Tuesday morning was a stark reminder of how fragile the global internet really is. Websites from X to ChatGPT went offline as Cloudflare, the company they rely on for web infrastructure services, experienced a massive outage. A huge number of sites and services across the world contract Cloudflare for cybersecurity protections, as well as to route traffic through servers local to each user, all in the name of performance and reliability. Ironic, of course, given today’s events.

When the public experiences such a massive internet outage, speculation runs awry. What caused this? Was it a simple bug on Cloudflare’s part, or something malicious? Are bad actors attacking Cloudflare, and the sites that rely on it? But, as it turns out, the reason appears to be closer to the former than the latter.

Cloudflare’s outage was a glitch

In a statement to Mashable, Cloudflare confirmed that the company had identified the cause of the issue, and had rolled out a fix to patch it. In addition, Cloudflare is adamant there is no reason to believe a cyberattack caused this outage. This is the full statement:

“Many of Cloudflare’s services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 11:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.

To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours. A detailed explanation will be posted soon on blog.cloudflare.com. Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”

It seems the reason for the outage was a preventative measure meant to block a potential cyberattack. While that goal is obviously important, it shows how complex these systems really are: One glitch with one cybersecurity protocol spun out of control, and took down the network en masse.

The best PDF editor on your Mac is the app your Mac ships with. I’m talking about Preview, an app whose name hides its versatility. It can do a lot more than just opening different types of files. For PDFs, it’s as good as most free PDF editors.

Enable dark mode for easier reading

Credit: Pranay Parab

I suffer from migraines and to keep the headaches at bay, I use dark mode wherever I can. In macOS 26 Tahoe, Preview now allows you to enable dark mode for any PDF file, which means that I no longer need to deal with bright white backgrounds when I have to go through any PDF document.

To use this feature, open a PDF file in Preview on your Mac. Now click the View button in the menu bar up top, and select Use Dark Appearance for PDF.

Insert pages in a PDF file

Credit: Pranay Parab

Preview lets you easily add pages to a PDF file. You can either add a blank page or insert a page from a different file. To use this feature, open a PDF file in Preview, and go to Edit > Insert. You can either choose Blank Page or Page from File….

The option to insert a blank page in the PDF is self-explanatory. If you want to insert a page from a different file, there are different ways to do so. The option in the Edit menu will directly insert the whole PDF or image file you select into your PDF. This is fine when you’re selecting a single-page PDF that needs to go into a bigger file, but it’s not ideal if you want to add just one page from a 50-page document. If you’re trying to do this, add pages by opening two PDF files side-by-side in Preview, and dragging pages from the first to the second PDF file. 

If the sidebar is hidden in Preview, go to View > Thumbnails. You can now drag the thumbnail from one sidebar to another with ease.

Reorder pages in a PDF 

Credit: Pranay Parab

If you want to change the order of pages in a PDF file in Preview, just drag and rearrange the thumbnails in the sidebar. It’s quite smooth and intuitive, and you’ll be able to get the job done pretty quickly.

Delete pages from a PDF file 

Credit: Pranay Parab

Preview has a page deletion feature built in, too. Once again, just open a PDF file in Preview, select any page in the sidebar, and press the Delete button to remove the page from your PDF document. This option is also available under Edit > Delete.

Annotate, edit, and redact text in a PDF file

Credit: Pranay Parab

You can use basic markup tools to add, select, edit, and redact text in Preview. These tools, along with the options to annotate and sign PDFs, are all available under the Markup Toolbar in Preview for Mac. To access these tools, open any PDF in Preview, and click the pencil icon in the toolbar. Alternatively, you can go to View > Show Markup Toolbar. These tools are more than sufficient for quick edits to PDF documents.

Add a PDF password

Credit: Pranay Parab

You can use Preview to add a password to a PDF file, or to remove passwords from a file. To add a password to the PDF file you’re viewing in Preview, go to File > Edit Permissions, and check the box labelled Require Password to Open Document. Once you’ve added and confirmed the password, you’ll also have to add an owner password to the document. The owner password lets you restrict others from making changes to the PDF file, printing it, etc. Ideally, it should be different from the password used to open the PDF file. With both passwords added, click Apply to confirm the changes.

Rotate pages in a PDF

Credit: Pranay Parab

Sometimes, PDF files arrive with an unusable orientation—e.g., portrait pages scanned in landscape mode. In such cases, you can use Preview to rotate the pages of a PDF. Just go to the page you want to rotate and press Command-L to rotate it left or Command-R to rotate right. Fun fact: You can also do the same thing using your trackpad. Use two fingers to mimic a rotating motion and you’ll see that the page of the PDF file rotates to the left or the right.

These options are also available under the Tools menu. Over there, you’ll also find options to flip a page horizontally or vertically, as well as a feature that removes the background from a PDF page.

Google released Gemini 3 on Tuesday, launching its latest AI model with a breakthrough score of 1501 Elo on the LMArena Leaderboard alongside state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks including 91.9% on GPQA Diamond for PhD-level reasoning and 37.5% on Humanity’s Last Exam without tool usage. The model is available starting today in the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search for Google AI Pro, Google AI Studio, Vertex AI and the newly launched Google Antigravity agentic development platform. Third-party platforms including Cursor, GitHub, JetBrains, Manus, and Replit are also gaining access.

