Meta is informing some users that they will soon be restricted in how many link posts they can share each month, unless they pay for its Meta Verified subscription service. As per the notification message: “Starting December 16, certain Facebook profiles without Meta Verified, including yours, will be limited to sharing links in 2 organic posts per month. Subscribe to Meta Verified to share more links on Facebook, plus get a verified badge and additional benefits to help protect your brand.”

To be clear, right now this is a limited test, so relatively few Pages are impacted. But understandably, a lot of users are also seeking more information on the change, and whether it could be expanded to all Pages. So, Meta’s seeking to boost take-up of Meta Verified, in order to make more money out of its subscription option, which, for business users, costs between $14.99 and $499 per month, depending on which package you choose.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After federal clean vehicle tax credits ended in September, the electric vehicle industry reached a crossroads. Well, technically, it has been there since Trump took office. This is a weird period in automotive history; A chunk of the industry is full-steam ahead with EV development, another is cutting back, and the consumer is left wondering what the electrification landscape will look like next year, let alone in three, during the next administration.

But what about the automotive aftermarket? Typically, this corner benefits from whatever progress is made on the OEM front—have Trump’s policies expanded or contracted its EV technological development? I recently spent some time chatting with personnel of the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) at its yearly tradeshow in Las Vegas to find out. I also hit the bricks (or, rather, bright carpeting) of the massive show itself, seeking out some new, unique developments in the space that behoove EV tech’s inherent benefits.

Above one of the show’s several sprawling halls, I met with Mike Spagnola, SEMA’s CEO, and Karen Bailey-Chapman, senior vice president, public and government affairs, to learn what the organization’s official stance is. First and foremost: It doesn’t want to be told what to do.

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I know what you’re thinking, didn’t OnePlus release a new phone just last month? It did. A little over five weeks after the announcement of the OP15, the company is back with the OnePlus 15R, a more affordable version of its new flagship that starts at $700 (or $200 less than its sibling). Off the top, this will be a shorter review because most of what I said about the OnePlus 15 also applies to the OP15R. It’s a great phone that asks you to make one pretty significant compromise. 

Design and display

Igor Bonifacic for Engadget

Like the OnePlus 15, the 15R looks like the OnePlus 13s and 13T, a pair of smaller, 6.32-inch phones the company released in India and China this past spring. I said the design of the OP15 was boring and derivative of the iPhone 16 Pro. The 15R has done nothing to change that opinion. With one fewer camera, the OP15R doesn’t look much different from the iPhone 12 I’ve been hanging on to since 2020. 

That said, I’m more fond of the 15R’s mint breeze color (the phone is also available in charcoal black) than the sand storm shade of my OP15. We’re big fans of minty phones here at Engadget, and OnePlus has gone with a particularly pleasing hue of the color with its new phone. With the redesign, OnePlus has also improved the phone’s waterproofing, bringing it in line with the OP15. The new handset is IP69K-certified against moisture and dust, meaning it can withstand heated water shot at it at pressure. Like the OP15, the 15R trades OnePlus’ old Alert Slider for a new Plus Key. It functions like the iPhone’s Action button, allowing you to add a shortcut for a favorite feature. For example, you can configure it to open the camera app or act as a do not disturb toggle, among a few other options.  

One departure from the OP15 is that the 15R has a larger 6.83-inch display, making it slightly taller than its sibling. OnePlus is marketing this as one reason buyers might pick the 15R over the OP15, but holding the phones side by side, there’s not much difference between the two. They’re both big, and you’ll either like that or won’t.

On top of being big, the 15R’s screen can refresh at a fast 165Hz in games. The two displays are also comparable in terms of resolution and brightness; both can push 1,800 nits of brightness. One difference I noticed is the OnePlus 15 has a warmer panel, even when the two phones are set to the same colorspace. I’ve reached out to OnePlus to find what might be causing the disparity, but for now it may be due to a quality control issue or oversight in the company’s software.  

One last thing, OnePlus has upgraded the 15R to add an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor beneath the screen. This is placed in a nice spot toward the bottom third of the display, and it’s fast and accurate.   

