Its pricing isn't bad, exactly, but even the Basic level is more expensive than just about everyone else at every duration. NordVPN's fast download speeds and wide server network make it worthwhile for lots of users, but it's hard to recommend to people on a budget.

What to look for in a good cheap VPN

Looking for an affordable VPN is the same as looking for any kind of VPN; it just requires more care. The worst VPNs usually present themselves as free, but there's also a fair number of mediocre options that think low prices have to mean a mediocre service. If you want to use a VPN but don't have much extra cash, take some additional care in a few areas of your search.

First, don't subscribe to a VPN — or even download any of its apps — if you haven't verified its security. To do that, start by checking what experts have to say about it. If a VPN is truly unsafe, chances are high that somebody has already sounded the alarm. You can also check the list of protocols the VPN offers. If it's anything other than OpenVPN, WireGuard or IKEv2, do a deep dive to make sure it's using worthwhile encryption.

If you've verified that the VPN isn't a virus, check to see if it has a free trial or a guaranteed money-back period. This will give you some risk-free time to do hands-on tests. Our article on how we test VPNs includes several tests you can run on your own computer, phone or tablet. Check the VPN's speed, make sure it has the server locations you need and look for anything that might be leaking your real IP address.

Read the VPN's privacy policy and make sure you're comfortable with how much information it saves. Some VPNs emphasize privacy more than others. Finally, before your free trial or refund period expires, make sure to double-check on the pricing structure of the VPN you're choosing — it's possible that it will only be cheap for the first subscription period.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/best-cheap-vpn-170000957.html?src=rss

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The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said it received more than 1 million reports of AI-related child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in 2025. The "vast majority" of that content was reported by Amazon, which found the material in its training data, according to an investigation by Bloomberg. In addition, Amazon said only that it obtained the inappropriate content from external sources used to train its AI services and claimed it could not provide any further details about where the CSAM came from. 

Amazon provided Engadget with the following statement to explain why it doesn’t have data that can provide any further action on the

“When we set up this reporting channel in 2024, we informed NCMEC that we would not have sufficient information to create actionable reports, because of the third-party nature of the scanned data. The separate channel ensures that these reports would not dilute the efficacy of our other reporting channels. Because of how this data is sourced, we don't have the data that comprises an actionable report.”

"This is really an outlier," Fallon McNulty, executive director of NCMEC’s CyberTipline, told Bloomberg. The CyberTipline is where many types of US-based companies are legally required to report suspected CSAM. “Having such a high volume come in throughout the year begs a lot of questions about where the data is coming from, and what safeguards have been put in place.” She added that aside from Amazon, the AI-related reports the organization received from other companies last year included actionable data that it could pass along to law enforcement for next steps. Since Amazon isn’t disclosing sources, McNulty said its reports have proved “inactionable.”

Amazon provided Engadget with these additional details, which were first reported in Bloomberg:

“Amazon is committed to preventing CSAM across all of its businesses, and we are not aware of any instances of our models generating CSAM. In accordance with our commitments to responsible AI and the Generative AI Principles to Prevent Child Abuse, we take a deliberately cautious approach to scanning foundation model training data, including data from the public web, to identify and remove known CSAM and protect our customers. While our proactive safeguards cannot provide the same detail in NCMEC reports as consumer-facing tools, we stand by our commitment to responsible AI and will continue our work to prevent CSAM.”

The company also reiterated that “we intentionally use an over-inclusive threshold for scanning, which yields a high percentage of false positives” to explain the high volume of content the company reported.

Safety questions for minors have emerged as a critical concern for the artificial intelligence industry in recent months. CSAM has skyrocketed in NCMEC's records; compared with the more than 1 million AI-related reports the organization received last year, the 2024 total was 67,000 reports while 2023 only saw 4,700 reports. 

In addition to issues such as abusive content being used to train models, AI chatbots have also been implicated in several dangerous or tragic cases involving young users. OpenAI and Character.AI have both been sued after teenagers planned their suicides with those companies' platforms. Meta is also being sued for alleged failures to protect teen users from sexually explicit conversations with chatbots.

Update, January 30, 2026, 11:05AM ET: This story has been updated with several statements from Amazon.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/amazon-discovered-a-high-volume-of-csam-in-its-ai-training-data-but-isnt-saying-where-it-came-from-224749228.html?src=rss

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The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is recommending measures to give publishers more control over how their content is used in Google’s AI overviews. The aim is to “provide a fairer deal for content publishers, particularly news organizations,” the CMA’s chief executive Sarah Cardell said in a press release.

With Google accounting for more than 90 percent of search inquiries in the UK, the CMA recently designated the company with “strategic market status” for search under the Digital Market Act. That allows the regulator to apply “conduct requirements” on Google to promote competition and avoid antitrust issues.

With those new powers, the CMA proposed a number of measures today. The first is a set of controls that would allow publishers to opt out of their content being used for features like AI Overviews or to train AI models. Google would also need to properly attribute publisher content.

Another measure would require Google to apply fair search result rankings for businesses, with an “effective process for raising and investigating issues.” Google would also need to provide a “choice screen” for alternative search options on Android mobile and Chrome browsers.

“These targeted and proportionate actions would give UK businesses and consumers more choice and control over how they interact with Google’s search services — as well as unlocking greater opportunities for innovation across the UK tech sector and broader economy,” Cardell said in a statement.

