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Apple has been leaning harder on services for several years now. That part of the business brought in tens of billions of dollars in revenue last year alone, and the company says 2025 was a record year. With Apple Creator Studio, Apple is extending that strategy further into professional creative software. Apple Creator Studio is a new subscription bundle that packages several of the companys pro apps under a single monthly or yearly fee. It launches on January 28 and includes a one-month free trial. The key shift is that some of these apps are now subscription-only on iPad, even as Apple continues to offer one-time purchases on the Mac albeit with slightly different feature offerings. Heres everything you need to know about Apple Creator Studio and the programs it includes. What Apple Creator Studio includes At its core, Apple Creator Studio gives subscribers access to Apples professional video, music and imaging apps. The bundle includes Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor and MainStage. Pixelmator Pro (which Apple acquired in late 2024) is also coming to iPad for the first time, with a touch-optimized interface and Apple Pencil support. A Creator Studio subscription also unlocks premium content and features inside Apples productivity apps. Keynote, Pages and Numbers remain free, but subscribers get access to premium templates and themes, plus a new Content Hub with Apple-curated photos, graphics and illustrations. Similar paid features are coming to Freeform later this year, the company says. Apple is also using the bundle to introduce new intelligence features across several apps. In Final Cut Pro, the new Beat Detection feature can analyze a music track and show a beat grid so you can line edits up to the rhythm. The app is also getting tools like transcript search and visual search designed to make it easier to find moments across footage. Logic Pro is gaining new AI-assisted Session Players and workflow features on Mac and iPad. Pixelmator Pro continues to rely heavily on machine learning for tasks like background removal, image repair and image upscaling. Note that some of these features require an Apple Intelligence-capable device. Which devices are supported Apple Creator Studio works across multiple Apple platforms, though not every app is available everywhere. On the Mac, subscribers get access to all six apps: Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor and MainStage. On the iPad, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and Pixelmator Pro are included. Motion, Compressor and MainStage remain Mac-only. On the iPhone, Creator Studio does not include full versions of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro or Pixelmator Pro. Instead, it unlocks premium features and content inside Keynote, Pages and Numbers, and eventually Freeform. Apple says the best experience is on macOS 26, iPadOS 26 and iOS 26 or later, with individual app requirements varying by device and chip. Apple Creator Studio apps Apple Pricing and subscription options Apple Creator Studio costs $12.99 per month or $129 per year, and new subscribers can try the service free for one month. College students and educators get a steep discount: the education plan costs $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year, and it also comes with a one-month free trial. A standard subscription can be shared with up to five other people using Family Sharing, allowing six users total. Education subscriptions are limited to individual use and cannot be shared. Apple is also offering three free months of Creator Studio to customers who purchase a qualifying new Mac or iPad aroun launch. But Creator Studio isnt the only way you can access most of these apps. Apple says all of the major apps included in Creator Studio will continue to be available as one-time purchases on the Mac App Store. Final Cut Pro remains priced at $299.99, Logic Pro at $199.99, Pixelmator Pro at $49.99, Motion at $49.99, Compressor at $49.99 and MainStage at $29.99. Users who already own these apps can keep using them and re-download them from the App Store as usual. On the iPad, however, things are different. Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and Pixelmator Pro for iPad are only available through the Creator Studio subscription. There is no standalone purchase option for those apps on iPadOS. Keynote, Pages, Numbers and Freeform remain free for everyone to download and use. Apple says those apps will continue receiving updates, including the upcoming visual design changes tied to iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. Without a Creator Studio subscription, you can still create, edit and collaborate in those apps. What you will not get are the paid templates, Content Hub assets and certain intelligence features. What happens to your projects if you cancel Apple says projects and content you create with an active subscription remain licensed as part of your original work. Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and Pixelmator Pro projects remain on your devices and can be copied or shared elsewhere. But you will need an active subscription to open or edit projects in those paid apps. Keynote, Pages, Numbers and Freeform documents remain editable without a subscription. However, you will not be able to make new edits that rely on paid features once your subscription ends. Other information about the new bundle Apple Creator Studio also comes with some immediate trade-offs. Alongside the bundle, Apple confirmed that the older Pixelmator app for iPhone and iPad, now described as Pixelmator Classic, will no longer receive updates. Apple says it will remain functional, but development is shifting to Pixelmator Pro, including the new iPad version included with Creator Studio. But don't expect the standalone versions of the apps to maintain feature parity with their Creator Studio counterparts. Per Apple's FAQ, "The Apple Creator Studio version of Pixelmator Pro includes access to the Warp Tool feature," which implies that feature isn't present on the standalone version. More broadly, the bundle puts Apple more directly in competition with Adobe and other subscription-focused creative platforms, especially for people who are looking for a lower monthly entry point. At the same time, Apple is keeping one-time purchases on the table for Mac users, even as iPad access moves behind a subscription. Apple Creator Studio will be available January 28. Whether it makes sense will likely come down to which device you work on and whether you would otherwise pay upfront for one or more of Apples pro apps. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/apple-creator-studio-is-now-available-whats-included-how-much-it-costs-and-what-it-means-for-creators-130000182.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
Amazon has confirmed that its letting go of 16,000 workers and employees across its organization. In an announcement by company SVP Beth Galetti, she explained that Amazon was going through organizational changes to reduce layers and remove bureaucracy. Affected employees in the US will be given 90 days to look for another internal role and will receive severance pay if they do not find any. Galetti also said that Amazon doesnt have plans to announce broad reductions every few months but admitted that the company could make adjustments as appropriate.News about the layoffs was leaked in an email mistakenly sent out early to workers, along with a calendar invitation for a meeting dubbed internally as Project Dawn. In the email seen by Bloomberg and the BBC, Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey told workers that their impacted colleagues from the US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been notified. Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success, Aubrey reportedly wrote in the email. Amazon eliminated 14,000 roles back in October 2025 across its games, logistics, payment and cloud computing divisions, with the availability of AI technologies being one of the main reasons for the layoffs. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology weve seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before, Amazon said in its announcement back then. This new round of layoffs is just a continuation of the previous one, as Amazon was reportedly looking to let 30,000 people go from the start. The announcement comes shortly after Amazon revealed that it was shutting down its remaining Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores and will focus on grocery deliveries instead. To note, Amazons year-over-year net sales grew by 13 percent in the third quarter of 2025 alone. Its net income increased to $21.2 billion compared to the $15.3 billion it posted in the third quarter of 2024. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazons-latest-round-of-layoffs-will-affect-16000-workers-120000702.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
Windscribe is a virtual private network (VPN) with intense "How do you do, fellow kids?" energy. It has servers in 69 countries and an annual plan that costs $69, an obsession with the sex number that rivals Elon Musk's. I'm shocked that it doesn't have a subscription costing $4.20 per month. But there's another side to Windscribe's cringe: an obsession with independence and a Bernie Sanders-like anger on behalf of an exploited public. In a market where the best VPNs aim for professionalism, Windscribe aspires to be punk. Its iconoclasm may have led it to develop an app that looks like ExpressVPN in a trash compactor, but it also spurred Windscribe to offer a strong free plan and forgo financial relationships with VPN reviewers. That attitude earned it a spot on my list of the best free VPNs. Although Windscribe's heart is in the right place, my job is to figure out whether that translates into a good product. I used our rigorous VPN testing procedure to rate Windscribe in 11 categories. You can find my results in the table below and a final verdict at the end of the review. Editor's note (1/27/26): We've overhauled our VPN coverage to provide more detailed, actionable buying advice. Going forward, we'll continue to update both our best VPN list and individual reviews (like this one) as circumstances change. Most recently, we added official scores to all of our VPN reviews. Check out how we test VPNs to learn more about the new standards we're using. Findings at a glance Category Notes Installation and UI Installation and setup are always straightforwardApps look very similar on Windows, macOS, iOS and AndroidApp design is overly compact and often impenetrable, but hides a solid programBrowser extensions allow one-click bypassing of security features on the current page, much like common ad blockers Speed Average latency below 300 worldwideSome slowdown in download and upload speeds, but not severeSpeeds were highly consistent everywhere except some African servers Security Six solid protocols WireGuard, IKEv2, and four based on OpenVPNMost protocols available on all platforms, except IKEv2 on AndroidNo leaks detected, even while switching