Performance and battery

Igor Bonifacic for Engadget

The OnePlus 15R is the first phone in North America to arrive with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset. Not to be confused with the Snapdragon Gen 5 Elite in the OP15, this new chipset is similar to Qualcomm’s flagship system-on-a-chip but has a weaker CPU and GPU. This is reflected in benchmarks like Geekbench 6 where the OP15 handily outperforms the OP15R. It’s not even close, either, with the OP15 delivering standout single- and multi-core scores of 3,773 and 11,293, while the 15R put up more modest results of 2,857 and 9,512. 

From that perspective, you’re losing a fair amount of performance, but real-world use tells a different story. Outside of the handful of games such as Call of Duty: Mobile and PUBG that support the OP15 and 15R’s 165Hz displays, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 offers more than enough muscle for the majority of applications. Even for most games (like the ones I like to play, including Diablo Immortal and League of Legends: Wild Rift), the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 is a great match. 

OnePlus also hasn’t skimped on the 15R’s other internal components. You’re still getting 12GB of LPDDR5X Ultra RAM and 256GB of UFS 4.1 storage. That’s the same configuration as the base model of the OP15. This translates to a phone that doesn’t miss a beat when switching between apps and loading files like images and videos.  

The 15R has a slightly bigger battery, coming in at 7,400mAh, up from 7,300mAh on the OP15. In practice, the two phones offer the same amount of battery life. Putting them through both Engadget’s video rundown test, they both ran for 38 hours before their batteries died (which makes sense given the OP15R has a bigger screen). Like the OP15, the 15R comes with the OnePlus 55W SUPERVOOC charger in the box. The adapter can get the 15R from dead to 100 percent in less than an hour. If you hate charging your phone, the 15R makes that process as painless as possible, with a battery that both lasts long and won’t be at the outlet for hours.            

Cameras

Igor Bonifacic for Engadget

By this point you’re probably wondering what OnePlus cut from the OP15 to make the 15R more affordable. The answer — quite literally — is an entire camera. The new phone is missing a telephoto camera, something you could find on its predecessor, the OnePlus 13R. And as far as I can tell, the two remaining cameras use the same 50-megapixel and 8MP sensors OnePlus shipped on last year’s model. The company also hasn’t upgraded the glass on either camera. That leaves the selfie camera as the only area to see some change in the form of a sharper 32MP sensor and the addition of autofocus.       

Unfortunately, none of the 15R’s cameras stand out. As a whole, they suffer from the same set of problems that plague the OnePlus 15’s cameras. They’re fine out on a sunny day, but as soon as the light becomes a bit challenging, the 15R struggles with shadow details, resulting in muddy pictures. The more I’ve used both the OP15 and 15R, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that OnePlus needs to go back to the drawing board with its new Detail Max Engine. It feels like it’s holding back what should, at least on paper, be solid hardware.

Software

Igor Bonifacic for Engadget

There’s not much to say here other than the 15R ships with OxygenOS 16, just like the OP15. OnePlus has also promised to support the 15R for the same amount of time as the OP15: four years with software updates and six years with security patches. That’s a shorter window than Google and Samsung, both of which promise seven years on all their latest phones. It’s hopefully something that OnePlus decides to change starting with the OnePlus 16. The reason I bring that up is that the company’s version of Android is one I like a lot. OxygenOS is slick, with animations that highlight the speed of the 15R’s processor and display. The fact the phone comes with the latest version of OxygenOS means you also get access to all of the company’s newest AI features, including its Mind Space hub where you can save screenshots and notes for an on-device model to transcribe and summarize.    

 Wrap-up

Igor Bonifacic for Engadget

In short, the OnePlus 15R is the phone for people who don’t care about photos and videos. That’s the same conclusion I came to with the OP15. If you’re a OnePlus fan, the 15R excels in all the areas you would expect the company’s devices to make a good showing: performance, battery life and display responsiveness. Given I wasn’t too impressed with the OP15’s camera, I would actually recommend the 15R over that model. For $200 off the starting price of the OP15, you’re getting a device that has almost all of the same strengths of its more expensive sibling.  

Compared to other phones in its price range, such as the Pixel 10 and Galaxy S25 FE, the 15R is not as well-rounded, and can’t compete with those devices in camera quality, but you’re getting much better performance, battery life and a display they can’t match.  

