A robot vacuum shouting slurs at a family, a TV camera streaming a stranger's living room to the internet — those stories get headlines because they're bizarre. Far less visible is what happens on ordinary phones, every day, when a parent installs an app to keep a child safe and ends up with a live...

A woman waiting for a delivery gets a text saying her package is stuck at customs and needs a small fee to release it. She's expecting a parcel, she's on her phone anyway, and the message looks exactly like the ones her courier normally sends. She taps the link, enters her card details on a page tha...

A lawyer in Minnesota was cleaning his kitchen when his robot vacuum started shouting racial slurs at him. In Los Angeles, another unit chased a family dog across the living room while broadcasting abuse through its speaker. In Australia, a television reporter sat in a park across the street from a...

Somewhere in almost every home right now, someone is staring at a speed test result that doesn't match a number printed on a router box or promised in an ISP contract, and concluding that they've been cheated. Sometimes they have been. Far more often, the real explanation is that "internet speed" is...

You've probably seen the prompt by now. You go to log into Gmail, Amazon, or PayPal, and instead of asking for a password, the site asks if you'd like to use your face, your fingerprint, or your phone's PIN instead. That's a passkey, and depending on who you ask, it's either the biggest security upg...

There's a persistent fear about contactless payments that goes something like this: someone brushes past you in a crowded subway car with a hidden card reader in their bag, and seconds later, your card has been silently charged. It makes for a good cautionary tale. It's also almost never how contact...

For most of the last decade, picking a VPN protocol meant wading through a handful of familiar acronyms — PPTP, L2TP, SSTP, IKEv2, OpenVPN — each with its own trade-offs and its own die-hard defenders. That fight has quietly settled for everyday use. But there's a second, much fiercer battle happeni...

People ask this question expecting a yes-or-no answer, and that's usually where the confusion starts. Disappearing online isn't one thing. It's at least four separate things wearing the same trench coat: hiding your identity, hiding your location, hiding your activity, and hiding your existence in d...

Roughly half the world's internet users live somewhere a VPN is restricted in one way or another. That's not a fringe statistic — it's basically half the planet. And yet the word "ban" gets thrown around so loosely that it's genuinely hard to tell which countries have actually outlawed VPNs, which o...