There’s a lot to like about NordVPN, as I covered in my full NordVPN review. It’s one of the fastest among the best VPNs, and it’s got a bunch of cool, specialized servers for various VPN tasks. But the apps can be frustrating, and beyond that, no VPN is perfect for everyone. If you’ve decided NordVPN isn’t for you, here’s how to cancel your subscription and get your money back.

How to turn off auto-renewal on NordVPN

Even though you’ve decided to part ways with NordVPN, you may want to keep your subscription active while you pick out a replacement service. If that’s the case, you can simply cancel automatic renewal and let your subscription expire at the end of the billing period. If you change your mind before then, you can turn auto-renew back on. Here’s how to do it.

1. Go to my.nordaccount.com. Click Log in to Nord Account and enter your email address and password.

2. You’ll arrive at the account overview page. In the left-hand column, click on Billing.

3. On the list of subscriptions that appears, find NordVPN. Find the line that says “Auto-renewal: ON,” and click the Cancel link next to it.

4. A warning message will appear. Click Cancel auto-renewal at the bottom-right.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

This will turn auto-renewal off. If you decide to turn it back on, just go back to the billing tab of your Nord account overview, find your NordVPN subscription and click Enable auto-renewal.

How to cancel if you subscribed through an app store

If you paid for NordVPN on a mobile device through Google Play or the Apple app store, you’ll need to go to the relevant app store to cancel the subscription. On Android, sign in to Google Play, touch your profile picture, tap Payments & subscriptions and tap Subscriptions. Scroll until you find NordVPN, tap it and hit Cancel subscription. If you want a refund, follow the instructions in “How to get a refund from NordVPN” below.

On iOS, open the settings app, touch your profile picture, then tap Subscription. Scroll down to NordVPN, tap it and hit Cancel subscription. To get a refund for an Apple purchase, contact the Apple support team instead of the NordVPN team.

How to delete your NordVPN account

On the other hand, if you’re sick of NordVPN and already have another VPN lined up, you can cancel immediately by deleting your Nord account altogether. This will also cut you off from any other Nord Security products you might be using, including NordPass and NordLocker.

1. Go to my.nordaccount.com, click Log in to Nord Account and enter your credentials.

2. At the top-right of the account overview page, click your email address. In the dropdown menu, click Account settings.

3. Look at the bottom of the page to find the account deletion controls. Click Delete account.

4. Nord will send an authentication code to your account’s email address. Enter it.

5. Follow the onscreen prompts to confirm deletion.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

How to get a refund from NordVPN

NordVPN has a standard 30-day money-back guarantee. As long as you bought your subscription in the last 30 days, you can get a full refund. To do so, you’ll need to first cancel auto-renewal on your plan as described above, then contact support to ask for the refund.

You can reach NordVPN support by going to the help center at support.nordvpn.com. To reach the live chat and email ticket options, you’ll need to work your way down to a bottom-level help center article, then scroll down until you reach the section titled “Still having issues?” It’s frustrating, but you can get there by just clicking the first link on every page (or just follow this link and scroll down).

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Once you’ve found the buttons, either start a live chat or open the email form. Whichever you choose, explain that you’ve cancelled your subscription and would like a refund. Make sure not to end the interaction until you’ve received confirmation that your refund will be processed. Afterwards, it’ll take up to 10 business days for your reimbursement to go through.

NordVPN alternatives

With NordVPN cancelled, you may be in the market for another VPN. I’ve collected several on my best VPN list (linked at the start of the article), but here’s a few specific recommendations: Proton VPN is the best overall, Surfshark is the fastest and ExpressVPN is good for beginners and great at streaming. Good luck in your quest for a VPN that meets your needs.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/how-to-cancel-nordvpn-and-get-your-money-back-173008588.html?src=rss

Oura has redesigned its official app with a refreshed visual interface and new health-tracking insights. The company boasts that the app refresh offers “modern visual language with deeper personalization.”

To that end, there are now three main and easily identifiable tabs. The “Today” tab includes only the most relevant data to help inform daily decisions. The “Vitals” tab offers “at-a-glance views of core health pillars.” This includes data on sleep, stress and cardiovascular trends. Colors change based on various biometric indicators to offer quick visual cues.

The “My Health” tab is more interested in long-term health, offering cumulative data on a user’s strengths, traits and opportunities for proactive care. This tab also includes a section about habits and routines to link “daily behaviors to measurable outcomes.”

