As frustrating as it is that governments and businesses are running roughshod over our online freedoms, at least we have plenty of good VPNs to choose from to keep us protected online. There are so many fast, intelligently designed, full-featured and affordable services on the market that the biggest problem is picking one. For any use case, you can bet at least two providers will be neck-and-neck for first place.
X seems to be working again after struggling with an outage that took the service offline and made it slow to load for much of the morning. According to X’s developer platform page, there is an ongoing incident related to streaming endpoints that’s caused increased errors. The incident started at 7:39AM PT, according to the page.
Google has filed its appeal to the Department of Justice’s antitrust case that ended with a federal judge ruling that the company was maintaining a monopoly with its search business.
If you're looking to up your privacy game on the internet in the new year, you can do so for a little less than usual thanks to ExpressVPN's latest deal. Its two-year plans are up to 78 percent off right now: the Advanced tier is on sale for $101 for two years, plus four additional free months. That works out to $3.59 per month during the promotional period.
CyberGhost is the middle child of the Kape Technologies VPN portfolio, but in quality, it's much closer to ExpressVPN than Private Internet Access. I mainly put it on my best VPN list because it's so cheap, but I wouldn't have done that if it didn't earn its place in other ways — affordable crap is still crap, after all.
Claude Cowork, Anthropic's AI assistant for taking care of simple tasks on your computer, is now available for anyone with a $20 per month Pro subscription to try.
If you follow Anthropic, you're probably familiar with Claude Code. Since the fall of 2024, the company has been training its AI models to use and navigate computers like a human would, and the coding agent has been the most practical expression of that work, giving developers a way to automate rote programming tasks.
OpenAI plans to start testing ads inside of ChatGPT "in the coming weeks." In a blog post published Friday, the company said adult users in the US of its free and Go tiers (more on the latter in a moment) would start seeing sponsored products and services appear below their conversations with its chatbot.
Although X removed Grok’s ability to create nonconsensual digitally undressed images on the social platform, the standalone Grok app is another story.