In response, Google wrote that it’s “exploring updates to let sites specifically opt out of Search generative AI features.” The aim, it said, is to keep search helpful for people who want information quickly while allowing publishers to better manage content. “Any new controls need to avoid breaking Search in a way that leads to a fragmented or confusing experience for people,” the company wrote, adding that it’s “optimistic” it can meet the CMA’s requirements.

When its new designation was announced in October 2025, Google complained that some of the proposed interventions would inhibit UK innovation and growth. Citing a study, the company said that similar measures imposed by the European Union produced “negative results” that “have cost businesses $114 billion.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/uk-wants-to-give-web-publishers-a-fairer-deal-with-googles-ai-overviews-132742850.html?src=rss

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Windscribe is a virtual private network (VPN) with intense "How do you do, fellow kids?" energy. It has servers in 69 countries and an annual plan that costs $69, an obsession with the sex number that rivals Elon Musk's. I'm shocked that it doesn't have a subscription costing $4.20 per month.

But there's another side to Windscribe's cringe: an obsession with independence and a Bernie Sanders-like anger on behalf of an exploited public. In a market where the best VPNs aim for professionalism, Windscribe aspires to be punk. Its iconoclasm may have led it to develop an app that looks like ExpressVPN in a trash compactor, but it also spurred Windscribe to offer a strong free plan and forgo financial relationships with VPN reviewers. That attitude earned it a spot on my list of the best free VPNs.

Although Windscribe's heart is in the right place, my job is to figure out whether that translates into a good product. I used our rigorous VPN testing procedure to rate Windscribe in 11 categories. You can find my results in the table below and a final verdict at the end of the review.

Editor's note (1/27/26): We've overhauled our VPN coverage to provide more detailed, actionable buying advice. Going forward, we'll continue to update both our best VPN list and individual reviews (like this one) as circumstances change. Most recently, we added official scores to all of our VPN reviews. Check out how we test VPNs to learn more about the new standards we're using.

Findings at a glance

Category	Notes
Installation and UI	Installation and setup are always straightforward Apps look very similar on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android App design is overly compact and often impenetrable, but hides a solid program Browser extensions allow one-click bypassing of security features on the current page, much like common ad blockers
Speed	Average latency below 300 worldwide Some slowdown in download and upload speeds, but not severe Speeds were highly consistent everywhere except some African servers
Security	Six solid protocols — WireGuard, IKEv2, and four based on OpenVPN Most protocols available on all platforms, except IKEv2 on Android No leaks detected, even while switching servers Packets are encrypted as expected
Pricing	$9 per month, $69 for one year ($5.75 per month) Custom plans cost $1 per country plus $1 for unlimited data; must spend at least $3 Static IPs available for $2 per month or $8 per month for a residential address Free plan gives you 10 locations and 10GB per month with a confirmed email
Bundles	Shares coupon codes for various discounts on five "partners in privacy"
Privacy policy	Retains very little information, none of it personally identifiable Can make an account without an email address All apps have been audited by independent overseers Fought Greek court case in 2025 because it had no logs to turn over
Virtual location change	15 different servers in five locations unblocked Netflix Content changed each time, suggesting the destination site was completely fooled
Server network	193 server locations in 122 cities across 71 countries Only two virtual server locations in the entire network Real servers in Russia and India risk abrupt shutdowns
Features	Standout extras include the customizable R.O.B.E.R.T blocker and split tunneling on Windows, Mac and Android Network Options offers lots of automation choices, but terminology makes it needlessly confusing Includes obfuscation to get online in restrictive regions Firewall is a stronger version of a kill switch, preventing any access unless the VPN is connected
Customer support	Knowledgebase search bar is good at finding articles, and articles themselves are useful Garry AI chatbot is helpful, but pushed way too hard at the expense of access to human agents Active Reddit and Discord communities for peer-to-peer help
Background check	Founded in Canada in 2016 No significant controversies in 10 years Canada is a Five Eyes nation, but this shouldn't matter if Windscribe is keeping to its no logs policy

Installing, configuring and using Windscribe

The first step is always to figure out how easy or hard the VPN is to use. Windscribe and other VPNs are important tools, but you'll never use them if the UI gets in the way. I tested Windscribe's desktop apps on Windows and Mac, its mobile apps on iOS and Android and its Chrome and Firefox browser extensions.

To start with, let me say that installing Windscribe is a breeze no matter where you do it. The downloaders and installers handle their own business, only requiring you to grant a few permissions. The apps arrive on your system ready to use out of the box.

Windows

The first thing you'll notice about Windscribe is that it's not even slightly interested in looking like any other VPN. It crams everything into an extremely compact window, which has some advantages — mainly that it's easy to operate it while looking at another app. On the downside, well, it looks like this.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The Windscribe team will probably just say that I'm brainwashed by the establishment, but there's a good reason that most VPNs choose designs with a little more space. This fiddly console, most of which is taken up by information you can't interact with, is likely to confirm all a newcomer's worst fears about using a VPN. Private Internet Access had a similar problem of tightening its app design to the point of being incomprehensible.

The problems persist when you get to the settings page. It's easy to make sense of a VPN without technical knowledge, but Windscribe's preferences menu does everything it can to obscure that truth. Highly technical features are mixed in with options for casual users, and the explanatory blurbs usually cloud the issue even further.