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/oneplus-15r-review-a-165hz-display-and-big-battery-for-700-150000340.html?src=rss

Warner Bros Discovery’s board spurned Paramount Skydance’s $108.4 billion hostile takeover bid on Wednesday, calling the offer “illusory” as it accused the studio giant of misleading shareholders about its financing. From a report: Paramount has been in a race with Netflix to win control of Warner Bros, and with it, its prized film and television studios, HBO Max streaming service and franchises like “Harry Potter.” After Warner Bros accepted the streaming giant’s offer, Paramount launched a hostile offer to outdo that bid.

In a letter to shareholders on Wednesday, the Warner Bros board wrote that Paramount had “consistently misled” Warner Bros shareholders that its $30-per-share cash offer was fully guaranteed, or “backstopped,” by the Ellison family, led by billionaire and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Tuesday, X Corporation, formerly known as Twitter, sued “Operation Bluebird,” the new startup that is seeking to reclaim the allegedly abandoned Twitter trademark and relaunch a new social media network under that name.

In its 43-page lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Delaware, X Corporation alleges trademark infringement, adding that despite Bluebird’s “purported plan, it cannot bring Twitter ‘back’—Twitter never left and continues to be exclusively owned by X Corp.”

One of Bluebird’s leaders, Michael Peroff, told Ars in an email that Operation Bluebird was “fully expecting” a lawsuit from X Corporation and that “we planned for it.”

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Following the major image editing upgrades added to Google Gemini back in August—under the whimsical codename Nano Banana—it’s OpenAI’s turn to supercharge the tools you get for image manipulations inside ChatGPT. The new update is called GPT Image 1.5, and is rolling out now for all users.

One of the key improvements here, as was the case with Nano Banana, is the way that ChatGPT can now edit a specific part of an image while keeping everything else consistent. You can add or remove something, or change the color or style of something, without ending up with an entirely different looking picture.

Another feature ChatGPT has now borrowed from Gemini: the ability to combine multiple images together in one scene. Want you and your best friend in front of Sydney Harbour Bridge? No problem—just supply the source pictures and the AI will do the rest. You can also change visual styles while maintaining consistent details.

OpenAI says the new image editor and generator is able to follow instructions “more reliably,” and render pictures up to four times faster than before. Text can be more varied in style and size, and images should be more realistic and error-free in general—though OpenAI also admits there’s still room for improvement.

It’s the best image generator tool we’ve ever seen in ChatGPT, and it all looks impressive at first glance—but how does it stack up in practice against Gemini and Nano Banana? I put the two models to the test via the $20-per-month plan on both platforms (that’s ChatGPT Plus and Google AI Pro, respectively) to see how they compared.

Rendering and editing images

Open up ChatGPT on the web or on mobile and you’ll see there’s a new Images tab on the left-hand navigation pane. This takes you to a library of your existing pictures, together with some new prompts for creating images. You get some suggestions for prompts, plus an assortment of preset portrait image styles you can apply.

A journalist, lamp, and countryside scene courtesy of Gemini.
Credit: Gemini

A journalist, lamp, and countryside scene courtesy of ChatGPT.
Credit: ChatGPT

I tested out the new GPT Image 1.5 model by getting ChatGPT to generate a busy tech journalist, a lamp in the middle of an empty warehouse, and a cartoon-style rolling landscape of hills in the fog. I then got Gemini to create the same pictures with the same prompts. While the results were pretty varied, in terms of quality and realism they were pretty equal—the occasional issue with weird physics and repetition, but nothing too bad.

Both ChatGPT and Gemini are now quite competent at clean image edits, too: Both AI bots seamlessly switched the journalist’s clothing to a shirt and tie without touching any other part of the picture. This would have taken a significant amount of time to do manually, even by a Photoshop expert, and shows just how transformative AI imaging is becoming.

Color changes were all handled with aplomb, but the AIs struggled a bit with perspective changes, where I asked to see the same shot from another angle. In these cases, instructions were less well-followed and the images were less consistent (as new areas needed to be rendered), though ChatGPT did a little better than Gemini at getting good results.

