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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and Chris discuss extending the range of electric vehicles with gasoline, EV’s range records, Microsoft’s new limits for Gamers, and more.
“News Pick of the Week” with Ralph Bond
Today’s wireless small-scale medical monitoring sensors are powered primarily by batteries. This week our science and technology reporter Ralph Bond tells us there’s a new wireless sensor system powered only by a patient’s body heat and the surrounding air temperature.
Read more here.
Madeline in Atlanta, Georgia asked: “First of all, I just want to say I love your show. You guys make me laugh and I learn things, so I appreciate that. I just had a question about different VPNs. I understand that with every computer, you should have anti-virus software. What is the best on that? That’s one question. And the second question is what’s the best VPN? Right now I have Norton, and sometimes I think it causes me trouble. I’ve heard different people say because it can cause the computer not to work as well as it should and block me from sites where I don’t want it to block me from. But also I was considering Express VPN. What’s the difference between like that and say Norton? Because I think Norton doesn’t block or doesn’t give anti trackers unless I buy that service, although they have a VPN. But express VPN from what I understand, provides the anti tracker included in the VPN. If you could explain the difference to me, I’d appreciate it. Thank you so much.”
Madeline, we have less than great news here. Most consumer VPN companies are fronts for a few underlying corporate giants that bought them all years ago.
For example, if you use IPVanish, StrongVPN, Encrypt.me, SaferVPN, OverPlay VPN, VPNhub, Namecheaps VPN, Tweaknews VPN, Easynews VPN, or Newshostings VPN, youre using the same VPN operated by a company named J2.
Thats the case for the overwhelming majority of providers and there are others that are two person operations running leased servers off of places like Panama to minimize the chance of logging.
The main difference behind something like Nortons VPN and something like ExpressVPN is that Nortons main business its still outside of VPNs and theyre going through the motions of providing a VPN service without really trying too hard.
People who use their service often report issues with streaming services, their speeds are not great, and more worryingly it leaks DNS data and doesnt work properly with IPv6.
Unfortunately, ExpressVPN was bought by Kape Technologies who has a less than stellar track record when it comes to privacy, so avoiding ExpressVPN for now may not be the worst thing in the world.
NordVPN is still independent and reasonably well reviewed and blocks trackers, so that may be an option for you. The same goes for ProtonVPN.
Just remember that all of these companies are constantly bought by corporate entities that want the user counts and do not care about your privacy, so check often and make sure that youre still paying who you think youre paying for the service that you think youre paying for.
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