Even the "Look & Feel" settings somehow manage to be confusing. What is the difference between the Stretch, Fill and Tile modes for aspect ratio? What the heck is a Bundled background, and what does it matter whether it's Square, Palm, Ripple, Drip or Snow? The answers to all these can be found by playing around or looking in the knowledgebase, but a VPN really shouldn't require that for its most basic toggles.

Once you get used to Windscribe and learn where to find the features that actually matter, it runs quite smoothly. Connections are never delayed and there are none of the random error messages that have dogged me on other VPNs. In a world of VPNs that look great but run clunkily, Windscribe has built one that looks terrible but runs great. I can't complain about how well it works, but is it too much to ask for a provider that does both? (Oh, wait, that's Proton VPN.)

Mac

Windscribe's macOS app is almost identical to its Windows app. That deserves praise in itself — you'll get much the same experience no matter which type of computer you use. But it also means the Mac app shares the same problems.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

There's the same overly compact design cluttered with too much information. The same technobabble-filled options menu. And the same fundamental solidity underlying it all: a VPN that does the job beautifully but has no interest in being accessible. It would be a mistake to write Windscribe off because of its app design, but it's important to know what you'll have to work through.

Android

One thing I can't fault Windscribe for is a lack of consistency. The Android app looks a lot like the Windows and Mac apps, only lightly adapted for the mobile format. On these devices, the design decisions make more sense — the UI writing is still impenetrable for casual users, but the compact pages look a lot more normal on a phone screen.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

iOS

There's not a lot to say about Windscribe on iOS that I haven't already said about the other three main platforms. Looking over all my screenshots, it seems fairly clear that Windscribe's problems — much like PIA's — come from starting on mobile and trying to make that same design work on desktop. It's still not great to look at, but I can at least see where they're coming from.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Browser extensions

Windscribe's extensions for Chrome and Firefox look a little like its desktop and mobile VPN apps, but they act a little differently. They serve the same basic purpose as the standalone apps — changing your IP address and location — but they're also customizable ad blockers for the web page you're currently on.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

For example, in the image above, I can control what location Google perceives me to be in. But I can also control what gets blocked by choosing to let Google bypass certain features. Clicking the leftmost button makes the current website skip the VPN tunnel. The central button shuts off the ad blocker and the right-hand button shuts off the features on the Privacy section of the preferences menu. Like everything else about Windscribe, it's unintuitive but works great once you figure it out.

Windscribe speed test

I used speedtest.net to test Windscribe's speeds. In case you aren't familiar with the jargon, Ping measures a server's latency, which is how long it takes a single packet of data to reach it from your device. Download speed measures how much data can be downloaded at a time, while upload speed shows how quickly you can send data to the network. Think of ping as your car's speed in miles per hour and download and upload speed as the amount of traffic on the road.

As usual, I used the WireGuard protocol to run these tests, since it's almost always the fastest. Starting with my unprotected speeds at home in Portland, I moved gradually farther away until I was connecting to the other side of the world. Ideally, ping should increase linearly (not exponentially), while download and upload speeds don't dip much at all. I've recorded Windscribe's performance in the table below.

Server location	Ping (ms)	Increase factor	Download speed (Mbps)	Percentage drop	Upload speed (Mbps)	Percentage drop
Portland, USA (unprotected)	22	—	59.35	—	5.92	—
Vancouver, Canada (fastest location)	27	1.2x	55.89	5.83	5.56	6.08
Boston, USA	161	7.3x	48.49	18.30	5.66	4.39
Quito, Ecuador	283	12.9x	46.46	21.72	4.68	20.95
London, UK	287	13.0x	43.70	26.37	4.51	23.82
Nairobi, Kenya	595	27.0x	32.63	45.02	3.57	39.70
Seoul, South Korea	258	11.7x	43.27	27.09	4.48	24.32
Average	269	12.2x	45.07	24.06	4.74	19.93

Windscribe gave me some of the shortest latencies I've ever seen — comparable to CyberGhost, whose ping lengths I was also very impressed by. Its download and upload speeds also look a lot like CyberGhost's, with both firmly in good-but-not-amazing territory.

However, Windscribe's speeds were a lot more consistent. Throughout the tests, I hardly ever saw major fluctuations in the same location, on any metric. The Nairobi server seemed to be under some strain, but that's not unusual for a VPN in Africa. Every location except for that one followed a smooth downward curve. I'm happy with that; speed is one of the areas where you want your VPN to be reliably boring, not flashy.

Practically, a speed test like this suggests that Windscribe is best for gaming, livestreaming and video chatting, and that it's perfectly serviceable for any other task you could do online. You may not get the best speeds you've ever seen, but unless your internet is bad to begin with, Windscribe should not slow it down enough to be noticeable.

Windscribe security test

I can say up top that Windscribe doesn't seem to have any dangerous security flaws, but I'll take this section to explain why I think that. To start with, it uses only the three VPN protocols currently known to be secure: WireGuard, OpenVPN and IKEv2, plus a few other options all based on OpenVPN. With those options, you can be sure you're getting encryption that's currently uncrackable.

It also passed two batteries of tests I ran on its security. The first set of tests looks for DNS leaks, WebRTC leaks and other slip-ups that might reveal your real IP address. The second checks whether data packets sent through the VPN tunnel are actually getting encrypted. Check each section below for details on how Windscribe did.