Clothing can now be swapped out in seconds (Gemini edition).
Credit: Gemini

Clothing can now be swapped out in seconds (ChatGPT edition).
Credit: ChatGPT

The classic “remove an object from this picture” challenge was handled with aplomb: Both Gemini and ChatGPT were able to remove a cottage from the countryside scene with surgical precision, leaving everything else intact. Again, these are the kind of time-intensive image edits that would previously have needed a lot of careful effort, and that can now be done in seconds.

Gemini’s attempt at removing a cottage.
Credit: Gemini

ChatGPT’s attempt at removing a cottage.
Credit: ChatGPT

Combining and remixing images

Another talent ChatGPT and Gemini now have is being able to combine images together. So you can have separate photos of you and your parents, put them together in the same shot, and then add in a background of wherever you like. You can get perfect family photos without actually gathering together your relatives together or going anywhere.

This was an area where Gemini and ChatGPT did struggle a bit more: The editing dexterity was still impressive, but the results didn’t always look like a single, coherent scene. Lighting is sometimes off, or elements from different images appear at different scales, and you’ll have to do a bit more tweaking and editing and reprompting to get everything right.

ChatGPT did fare slightly better at blending different images and elements together, and changing the overall look of a picture. When I tried to get the AIs to mix all my images together in a moody film noir shot, ChatGPT produced something pretty consistent—the Gemini effort looked a lot more like a cut-and-paste job.

It can be fun remixing photos again and again—adding new people, changing the weather, moving the location—and both these bots are now capable of some rather incredible results. Remixing photos of family and friends will be popular, but it’s not all that easy: With people you know, any generative AI that gets added tends to look wrong, because neither ChatGPT nor Gemini knows exactly what these people look like, how they smile, how they’re built, or how they tend to stand or sit.

Gemini can combine images—but they look like different images.
Credit: Gemini

ChatGPT did a better job at creating a new image that looked correct.
Credit: ChatGPT

In terms of ChatGPT vs. Gemini, they’re both at a high level now—a level that puts advanced Photoshop-style editing capabilities at everyone’s fingertips. If either AI model has the edge right now, it’s ChatGPT’s, but there’s not much in it. It’s also going to be fascinating to see where these image editing capabilities go next.

The best VPNs can make your online life more private with software that’s convenient and cheap — sometimes even free. While keeping your IP address invisible, you can use your VPN to explore streaming content from all over the world or (virtually) sneak into a sports event that’s not available in your area.

However, while VPNs are widely available, there’s a strange dearth of information on what they actually do behind the scenes. You may know that a VPN masks your device with a proxy server to make it look like you’re somewhere else, and maybe even that encryption is involved. But finding any more details can mean running a gauntlet of misinformation.

That’s a shame, because the inner workings of a VPN aren’t all that difficult to understand. You may not be able to build one yourself without a degree in computer science, but with a little work, you can understand exactly what it’s doing on your computer. That’s information you can use to select the right VPN for you, and make the most of it once you’ve got it.

What is a VPN?

To make sure nobody gets left behind, I’ll start from the beginning. A VPN (virtual private network) is a method of securely accessing a network, either a closed network (like you might have at the office) or the internet as a whole. Initially, organizations set up VPNs so remote workers can work with secure files. While this still happens, the last 15 years have seen VPNs increasingly marketed to individuals, with Proton VPN, ExpressVPN and others seeing massive user growth.

Broadly, a VPN consists of two parts: the server, which forwards requests to your chosen destination, and the client, a piece of software that lets you interact with the server. You can find a longer explanation here, but I’ll use the two sections below to tell you what you need to know right now.

One more note before that — there are multiple kinds of VPNs, including the remote-access VPNs and site-to-site VPNs commonly used by workplaces. However, for this article, I’ll be talking mainly about the commercial VPN services sold to individuals for general security needs. Instead of a specific network, these VPNs are designed to handle all of a user’s traffic to any point on the internet.

What happens when you use a VPN?

First, you use the client to connect to a server — either the fastest one available or a particular location you need. Once you’ve connected, every request you send to the internet goes through the VPN server first. This communication between your device and the web is encrypted so it can’t be traced back to you.

