Like many other companies during Super Bowl season, Sonos is discounting its home theater gear. Today, you can save $130 on the Beam (Gen 2) soundbar, bringing its price down to $369. You’ll also find deals on the flagship Arc Ultra Soundbar, Sonos subwoofers, and more.

The Sonos Beam is the company’s sub-$500 soundbar. Engadget’s pick for the best midrange model, the compact speaker has impressive sound for its size. Part of that is its Dolby Atmos support. Although the soundbar lacks upward-firing speakers, it uses software tricks to compensate. Audio timing and frequency adjustments make sound seem to come from the side or slightly above.

One of the biggest drawbacks is that the Beam only has one HDMI port. Regardless, that compromise may be easier to accept at Beam’s current $369 than at its usual $499.

Several more home theater speakers are included in Sonos’s sale. If you have a loftier budget for a soundbar, there’s the Arc Ultra. Typically $1,099, it’s now $899. The company’s pair of subwoofers is included as well. You can get the Sub Mini for $399 (down from $499) or the Sub 4 for $759 (from $899).

Although they aren’t explicitly sold as home theater products, the Era 100 ($179) and Era 300 ($379) are also included in the sale. The portable Move 2 isn’t discounted individually, but you will find it in a couple of bundles. You can check out the sale page for the complete list.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/sonos-home-theater-gear-is-up-to-20-percent-off-ahead-of-super-bowl-lx-174053619.html?src=rss

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Last August, ChatGPT developers OpenAI unceremoniously killed the fan favorite GPT-4o model, before giving in to complaints and bringing it back a week later. Now, the company’s taking a second swing at getting its users to move on. In a new post to its website, OpenAI announced that it’s retiring GPT-4o again.

The model’s set to disappear from ChatGPT’s model picker on Feb. 13, alongside other older models like GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-Mini. And OpenAI is clearly nervous about the decision.

“While the announcement applies to several older models,” OpenAI wrote, “GPT-4o deserves special context.”

According to the company, it has taken user outcry over the initial deprecation of 4o to heart while developing its newest models, GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.2, and has built these models with the idea of maintaining the features fans liked best about the old model. The company says that now “only 0.1% of users” opt for GPT-4o on a daily basis.

As such, the company wants to focus on “improving the models most people use today,” which apparently means removing older ones. “We know that losing access to GPT-4o will feel frustrating for some users, and we didn’t make this decision lightly,” the post reads.

What’s the big deal with GPT-4o?

So, what’s with OpenAI treating its users so gingerly, especially when GPT-4o is a few generations behind, and there are newer models that supposedly do everything it does, but better?

Well, when GPT-4o was first deprecated, people weren’t happy. Users called its successor, GPT-5, “an unmitigated disaster,” and accused OpenAI of pulling “the biggest bait-and-switch in AI history.“

Some criticized the model’s usefulness, saying it got answers wrong and broke code, but what maybe stuck out the most was people calling out its more concise tone.

GPT-4o has been called “sycophantic” by critics, something the company addressed and said it wanted to pull back on in future updates. But I guess one person’s “yes man” is another person’s “active listener.” When the company initially pulled GPT-4o, users complained that its replacement was cold and felt less like a “friend.” Even OpenAI acknowledged this, saying in today’s post that users “preferred GPT-4o’s conversational style and warmth.”

In short, in the words of 4o-supporters themselves, they were “grieving” the model.

Is GPT-5.2 a good replacement for 4o?

That said, with so many users now seeming to have moved on from 4o, OpenAI’s decision does seem understandable on the surface. Personally, one of the things that drives me away from AI is how much reassuring filler text seems to fluff up most answers (“you’re absolutely right” and such), seemingly just to make me feel good about myself. More concise, to-the-point responses would be a little less off-putting for me.

To try to split the difference, OpenAI reworked its Personalization feature in GPT-5.1, so users can simply choose how the chatbot will treat them. There are options for more professional responses, more nerdy ones, more efficient ones, and for those who want that active listener style, more friendly ones.

Going by OpenAI’s numbers, that seems to have been enough for most people, but there are still some calling foul at the company’s new announcement.

