Listening to your favorite songs uninterrupted is about to get a little pricier: Spotify has announced it's raising the price of all its Premium plans. In the United States, this means a Premium Single subscription is going from $10 a month to $11 a month — its first increase since Spotify launched over a decade ago. Its Premium Family and Student plans are also going up by a dollar, now costing $17 and $6 per month, respectively. Premium Duo has the largest bump, going up two dollars per month from $13 to $15.

The move follows similar price hikes by competitors, with Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music all raising their ad-free individual plans to $11 in the past year. Last October, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek seemed to revel in other companies' increased costs, "When our competitors are raising their prices, that is really good for us." At the time, Ek said he would like to charge more for subscriptions, especially in the US, and felt confident Spotify would be able to in 2023. 

People keep coming to Spotify, with the music streamer reporting five million more users during 2023's first quarter worldwide, and an extra $12 a year might not impact that much. Updated prices are rolling out in countries across the world, from the United Kingdom to Thailand. Spotify says it will contact users via email to share how much their bill will go up and when it will happen. 

In a series of tweets last Saturday, Musk said the company’s famous bird logo and name would soon disappear. The company will change from Twitter to “X.” According to Platformer, Musk emailed staff later over the weekend saying the company would become X and his note “was the last email he’ll ever send from a Twitter email address.” And a lot of those changes have now happened.

Twitter’s own account is now all “X” branding, and it’s rolled out quickly elsewhere. Twitter employees are getting an “X” tag to their Twitter handles, next to their blue check, while the “X” logo has already been projected on a building, like a bat signal for self-aggrandizing tech executives and their minions. (I’m still not sure what this tweet (X?) even means.)

X.com was once an online bank co-founded by Musk in 1999. It eventually became PayPal and was bought by eBay. Of course, we already have SpaceX, his recently announced AI venture is called xAI and Twitter’s holding company was rammed to X Corp in April. Musk has also talked about how X would help Twitter become an “everything app.”

Terms that still need to be rebranded: subtweets, retweets, fail whales.

– Mat Smith

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The biggest stories you might have missed

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Engadget Podcast: How AI created a 'South Park' episode around us

Plus, we chat with the director and writers of Netflix's ‘They Cloned Tyrone.’

AI can now place us inside South Park episodes – should we be worried? This week, Devindra and Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham chat with Edward Saatchi, the CEO of The Simulation, about his company’s new AI technology that can generate TV episodes, movies and more. We preview a test South Park episode featuring Devindra and discuss if this technology is actually a good thing for creatives. Also, Editor at Large James Trew joins to discuss his piece on AI-powered immortality.

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Redditors troll AI content farm into covering a fake 'WoW' feature

The hugely anticipated Glorbo feature is not a feature.

Blizzard

Some redditors were very excited about a new World of Warcraft feature called Glorbo. Just one problem: Glorbo isn't real. Their faux enthusiasm for Glorbo caught the attention of a blog named The Portal, which publishes "gaming content powered by Z League" – often tenuously rewritten subreddit scraping, seemingly done by AI. (We hope it’s not a human.)

Redditor u/kaefer_kriegerin noticed The Portal was turning discussions from some gaming subreddits into blog posts. They decided to try to trick the content farm into covering a fake WoW feature. The ruse was a success. The Portal's now-deleted blog post even quoted u/kaefer_kriegerin as stating, "Honestly, this new feature makes me so happy! I just really want some major bot-operated news websites to publish an article about this."

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Our favorite VPN is Express VPN

It’s the best one for gaming and streaming.

The best VPNs stay out of your way, and you'll barely even notice they’re running. But ExpressVPN internet speeds outperformed even our baseline internet speed measures. The service is likely circumventing traffic shaping by the internet service provider or a similar anomaly because every other VPN will hurt internet speed in some way. It was also easy to access geo-blocked content using ExpressVPN, with little-to-no buffering – which is the cheeky reason a lot of us invest in a VPN.