Separately, Google said AI Overviews now have 2 billion users every month. Gemini app has topped 650 million users per month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Tuesday, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai warned of “irrationality” in the AI market, telling the BBC in an interview, “I think no company is going to be immune, including us.” His comments arrive as scrutiny over the state of the AI market has reached new heights, with Alphabet shares doubling in value over seven months to reach a $3.5 trillion market capitalization.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC at Google’s California headquarters, Pichai acknowledged that while AI investment growth is at an “extraordinary moment,” the industry can “overshoot” in investment cycles, as we’re seeing now. He drew comparisons to the late 1990s Internet boom, which saw early Internet company valuations surge before collapsing in 2000, leading to bankruptcies and job losses.

“We can look back at the Internet right now. There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the Internet was profound,” Pichai said. “I expect AI to be the same. So I think it’s both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this.”

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Google has officially launched its Gemini 3 Pro model, and for the first time, it’s already making its way directly to the public, without making you wait months after the announcement to actually get your hands on it. On top of introducing a few new features, Google says the model has the typical increased accuracy, but also, that it finally cuts down on some of the excessive people-pleasing flattery that drives me nuts when using AI. The catch? Most features are paywalled, and one is still in the oven.

For the more obvious improvements, Google says Gemini 3 Pro is at the top of LMArena with a score of 1501 points, while also demonstrating “PhD-level reasoning” on Humanity’s Last Exam, earning a 37.5% score without the use of tools. Math buffs will also be happy to hear that the new model scored 91.9% on GPQA Diamond and 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

But for everyone else, the real excitement comes from the brand new things you can do in Gemini 3 Pro. This isn’t just a performance bump. Instead of just being Gemini 2.5 but better, Gemini 3 Pro also debuts three new consumer-facing features, plus a new platform for developers. It’s a much meatier release than, say, ChatGPT 5.1—assuming you’re willing to pay up.

Generative UI

Google’s press release bounces back and forth between calling this feature “Generative UI” and “Generative Interfaces,” although I prefer the former. Essentially, it’s supposed to make your AI results easier to read.

It’s one of the few new features that’s freely open to everyone, although Google has two different approaches to it, and not everyone might see the same one.

Credit: Google

The first is called “visual layout,” and is more similar to Gemini’s current results pages. Essentially, when you enter a complex, multi-layered prompt, like “plan a three-day trip to Rome next summer,” you’ll now get an explorable visual itinerary, rather than static text. This will include photos and clickable modules, but remain within the Gemini interface you’ve gotten used to. It may also have interactive sliders and buttons for further refining your search, but Google says the idea is to give you an “immersive, magazine-style view.”

Credit: Google

The second, then, is more like an on-demand webpage. It’s called “dynamic view,” and basically uses agentic coding to generate an on-the-fly app to help you learn more about a topic. This will include generated text and imagery, but may appear quite different from the Gemini interface you’ve gotten used to. An example in the press release sees Google generating a dynamic view response to “explain the Van Gogh Gallery with life context for each piece,” which creates a scrollable page with a clickable header, the art justified on the left, and scrollable text on the right with clickable subheadings and pull quotes, all with custom font and design that can differ pretty wildly from Gemini’s other output.

One of the issues I’ve had with lengthy plain-text AI responses is that they can get a bit tiresome to skim, and Google’s hoping this will help deal with that. Still, it hasn’t settled on an approach. Both visual layout and dynamic view are rolling out today, to free and paying customers, but the company says that “to help us compare these experiments, you may initially see only one of them.”

Gemini 3 Deep Think

As a contrast to Generative UI, Gemini 3 Deep Think is behind a hefty paywall, and still in the oven. The feature is an evolution on the existing Gemini 2.5 Deep Think mode, and essentially allows the AI to take more time to answer a question so it can better reason out an appropriate response. It’s similar to existing free deep research modes across Gemini and other AI apps, but more broadly applicable, and Google says it’s great for use cases like intricate graphic design or coding.

Unfortunately, it’s only in the hands of a few “safety testers” for now. Google told press it will start to release “in the coming weeks,” but even then, it’ll be limited to Google AI Ultra subscribers. Since Google AI Ultra is $250/month (although it starts at $125/month for the first three months), that’s a pricey proposition.

Gemini Agent

Another Google AI Ultra-exclusive feature, Gemini Agent will start rolling out to subscribers today, and is similar to the company’s recent AI shopping push. The idea is for it to take action for you, to help you handle multi-step tasks without having to leave Gemini.

Credit: Google

The key thing is that it works with Google’s other apps. So, for instance, you could ask it to help organize your Gmail inbox, and it’ll separate out your pending emails into categories and submit emails it thinks you could delete for your approval. Or, you could ask it to help you rent a car under a certain budget for an upcoming trip, and it’ll scan your emails for flight and hotel details, then search for an appropriate booking and reach out to you before finalizing it. It’s got access to the web, Google Workspace, and other AI tools like Canvas, so in theory, it can pull from pretty much every resource Google has to help you answer your question.

Google also says it will “seek confirmation before critical actions like making purchases or sending messages, and you can take over any time.”

If it works, it sounds like the type of virtual secretary most people probably thought of when these companies started talking about AI just a few years ago. But with such a high monthly price tag, it’s probably only for the highest of rollers for now. So, kind of like a regular secretary, I guess.