The new Oura app also offers some increased health-tracking capabilities. The previous version of the app included a view that showed a month of data regarding menstrual cycles and fertility window predictions. This has been increased to a full year. Members also now get personalized cycle phase data from a single night of sleep instead of having to wait two months like before.

The app is launching “in the coming weeks,” but there’s a spot of bad news. It’ll only be available for the Oura Ring Gen3 and the Ring 4. The Ring 4 recently got a hardware update, with an option for a durable ceramic coating

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/ouras-new-app-brings-enhanced-health-insights-and-longer-fertility-window-predictions-171329174.html?src=rss

If you haven’t logged into X for a while but still want to keep your X username, you might want to log back in soon. According to a recent post on the website formerly known as Twitter, the company will soon start selling “handles that are no longer in use” to paying subscribers.

The feature, called the X Handle Marketplace, is currently only being teased, but a waitlist for it is live. Once active, it’ll allow X Premium+ subscribers (at the $40/month level) and Premium Business accounts to both request free (with their subscription, at least) handles, and directly purchase especially rare ones.

Rare usernames could cost $2,500 or more

According to an FAQ page, pricing for rare handles starts at $2,500 and could go “over seven figures, depending on demand and uniqueness.” You’ll also need an invitation to even be allowed to purchase a paid username, although receiving the complimentary handles also comes with complications.

For free handles, there are two types. The standard ones, called “priority handles,” are open for any eligible subscriber to request; X says it will usually review requests within three business days, although not all requests will be approved. But X also says it will occasionally drop select rare handles (the type it would usually charge for) as part of free giveaways, where multiple subscribers can apply for the handle and a winner will be selected “based on merit.”

As for what X considers “merit” to be, that would include past contributions to the site, intended usage for the handle, as well as engagement and reach on the platform.

Once you’ve got a new handle, your current username will be locked so others won’t be able to change it, and your page’s @ will change to the new one. X also says it may offer paid redirects from old usernames to new ones in the future.

Note, though, that if you got your new handle for free, you’ll need to stay subscribed to keep using it. Users who paid for their handles will be able to let their X subscriptions lapse without losing them.

What handles X will be giving out for free

As for what type of inactivate handles X will be giving out, the site has provided a few examples. Generally, paid handles will be pithy, one word, “culturally significant names,” like @Pizza or @Tom. Meanwhile, free ones are more likely to be full names or multi-word phrases, like @GabrielJones or @PizzaEater. 

As someone who doesn’t subscribe to X, it’s the full names that have me concerned—and the ones I’d suggest logging into your account to preserve. Part of the reason I haven’t deactivated my X account yet is because I don’t want someone else to be able to make an account with my username, which is a variation on my full given name. I don’t post on it very often, but I’d rather others not be able to easily masquerade as me.

With that in mind, I’ve reached out to X to ask how the website will decide when to make “inactive” usernames available to request, and will update this post when I hear back. X’s inactive account policy says that users should log in “at least every 30 days” to keep their accounts active, though, so if you’re concerned about your username being taken, it’s best to play it safe.

To be fair to X, redistributing usernames from inactive accounts is not an unheard of practice for social media sites, although charging for them is a bit novel. X says the reason it’s requiring a subscription to access the X Handle Marketplace is “to prevent bot spam or misuse,” so that the site can make way for “fair and secure distribution through a controlled process.”

However, as hinted at by another change coming to the site, a subscribed account does not necessarily mean a bot-free account. I’m curious to see how the X Handle Marketplace launch goes once the feature hits the (paying) public.

An electronic eye implant has restored reading ability to patients blinded by geographic atrophy, a form of dry age-related macular degeneration. Results published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that 84% of trial participants regained the ability to read letters, numbers, and words after receiving the Prima device.

The microchip measures two millimetres by two millimetres and is implanted beneath the center of the retina. Patients wear augmented reality glasses containing a camera that projects images onto the chip. The device converts light into electrical pulses transmitted to the brain.