VPN protocols

A VPN protocol determines how exactly a VPN makes contact between its own servers, your device and your ISP. Certain protocols can make your VPN run faster, stabilize a shaky connection or get into websites other protocols fail to unlock. If you're having a problem with your VPN, changing the protocol is one of the first troubleshooting steps.

Windscribe makes a total of six protocols available, though it's really just three, since four of the six are variations on OpenVPN. WireGuard works on every platform, and is currently the fastest and most stable — its drawback used to be that it was new, but with the passage of time, it's no longer new enough to make it suspect.

IKEv2 is a connection protocol that uses the separate IPSec protocol for its security. This double team's main strength is reconnecting to the VPN when a device switches networks; it's also good at not draining phone batteries. Windscribe supports IKEv2 on Mac, iOS and Windows.

OpenVPN is the oldest open-source VPN protocol, refined by over a decade of repeated probing by volunteers. It's not only relatively fast and highly secure, but comes in two flavors: TCP, which makes connections more stable, and UDP, which is usually faster and should be your first resort with OpenVPN. Windscribe supports OpenVPN on all platforms.

Windscribe rounds out the selection with two unique protocols, both focused on hiding your VPN traffic from firewalls and censors. Stealth uses the same connection ports as HTTPS, so it can't be blocked by shutting certain ports down entirely. WStunnel obfuscates connections even further by using the extremely common WebSocket technology to establish VPN connections. Both these proprietary protocols are much slower than the other options, but can save you if you find yourself repeatedly blocked while using Windscribe.

Leak test

I started my leak tests by using ipleak.net to check several Windscribe servers for IP leaks of all sorts. Each time I connected and checked my location, I only saw the VPN server's IP address, never my real one. I tried to trip Windscribe up by switching servers while remaining connected, even changing continents, but my true location never once slipped out. This puts its security solidly above CyberGhost, Norton VPN and many others.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Windscribe automatically blocks IPv6 traffic while connected, so IPv6 leaks weren't going to be a thing. I finished the test by checking five servers using browserleaks.com/webrtc, finding no issues each time.

Encryption test

The final step is to make sure Windscribe is applying encryption properly through its VPN protocols. For this test, I used a free packet sniffer app called Wireshark to look directly at what my computer was sending out.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

It's a bit hard to tell what's going on, but to summarize, I've loaded a website without HTTPS protection and checked whether Windscribe managed to apply that protection. The lack of readable information in the data stream proves that its encryption is indeed working as expected.

How much does Windscribe cost?

Windscribe has three subscription options (not counting its free plan, which I'll discuss in a moment). One month of Pro service costs $9.00 — after Mullvad, the second-cheapest monthly subscription to a top-tier VPN. You can also pay $69 for a 12-month Pro subscription, working out to $5.75 per month. Both of these tiers give you the exact same set of Pro features and can be used on unlimited simultaneous devices.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The third option is to build your own plan. Build-A-Plan is an interesting beast that's unique to Windscribe. When you choose a custom plan, you must spend at least $3 per month. Gaining access to all the Pro servers in a country costs $1. For each country you add, you get an additional 10GB of data per month on top of the 10GB already included for free.

If you'd rather not budget your data at all, you can pay another $1 for unlimited data, plus 10 custom rules for the R.O.B.E.R.T. content blocker (I'll untangle the tortured acronym soon). It's a little convoluted, but wonderfully flexible. You can even change your Build-A-Plan in the middle of the subscription period.

Windscribe also offers shared static IPs for an extra fee. You can add a datacenter IP to any plan for $2 per month or a residential IP (usually better at getting around restrictions) for $8 per month. Team billing is also available through ScribeForce at $3 per seat per month, including a centralized management panel.

The Windscribe free plan

Windscribe isn't the overall best free VPN — hide.me wins that honor with its more flexible data limit — but it's close. Free users get access to servers in 10 countries: the US, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Germany, Switzerland, Romania and Hong Kong. If you plot that on a map, you'll see that the Windscribe free plan is most useful in North America and Europe.

Free users start with a data allotment of 2GB per month. The monthly limit rises to 10GB if you sign up with a confirmed email address and 15GB if you post about Windscribe on Twitter/X. That's enough for casual browsing, but streaming in standard definition takes about 1GB per hour, so you won't be doing much binge-watching.

On the upside, a free plan gives you access to all Windscribe's features except for dynamic port forwarding. You can set three R.O.B.E.R.T. rules and use your free account on an infinite number of devices (subject to the usual restrictions about exploiting that for commercial purposes — as Windscribe itself states, no one person has 30 devices that need a VPN).

Windscribe side apps and bundles

Windscribe doesn't have any add-ons of its own except for static IP addresses. However, it does offer discount codes for a group of "partners in privacy" that share its business ethics. The coupon codes are available here and don't require a Windscribe subscription to use.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

There are currently five allies in the gang. Control D offers DNS filtering for organizations to block unwanted websites; the Windscribe coupon gives you 50 percent off. You can get 25 percent off a one-year subscription to addy.io, an open-source email anonymizer, and Ente, an encrypted storage space for photos and videos.

Rounding out the team are Kagi, a private search engine which you can use for three months free with the Windscribe coupon, and Notesnook, an encrypted notes app. Windscribe's coupon gives you a 10% discount on Notesnook's yearly plans in perpetuity.