Google Antigravity

Finally, this feature is intended more for developers than the average internet user, but it’s worth bringing up, if only because it’s free. Called Google Antigravity, it’s a new development platform focusing on agentic coding, AKA having the AI generate code for you. It’s more complicated than that—you’re able to freely browse and edit generated code—but the idea is to make it easier to use Gemini as a development partner.

Credit: Google

It’s not Gemini’s first development tool, but the idea is to give developers a dedicated AI workspace. To that end, Antigravity can pull from existing features like Canvas, as well as implement “browser control capabilities” and “asynchronous interaction patterns” to achieve an “agent-first product form factor” that can “autonomously plan and execute complex, end-to-end software tasks.”

I’m sure the people who would use Antigravity will know what all that means. To a layperson like me, it seems like the big improvement is that it’s one app that you can use to go straight from ideation to publishing, rather than having to bounce between several different Gemini tools.

What’s probably more interesting, though, is that Antigravity is free, “with generous rate limits on Gemini 3 Pro usage.” Yep, developing with Gemini is actually now cheaper than using Gemini, depending on what you want to do.

How to use Gemini 3

At least some of Gemini 3 Pro is available to everyone. To try Gemini 3 Pro for yourself, open the Gemini app or webpage and select “Thinking” from the model selector underneath your prompt. Google told me free users will have up to five Gemini 3 Pro prompts per day, while AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers will “enjoy higher limits.”

Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers will also be able to use Gemini 3 Pro right from Google search’s AI Mode, also by selecting “Thinking” from the model selector (next to the “AI Mode” button). Free users will have to stick to the Gemini app for now, unfortunately, but Google says that will change “soon.” On the plus side, AI Mode will still be able to generate visual layouts and dynamic views, assuming you have access to Gemini 3 Pro within it.

AI Overviews will also start to use Gemini 3 Pro for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, although that’s set for “the coming weeks.” When it arrives, AI Mode will also be upgraded to automatically send your hardest questions to Gemini 3 Pro, without you having to pick it in the model selector (although you can continue to manually pick older models if you prefer).

Personally, I’m glad to see Google releasing Gemini 3 Pro alongside concrete new features, instead of just making “AI, but better.” At the same time, because most of this requires a subscription, it’s clear we’re still a little while away from that wide AI adoption the tech industry still seems to be clamoring for.

When a brand new company debuts its first product at CES, it can take a while before the device makes it to market. In fact, sometimes those products don’t make it at all. That’s not the case with Seergrills though, as the company has started shipping its AI-powered Perfecta grills to early adopters after introducing the machine at CES 2024.

The Perfecta relies on AI-powered cooking tech that helps you create “chef-quality results” in a fraction of the time as traditional grilling. It’s powered by a quad-core processor and an arsenal of sensors which allow it to detect food thickness, temperature and doneness. All you have to do is select the food and desired sear and doneness levels via the built-in touchscreen or the Seergrills app.

The Perfecta utilizes a vertical cooking system where food is held by so-called VertiGrates. Dual infrared burners move closer to foods as needed during the cooking process and can achieve a maximum temperature of 1,652 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to cook a steak in 90 seconds. Seergrills says the Perfecta can hit those temps in under two minutes, drastically reducing preheating times. This setup also means that there’s no flipping required. The company says the configuration will consistently provide the perfect sear, doneness and moisture retention. Over time, the Perfecta learns from your culinary exploits, refining various cooking profiles to become more precise with each grilling session.

Seergrills

And it’s not just a grill either. The Perfecta has oven, pizza and rotisserie modes — if you splurge for the requisite accessories — and a manual mode (called Human Mode) for AI-free operation. What’s more, you can build and save your own cooking profiles for future use.

Despite the oven look, the Perfecta is very much an outdoor grill. It runs on 120-volt electricity and propane gas in order to power the electronics and those high-heat burners. The grill is built with aerospace-grade aluminum, marine-grade stainless steel and both ceramic and tempered glass. The cooking grates are made of naturally non-stick stainless steel and internal components also use stainless steel for easy cleaning. Lastly, the drip tray and grease management system are dishwasher safe.

If you were waiting until the company starting shipping units before committing to one, you’re going to have to wait even longer. Seergrills is now taking orders for its fifth wave of shipments, but those aren’t scheduled to go out until May 2026. You’re also going to pay a lot more for it. Back in 2024, the price tag on the Perfecta was set at $3,500, but now that has gone up to $5,999.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/kitchen-tech/the-ai-powered-perfecta-from-seergrills-is-now-shipping-after-its-ces-2024-debut-163000474.html?src=rss

If you went on the internet Tuesday morning, you likely experienced some issues. Popular sites like X and ChatGPT were unresponsive, returning error messages rather than their usual homepages. The culprit? A massive Cloudflare outage.

The upside is that the outage appears to be ending. Cloudflare says it has identified the problem and issued a fix, so affected websites should be coming back online this morning. But that doesn’t change the fact that so many websites went dark today, all because one company experienced unexplained downtime. How is it that a Cloudflare outage can seemingly break the internet?

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers a number of products for sites and services with the goals of improving traffic performance and reliability, as well as cybersecurity. A company like Cloudflare spreads its network out throughout the globe, so that when users try to visit a website, the server they ping is the one closest to them. Rather than all users attempting to visit your server at once, they go through their Cloudflare server local.