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Unlike when Dogecoin's Shiba Inu briefly replaced it, it seems Twitter's longstanding bird logo is genuinely having its last curtain call. Elon Musk and Twitter (or should we say X?) CEO Linda Yaccarino announced that the company was rebranding as "X" and projected the new emblem onto the company's San Francisco headquarters. So far, the simple white logo with a black background has replaced the bird in the top left spot of the website, and the pair have it next to their respective names and blue checks. Twitter's official account has also been renamed X, with the new logo and a stark black background. As of publication, the blue bird still exists in the browser icon, but that will likely change soon.

Musk has long had an affinity for the letter X, naming his 1999 banking startup x.com, aerospace company SpaceX and recent AI venture xAI. Speaking of x.com, type that into your search bar, and it will automatically reroute you to Twitter's homepage — Musk bought x.com back from PayPal in 2017.

Musk and co have made hefty claims about Twitter's future since he first took ownership, and its rebrand is no exception. "X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities," Yaccarino said in a Twitter thread repeating much of what Musk has said in the past. "Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we're just beginning to imagine." We'll have to wait and see if the rebrand does anything to bring back all the advertising dollars the company has lost or help it compete against Meta's Threads.

Star Trek musical parodies have been a thing since the Shatner days, but no official Star Trek musical has ever been released officially. That's about to change, though, as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 will feature the first ever Star Trek musical episode, Paramount announced. Called Subspace Rhapsody, it will be the ninth episode of the season and debut on Paramount Plus on August 3rd at 7PM ET.  

The news dropped at San Diego Comic-Con during the Star Trek Universe panel, along with a video (below, US only). It features 10 new songs composed by Kay Hanley and Tom Polce of the rock band Letters to Cleo.

Strange New Worlds has been a success with both critics (including Engadget's Daniel Cooper) and audiences since its debut, thanks in large part to the cast led by Anson Mount (Captain Pike), Rebecca Romjin (Number 1) and Ethan Peck (Spock). It also brought a lighter touch to the Star Trek universe following darker shows like Picard. As we detailed yesterday, the show dropped its Lower Decks crossover episode earlier than expected, and it's now available to stream. 

Musical TV episodes are nothing new, with some of the more noteworthy ones coming out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scrubs and Xena, Warrior Princess (yep). Sometimes these are, well, unmotivated, with everyone suddenly breaking into song (Scrubs), or the musical is built as a bottle episode outside the reality of the main show (Xena). 

Subspace Rhapsody seems to be set in motion by plot events, though, with some kind of (insert your favorite Trek MacGuffin here) event bringing out the characters' inner theater kids. As shown in the trailer and retro-style poster, it's staged and performed as a full-blown musical, and looks like some silly fun. 

Elon Musk’s rebrand of Twitter seems to be underway. In a series of late-night tweets Saturday, Musk shared that the company’s famous bird logo and name would soon be no more. The company, it seems, will simply be known as “X.”

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” he tweeted. He later said in a Twitter space that the Twitter logo would be changed Sunday. “It should have been done a long time ago, sorry it took so long,” he said.

Later that night, he reportedly emailed employees about the change. According to Platformer’sZoe Schiffer, Musk emailed staff saying the company would become X and that his note “was the last email he’ll ever send from a Twitter email address.”

Twitter didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s long been known that Musk favors the “X” branding. The banking startup he co-founded in 1999 was called x.com, and his recently-announced Ai venture is called xAI. And Twitter’s holding company was rammed to X Corp in April. Musk has also talked about how X would help Twitter become an “everything app.” Though Musk has offered few specifics on this vision, many believe he’s referencing apps like WeChat, the most popular app in China that people use for a host of everyday activities, like payments and shopping, in addition to social networking.