The VPN server decrypts your requests and sends them on. The destination then communicates with the VPN server, which relays the information back to you — after re-encrypting it so nobody follows it home.

Since the VPN does everything on your behalf, it’s your “mask” online. Your internet service provider (ISP) and third parties can see what’s being done, but — so long as you’re not otherwise logged in or identifying yourself — nobody knows that it’s you doing it. It’s like having a friend order pizza for you so the pizzeria doesn’t hear you calling for the third time this week (not that I speak from experience).

What’s the point of using a VPN?

Why add an extra step to the already complex process of getting online? The two biggest reasons are maintaining anonymity and changing your virtual location. I’ve already explained how a VPN keeps you anonymous. Among other things, this prevents your ISP from selling your browsing history to advertisers and protects activists who face government repercussions for what they do online.

Changing your virtual location is part of masking, but it can also be used to see the internet as it’s visible in other countries. Streaming services are frequently limited to certain places, and almost all of them change the available content based on their licenses in each nation. You can also use a VPN in a country with a nationwide firewall, like China, to see forbidden outside information sources.

How does a VPN work? The full technical explanation

Most online explanations stop after defining a VPN as an anonymous agent between you and the internet — but I wrote this article to go a little bit deeper. To understand what a VPN is doing on a technical level, we’ll need to cover how the internet works, how the VPN knows where to send encrypted information and just what “encryption” actually is.

How the internet transmits data

When you’re not using a VPN, internet traffic goes directly from your modem to your ISP, then on to your chosen destination. The key technologies here are IP, which stands for Internet Protocol, and TCP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol. They’re usually combined as TCP/IP.

You may have heard that every online device has an IP address that identifies it to every other device. TCP/IP governs not just those names but how data moves between them. Here’s how it works, step-by-step.

1. You click a link or enter a URL into your web browser.

2. Your computer sends a request to your modem, asking to see the page associated with the URL. Your modem forwards the request to your ISP.

3. Your ISP finds a domain name server (DNS) that tells it which IP address is connected to the URL you asked to see. It then sends the request to that IP address along the fastest available route, which will involve being relayed between several nodes.

4. That IP address is connected with a server that holds the content you’re looking for. Once it receives the request, it breaks the data down into small packets of about 1 to 1.5 kilobytes.

5. These packets separate to find their own fastest routes back to your ISP, your modem and finally your web browser, which reassembles them.

6. You see a web page, likely no more than a second after you asked for it.

The outgoing requests and inbound packets are key to understanding VPN function. A VPN intervenes during step 2 (when your modem contacts your ISP) and step 5 (when your ISP sends the packets back to you). In the next section, I’ll explain exactly what it does during those steps.

How VPN tunneling protects data

You might have heard a VPN’s activities described as “tunneling.” That term refers to a figurative tunnel being created between your device and the VPN. Data enters the tunnel when it’s encrypted by the VPN client and exits when it’s decrypted by the VPN server. Between those two points, encryption means nobody can see the true data. It’s as though it’s traveling through an opaque tunnel.

While the tunnel is a useful metaphor, it may be better to think of VPN encryption as an encapsulation. Each packet of data sent via VPN is “wrapped” in a second packet, which both encrypts the original packet and contains information for reaching the VPN server. However, none of these outer layers have the complete path — each just knows enough to reach the next relay. In this way, the origin point (that’s you) remains invisible.

The same thing happens when the internet returns content to show you. Your ISP sends the data to the VPN server, because, as far as it knows, that’s where the request came from. The VPN then encrypts each packet and sends them back to you for decryption and reassembly. It takes a little longer with the extra steps; that’s why VPNs always slightly slow down your browsing speed, though the best ones don’t do that by much (Surfshark is currently the fastest).

You learned in that last section that two protocols, IP and TCP (usually combined as TCP/IP), are responsible for letting online devices talk to each other, even if they’ve never connected before. In the same way, a VPN protocol is like a shared language that lets VPNs encrypt, move and decrypt information. See the next section to learn how a VPN protocol works in detail.