This serves two main purposes: First, it limits the demand on your site. If all users were trying to ping your server at once, it puts a strain on your network, and could either slow things down or shut them down completely. Routing users to the Cloudflare server closest to them spreads out the demand, and reduces the risk of interruption. In addition, users are less likely to experience delays in physical distance to your network: If you’re based in Japan, and your user is based in New York, it’s going to take them longer to reach your server than it would a user from South Korea. However, if that New York user instead connects to a Cloudflare server closest to them, they can access your data much more quickly.

Why does Cloudflare affect so many websites?

Cloudflare’s goal is to improve the experience for users around the world to visit international websites—so why does it seem like half the internet went dark when Cloudflare experienced an outage?

The reason is because so many websites use Cloudflares services. According to Backlinko, over 24 million websites actively rely on Cloudflare in some capacity. That includes over 4,300 of the 10,000 “most popular” websites around the world. The U.S. alone has nearly 2,470,000 million websites relying on Cloudflare, while the UK has almost 780,000. Many other countries, like Brazil, Germany, Russia, Australia, Canada, China, India, and France, each have hundreds of thousands of websites running on Cloudflare.

There are over one billion websites out there in the world, which means a total Cloudflare outage would account for roughly 2% of global websites’ connectivity issues. However, if Backlinko’s stats are correct, a huge percentage of popular websites rely on Cloudflare. Sure, the vast majority of websites may remain unaffected by this outage, but nearly half of the sites people most often visit have problems here. If you primarily visit U.S. websites, that number may be even higher.

It’s a similar reason why an AWS (Amazon Web Services) outage takes down so many websites. AWS provides cloud computing services for so many companies and websites, that when issues pop-up, you experience problems with your favorite websites. It poses a logistical question for how the global internet currently works: Yes, it’s great that services like Cloudflare make it possible to reliably access international websites as if they were within your region—but if too much of the internet leans on it, is it really all that reliable?

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a tool you can use to protect your identity online, change your virtual location, evade censorship, check out foreign streaming services and more. They mostly take the form of commercially available subscription apps, often so simple to operate that all you need to do is press a button to turn them on and off.

While using a VPN is easy in practice, there’s a lot going on under the hood. Knowing what’s really happening can help you decide which VPN is right for you, then use it more effectively once you’ve got it. In this guide, I’m going to delve into what a VPN really is, how it works and what you might need one for.

If this article convinces you that you need a VPN — and I hope it does! — I curate a collection of the best VPN deals that I update at least once a week. Head over there to get your VPN shopping started.

What is a VPN?

The name “virtual private network” comes from the initial use of the technology to access restricted networks from off-site — if you work remotely, you probably still use a VPN this way. Those are corporate VPNs, though, from providers like Cisco. Here, we’re talking about commercial VPNs sold for individual use.

These services came about when people realized that if you connected to the public internet through a VPN, every server you contacted would see the VPN server instead of your personal computer. The VPN effectively becomes a mask that interacts with the web on your behalf. That’s the simple principle underlying every commercial VPN you’ve seen advertised.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

VPNs like Proton VPN and ExpressVPN operate servers in various locations around the world. When you use their apps, you’ve got access to all the servers in their network. After you connect, communications between your device and your chosen server are encrypted so nobody can trace your activities back to you. This is called tunneling, and is the main difference between a full VPN and a simple proxy server.

How does a VPN work?

Questions like the above can get into the weeds fast, so I’ll be oversimplifying here. VPNs handle encryption in two steps. First, they establish a secure tunnel to your computer or phone, then they send information through it.

The first step — establishing the connection — is called a handshake. It uses asymmetric encryption, where each party has a public and a private key. In a handshake, two parties use public keys to confirm that they are who they say they are, then exchange the keys they’ll use for simpler symmetric encryption.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Once the handshake has confirmed the path between your device and the VPN server, the tunnel is complete. From then on until you disconnect, every packet of data you send will be encrypted before it leaves your device and not decrypted until it reaches the VPN. The same is true in the other direction. Website requests and other data sent between the VPN and your internet service provider (ISP) will not be encrypted, but that’s OK — without the information on the first step, it’s impossible to identify you behind the VPN.

This is a complicated process, but VPNs use sets of instructions called VPN protocols to run through it near-instantly. A VPN protocol covers encryption and transit using several sets of ciphers. The most common protocols these days are OpenVPN, WireGuard and IKEv2/IPSec, though many VPN services have their own proprietary protocols as selling points.

What are the benefits of using a VPN?

Although the above process happens mostly in the background, it does tax your internet connection a little. The best VPNs keep impacts to a minimum, but you may notice a drop in speed, plus higher latencies when connecting to servers far away. So, what benefits do you get in exchange for all that?

Anonymity

The first and biggest boon is near-total anonymity. In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) put out a comprehensive report on everything your ISP knows about you — confirming that nearly every ISP gets a second profit stream from selling information on your online activities. In essence, they’re making you pay them for the right to hose your own privacy. But a VPN lets you strike back.

Since you connect to the VPN server before your ISP ever clocks you (let alone your destination websites), your computer and modem broadcast no information about who you really are. Anyone can see what you’re doing, but they’ll only see the VPN server doing it. And hiding your IP address is vital — lots of people (not just ISPs) can deduce a shocking amount about you with no other information, including your real location.