Still, officially abandoning the Twitter brand could be a risky move for Musk. The company is already facing an advertiser exodus that’s resulted in a loss of more than half the company’s ad revenue. A rebrand could further alienate advertisers. At the same time, Musk may be betting that a new name and identity could help the company shed its ties to its former leadership and the decisions made under them, both of which he has been deeply critical of.

Despite decades of focusing our national infrastructure on personal vehicles (often at the direct exclusion and expense of other modes of transport), modern folks gets around on far more than planes, trains and automobiles these days. With our city streets and suburban neighborhoods increasingly populated by an ever-widening variety of vehicle — from e-scooters to city bikes, to autonomous EV taxis and internal combustion SUVs. The task of accommodating these competing priorities ensuring that everybody in town, regardless of physical or financial ability, can get where they're going is growing ever more challenging. 

Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Divided Communities, by civil engineer Veronica O Davis, highlights the many failings (both procedural and structural) of America's transportation infrastructure and calls on city planners to reexamine how their public works projects actually affect the people they are intended to serve. Davis deftly agues in favor of a systemic revolution to the transportation planning field demanding better and more functional training for civil engineers, more diverse voices in transportation planning projects, and undoing at least some of the community-dividing harms that America's past love affair with freeways has wrought. In the excerpt below, Davis examines the relative successes of Washington DC's Vision Zero road safety program.  

Island Press

From Inclusive Transportation by Veronica O. Davis. Copyright © 2023 Veronica O. Davis.

Reevaluating Transportation Policies

Policies lay the foundation for many decisions. For example, I worked with a city that had a policy that the curb-to-curb space could not be expanded unless there were extenuating circumstances, and even then the answer was no. That meant the roadway could not be expanded, but we could do a “road diet,” or narrowing of the roadway. As an example, if a road was sixty feet wide from curb to curb, all we had was sixty feet to work with as we developed alternatives to move the growing number of people moving into the corridor. The city’s policy decision was “Work with what you have, and if we are going to spend money to reconstruct the road, it will not be to widen it.”

Vision Zero could be a path forward as an overall framework for changing policy priorities, but it needs to be more than a plan, and it needs to be crafted with the people. Vision Zero is a concept from Sweden that recognizes we are human and we will make mistakes, but our mistakes should not lead to serious injuries or fatalities. One thing that gets muddled as people in the United States attempt to adopt Vision Zero is conflation of the total number of crashes with the total number of crashes that lead to deaths and serious injuries. Vision Zero does not demand perfect records, and it recognizes that crashes will occur because we are human. Instead, it argues that the focus should be on deaths and serious injuries. The distinction is important because crashes generally happen all over a community and people walk away from fender benders and sideswipes with minor or no injuries. Other than having a bad day, everyone is alive to recount the drama with their family and friends. But the more severe crashes tend to cluster in certain communities. If you focus on crashes regardless of the resulting injury, you may move resources from communities that need them more because they are where people are dying.

The Vision Zero plan of Washington, DC, is a great example of both successful interactions and some shortcomings. In 2015, only a few US cities embraced Vision Zero. DC’s plan was one of the first in the United States that included extensive outreach during the plan’s development. Over the course of a summer, we had ten meetings on street corners around the city, a youth summit with over two hundred young people, two meetings with special advocacy groups, and meetings with over thirty-five city agencies. We did not just inform people; we also engaged with them and used their feedback and stories to shape the plan. As an example, after talking with a group of young Black teens at the youth summit, we removed all enforcement related to people walking and biking. The young people conveyed to us that sometimes crossing the street mid-block got them away from a group of people who may want to cause them harm. The teens weighed their risk of being targeted by violence as higher than their risk of being struck by someone driving a vehicle.

In addition, we heard from people that having police enforce laws related to walking and biking put the community and law enforcement in conflict with each other. Charles T. Brown has documented in his research for his podcast Arrested Mobility how laws such as those prohibiting jaywalking are disproportionately enforced in Black and Brown communities, for men in particular. In DC’s Vision Zero plan, enforcement was instead targeted to dangerous driving behavior such as excessive speeding, driving under the influence, distracted driving, and reckless driving.