Close-reading Windscribe's privacy policy

Windscribe's marketing positions it as serious about user independence, so I came into this section hoping for a privacy policy that backs those words up. An early green flag is that the policy is short, succinct and obviously written to be read by the users themselves. It's also fantastic that you can sign up without an email address (though you will need one to get the full data allotment on the free plan).

Windscribe gathers information on its website using Piwik, an open-source analytics tool that it manages itself; no third parties are involved. The Windscribe app itself collects no information except for the amount of data used in a month, the time of your last connection and the number of devices you have online at once. When actively connected, it also gives you an anonymized username necessary for the OpenVPN and IKEv2 protocols.

My only quibble is that Windscribe is oddly reluctant to identify which third-party payment processors it uses. The information does exist elsewhere — an article in the knowledgebase states that payments are handled by "trusted third party processors such as PayPal and Stripe," and another page says that CoinPayments handles cryptocurrency transactions. It's a small thing, but the rest of the policy is so airtight that it stands out.

Independent privacy audits

Windscribe's apps are fully open-source (you can find them on Github here). In addition to this general exposure, it's also undergone three intensive audits from security firms. Leviathan Security looked into its desktop apps in 2021 and its mobile apps in 2022. The auditors made a total of five high-severity recommendations, all of which Windscribe claims to have addressed.

More recently, Windscribe had its entire codebase audited by PacketLabs. The auditors' June 2024 report found that some of Windscribe's code was storing more user information than it strictly needed to. Windscribe also claims to have handled this risk. More importantly, PacketLabs found no intentional subversions of Windscribe's no-logs policy, so its privacy statements can likely be trusted.

Further corroboration of the latter came from a 2025 court case in which Windscribe founder and CEO Yegor Sak was indicted in Greece and charged with a crime committed by a Windscribe user through an IP address in Finland. This case is obviously absurd — like charging the head of GM with a single instance of vehicular manslaughter committed by someone driving a Buick — but Sak was obliged to appear in court anyway.

As Sak writes in the linked post, he could have turned over the logs and shown who actually committed the crime, but he couldn't since Windscribe doesn't keep that information. Had there been an alternative to waging an expensive and inconvenient legal campaign in another country, Sak would surely have taken it. The fact that he didn't is strong proof of Windscribe's no-logging policy.

Can Windscribe change your virtual location?

Changing your IP address with a VPN can do more than just anonymize your internet activity. A service like Windscribe can give you an IP address associated with a certain country or region, letting you use the internet like you were there. This has applications ranging from the serious (break out of a nationwide firewall to document human rights issues) to the fun (get new titles on streaming platforms without paying for a new subscription).

Netflix is a great tool for testing whether a VPN can change your virtual location. Like most streamers, it tries to block all VPN access to protect the copyrights it holds. Consequently, if a VPN can crack Netflix, it must be serious about keeping its server network fresh to foil any potential blockers.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

For this test, I tried to access Netflix three times each through five different Windscribe server locations, refreshing the connection to use different servers each time. I looked for successful Netflix access, plus different content to prove my location had actually changed.

Server location	Unblocked Netflix?	Changed content?
Vancouver, Canada	3/3	3/3
Queretaro, Mexico	3/3	3/3
Tokyo, Japan	3/3	3/3
London, UK	3/3	3/3
Auckland, NZ	3/3	3/3

Windscribe got a perfect score. Netflix loaded easily every time, and the content was always localized to the country I chose. With this performance combined with its fairly consistent speeds over long distances, Windscribe makes a nearly perfect streaming VPN. The only downside is that the data limits on the free plan mean you'll probably have to pay for serious streaming time.

Investigating Windscribe's server network

Windscribe has 193 server locations in 71 countries, which it insists on listing as "69+" (again, hilarious). Although 193 sounds like a lot, many of them are duplicate locations in the same city. This isn't necessarily a problem, but for accuracy's sake, the total number of cities with Windscribe servers is 122.

Region	Countries with servers	Cities with servers	Total server locations	Virtual server locations
North America	6	40	61	0
South America	7	7	9	0
Europe	38	47	75	0
Africa	3	3	5	0
Middle East	2	2	2	0
Asia	12	16	28	1
Oceania	2	6	12	0
Antarctica	1	1	1	1
Total	71	122	193	2 (1 percent)

The bigger story here is Windscribe's spurning of virtual servers. A virtual server location is physically located in a different region than the one it outwardly displays. For example, a server with an Indian IP address might really be in Singapore. Throughout the entire Windscribe network, only two servers are virtual: one in India and one in Antarctica.

This is both good and bad. On the positive side, the near-total lack of virtual servers means you can be sure of how any server will perform. If it says it's in Buenos Aires, it'll run like it's in Buenos Aires — you won't be surprised with lagging speeds because it's really in Miami. This also makes it clear that Windscribe isn't interested in pumping up its network size for marketing purposes.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

On the other hand, virtual locations aren't an inherently bad thing. Windscribe acts as though advertising hype is the only reason any VPN would employ them, but there are real use cases. Virtual servers can be used to place locations inside countries where real servers would risk confiscation by the government, like Russia, India and China. Windscribe chooses instead to place real servers in Russia and India, both of which have data retention laws that directly conflict with its own privacy policy.