Prevent ISP speed throttling

Speed isn’t normally one of the benefits of a VPN, but in some specific cases, you might get faster internet. ISPs occasionally throttle the speeds of certain users they perceive as using too much bandwidth. This can happen to you, whether or not the charge is accurate. Using a VPN can get around the slowdown, since the ISP can’t identify you to throttle you. Just note you still can’t go faster than your unprotected internet speed.

Public Wi-Fi safety

A VPN can also keep you safe when using public Wi-Fi. On an unsecured Wi-Fi network — the sort you often find in cafes, hotel lobbies and other public buildings — hackers can spy on you through various vulnerabilities, or even set up fake networks (called “rogue hotspots”) to capture your information. If your connection with the network is encrypted, the criminal’s window of opportunity slams shut.

Get around content blocks and firewalls

The other most important thing a VPN can do is to change your virtual location. IP addresses are keyed to specific locations — some to countries or regions, and some to networks as small as one building. Authorities can use this to restrict internet access on the networks they control. This can vary in scale, from your school or workplace blocking certain content, all the way up to the nation-level firewalls in China, Saudi Arabia and other countries.

Remember, though, that your internet goes to the VPN before it goes anywhere else. If your school’s internet blocks some sites, you could get on a VPN server and the school’s firewall won’t know you’re connecting from inside. This even works with countries (though not always). By connecting to a server outside the sphere of oppression, you can organize activism online even when the government doesn’t want you to.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Of course, you can also use this trick for fun by checking out other countries’ streaming libraries, viewing local exclusive events or protecting you while you download a torrent file. The key takeaway is that VPNs are versatile, and can be used for casual entertainment, life-and-death anonymity or both at once.

Will a VPN keep me completely safe online?

VPNs are a huge positive for individual privacy rights, but just having one doesn’t mean you can ignore your online safety. It’s better to think of VPNs as one part of a comprehensive strategy.

A VPN keeps you anonymous, prevents you from being tracked and changes your location to bypass censorship. However, it can’t directly protect you from downloading malware, falling for a phishing scam, oversharing information on social media, using an easily guessed password or getting your phone stolen in real life.

There’s one key difference between threats a VPN can prevent and those it can’t: A VPN only protects you from being spied on without your consent. If all you’re doing is browsing on a network, a VPN keeps you concealed. But today’s malefactors have all sorts of tricks to get you to give your consent. Websites spam message windows until you click “allow cookies.” Hackers send phishing emails and make you click links that download malware. And so on.

Can VPNs be trusted?

There’s also one other critical point. Even if a VPN keeps you completely anonymous, the VPN itself can still tie your identity to what you do online. That’s why VPNs all claim to have “strict no-logging policies” or something similar — they’re promising not to abuse their access.

Naturally, some do anyway. A VPN can be sued if it breaks its own privacy policy, but many escape liability by leaving just enough leeway that they technically aren’t in violation. The best way to determine if you can trust a VPN is to look at its history. How long has it been operating? Has it ever mishandled or profited off customer data in that time? On the other hand, has it ever been raided by police who then found nothing, bolstering its claim to not keep logs?

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Some of the most trustworthy VPNs take technical steps to guarantee that they aren’t logging user activity. Many use RAM-only or diskless servers that automatically delete any logs. Proton VPN goes even farther, using full-disk encryption to render any logs unreadable (even if they did exist). These services back their claims up with independent audits from reliable firms.

Bottom line: A VPN is no substitute for common sense, threat awareness and a suite of strong security tools. It’ll work best alongside a password manager, virus scanner and two-factor authentication.

Are VPNs legal?

VPNs are legal in every free country on Earth. While the UK recently suggested that a VPN ban was “on the table” to enforce its age verification laws, and the US states of Wisconsin and Michigan are considering bans in various forms, no democracy has yet outlawed VPN usage.

The countries that do ban VPNs are the ones you’d probably expect — those with deep-rooted internet censorship regimes that VPN use might threaten. Belarus, Iraq, Myanmar, North Korea and Turkmenistan have made all VPNs illegal. In China, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Uganda and Iran, only state-approved VPNs are permitted, and services that get approved tend to have government backdoors.

Other countries heavily restrict VPNs without banning them altogether, including Turkey and Pakistan. In India, VPNs are legal, but the law requires them to keep logs of user activities. The law’s passage in 2022 led many VPNs to pull their servers from India and replace them with virtual locations.

Finally, there are countries like Egypt where using a VPN is legal, but you’ll face extra penalties if you’re caught using one to commit a crime. Also, it should go without saying, but VPNs don’t make crime legal. If something is illegal without a VPN, it’s illegal with a VPN, even if VPNs themselves are allowed in your state and country.

Are VPNs free?

Some of them are, but many of them are dangerous. If you’ve just been faced with a new threat to your online freedom — like, say, the UK’s new age restriction laws — it can be tempting to jump to a free VPN to solve the problem quickly.

But free VPNs are easy to hack together, and app stores rarely probe them for violations before listing them. I frequently see free VPNs that either don’t work, track you for ad sales or even sneak malware onto your computer. Another big problem is that many of these shovelware VPNs are all secretly run by the same monolithic entities.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The best free VPNs are free plans offered by paid services. With subscription fees supporting the free tier, you don’t need to worry that the real money comes from selling your information to advertisers. Proton VPN, hide.me, Windscribe, TunnelBear and PrivadoVPN all fall into this category. None of them show you ads, but they’re all restricted in other ways, whether by the amount you can use the VPN per month, the speeds you’ll get or the servers you can access.