In a world where we are examining policing more closely after George Floyd’s murder, I think plans that reexamine equity in this way should take one more step. DC’s Vision Zero plan correctly focused on behaviors that lead to deaths and fatalities. However, the plan should have recommended a comprehensive evaluation of all the transportation laws and the removal of any that were not supported by data or did not lead to safer streets. If we are discussing data-driven approaches, the laws should target behaviors that lead to crashes that result in deaths and serious injuries.

Moreover, this plan offered recommendations and strategies and did not go further. After the Vision Zero plan was shared, communities were all demanding safer streets. This calls to mind the discussion [in chapter 2] of Montgomery County and the tension about who would get resources. All streets could be safer, even if incrementally, and without guiding principles for more of an “emergency room” structure. DC’s Vision Zero program led to resources going to where there was advocacy but not necessarily to the areas that needed the investment the most. If you have an opportunity similar to this, I emphasize the importance of putting in a framework that allocates resources to communities and areas experiencing high rates of fatalities and serious injuries, which tend to be the areas with high numbers of Black, Latino, or low-income residents or all of these.

Ever since Strange New Worlds’ second season was announced, the big draw has been the crossover episode with animated sitcom Lower Decks. It would see Tawny Newsome (Mariner) and Jack Quaid (Boimler) taking their until-now animated characters into live action. Following an early screening at Comic-Con, the episode is now available to watch on Paramount Plus.

The following article contains spoilers for “Those Old Scientists.”

There’s an SNL sketch where William Shatner, as himself, exhorts a room full of Star Trek fans to “Get a Life!” It’s clearly intended in jest, given Shatner’s barely-suppressed smile and a twist where Phil Hartman’s manager forces him to instantly recant his rant. Depending on who you ask, the sketch was either taken in the spirit it was intended, or with outrage amongst fans who felt mischaracterized, and misunderstood. But it’s this dichotomy, between the legend and the truth that’s mined for laughs in “Those Old Scientists,” the crossover episode between Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks. Well, that and an affectionate elbow in the ribs suggesting that we could all do with being a bit less obsessive.

The (animated) beta shift is making a routine survey of a long-dormant time-travel portal, while Boimler and Tendi argue about who discovered it. Boimler brags it was found by Starfleet, but Tendi says it was Orion scientists, once again trying to dispel myths that all Orions are pirates. While messing around Boimler is standing on the portal when Rutherford accidentally sets it running, throwing him back in time. When he arrives on the other side, he’s now in the live action world of Strange New Worlds, and is greeted by Spock, Una and La’an. And with that, we’re into an animated version of the title sequence, complete with nacelle-sucking alien.

On the Enterprise, Boimler can’t help but express his shock, surprise and generally fanboy out in front of his heroes. He gets lectured by La’an about not polluting the timeline and, thanks to her adventure in “Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” not getting attached. But, since this is the Boimler we know and love, he can’t help but throw spoilers out left, right and center. Not to mention his insistence on pointing out the difference between the history as he knows it, and the storylines as they’re presently unfolding on Strange New Worlds. For instance, he’s mightily disturbed by the fact that Spock – happy in a relationship with Chapel – is laughing, smiling and generally acting like he’s in love. After all, the Spock he knows – his Spock – isn’t this outwardly emotional, because that’s what the legend tells us. It’s almost as if he’s a stand-in for the sort of obsessive fan who tries to police the borders of what Star Trek is, instead of enjoying the journey.

