Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. Deals

Why you need a VPN — and which one to get

Add as a preferred source on Google

A virtual private network, or VPN, is a necessity these days to protect your online privacy. A VPN lets you take advantage of high-performance servers that are set up around the world that serve as middlemen while you browse the internet. Whenever you access a website, the data that you send will not have your own address but rather that of the VPN’s, making your location difficult to track, shielding you from surveillance and preventing hackers from intercepting your information.

When logging on to a VPN, you choose one of the servers that the service provides. If you choose a server that’s located in another country, your computer or mobile device will appear like it’s located in that place. This brings up another benefit of VPNs: the ability to get around geoblocking. This will allow people to access certain websites that are banned by their government, but it also has simpler uses such as accessing streaming content that’s not available in your region.

Using a VPN is easy — just sign up for the service and log on using your computer or mobile device. There are free VPNs available, but these usually come with limited features and only basic protection. You’re going to want to subscribe to a paid VPN service if you want to enjoy all of the advantages of the technology.

Not all VPN deals are built the same though, as some services provide better protection with more seamless features and wider compatibility. We highly recommend signing up for Surfshark, which we’ve tagged in our list of the best VPNs as the top choice for unlimited devices.

Sign Up Now

Why you should sign up for Surfshark

With Surfshark as your VPN, you’ll get an easy-to-navigate interface and an intuitive setup process, alongside access to multiple encryption protocols and the option of a double VPN hop that routes your connection through two remote servers instead of just one for additional protection. Surfshark supports most platforms, including Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android, and you can have any number of your devices logged in to the VPN at all times.

The Surfshark Starter plan, which gets you access to the VPN and an alternative ID, is just $2.19 per month for 24 months for an 86% discount, while the Surfshark One plan, which adds antivirus, leak alerts, and ad-free search results, is only $2.69 per month for 24 months for an 85% discount. The Surfshark One+ plan, meanwhile, will also help you remove your personal information from data brokers through the Incogni service for $4.29 per month for 24 months for a 79% discount.

Sign Up Now

Aaron Mamiit
Aaron received an NES and a copy of Super Mario Bros. for Christmas when he was four years old, and he has been fascinated…
MIT researchers found a new Spectre attack that can slip past Intel and AMD defenses
AMD Ryzen CPU inside a socket installed on a motherboard

Spectre has been haunting CPU security since 2018, and MIT researchers have now found another way to make it misbehave. The new TONTOU attack can bypass some of the defenses Intel and AMD have added over the years by exploiting a tiny gap in how those protections work. The research comes from Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Their findings show that even after a processor wipes or isolates information used by its branch predictor, there can be a brief window before that information is actually used. TONTOU, short for Time-of-Neutralization to Time-of-Use, attacks precisely that gap.

The tiny gap that TONTOU exploits

Read more
Microsoft accidentally gave Windows 11 users another OneDrive app, and you can’t easily remove it
Microsoft says the wider-than-intended rollout was an accident, but removing the app currently means removing OneDrive too.
Microsoft OneDrive Featured Graphic

Windows 11 users have been getting a new OneDrive app whether they asked for it or not. The problem? Microsoft says it wasn't supposed to happen. Microsoft has confirmed that its OneDrive Photos app was rolled out to Windows 11 PCs more broadly than intended, including enterprise machines where the app isn't even designed to work. The company says it is now working on a fix, but there's an awkward catch: users currently can't uninstall OneDrive Photos without removing the main OneDrive app too.

So, what exactly got installed?

Read more
Apple Reminders sucked for project management until I learned this feature
Your checklist deserves better. Here's how to turn Reminders into a proper Kanban board.
Apple reminders on Mac

For the longest time, I used Apple Reminders only for capturing quick tasks. Thanks to its Siri integration, Reminders let me add tasks quickly so nothing would fall through the cracks. However, when it came to managing big projects, I always moved to a more powerful task manager like OmniFocus or Things 3. 

That changed the day I stumbled onto the Column view. Apple added this feature with the iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma updates, and somehow I completely missed it. But once I discovered and got the hang of it, Reminders finally started to feel like a real project management tool instead of a glorified sticky note.

Read more