GPT-4o loyalists are still out there

In a Reddit thread responding to OpenAI’s new posts, users doubted that the 0.1% number for 4o was accurate, saying that prompts have been “rerouting to 5.2 no matter what” and that “something somewhere in their calculations doesn’t add up.” Others pointed out that free users can’t use GPT-4o and that it’s not enabled by default, which will naturally juice the numbers against it.

As such, calls to cancel ChatGPT subscriptions are once again circulating amongst 4o’s more dedicated fans. In a popular thread on the OpenAI subreddit, one user called 4o “OpenAI’s most advanced and beloved model,” and praised its “personality, warmth, and consistency,” saying that its fans have built long-term project and “emotional support routines” around it, and that suddenly losing it without even the option for a legacy mode “feels abrupt and deeply disappointing.”

“This isn’t about resisting innovation,” the post writes. “It’s about respecting bonds users have formed with specific models.”

Whether the fan outcry will work again remains to be seen. However, as ChatGPT chief Nick Turley has previously looked at those kinds of bonds with skepticism, and because keeping old models in operating condition probably takes developer resources away from making new ones, I wouldn’t count on it.

A new study [PDF] examining the United States between 1850 and 1920 found that expanded market access — driven largely by railroad expansion — made Americans more trusting of strangers and more outward-looking, but weakened family-based care for the vulnerable.

Researchers Max Posch of the University of Exeter and Itzchak Tzachi Raz of Hebrew University compared places and people gaining different levels of commercial connectivity. In better-connected regions, Americans became more likely to marry outside their local communities, and parents more likely to pick nationally common names for children. Trust toward others rose, as measured through language in local newspapers.

The researchers used multiple tests to rule out the possibility that these shifts simply reflected places getting richer. The cultural changes were concentrated among migrants in trade-exposed industries; workers in construction and entertainment showed no effect. But market access also meant orphans, the disabled, and the elderly became less likely to be cared for by relatives at home.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

Best cheap VPNs for 2026

Other VPNs we tested with good deals

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

ExpressVPN

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

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

NordVPN

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

What to look for in a good cheap VPN

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

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

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

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

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

Apple’s call-screening feature, introduced in iOS 26 last year, was designed to combat the more than 2 billion robocalls placed to Americans every month, but as WSJ is reporting, it is now creating friction for the rich and powerful who find themselves subjected to automated interrogation when dialing from unrecognized numbers.

The feature uses an automated voice to ask unknown callers for their names and reasons for calling, transcribes the responses, and lets recipients decide whether to answer — essentially giving everyone a pocket-sized executive assistant.

Venture capitalist Bradley Tusk said his first reaction when encountering call screening is irritation, though he understands the necessity given the spam problem. Ben Schaechter, who runs cloud-cost management company Vantage, said the feature “dramatically changed my life” after his personal number ended up in founding paperwork and attracted endless sales calls.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fallout’s second season is coming to a close, and it’s been well worth the wait. But if a reluctance to add yet another subscription to your streaming rotation means you haven’t watched Amazon’s surprisingly excellent adaptation yet, you might be interested to know that the company is currently releasing season one for free on the Prime Video YouTube channel.

Whether driven by Amazon wanting even more people to watch what has become one of its biggest TV success stories, or a move that speaks to how few people are actually signed up for Prime Video, it’s good news for anyone who hasn’t seen the show yet. Fallout’s first season did a great job of taking everything that’s great about the long-running post-apocalyptic RPG series and weaving it into a wildly entertaining live-action show, elevated by excellent performances from Ella Purnell as a hopelessly naive but endearingly optimistic vault-dweller, and Walton Goggins as the Ghoul.

Amazon is currently adding a new episode each day ahead of next week’s season two finale, presumably hoping a whole new set of fans hop straight into that once they’re done. But here’s the catch: you only have until February 11 to watch the whole lot. After that, the show will be for Prime Video subscribers only once again.

And that isn’t the the only Fallout freebie up for grabs right now. Between now and February 5, Bethesda’s MMORPG, Fallout 76, is free-to-play on Xbox and PC, while PlayStation players have until February 4. Fallout 76 first launched in 2018, and as a fully multiplayer-focused game it represented a new direction for the series. It was, to put it bluntly, a bit of a mess for quite a while, but Bethesda has never abandoned the title or its player-base, and if you have Fallout on the brain, this is the perfect opportunity to see how it’s looking in 2026.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/the-first-season-of-amazons-fallout-show-is-now-free-on-youtube-162920615.html?src=rss

The UK government paid consulting firm PwC $5.65 million to build its new AI Skills Hub, a site meant to help 10 million workers gain AI skills by 2030 that functions largely as a bookmarking service, directing users to external training courses that already existed before the contract was awarded.

