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Affiliate Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. These two VPNs run ads directly against each other all year. They look like bitter rivals — and this time the rivalry is real, because they answer to different companies. ExpressVPN has been owned by Kape Technologies since a roughly $936 million deal closed in September 2021. Surfshark merged into Nord Security, the parent of NordVPN, in early 2022, and the two brands keep running independently. Different parents, a $4-a-month price gap, and completely different product philosophies. And that gap is exactly why this comparison exists — so you know which one your money is really going to. ...

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. So you have a home server running Plex, a Transmission container, a Home Assistant instance, and a couple of web apps you’ve containerized for fun. But all of them share your host’s IP — so your ISP sees every connection each container makes. Sure, you could install a VPN on the host. But that routes everything including local services that shouldn’t go through a tunnel. Or you could configure iptables rules and kill switches by hand. But that’s an afternoon of debugging you’d rather not repeat, trust us. In practice, a cleaner option exists, and it fits inside a single 43MB Docker container. ...

CISA’s Malcolm (2,462★) combines Zeek, Suricata, Arkime, OpenSearch in one containerized stack. We tested deployment and PCAP ingestion on real hardware.

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. NordVPN — speed leader (845 Mbps NordLynx, 3x PwC audits) Surfshark — unlimited devices from $2.49/mo Your ISP logs every site you visit. Public Wi-Fi hands your credentials to anyone on the same network with a packet sniffer. And geo-blocks cut off half the streaming catalog depending on where you plug in. Three problems, three market-leading VPN solutions — but which one actually solves yours? ...

Your cloud servers, home lab, and laptop need to talk to each other without exposing ports to the open internet. But standard VPNs don’t scale to many endpoints. That’s where Nebula comes in. Nebula is an open-source overlay networking tool from Slack Technologies (17,553 GitHub stars). Instead of routing everything through a central gateway like traditional VPNs do, Nebula creates a peer-to-peer mesh. Every node talks directly to every other node — if the network allows it. On top of that, it uses the Noise Protocol Framework for encryption, a built-in certificate authority for authentication, and lighthouse nodes for peer discovery. ...

Picture this: a household with four people, two laptops, three phones, two tablets, a smart TV, and a gaming console — 12 devices that should probably be on a VPN. With NordVPN, that’s two subscriptions. With ExpressVPN, two subscriptions. With ProtonVPN Plus, two subscriptions. With Surfshark, it’s one. (affiliate link) But that single difference — unlimited simultaneous connections at $2.49/month on the long-term plan — is Surfshark’s headline advantage. But a VPN isn’t worth any price if speed, privacy, or streaming reliability fall short. So we put it through a 10-server speed benchmark, a 5-platform streaming test, and a full privacy stack check to see whether the unlimited-device pitch holds up in practice. ...

ExpressVPN In-Depth Review 2026 Streaming unblocked on the first try across five platforms with zero buffering delays. So that’s ExpressVPN’s reputation — and our 10-server benchmark across four continents tested whether the performance matches the promise. Three years after Kape Technologies bought ExpressVPN for $936 million, the product still passes annual privacy audits. But should you trust it? So we ran our own tests — speed, leaks, obfuscation, multi-platform consistency — with the full picture below. ...

Your ISP is selling your browsing data. Public Wi-Fi at the airport is one misconfigured router away from handing your credentials to a stranger. And geo-restricted content blocks half the internet depending on where you connect. So these are the three problems a VPN is supposed to solve — and NordVPN has spent the better part of a decade building a feature set that addresses all of them. TL;DR — Our Verdict: Still, NordVPN (affiliate link) remains one of the most complete consumer VPNs in 2026. NordLynx delivered top-tier speeds across 10 global test nodes, streaming compatibility hit 9 out of 10 platforms tested, and three consecutive PwC audits give its no-logs claim stronger evidence than most competitors offer. But the renewal price jump ($3.39/month → $14.49/month), closed-source client, and Kape Technologies ownership are genuine trade-offs. Recommended for streaming, general privacy, and users who want a full suite of security features. ...

What if you could encrypt a file and the ciphertext looked like a cat had a keyboard tantrum — but with actual secp256k1 elliptic curve math underneath? That’s exactly what PurrCrypt does. After testing it on two operating systems, we found it surprisingly usable for a project that takes itself this unseriously. What Is PurrCrypt? PurrCrypt (622 stars on GitHub, MIT license) is a Rust CLI tool that encrypts files using elliptic curve cryptography — the same secp256k1 curve behind Bitcoin. It then encodes the output as sequences of cat or dog vocalizations. So it’s steganography meets public-key encryption: the ciphertext looks like pet-sound spam to anyone who intercepts it. But only the intended recipient can decrypt it back to the original file. This approach is a different angle on privacy — similar to how multi-hop VPN tunnels add layers of protection to network traffic, PurrCrypt adds them to stored data. ...

In June 2026, a patent filed by Meta Platforms Inc. surfaced on the USPTO database — and r/privacy lit up with 486 upvotes within hours. The patent describes a system that analyzes voice characteristics captured through device microphones to infer a speaker’s emotional state. The accompanying diagrams show microphones on smartphones, smart speakers, and vehicle infotainment systems feeding voice data into a machine learning pipeline that classifies emotions across axes of valence, arousal, and dominance. ...