Do I need a VPN?

If you use the internet — which you must, if you’re reading this — you’ll benefit from a VPN. To determine what you’ll need it for, though, ask yourself the following questions. If you answer yes to any of them, think about subscribing to a VPN to address the problem in question.

• Do you feel strongly about whether your ISP and other third parties can see what you do online and use that information for profit?

• Do you live in a place where the law prevents you from freely using the internet and/or forbids certain platforms?

• Have online freedoms been temporarily suspended in your country because of unrest?

• Are you planning to travel to a country with restrictive internet laws?

• Do you normally use the internet on a network that restricts access to certain sites?

• Do you use the internet for any tasks that would risk your own safety or someone else’s if exposed?

• Do you often get online through public Wi-Fi networks or networks without passwords?

• Are you concerned that your ISP is throttling your internet speeds?

• Do you want to watch TV shows and movies that aren’t available in your country on the streaming services you’re subscribed to?

• Do you want to watch events that are limited to specific regions, such as local sports?

• Do you enjoy looking in various regions for better deals on products you want?

• Are you an online gamer concerned about doxxing and/or DDoS attacks from sore losers?

Different VPNs have features that make them better at various tasks from the lists above. However, the providers on my best VPN list are good at just about everything. Proton VPN is my favorite for its balance of speed, design and anonymity, but ExpressVPN is another excellent choice if you’re willing to pay more for fantastic ease of use. Surfshark is the fastest VPN I’ve tested this year, while NordVPN has a great set of features.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/what-is-a-vpn-and-what-can-you-do-with-one-161549146.html?src=rss

Google has kicked its Gemini rollout into high gear over the past year, releasing the much-improved Gemini 2.5 family and cramming various flavors of the model into Search, Gmail, and just about everything else the company makes.

Now, Google’s increasingly unavoidable AI is getting an upgrade. Gemini 3 Pro is available in a limited form today, featuring more immersive, visual outputs and fewer lies, Google says. The company also says Gemini 3 sets a new high-water mark for vibe coding, and Google is announcing a new AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) called Antigravity, which is also available today.

The first member of the Gemini 3 family

Google says the release of Gemini 3 is yet another step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). The new version of Google’s flagship AI model has expanded simulated reasoning abilities and shows improved understanding of text, images, and video. So far, testers like it—Google’s latest LLM is once again atop the LMArena leaderboard with an ELO score of 1,501, besting Gemini 2.5 Pro by 50 points.

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Microsoft has rolled out a new preview build for Windows 11 Insiders in the Dev and Beta Channel this week that introduces a new toggle called ‘experimental agentic features’ that can be enabled or disabled in the Windows Settings app. From a report: According to Microsoft, this new toggle is designed to “allow agents to use new Windows agentic features.” The company says the feature will work with AI-powered apps, which “help you automate everyday tasks — like organizing files, scheduling meetings, or sending emails — so you can spend less time on busy work and more time on what matters most. One powerful way apps are implementing AI today is by interacting with your apps and your files, using vision and advanced reasoning to click, type and scroll like a human would.”

The setting in the Windows Setting says “When this setting is on, agents can use Windows agentic features.” Features such as the recently announced Copilot Actions for Windows feature are going to take advantage of this new experimental agentic feature capability.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few weeks short of Gemini 2’s first birthday, Google has announced Gemini 3 Pro. Naturally, the company claims the new system is its most intelligent AI model yet, offering state-of-the-art reasoning, class-leading vibe coding performance and more. The good news is you can put those claims to the test today, with Google making Gemini 3 Pro available across many of its products and services.

Google is highlighting a couple of benchmarks to tout Gemini 3 Pro’s performance. In Humanity’s Last Exam, widely considered one of the toughest tests AI labs can put their systems through, the model delivered a new top accuracy score of 37.5 percent, beating the previous leader, Grok 4, by an impressive 12.1 percentage points. Notably, it achieved its score without turning to tools like web search. On LMArena, meanwhile, Gemini 3 Pro is now on top of the site’s leaderboards with a score of 1,501 points.

Okay, but what about the practical benefits of Gemini 3 Pro? In the Gemini app, the new model will translate to answers that are more concise and better formatted. It also enables a new feature Google calls Gemini Agent. The tool builds on Project Mariner, the web-surfing Chrome AI the company debuted at the end of last year. It allows users to ask Gemini to complete tasks for them. For example, say you want help managing your email inbox. In the past, Gemini would have offered some general tips. Now, it can do that work for you.

To try Gemini 3 Pro inside of the Gemini app, select “Thinking” from the model picker. The new model is available to everyone, though AI Plus, Pro and Ultra subscribers can use it more often before hitting their rate limit. To make the most of Gemini Agent, you’ll need to grant the tool access to your Google apps.

In Search, meanwhile, Gemini 3 Pro will debut inside of AI Mode, with availability of the new model first rolling out to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Google will also bring the model to AI Overviews, where it will be used to answer the most difficult questions people ask of its search engine. In the coming weeks, Google plans to roll out a new routing algorithm for both AI Mode and AI Overviews that will know when to put questions through Gemini 3 Pro. In the meantime, subscribers can try the new model inside of AI Mode by selecting “Thinking” from the dropdown menu.