At the same time, the Enterprise has to deal with an Orion vessel with undetermined intentions which then steals the time portal. Boimler urges Pike to be diplomatic, but winds up forcing him to trade a supply of much-needed triticale grain to get it back. Pike sees this – and the forced relocation of a planet-full of starving colonists – as preferable to having this guy on his ship any longer. When the portal is active and back in position, the Enterprise crew ready to get rid of this purple-haired irritation, Mariner leaps through, bravely declaring that she’s coming to the rescue. Except, the hardware had power enough for just one trip, and there’s not a fuel source available anywhere else in the quadrant. Leaving an eye-rolling Pike with the unwelcome possibility that they’re stuck with the Cerritos’ pair for good.

Boimler and Mariner wind up spending some time with their heroes, until they eventually realize that the Enterprise itself has a supply of fuel. Thanks to the naval tradition of using a component from the previous vessel in the construction of the next one, they can refine a chunk of NX-01 into fuel which can be used to send the pair home. (But not before the Strange New Worlds crew can reveal that they, too, are secretly as nerdy as a bunch of fans of their predecessors from Enterprise as Boimler is for this era.) They meet with the Orions again, and Pike pledges to claim that the Orions discovered the portal, giving their burgeoning science ship a small chunk of credit. And when Boimler and Mariner leap back to the future, the Enterprise crew drink an Orion cocktail that, in the closer, renders them all as animated characters.

“Those Old Scientists” is as pure a dose of fan service as Star Trek has ever produced, and I mean that as both a compliment and a criticism. Plenty of the elements, including the animated title sequence, reached straight into the lizard part of my brain and left me grinning like a loon. The screenplay, credited to Lower Decks’ executive story editor Kathryn Lyn and Bill Wolkloff, is crammed full of great gags. It helps, too, that Strange New Worlds has enough comic talent in its ranks to play an episode like this, and Carol Kane steals the show with the best gag in the episode.

But, and there is a but, the episode is a bit like cotton candy in that once the initial hit of sugar leaves your tongue, there’s little else here. We get a lot of scenes of Boimler and then Mariner telling the Enterprise crew how great they are, or are seen as such, by their successors. Most of these scenes take place sitting around desks, bars or lounges – telling rather than showing. I know that this is Strange New Worlds, and so the narrative will always belong with this crew rather than its guest stars. But the lower deckers are rendered passive observers in a narrative that could, or should, really have enabled them to demonstrate the dynamism they have in their own show. In the moment where Boimler and Mariner try to solve things on their own, they’re instantly shut down by La’an and Uhura and told to sit back on the bench. The worst served by this is Tawny Newsome, who is absent a major chunk of the episode and has little to do when Mariner does finally arrive in the past.

That cotton candy metaphor is probably the best way to sum up “Those Old Scientists,” a goofy snack between meatier meals, or episodes, either side. The fact it exists at all is a joy, even if it’s not as wonderful as it could have been, and I’d love nothing more than to see more forays into the real world by the Lower Decks crew. At the very least, with Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks in production at the same time, it’s a great time to be a Star Trek fan.

At one point Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb dons his iconic uniform — a fedora cap, a smoking pipe, a slightly over-sized suit — like Batman wearing his cape and cowl for the first time. It's a look that serves as a sort of armor against mere mortals, who he woos with a peculiar charisma, as well as the military and political bureaucracy he battles while leading the Manhattan Project. It's also a way for Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) to ground himself as he wrestles with the major conflict around his work: Building an atomic bomb could help to the war, but at what cost to humanity?

Oppenheimer may seem like a curious project for Nolan: Since wrapping up his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, he's thrown himself into increasingly complex projects (perhaps to atone for that disappointment). Interstellar was ostensibly a story about a man exploring the cosmos to find a new planet for humanity, but it also wrestled with personal sacrifices as his children aged beyond him.

Universal Pictures

Dunkirk was a purely cinematic, almost dialog-free depiction of a famous wartime evacuation. And Tenet was a bold attempt at mixing another heady sci-fi concept (what if you could go backwards through time?!) with bombastic James Bond-esque set pieces. Oppenheimer, meanwhile, is a mostly talky film set in a variety of meeting rooms, save for one explosive sequence.