Does this mean that using Windscribe's Russian servers will earn you a midnight visit from the FSB? Probably not. Assuming Windscribe is following its no-logs policy (which appears to be the case), there won't be any user data on those servers if the government seizes them. But it does mean they're effectively running illegal data centers which could be raided and shut down at any time. Be aware of this if you depend on Windscribe's locations in Russia or India.

Extra features of Windscribe

As covered in the UI section, Windscribe has a lot going on in its apps. The Connection tab alone has 13 different features, including two submenus with several options of their own. With this many options, and so many of them highly situational, I won't be able to cover every nook and cranny without this review getting seriously bloated. I've instead chosen some of the most important and illustrative features to give you a clear sense of the whole picture.

Network Options

You'll find this feature at the top of the Connection tab. When you click Network Options, you should see the name of your current Wi-Fi network and all the others your Windscribe account has discovered. This feature lets you control how the VPN reacts to each network it encounters, not unlike CyberGhost's Smart Rules.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The app does a remarkably poor job of explaining how this works, so I'll break it down for you here. When the Auto-Secure Networks switch is turned on, Windscribe will automatically mark each new network as Secured — a word which here means "Windscribe turns on when it encounters the network."

So far, so good. But if you turn Auto-Secure Networks off, things get weird. Without it, Windscribe tags every network you encounter as Unsecured. Whenever you connect to an Unsecured network, Windscribe immediately disconnects itself. This means it secures all Secured networks and does not secure any Unsecured networks.

It feels backwards until you realize that Windscribe is referring entirely to itself here. "Secured" doesn't mean that the Wi-Fi network is password-protected or otherwise considered safe, and "Unsecured" doesn't mean that it's open to the public without a password. All that matters is whether or not you want Windscribe to activate or deactivate on that network. It's a useful feature that even lets you choose a VPN protocol for each network, but it would help to bring it more in line with mainstream terminology.

R.O.B.E.R.T.

This mouthful of a feature name allegedly stands for Remote Omnidirectional Badware Eliminating Robotic Tool. This is perhaps the apex of the VPN industry's unfortunate habit of saddling perfectly good features with word-salad names (yes, I'm aware it's supposed to be funny).

R.O.B.E.R.T. is perhaps the most customizable content blocker on any VPN right now. To start with, it includes eight lists of sites it blocks at the DNS level: Malware, Ad + Trackers, Social Networks, Porn, Gambling, Clickbait, Other VPNs and Crypto. These vary in usefulness, and you can't determine the contents of each list, but it's nice to have such a range of choices.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Where R.O.B.E.R.T really shines, though, is in its browser-based customization dashboard. Each Free user can make three custom rules, and Pro upgrades that to 10. Each custom rule can be used to block a specific website or network or allowlist it from one of the other general blocklists. You can also set it to spoof a domain, though there's no practical reason to do this (Windscribe's idea of a "useful" application is making your friends think your post made the front page of Reddit).

Split tunneling

Split tunneling sends some of your internet requests through the VPN tunnel while others go unencrypted as normal. This can be useful if you get worse-than-usual speeds and want to minimize the amount of traffic going through the VPN, or for certain websites that refuse to work with any VPN server.

You can split tunnel on Windscribe's apps for Windows, Mac and Android. Windows and Android users can split by app or website, while Mac users can only split by website. Windscribe lets you choose whether your split tunnel will be inclusive (only apps and IPs on the list will go through the VPN) or exclusive (the apps and IPs on the list will not go through the VPN). Note that R.O.B.E.R.T. rules apply to the entire system, even excluded apps and domains.

Firewall and Always On VPN

Instead of a kill switch, which it derides as an incomplete solution, Windscribe includes a Firewall feature on desktop and an Always On VPN feature on mobile. The Firewall can be considered a strong kill switch that prevents any internet traffic from going outside the VPN tunnel — something doesn't have to go wrong for the blocks to activate. Always On VPN on iOS and Android is functionally the same.

A more proactive defense has its advantages, but it would be nice if Windscribe included the weak kill switch option. Kill switches and firewalls can be overactive, and sometimes, you don't want the strongest level of security.

Circumvent Censorship

This feature is designed to let you access Windscribe on networks that don't want you to use a VPN, from school and work systems to entire censorious countries like China. Windscribe isn't forthcoming about how it works, but it's probably a deep-packet obfuscation that makes VPN traffic look like regular traffic. I didn't have time to pop over to China and test Circumvent Censorship, but I'm glad it exists.

Windscribe customer support options

Clicking the question mark tab on the Windscribe app shows you the full list of support options. You can peruse the knowledgebase, ask their chatbot Garry, talk directly to a human or check out their user communities on Reddit and Discord.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

I started with the written FAQs. At the top of the knowledgebase, there's a row of buttons you can click to see only articles relating to a particular operating system. This is a good idea in theory, but it's not implemented very well — there's no visible tagging system, so we can't see how it's deciding which articles to filter.

The search bar is much more likely to get you where you need to go. It works instantaneously and always turns up relevant articles, though it's weirdly insistent on showing exactly 10 results. I have few complaints about articles themselves, which are written in a way any user should find useful (give or take yet more attempted humor).