serversPackets are encrypted as expected Pricing $9 per month, $69 for one year ($5.75 per month)Custom plans cost $1 per country plus $1 for unlimited data; must spend at least $3Static IPs available for $2 per month or $8 per month for a residential addressFree plan gives you 10 locations and 10GB per month with a confirmed email Bundles Shares coupon codes for various discounts on five "partners in privacy" Privacy policy Retains very little information, none of it personally identifiableCan make an account without an email addressAll apps have been audited by independent overseersFought Greek court case in 2025 because it had no logs to turn over Virtual location change 15 different servers in five locations unblocked NetflixContent changed each time, suggesting the destination site was completely fooled Server network 193 server locations in 122 cities across 71 countriesOnly two virtual server locations in the entire networkReal servers in Russia and India risk abrupt shutdowns Features Standout extras include the customizable R.O.B.E.R.T blocker and split tunneling on Windows, Mac and AndroidNetwork Options offers lots of automation choices, but terminology makes it needlessly confusingIncludes obfuscation to get online in restrictive regionsFirewall is a stronger version of a kill switch, preventing any access unless the VPN is connected Customer support Knowledgebase search bar is good at finding articles, and articles themselves are usefulGarry AI chatbot is helpful, but pushed way too hard at the expense of access to human agentsActive Reddit and Discord communities for peer-to-peer help Background check Founded in Canada in 2016No significant controversies in 10 yearsCanada is a Five Eyes nation, but this shouldn't matter if Windscribe is keeping to its no logs policy Installing, configuring and using Windscribe The first step is always to figure out how easy or hard the VPN is to use. Windscribe and other VPNs are important tools, but you'll never use them if the UI gets in the way. I tested Windscribe's desktop apps on Windows and Mac, its mobile apps on iOS and Android and its Chrome and Firefox browser extensions. To start with, let me say that installing Windscribe is a breeze no matter where you do it. The downloaders and installers handle their own business, only requiring you to grant a few permissions. The apps arrive on your system ready to use out of the box. Windows The first thing you'll notice about Windscribe is that it's not even slightly interested in looking like any other VPN. It crams everything into an extremely compact window, which has some advantages mainly that it's easy to operate it while looking at another app. On the downside, well, it looks like this. Windscribe's UI on a Windows laptop. Sam Chapman for Engadget The Windscribe team will probably just say that I'm brainwashed by the establishment, but there's a good reason that most VPNs choose designs with a little more space. This fiddly console, most of which is taken up by information you can't interact with, is likely to confirm all a newcomer's worst fears about using a VPN. Private Internet Access had a similar problem of tightening its app design to the point of being incomprehensible. The problems persist when you get to the settings page. It's easy to make sense of a VPN without technical knowledge, but Windscribe's preferences menu does everything it can to obscure that truth. Highly technical features are mixed in with options for casual users, and the explanatory blurbs usually cloud the issue even further. Even the "Look & Feel" settings somehow manage to be confusing. What is the difference between the Stretch, Fill and Tile modes for aspect ratio? What the heck is a Bundled background, and what does it matter whether it's Square, Palm, Ripple, Drip or Snow? The answers to all these can be found by playing around or looking in the knowledgebase, but a VPN really shouldn't require that for its most basic toggles. Once you get used to Windscribe and learn where to find the features that actually matter, it runs quite smoothly. Connections are never delayed and there are none of the random error messages that have dogged me on other VPNs. In a world of VPNs that look great but run clunkily, Windscribe has built one that looks terrible but runs great. I can't complain about how well it works, but is it too much to ask for a provider that does both? (Oh, wait, that's Proton VPN.) Mac Windscribe's macOS app is almost identical to its Windows app. That deserves praise in itself you'll get much the same experience no matter which type of computer you use. But it also means the Mac app shares the same problems. Windscribe's app for Mac desktops and laptops. Sam Chapman for Engadget There's the same overly compact design cluttered with too much information. The same technobabble-filled options menu. And the same fundamental solidity underlying it all: a VPN that does the job beautifully but has no interest in being accessible. It would be a mistake to write Windscribe off because of its app design, but it's important to know what you'll have to work through. Android One thing I can't fault Windscribe for is a lack of consistency. The Android app looks a lot like the Windows and Mac apps, only lightly adapted for the mobile format. On these devices, the design decisions make more sense the UI writing is still impenetrable for casual users, but the compact pages look a lot more normal on a phone screen. A comparison of Windscribe's extremely similar apps on Android and Mac. Sam Chapman for Engadget iOS There's not a lot to say