Frank Holz, the study’s lead author and chair of ophthalmology at the University Hospital of Bonn, called the implant “a paradigm shift in treating late-stage age-related macular degeneration.” Mahi Muqit, a consultant at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, said the trial enabled “meaningful central vision restoration, which has never been done before.” The procedure takes less than two hours and requires intensive rehabilitation. Science Corporation, which manufactures the device, has applied for clinical authorization in the United States and Europe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Food allergies in children dropped sharply in the years after new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce infants to peanuts, a study has found. The New York Times: For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens. But a landmark trial in 2015 found that feeding peanuts to babies could cut their chances of developing an allergy by over 80%. [non-paywalled source.] In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines.

The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place — dropping to 0.93% between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46% between 2012 and 2015. That’s a 36% reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43% drop in peanut allergies. The study also found that eggs overtook peanuts as the No. 1 food allergen in young children.

The study did not examine what infants ate, so it does not show that the guidelines caused the decline. Still, the data is promising. While all food allergies can be dangerous, 80% of people never outgrow one.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When your PC is acting up, one diagnostic tool at your disposal is the Windows Recovery Environment (or Windows RE). Windows RE offers a series of functions to help you root out whatever is ailing your machine. Using it, you can choose to reset your computer, run an automated diagnosis and repair tool, adjust settings to see if any are causing the issue, uninstall previous updates that might be tripping up Windows, and restore to a previous back Windows backup, among other potentially helpful options.

It’s a necessary feature of the operating system, meant for times when a simple shut down and restart doesn’t help your PC get back to normal operations. So it’s not ideal when Windows ships with a bug that not only breaks part of the OS, but also breaks the part of the OS designed to help fix your PC.

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, a bug in Windows 11’s October update, KB5066835, hinders your ability to access Windows RE. The recovery environment can still load if you need it, but you’ll find you won’t be able to select any of the options it offers to try to fix your PC. That’s because this bug breaks USB device functionality specifically in Windows RE. Simply stated, your mouse and keyboard will not work in Windows RE, preventing any navigation within the recovery environment.

This is obviously bad news for anyone who wants to use Windows RE to fix a problem with their PC—including, ironically, this Windows RE-specific bug. But you might think that so long as your particular issue with Windows isn’t prohibiting you from actually using your computer, you could live without Windows RE for the time being. As Tom’s Hardware points out, however, it’s not so simple: When your PC has trouble starting up, it will automatically boot into the recovery environment. That’s normally a good thing, since you’ll have the tools to help diagnose and solve the issue. However, when Windows takes you to a screen where you can’t use your mouse and keyboard, or interact with any elements whatsoever, you’re kind of stuck.

The good news is Microsoft is aware of the issue. The company has called out the bug as a known issue in Windows 11, version 25H2, and says it is working on releasing a fix “in the coming days.”

Windows is experiencing other issues, too

Windows is going through it this month. This same October update also broke localhost functionality, which impacted any apps that connect to services running locally on your PC. (Luckily, Microsoft did issue a fix for that bug.) Then, last week, the company also officially ended support for Windows 10, and though it still offers Extended Security Updates for any user that wants to enroll their PC in the program, it puts the security of roughly half a billion PC users into question.

This Windows RE bug is just one more critical issue PC users have to deal with. Hopefully, Microsoft’s next Windows 11 build introduces only fixes, and no additional bugs.

Spotify just introduced a feature that lets users follow their favorite concert venues. This will provide people with updates and details about upcoming concerts.

Once a venue is selected as a favorite, it gets saved in a user’s library. Browsing each venue provides information on scheduled concerts, general announcements and other stuff. Folks can even filter upcoming shows by genre. Clicking on a specific spot will also pull up “tailored suggestions for other venues” in the vicinity.

Spotify’s new venue-tracking platform will offer links to each location’s “official ticketing partner” to make it easier to scoop up some tickets. The company says it currently tracks over 20,000 venues throughout the globe, from “iconic arenas to beloved independent clubs.”

Spotify also announced a change to its live event feed. This will now update daily instead of weekly. For the uninitiated, this tool tracks when artists are touring and lists nearby live events.

The platform recently added yet another tool for concert discovery in the form of custom playlists that highlight artists with upcoming shows in the area. These playlists update every week and include 30 songs.