I tested the chatbot, Garry, by asking it about the mysterious Advanced Parameters tab of the Windscribe app. It explained each feature on that tab (none of which should be touched except by users with technical knowledge) in a spiel that was clearly pre-written but nonetheless useful. Garry was launched in 2018, when IBM Watson was the biggest thing in AI, and recently revamped into "Garry 2.0" — whether this is based on OpenAI or another platform is anyone's guess at the moment.

Live support

Windscribe appears to handle all of its own support, without outsourcing to Zendesk or a similar third party. If you decide not to go through Garry, Windscribe does have the option of connecting directly to a human. However, the Contact Humans option on the app sends you directly back to Garry. It's eventually possible to get Garry to connect you to a real person, but that doesn't excuse Windscribe building an outright lie into its app.

The Contact Support button on the knowledgebase, which I expected to lead to a ticket submission, also sends you straight to Garry. Windscribe really, really wants you to use Garry, in case that wasn't clear. You might have a better time going straight to the Windscribe Discord server or the r/Windscribe subreddit, both of which are linked to in the app.

Windscribe background check

Windscribe eschews a lot of the things we've come to expect from a VPN provider. It doesn't pay for ads anywhere. It has no affiliate relationships with news sites. The only thing resembling a Windscribe ad campaign is the free-plan data reward for Xeeting about it. It doesn't even have any venture capital investors — it's completely self-funded and self-hosted.

As a jaded and cynical reviewer who was already annoyed by Windscribe's memelord attitude, I was prepared to sniff out any hypocrisy in its background, which makes it all the more impressive that I didn't find any. Since its founding in Canada in 2016, Windscribe has never once been involved in any public doings that contradict its statements of ethics. It's even given free unlimited VPN access to every journalist working in Ukraine.

The only thing I could find resembling a controversy was an incident in July 2021 when Ukrainian police confiscated two servers that weren't fully encrypted. Although this would only have posed a risk to users running a customized connection profile under very specific conditions, it was still a lapse. Windscribe responded appropriately in my view, ending the legacy OpenVPN implementation that caused the problem.

Canadian headquarters

Windscribe is based in Canada, which is one of the Five Eyes nations (along with the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand). This sounds scary, but it's not actually an issue, as Yegor Sak himself points out in a blog post I reference frequently.

Five Eyes is not an organization, but an agreement between five allied countries to share necessary intelligence with each other. This can absolutely be misused. If the U.S. government wants to spy on someone without running into the 4th Amendment, it can ask the Brits to spy on that person instead and tell them what they find, knowing the Constitution can't determine what other countries do to our citizens.

As bad as that is for our civil liberties, it doesn't actually change anything where VPNs are concerned. If a VPN isn't logging user data, there shouldn't be anything for any of the Five Eyes (or Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes) nations to find. And if it is keeping logs, you shouldn't be using it no matter where its headquarters are.

Final verdict

You might wonder, at this point, why my distaste for Windscribe's tryhard sense of humor has featured so prominently in this review. One reason is that I had to read a lot of it this week, and you must suffer as I have suffered. But it also makes Windscribe look very good by implication. Having no patience for the discount-4chan act that pervades Windscribe's brand, I was primed to dislike the VPN itself — and I simply couldn't.

This is not to say I had no problems at all with Windscribe. Its physical servers in Russia are difficult to trust. Its help options lean way too heavily on Garry the chatbot. Its app design and UI writing are significant faults. The free plan doesn't give you enough data for streaming.

Having said all that, though, Windscribe does everything else right. It changes virtual locations and unblocks Netflix without breaking a sweat. Its servers keep latencies low, and download speeds remain solid across the world. The apps may look bad, but they never break down. Some features, like R.O.B.E.R.T. and Auto-Secure, are both useful to everybody and deeply customizable for power users.

Windscribe may be best for privacy nerds who know how all its doohickeys work, but it's a VPN I recommend for everybody. In a world of predatory software, it's a relief to use an app that's unabashedly on the customer's side.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/windscribe-review-despite-the-annoyances-it-has-the-right-idea-120000837.html?src=rss

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Pornhub will stop offering full access to new users in the UK on February 2, its parent company Aylo said Tuesday, citing the nation's Online Safety Act and its age-verification requirements. The company said users who already verified their ages before the cutoff will still be able to access the adult site through existing accounts.

The move follows the Online Safety Act’s Protection of Children Codes, which took effect last summer and require adult sites to use "highly effective" methods of age verification. Aylo claims the system is backfiring and shifting both adults and minors to noncompliant porn sites that don’t verify age or moderate content according to Politico. Aylo's lawyers argued that only device-based age verification methods sufficiently protect user data.

Alexzandra Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Aylo, said "anyone who has not gone through that process prior to February 2 will no longer be able to access [the sites] and they're going to be met with a wall," according to 404 Media. The adult site was similarly made unavailable in various US states after the passage of age-verification laws that Pornhub claimed put users' privacy at risk. "These people did not stop looking for porn," Aylo said at the time. "They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content."

Users who wish to get around these sorts of bans typically use VPNs to mask the origin of their internet traffic, though the UK is reportedly considering a ban on VPNs for children. The nation has also been considering a social media ban for users under 16 years of age, similar to the one enacted in Australia.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/pornhub-will-become-unavailable-for-many-uk-users-as-of-february-2-194622124.html?src=rss

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© Ethan Miller via Getty Images

Meta's WhatsApp just introduced something called Strict Account Settings, a tool "that further protects your account from highly sophisticated cyber attacks." This is a one-click button in the settings that automatically initiates a series of defenses.