The hub links to platforms like Salesforce’s free Trailhead learning system rather than offering original educational content. PwC has acknowledged the site does not fully meet accessibility standards. The platform also contains factual errors in its course on AI and intellectual property, which references “fair use” — a legal doctrine specific to the U.S. — rather than the UK’s “fair dealing” framework.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you’re the kind of person who only uses Safari to download Chrome, you need to think again. For a Mac user, Safari might be the best browser there is (yes, even better than Chrome). It’s fast, secure, doesn’t buckle under most loads, sips RAM instead of munching through it, and it’ll help your battery last longer as well. And yes, there are even extensions and ad blockers that work natively in Safari.

It’s time to take another look at Safari, and use all its hidden features and smarts to make your browsing better.

Blast away ads and other distracting items

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

When this feature came out, it became a bit of a meme on TikTok. In case you haven’t heard, Safari has a new Hide Distracting Items feature that can zap pretty much anything on a webpage out of existence. You’ll find in the page options menu (the – icon to the left of the address bar). After activating it, try clicking on a popup menu, autoplaying video, newsletter box or pretty much anything else. It’ll be banished from your screen, and there will even be a little animation showing it disappearing like it’s just been snapped by Thanos. And Safari will remember your snap, so it won’t show up the next time you visit that site on your Mac, or even your iPhone or iPad. And if you’re feeling more like Iron Man, yes, you can cancel your snaps.

Give Safari a decent ad blocker

Credit: Justin Pot

For ad blocking, Firefox and Chrome have the uBlock Origin extension. Then there are browsers like Brave and Opera, which come with ad-blocking built-in. Safari has always suffered in this regard. There was never really a true alternative to uBlock available for Safari. There is a version of uBlock Origin for Safari, but it doesn’t use Safari’s own framework for ad-blocking, so it suffers when it comes to performance and blocking capabilities.

But now it seems like there’s finally a decent alternative, called wBlock. I’ve been using it ever since my colleague, Justin Pot, wrote about it, and I am happy to say that it finally makes Safari’s ad-blocking experience on par with some of the bigger browsers. And the best part? wBlock is free and open-source.

Embrace tab groups and the sidebar

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Before development was suspended, I loved the Arc browser. But ever since the company shut it down, I have become jaded, and I haven’t really started using alternatives like the Zen Browser. The biggest features I miss from Arc are the workspaces and vertical tabs. But now, Safari has those too. In Safari, you can now create Tab Groups, which can contain as many tabs as you want. I use these as my workspaces. One group for reading long articles, another for travel research, and so on.

And while I’m in a tab group, I also like to do it with the sidebar open (click the Sidebar button next to the Back and Forward buttons), which gives me a vertical-tabs experience similar to Arc’s. It isn’t exactly like Arc, because the horizontal tab bar up top doesn’t disappear. But having a vertical list of tabs still helps. So does the fact that Tab Groups sync with my iPhone and iPad, so I can pick up my research there as well.

To create a new tab group, click the New Tab Group button at the top of the sidebar. Or you can select multiple tabs, right-click, and choose the Move to Tab Group > New Tab Group option. On the iPhone, open the tab switcher, tap the Menu button from the top, and choose New Empty Tab Group to get started.

Master Safari’s new design for iPhone

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Safari was one of the few apps that saw a major design update in iOS 26, with a redesigned bottom bar. Lifehacker has a detailed guide on all the new hidden gestures and features in Safari’s iOS 26 redesign, but I’ll highlight some of my favorites here.

• Swipe to switch tabs: To quickly switch between tabs, just swipe left or right on the address bar.

• Press and hold the address bar: A lot is hidden here. You can copy a link, paste from your clipboard, switch to another tab group, close tabs, or close all tabs.

• Swipe up on the address bar: Swipe up on the address bar to reveal all open tabs. From here, you can swipe left or right to switch between tab groups. From the top menu, you can copy links for all open tabs with ease.