Take a step back, though, and a film about an intelligent and very capable man wrestling with huge moral issues is very much in the Nolan wheelhouse. Oppenheimer's swaggering genius fits right alongside Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne/Batman, the dedicated magicians in The Prestige or the expert dream divers/super spies in Inception.

The film, which is based on the biography American Prometheus by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, follows Oppenheimer from his time in Germany as a doctoral student, to his professorship at UC Berkeley. He mingles with notable scientists, including Albert Einstein himself, and makes a name for himself as a quantum physics researcher. We see Oppenheimer as more than just a bookish geek: He sends money to anti-fascists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he pushes for unionization among lab workers and professors, and he supports local Communists. (Something that will come back to haunt him later.)

It's not too long before he's recruited to the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, and the myth-making truly begins. Like a Nolan heist film, he assembles a team of the brightest scientific minds in America and beyond, and he pushes the government to establish a town doubling as a secret research base in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The film is strongest when it focuses on the specificities of the Manhattan Project: the rush to build a bomb before Nazi Germany, the pushback from scientists terrified about the damage "the gadget" could do.

Universal Pictures

The movie firmly focuses on Oppenheimer's point of view, so much so that we mainly see him as a heroic tortured genius. Only he can put the right scientists together and motivate them to work; only he can solve the riddles of quantum physics to keep America safe. Some colleagues criticize his cavalier attitude about building an atomic bomb — they think it can lead to untold disaster, while he naively thinks it may be so powerful it may end all war. But, for the most part, we're left feeling that he was a great man who was ultimately betrayed by a country that didn't care for his post-war anti-nuclear activism.

I wasn't able to see Oppenheimer on an IMAX screen, unfortunately, but sitting front row in a local theater still managed to be a thoroughly immersive experience. That was particularly surp—rising since it's really a movie featuring people (mostly men) talking to each other in a series of unremarkable rooms. Save for one virtuoso set piece — the build-up and aftermath of a successful atomic bomb test is Nolan at his best — what's most impressive is how cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema makes those conversations utterly engaging. We've never seen Cillian Murphy's piercing blue eyes do so much work in close-up.

Universal Pictures

Still, it's an overall disjointed experience. The few featured women — Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh as the Communist activist Jean Tatlock — are sketched thin, even by Nolan standards. And the movie would have benefitted from more insight into Oppenheimer's thinking. It's a surprisingly standard biopic, even though it's three hours long and far more technical than any studio film this year.

At the very least, it would have been interesting to see Oppenheimer reckon more directly with the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see him confront President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) in a vain attempt to stop building nuclear weapons, and the film points to his very public stance against future bombs. But even those scenes feel self-serving.

At the end of the film, Oppenheimer finally comes to understand something many of his colleagues have been saying from the beginning. Nothing will be the same because of him. There is no peace now, only the undying specter of nuclear annihilation.

ExpressVPN has become a household name – or at least as close to one as a VPN is likely to get – taking over mainstream advertisements on sites like YouTube. On our roundup of the nine top providers in June, it came out tops for streaming services, frequent travel and gaming. But, notably, it wasn’t the overall best, falling short on areas like security and user friendliness.

There are three main VPN use cases on top of general security: geoblocking, streaming and gaming. That means my tests looked like watching Shrek on the clock, by using a VPN to access Canadian Netflix from my US-based home office, where the ogre movie isn’t currently available.

ExpressVPN was easy to sign up for, download and use, but compared to the other services, it didn't wow me. Competitors like ProtonVPN, for example, had easier ways to sign in across platforms. But an ExpressVPN subscription does come with a password manager to store and autofill credentials across websites. That’s a plus in a world where complex passwords are crucial to keeping your accounts secure.