How VPN protocols encrypt data

VPN protocols are the technology behind VPNs; every other feature of your VPN is just a method of interacting with them. All protocols are designed to encrypt data packets and wrap them in a second layer that includes information on where to send them. The main differences are the shape of that second layer, the types of encryption used and how the client establishes its initial secure connection with the server.

It’s extremely common for VPNs to advertise protocols with “bank-grade” or “military-grade” encryption. This is talking about the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256), a symmetric encryption algorithm, which is used by financial institutions and the US government and military. AES-256 is indeed some of the strongest available encryption, but it’s only part of the story. As a symmetric algorithm, it’s not fully secure on its own, because the same keys are used to encrypt and decrypt it — and those keys can be stolen.

For that reason, most VPN protocols use AES-256 (or a similarly strong cipher like ChaCha20) to encrypt the data packets themselves, then combine it with a larger suite of multiple encryption algorithms. One of the most reliable and popular protocols, OpenVPN, uses the asymmetric TLS protocol to establish a secure relationship between client and server, then transmits packets encrypted with AES-256 across that channel, knowing the keys will be safe.

Explaining this could easily reach the length of a book, but the basic principle isn’t complicated. In asymmetric encryption, a sender encodes data with a unique key, then a recipient decodes it with a different paired key. The keys are provided by a trusted third party. In a maneuver called a TLS handshake, the server and client send each other encrypted data. If each can decode the other’s test data, they know they have a matched pair of keys, which proves that both are the same client and server that got the keys from the trusted authority.

Why not just use asymmetric encryption for the data itself, if it’s more secure? Mainly, protocols don’t do this because it’s a lot slower. Asymmetric encryption requires a lot of resource-heavy math that makes connections drag. That’s why OpenVPN and others use the asymmetric-to-symmetric two-step instead.

To summarize, a VPN protocol is a complex set of instructions and tools that control encryption and routing via VPN servers. Protocols still in use include OpenVPN, WireGuard, IKEv2, SSTP and L2TP. PPTP, one of the oldest protocols, is no longer considered secure. On top of these, VPNs often build their own proprietary protocols, such as ExpressVPN’s Lightway.

Putting it all together

Now that we’ve hit all the relevant information, let’s revisit that step-by-step from earlier, this time with a VPN in the mix. Here are the steps, starting with establishing the VPN connection and ending with anonymously viewing a website.

1. You open your VPN client, choose a server location and connect. The VPN client and server authenticate each other with a TLS handshake.

2. The client and server exchange the symmetric keys they’ll use to encrypt and decrypt packets for the duration of this session (i.e. until you disconnect). Your VPN client tells you that it’s established a secure tunnel.

3. You open your web browser and enter a URL. Your browser sends a request to view the content at that address.

4. The request goes to your VPN client, which encrypts it and adds an outer layer of information with directions to the VPN server.

5. The encrypted request reaches the VPN server, which decrypts it and forwards it to your ISP.

6. As normal, your ISP finds the IP address associated with the URL you entered and forwards your request along.

7. The destination server receives the request and sends all the necessary packets of information back to your ISP, which forwards it to the VPN server.

8. The VPN server encrypts each packet and adds a header directing it to the VPN client.

9. The client decrypts the packets and forwards them to your web browser.

10. You see the web page you opened.

Because of the encrypted tunnel, the request arrives at the VPN server without any information on where it came from. Thus, the VPN doesn’t actually encrypt your activity on the websites themselves — for the most part, the HTTPS protocol does that. Instead, a VPN gives you a false name to put in the register, with no information that could be traced back to your real identity.

How to use this information

Now that you know how a VPN works on a technical level, you’re better equipped to choose one for yourself. You can cut through marketing hype statements like:

• “Military-grade encryption!” (It’s the same algorithm everybody uses)

• “Stay completely anonymous online!” (Plaintext you post on social media is not encrypted)

• “Dodge ISP throttling!” (If your ISP is throttling you based on your IP address, this works — but if you’re being slowed down because of your moment-to-moment activity, your identity doesn’t matter)

A VPN is just one important part of a complete cybersecurity breakfast. While hiding your IP address, make sure to also use strong passwords, download updates immediately and remain alert for social engineering tactics.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/how-a-vpn-works-and-why-you-should-care-143000250.html?src=rss