So what does it do? It blocks media and attachments from unknown senders, disables link previews and silences calls from unknown senders. This results in a more restrictive experience, but hopefully a safer one.

The company says this isn't necessarily for regular users, as conversations are already protected by end-to-end encryption. Instead, this is being pitched as a tool for "journalists or public-facing figures" that "may need extreme safeguards against rare and highly sophisticated cyberattacks."

Strict Account Settings will be rolling out globally in the coming weeks. Users will find the tool in the Privacy settings.

WhatsApp is just the latest tech platform to offer enhanced security tools for high-risk users. Apple introduced Lockdown Mode back in 2022 and Android introduced its Advanced Protection Mode last year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/whatsapp-introduces-an-advanced-security-mode-to-protect-against-hackers-174144598.html?src=rss

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Your Gmail inbox should now be back to normal after Saturday’s hiccups. Google said in an update on X on Saturday night that the issue, which affected the automatic filters that keep Gmail users’ inboxes free from the clutter of promotional emails, non-urgent updates and spam, “is now fully resolved for all users.” On its Workspace status dashboard, it added that an investigation is underway, and an analysis will be published once complete.

Gmail users on Saturday reported that their inboxes were flooded with promotional emails that had not been properly sorted out of the main tab, and some said they were seeing notices that emails had not been scanned for spam. On social media and DownDetector, some Gmail users also reported delays in receiving messages, leading to issues with two-factor authentication logins. After confirming the issue, Google noted in an update on its Workspace dashboard that the problem resulted in the "misclassification of emails in their inbox and additional spam warnings," including a banner that says, “Be careful with this message. Gmail hasn't scanned this message for spam, unverified senders, or harmful software.”

In a statement to Engadget, a Google spokesperson echoed the message from its dashboard, saying, "We are actively working to resolve the issue. As always, we encourage users to follow standard best practices when engaging with messages from unknown senders."

Update, January 25 2026, 9:53AM ET: This story has been updated to reflect that the issue has been resolved.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/google-says-its-working-to-fix-gmail-issue-thats-led-to-flooded-inboxes-and-increased-spam-warnings-183358654.html?src=rss

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Meta will no longer allow teens to chat with its AI chatbot characters in their present form. The company announced Friday that it will be "temporarily pausing teens’ access to existing AI characters globally."

The pause comes months after Meta had said it was working on chatbot-focused parental controls following reports that some of Meta's character chatbots had engaged in sexual conversations and other alarming interactions with teens. Reuters reported on an internal Meta policy document that said the chatbots were permitted to have "sensual" conversations with underage users, language Meta later said was "erroneous and inconsistent with our policies." The company announced in August that it was re-training its character chatbots to add "guardrails as an extra precaution" that would prevent teens from discussing self harm, disordered eating and suicide. 

Now, Meta says it will prevent teens from accessing any of its character chatbots until "the updated experience is ready." Those updates will include parental controls, according to a Meta spokesperson. The new restrictions, which will be starting "in the coming weeks," will apply to those with teen accounts, "as well as people who claim to be adults but who we suspect are teens based on our age prediction technology." Teens will still be able to access the official Meta AI chatbot, which the company says already has "age-appropriate protections in place." 

Meta and other AI companies that make "companion" characters have faced increasing scrutiny over the safety risks these chatbots could pose to young people. The FTC and the Texas attorney general have both kicked off investigations into Meta and other companies in recent months. The issue of chatbots has also come up in the context of a safety lawsuit brought by New Mexico's attorney general. A trial is scheduled to start early next month; Meta's lawyers have attempted to exclude testimony related to the company's AI chatbots, Wired reported this week.

Correction, January 23, 2026, 11:18AM PT: This post was updated to clarify that Meta’s planned chatbot parental control features have not yet rolled out.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-temporarily-pulling-teens-access-from-its-ai-chatbot-characters-180626052.html?src=rss

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1Password has a new tool designed to counteract the advantages AI has given to phishing scammers. A new feature for the company's browser extension gives you a "second pair of eyes" to help you catch a bogus website before entering your login info.

Before AI, phishing attempts often included telltale signs like obvious typos or rudimentary graphic design. Now that AI makes it much easier to design and code convincingly, scams are on the rise. According to Fortune, 60 percent of companies reported an increase in fraud-related losses from 2024 to 2025. And the advent of AI browsers could make things even worse.

“Our new phishing feature adds an extra layer of protection,” 1Password says. Once the feature is activated, the extension actively watches for suspicious sign-ins. To be clear, even before this feature's arrival, 1Password wouldn't autofill saved credentials for a bogus website impersonating it. But that still left room for people to manually paste their login info, handing it over to those with the worst intentions.

That moment when you try to paste your login manually is where the new feature comes in. "The website you're on isn't linked to a login in 1Password," the feature's warning pop-up reads. "Make sure you trust this site before continuing."

1Password says that's the "breakthrough" moment that can help you avoid a major hassle. "That single moment of pause, that tiny bit of friction, is often all it takes to disrupt the attackers' entire plan."

The new feature is available today. You can enable it in the 1Password browser extension's settings. Under the Notifications section, activate the setting for "Warn about pasted logins on non-linked websites."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/1password-adds-an-extra-layer-of-phishing-protection-140000293.html?src=rss

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