Google

In practice, Google says Gemini 3 Pro will result in AI Mode finding more credible and relevant content related to your questions. This is thanks to how the new model augments the fan-out technique that powers AI Mode. The tool will perform even more searches than before and with its new intelligence, Google suggests it may even uncover content previous models may have missed. At the same time, Gemini 3’s better multi-modal understanding will translate to AI Mode generating more dynamic and interactive interfaces to answer your questions. For example, if you’re researching mortgage loans, the tool can create a loan calculator directly inside of its response.

For developers and its enterprise customers, Google is bringing Gemini 3 to all the usual places one can find its models, including inside of the Gemini API, AI Studio and Vertex AI. The company is also releasing a new agentic coding app called Antigravity. It can autonomously program while creating tasks for itself and providing progress reports. Alongside Gemini 3 Pro, Google is introducing Gemini 3 Deep Think. The enhanced reasoning mode will be available to safety testers before it rolls out to AI Ultra subscribers.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/googles-new-gemini-3-model-arrives-in-ai-mode-and-the-gemini-app-160054273.html?src=rss

While there are countless ways to play old video games, endless emulators that eat up ROMs and spew out memories, the hardware offerings from Analogue have elevated the act of retro gaming to an art form. With an obsessive dedication to pixel-perfect reproductions of classic platforms, Analogue’s various devices generally set the benchmark for consuming old games on new displays.

The company’s latest entry is an ode to the Nintendo 64, and that poses a bit of a problem. While Analogue’s other systems honored the golden age of 2D gaming, the pinnacle of pixel art in many ways, the N64 ushered gamers into the early, ugly days of 3D gaming. Nearly three decades after its initial release, most N64 games look pretty catastrophic by modern standards. Can the Analogue 3D ($250) treatment save them?

Origin Story

The early to mid-’90s were a heady time for console gaming. Sega and Nintendo had printed so much money in the 16-bit era that both were throwing everything they could at the wall to capture the fluorescent pink, velcro wallets of the gamers of the day. Wild controllers, endless system add-ons and even virtual reality were in the cards.

But it would be the humble CD-ROM that really pushed things forward. Sega did its own multimedia add-on in-house, with the Sega CD. Nintendo decided to team up with Sony for the development of its own disc drive. When that project fell apart, Sony famously decided to continue on, releasing the original PlayStation in 1995.

Almost overnight, the gaming world was all about three-dimensional gaming, a landscape that Sega’s Saturn was ill-prepared for. Nintendo, though, went all-in for its next system, the Nintendo 64. It not only packed more polygons and colors than Sony’s system, but Nintendo finally cracked the code of how to make a truly good three-dimensional platformer with Mario 64. 

Mario 64 is not only a great game, it became the template for how player and camera controls worked, defining rules that still exist today. 

The N64 was also the first mainstream console to feature an analog controller out of the box, the first console since the Atari 5200 in the early ’80s to have four controller ports and the first American console to offer haptic feedback in the form of 1997’s Rumble Pak. Today it all sounds quaint, but it was a truly revolutionary machine back in the day.

N64 redux

Tim Stevens for Engadget

The Analogue 3D is somewhat revolutionary as well, but for different reasons. At its core, it relies on a field programmable gate array, or FPGA, much like Analogue’s previous devices (the Super Nt, Mega Sg, Pocket and Duo). An FPGA is effectively a processor full of virtual building blocks, called logic elements, which enable it to replicate any other system. It takes a massive amount of configuration, but the result is pure hardware emulation. 

Again, it’s the same concept as Analogue’s previous devices, just on a massively larger scale. Where the Pocket used an Altera Cyclone V FPGA with 49,000 logic elements, this one uses an Intel Cyclone 10 GX FPGA clocking in at 220,000 logic elements. While Analogue never gave much in the way of explanation, it’s likely that the extreme complexity that resulted in delay after annoying delay — well, that and the complexities of running an international business in the tariff-laden minefield that is today’s global trading landscape. 

Beyond that, the Analogue 3D very much follows the same aesthetic seen in the company’s previous units: a minimalist take on the original hardware. It looks like a smaller and thinner N64 — one that requires active cooling, by the way, so make sure you don’t crowd this thing in among your other, lesser game consoles.

It (virtually) supports all the N64’s key accessories, like the Transfer Pak, the Expansion Pak and the Rumble Pak. It’s USB-C powered and output comes via HDMI, and you’ll find the requisite cables included in the box. There’s also an SD card around the back for firmware updates and a pair of USB-A ports for good measure. Up front, you’ll find four controller ports, with the distinctive circular style used by the N64. But you can connect controllers via USB or wirelessly too, if you prefer.

Tim Stevens for Engadget

The system’s default controller is again provided by 8BitDo, which has created special designs for Analogue’s other recent releases. For better or worse, the $39.99 8BitDo 64 controller doesn’t imitate the three-pronged N64 style, but does offer all that system’s buttons in a more traditional layout. It’s perhaps too traditional, difficult to tell apart from Nintendo’s own Switch Pro controller from a distance.

I haven’t been a fan of 8BitDo controllers in the past. Given the premium Analogue charges for its systems, the 8BitDo controllers haven’t risen to that level of polish. This new generation, though, is definitely a step up. The controller’s buttons don’t rattle when you shake it, the inputs have a good feel to them, the vibration isn’t harsh and pairing is quick and easy. 