• Pin tabs: Tap and hold a website from the tabs screen, and choose the Pin Tab option to pin the website to the top of your browser.

Bring back the iPhone’s old tab bar

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

If you don’t like the iPhone’s new compact tab bar or its gestures, you can still go back to the way things used to be. Go to Settings > Apps > Safari > Tabs. Switch to the Bottom option to bring back the expanded bottom toolbar, or to go further back in time, go with the Top option.

Lead separate browsing lives using Profiles

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

It’s not as obvious as in Chrome, but Safari also has profiles that sync between iPhone, iPad, and Mac. You can use Profiles to keep your work and personal lives separate. This can also be useful if you and your spouse use the same Mac.

Profiles will fully separate your browsing from other users, including logins, cookies, browsing history, tab groups, favorites, and even extensions.

To set one up for Safari on Mac, go to Settings > Profiles. On the iPhone, go to Settings > Apps > Safari > Profiles and tap New Profile. Give it a name, and make sure to pick an icon and color. This will tint the background of the start page, so it’ll find it easier to know which profile you’re in.

Turn your favorite sites into apps

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

On Mac, you can use Safari to turn any frequently used website into an app of its own. It will show up in the Dock and the app-switcher. It’s still the same website, but it will have its own shortcut on your Mac’s interface, making it easier to use. If you use your Mac for retail, or any kind of specialized work that happens via a website, this can be really handy.

To do this, visit a website, click the Share button, and click Add to Dock. Your logins will sync automatically, and so will your extensions. The toolbar will be colored based on the website colors as well.

You can also do this on iPhone, by navigating to a site, tapping the Share button, tapping More, and tapping Add to Home Screen. The website’s logo will show up as an “app” on your home screen, and it’ll act as a shortcut to the site.

Automatically close open tabs

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

I love opening tabs, but I hate closing them. That means it’s easy for me to hit the 500 tab limit in Safari. So I enabled the option that automatically closes tabs that are older than 30 days. You can do this by going to Settings > Apps > Safari > Close Tabs. You can choose between one day, one week, or one month.

Listen to a page out loud

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

You might be familiar with Safari’s Reader Mode, which is perhaps the best in the business. But there’s another feature hidden in the Page Settings option. Tap the Listen to Page button, and Safari will instantly start reading the site you’re on out loud. Before doing this, though, I would recommend you switch to Reader Mode first, so the text-to-speech doesn’t get caught on ads or other distractions.

Customize or change the Safari start page

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Every time you open Safari, or a new tab, you see the browser’s default start page. Let’s take some time to customize just how it looks and works. First, open the start page, then click the Edit button in the bottom-right corner to enable or disable which sections you want to see. I suggest adding sections for your Favorites, Reading List, iCloud Tabs, and Recently Closed Tabs. You can also change the background to any color that you like.

If you don’t like an overloaded start page, you can also try out the Bonjourr Safari extension. It’s a start-page replacement that I’ve used for months now. It automatically cycles between serene backgrounds while showing the time and weather. You can add quick shortcuts for your frequently visited sites, too. It’s also fully customizable, and looks great on iPhone as well as Mac.

I’ve been thinking about used electric vehicles lately. It’s not news that EVs depreciate faster than gasoline-powered cars. All the incentives like tax credits and OEM rebates that entice the first owner to sign the paperwork are factored in by whoever wants to be the second owner. There are widespread—if mostly ill-founded—worries about battery longevity and having to shell out for expensive replacement packs. Technology keeps improving, which means older models will date faster. Plus, there are the usual concerns about EVs, like charging infrastructure and winter performance.

So depreciate they do, and that’s good news for the three-quarters of US car buyers who buy used vehicles. It means that some very expensive EVs can now be had for quite little, but we’ll explore that more at a later date. Today, I want to focus on what you can get for peanuts. What if you wanted to only spend $5,000—or less—on an EV?

As it turns out, there are options even at this end of the market. Just don’t expect that much in the way of range: We’re still a while away from a $5,000 EV also being an EV a sane person would want to road trip. At the same time, most of us don’t drive more than 40 miles a day, and EVs are great at sitting in traffic because there’s no engine to idle. If you’re not commuting long distances and don’t live an hour from the nearest town, a cheap EV could make sense as a runabout. Especially as they’re cheaper to run than a gas-powered car.

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