These are welcome tools, as artists don’t get paid a whole lot from streaming platforms, instead relying on live ticket sales. The features could also help stem some of the bad press that’s been coming Spotify’s way lately, thanks to CEO Daniel Ek’s involvement with a weapons manufacturing company and the platform going running recruitment ads for controversial government entities like ICE.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/spotify-now-lets-people-follow-venues-to-find-out-about-concerts-153836816.html?src=rss

India will need as much as $21 trillion to achieve its climate goals and lift its population out of poverty, according to a draft government plan seen by Bloomberg. From the report: The estimate offers a first glimpse of how the country intends to live up to its target of net zero emissions by 2070. The updated scenario implies hitting peak emissions in 2045, which is a decade earlier than the current trajectory.

India is already being severely battered by the fallout of climate change, as deadly floods and heat waves become more destructive each year. But the need to mitigate the emissions that feed climate change has historically been at odds with India’s priorities of economic growth and energy security, with the latter still mostly provided through coal. The new plan shows India will seek to achieve climate and economic development goals simultaneously, with low-carbon options envisaged for much of its yet-to-be-built residential and industrial infrastructure.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT’s Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work.

She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On this crisp October morning, it feels like half of the internet is dealing with a hangover. A severe Amazon Web Services outage took out many, many websites, apps, games and other services that rely on Amazon’s cloud division to stay up and running.

According to the AWS service health page, Amazon was looking into “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” in the US-EAST-1 region (i.e. data centers in Northern Virginia) as of 3:11AM ET on Monday. By 5:01AM, AWS had figured out that a DNS resolution issue with its DynamoDB API was the cause of the outage. DynamoDB is a database that holds info for AWS clients. 

“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data,” Mike Chapple, a teaching professor of IT, analytics and operations at University of Notre Dame, told CNN. “It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”

As of 6:35AM, AWS said it had fully mitigated the DNS issue and that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now.” However, the knock-on effect caused issues with other AWS services, including EC2, a virtual machine service on which many companies build online applications.

At 8:48AM, AWS said it was “making progress on resolving the issue with new EC2 instance launches in the US-EAST-1 Region.” It recommended that clients not tie new deployments to specific Availability Zones (i.e. one or more data centers in a given region) “so that EC2 has flexibility” in picking a zone that may be a better option.

At 9:42AM, Amazon noted on the status page that although it had applied “multiple mitigations” across several Availability Zones in US-EAST-1, it was “still experiencing elevated errors for new EC2 instance launches.” As such, AWS was “rate limiting new instance launches to aid recovery.” The company added at 10:14AM that it was seeing “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” Even once all the issues are resolved, AWS will have a significant backlog of requests and other factors to process, so it’ll take some time for everything to recover.

Many, many, many companies use US-EAST-1 for their AWS deployments, which is why it felt like half of the internet was knocked offline on Monday morning. As of mid-morning, tons of websites and other services were sluggish or offering up error messages. Outage reports for a broad swathe of services spiked on Down Detector. Along with Amazon’s own services, users reported issues with the likes of banks, airlines, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox and The New York Times — sorry to anyone whose Wordle streaks may be at risk.

AWS offers a lot of useful features to clients, such as the ability for websites and apps to automatically scale compute and server capacity up and down as needed to handle ebbs and flows in traffic. It also has data centers around the world. That kind of infrastructure is attractive to companies that serve a global audience and need to stay online around the clock. As of mid-2025, it was estimated that AWS’ share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market was 30 percent. But incidents such as this highlight that relying on just a few providers to be the backbone of much of the internet is a bit of a problem.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/aws-fell-on-its-face-knocking-many-apps-websites-and-games-offline-142935040.html?src=rss

Formula 1 held the third of its five North American rounds this past weekend at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Unlike the races in Montreal, Miami, and Las Vegas, the US Grand Prix is held on a proper road course, one purpose-built for the task of hosting F1 a little over a decade ago.

It’s a circuit Ars knows quite well—along with some friends, I was on the turn-19 banking for the first race in 2012, and we checked out Caterham’s setup the following year; toured the F1 tech center in 2015, where the race broadcasts are directed; then learned about tires there with Pirelli in 2021. And we’ve driven it in everything from an Audi TT-S to a Corvette ZR1 to a Mocabene Vent Noir. Not to mention all the Lone Star Le Mans races we’ve attended.

The crowds now exceed even the mass of humanity that showed up for that first race. And while Miami and Las Vegas have been pitched at the “more money than they know what to do with” people, ticket prices at COTA are more reasonable (for an F1 event). As long as you don’t mind brutal heat and humidity, it can be quite a good race to attend.

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