That said, I did run into latency issues if I was more than about 10 feet away from the system, or if I closed the door on the cabinet that held the Analogue 3D. That’s a far cry from the connectivity of a Switch Pro controller, which I can readily use from another room if I’m ever so inclined.

CRT vibes in an OLED era

Tim Stevens for Engadget

Analogue has made a name for itself by obsessing over striking the perfect blend of honoring original systems while making them great in a modern world. If I may insert one automotive reference, they are doing to game systems what Singer Vehicle Design does to Porsches. 

But where cars both old and reimagined look great on the same road, vintage consoles struggle with modern TVs. Plug an original N64 into your 4K HDTV via a tangle of adapters, and you’ll get a blurry, blocky mess that will make you question everything your childhood self held dear. Even if you go the hardcore route with something like an Open Source Scan Converter or an HDMI mod kit to take vintage analog signals and turn them into modern digital ones, you’re still probably not going to like the results. That’s because it isn’t all about getting crisp signals from console to display. These systems were designed for cathode rays, where one colored pixel bled into the next to create a seamless view to hide many of the N64’s 320 x 240 flaws. 

The Analogue 3D goes to great lengths to replicate that look through a series of filters meant to replicate everything from a consumer-grade CRT to the sort of professional-grade monitor that cost as much as a new car did back in the ’90s. Analogue has experimented with these filters in the past, but they’re taken to a new level here, with options for specifying monitor type, quality and size. The results are quite impressive, still a bit grittier than a giant-sized CRT would be in real life, but looking miles better than the unfiltered view of the games. You can even tune and tweak those display settings on a per-game basis, if you’re especially finicky.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to take my word for that. The 4K CRT effects don’t really show up through a capture card, and as of now the Analogue 3D has no integrated screen capture functionality. That, I was told, is coming later. 

Back to the future of gaming

Tim Stevens for Engadget

I started my testing with the game that, in the eyes of many, represents the high-water mark of the N64 experience: Perfect Dark. Rare’s classic first-person shooter shares a lot of its concepts (and surely its code) with that other N64 icon, Goldeneye. But, in the three years between those games, developers learned plenty of tricks, resulting in a game that really pushed the hardware to its limits.

Or past its limits, really. Perfect Dark was equally famous for its uneven frame rates. Expecting a one-to-one recreation of the original hardware, I was surprised to find the game running buttery smooth on the Analogue 3D. How?

The system includes a series of tweaking and tuning options, including something of a baked-in overclocking function. By default, it’s on Auto, which, at least in the case of Perfect Dark, dialed up the Analogue 3D’s power to make up for the original system’s polygon processing shortcomings. But the Analogue 3D is nothing if not tweakable, and with a few taps into the system’s menu, I was able to turn that off.

Now locked into “Force Original Hardware” mode, Perfect Dark played just like it did back in the day, a shaky and jittery testament to the overachieving aspirations of Rare’s developers. And, thanks to more settings adjustments, I could enable the 16:9 mode in Perfect Dark and stretch the video output on the Analogue 3D, getting a proper widescreen effect — even though the game doesn’t output a full 16:9 grid of pixels. 

Tim Stevens for Engadget

Beyond Auto, you can set the game to run in Enhanced, Enhanced+ and Unleashed speeds. I switched over to another game notorious for its poor performance: Superman: The New Superman Adventures. I initially reviewed this game way back in 1999, and it has since become notorious as one of the worst of all time. 

It’s no better today, but thanks to the Analogue 3D, it is at least more fluid. The game’s choppiness is gone, replaced by a too-rapid pace to the uninspired ring-chasing gameplay. Sadly, the faster frame rate doesn’t make up for the omnipresent green fog that makes Superman 64 feel so claustrophobic. Neither does it fix the crunchy, murky textures that surround you in Perfect Dark.

It’s not all bad, though. 1997’s Super Robot Spirits, a giant robot fighting game released only in Japan, features untextured 3D models that use Gouraud shading to look a little less blocky. The result looks genuinely crisp and clean on the Analogue 3D.So too do games like Mario Kart 64 and Yoshi’s Story, 3D games that rely heavily on 2D elements, which scale very nicely up to a modern, 65-inch 4K OLED, like the LG B7 I used for testing.  

Unfortunately, there were few games that really popped for me. Much of the time, I was stuck looking at blurry, blocky textures poking out of foggy landscapes that were far less breathtaking than I remembered them 25-plus years ago.

Wrap-up

Tim Stevens for Engadget

Analogue’s earlier systems take some of the greatest 2D games ever made and elevate them to crisply defined, high-resolution pixel art. They are gorgeous and charming to behold, which just makes them all the more engaging to play. Sadly, few of the games on the N64 stand up so well. Making these games look truly good would require pushing back the omnipresent fog and upscaling the ugly textures that plague many N64 games. That, it’s safe to say, would go well past the point of faithful recreation that Analogue strives for. 

It’s hard to fault the Analogue 3D itself for this. The hardware does a remarkable job of recreating that original experience. My N64 library has never looked better, and I am definitely enjoying digging into games I haven’t played in decades, plus a few newly acquired gems that I missed back in the day. But, more often than not, I’m left shaking my head at just how bad these games looked, and no amount of 4K upscaling and CRT emulation can fix that.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/analogue-3d-review-modern-processing-cant-fix-vintage-flaws-160000410.html?src=rss