The best VPNs stay out of your way and you'll barely even notice they’re running. But one oddity was that ExpressVPN internet speeds outperformed our baseline internet speed measures. The service is likely circumventing traffic shaping by the internet service provider or a similar anomaly because every other VPN will hurt internet speed in some way. But it did successfully mask the IP address, and pass the DNS and WebRTC leak tests as privacy measures.

ExpressVPN

It was also easy to access geo-blocked content using ExpressVPN, with little-to-no buffering. There were some loading delays that only lasted a few seconds when I tried to stream the news on YouTube using ExpressVPN, but no lag came up after that. Finally, ExpressVPN passed the gaming test by avoiding lag and maintaining a normal loading time. Although, it was a pretty basic test where I logged into online game Slither.io from a UK-based VPN to play the worm-eating competition with international users. Surfing the web with ExpressVPN was just as easy as being online without it. With ExpressVPN, a ping test measured how long data takes to travel from the computer to the server and back at 100 milliseconds, versus 16 milliseconds with no VPN turned on.

ExpressVPN’s biggest perk is that it supports up to five devices at once. That means I could conduct all tests simultaneously and still had no slowdown. That’s great for sharing it with a family, or folks that like to game, watch TV and scroll on their phone at the same time. It’s the main reason ExpressVPN landed as our top choice for streaming and gaming. The connectivity was solid, it had a wide range of servers in 94 countries and provided clear instructions on configuration for any device.

But security-wise, I found myself wanting more. ExpressVPN is based in the British Virgin Islands, which the company touts because the territory lacks any foreign intelligence operations and does not participate in 14 Eyes intelligence-sharing agreements. But it is owned by Kape Technologies, which also owns competitor CyberGhost, and Kape has a problematic history that includes spreading malware. Not only that, in 2021, the Department of Justice charged ExpressVPN CIO Daniel Gericke for cyberspying activities on behalf of the UAE. ExpressVPN stood by the CIO in a blog post.

But it’s not all bad. ExpressVPN publicly shared security audits of its mobile apps, protocol and desktop apps last year. That’s a win for security transparency. Still, a 2021 Consumer Reports study found that ExpressVPN didn’t support multifactor authentication, did not meet brute force mitigation checks and retained some data even after an account was terminated. ExpressVPN did, however, exceed industry standards in protections against unauthorized access, implement a vulnerability disclosure program and said it would not pursue legal action against security researchers. That means when it comes to security standards and practices, ExpressVPN as a company has a few too many misses and not enough hits.

I recommended ExpressVPN as our top choice for gamers, frequent travelers and heavy users of streaming services because it lets users access a wide range of locations from a variety of devices with high speed connections and no lag. With options to configure directly to routers and gaming consoles, it’s a solid choice for people that put a lot of strain on their ISPs. Still, there are better VPNs for the security-minded or those who want something more affordable.

Tesla has started notifying owners that they can transfer the Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature they purchased to a new vehicle, as long as they take delivery within the next three months. During the automaker's Q2 2023 investor call, Elon Musk announced a "one-time amnesty" that will allow owners to transfer their FSD. Now, Twitter user Keith Dahlenburg has posted a screenshot (via Not A Tesla App, The Verge) of the offer, along with its rules and conditions. 

Perhaps the most pertinent condition is that owners can only take advantage of this one-time amnesty if they take delivery of a new Tesla vehicle between July 20th and September 30th, 2023. It can't be applied retroactively, so those who've taken delivery before and after those dates unfortunately have to pay for access again. And FSD doesn't come cheap — Tesla raised its price to $15,000 last year. That's an enormous price jump for early adopters who were able to snag the feature for $5,000 years ago. Now, they can get a new model without having to pay for the feature again. 

Owners who choose to take the transfer offer will have to forfeit the capability in their current vehicle. Tesla will remove FSD from their old EV up to a week before their scheduled delivery date, and they can't get it back even if they cancel their purchase for a new car. That said, Tesla also doesn't guarantee delivery by the time the promo is over, so owners could still miss the offer if their deliveries unfortunately get delayed.