about Windscribe on iOS that I haven't already said about the other three main platforms. Looking over all my screenshots, it seems fairly clear that Windscribe's problems much like PIA's come from starting on mobile and trying to make that same design work on desktop. It's still not great to look at, but I can at least see where they're coming from. Windscribe's iOS app. Sam Chapman for Engadget Browser extensions Windscribe's extensions for Chrome and Firefox look a little like its desktop and mobile VPN apps, but they act a little differently. They serve the same basic purpose as the standalone apps changing your IP address and location but they're also customizable ad blockers for the web page you're currently on. Windscribe's Google Chrome extension. Sam Chapman for Engadget For example, in the image above, I can control what location Google perceives me to be in. But I can also control what gets blocked by choosing to let Google bypass certain features. Clicking the leftmost button makes the current website skip the VPN tunnel. The central button shuts off the ad blocker and the right-hand button shuts off the features on the Privacy section of the preferences menu. Like everything else about Windscribe, it's unintuitive but works great once you figure it out. Windscribe speed test I used speedtest.net to test Windscribe's speeds. In case you aren't familiar with the jargon, Ping measures a server's latency, which is how long it takes a single packet of data to reach it from your device. Download speed measures how much data can be downloaded at a time, while upload speed shows how quickly you can send data to the network. Think of ping as your car's speed in miles per hour and download and upload speed as the amount of traffic on the road. As usual, I used the WireGuard protocol to run these tests, since it's almost always the fastest. Starting with my unprotected speeds at home in Portland, I moved gradually farther away until I was connecting to the other side of the world. Ideally, ping should increase linearly (not exponentially), while download and upload speeds don't dip much at all. I've recorded Windscribe's performance in the table below. Server location Ping (ms) Increase factor Download speed (Mbps) Percentage drop Upload speed (Mbps) Percentage drop Portland, USA (unprotected) 22 59.35 5.92 Vancouver, Canada (fastest location) 27 1.2x 55.89 5.83 5.56 6.08 Boston, USA 161 7.3x 48.49 18.30 5.66 4.39 Quito, Ecuador 283 12.9x 46.46 21.72 4.68 20.95 London, UK 287 13.0x 43.70 26.37 4.51 23.82 Nairobi, Kenya 595 27.0x 32.63 45.02 3.57 39.70 Seoul, South Korea 258 11.7x 43.27 27.09 4.48 24.32 Average 269 12.2x 45.07 24.06 4.74 19.93 Windscribe gave me some of the shortest latencies I've ever seen comparable to CyberGhost, whose ping lengths I was also very impressed by. Its download and upload speeds also look a lot like CyberGhost's, with both firmly in good-but-not-amazing territory. However, Windscribe's speeds were a lot more consistent. Throughout the tests, I hardly ever saw major fluctuations in the same location, on any metric. The Nairobi server seemed to be under some strain, but that's not unusual for a VPN in Africa. Every location except for that one followed a smooth downward curve. I'm happy with that; speed is one of the areas where you want your VPN to be reliably boring, not flashy. Practically, a speed test like this suggests that Windscribe is best for gaming, livestreaming and video chatting, and that it's perfectly serviceable for any other task you could do online. You may not get the best speeds you've ever seen, but unless your internet is bad to begin with, Windscribe should not slow it down enough to be noticeable. Windscribe security test I can say up top that Windscribe doesn't seem to have any dangerous security flaws, but I'll take this section to explain why I think that. To start with, it uses only the three VPN protocols currently known to be secure: WireGuard, OpenVPN and IKEv2, plus a few other options all based on OpenVPN. With those options, you can be sure you're getting encryption that's currently uncrackable. It also passed two batteries of tests I ran on its security. The first set of tests looks for DNS leaks, WebRTC leaks and other slip-ups that might reveal your real IP address. The second checks whether data packets sent through the VPN tunnel are actually getting encrypted. Check each section below for details on how Windscribe did. VPN protocols A VPN protocol determines how exactly a VPN makes contact between its own servers, your device and your ISP. Certain protocols can make your VPN run faster, stabilize a shaky connection or get into websites other protocols fail to unlock. If you're having a problem with your VPN, changing the protocol is one of the first troubleshooting steps. Windscribe makes a total of six protocols available, though it's really just three, since four of the six are variations on OpenVPN. WireGuard works on every platform, and is currently the fastest and most stable its drawback used to be that it was new, but with the passage of time, it's no longer new enough to make it suspect. IKEv2 is a connection protocol that uses the separate IPSec protocol for its security. This double team's main strength is reconnecting to the VPN when a device switches networks; it's also good at not draining phone batteries. Windscribe supports IKEv2 on Mac, iOS and Windows. OpenVPN is the oldest open-source VPN protocol, refined by over a decade of repeated probing by volunteers. It's not only relatively fast and highly secure, but comes in two flavors: TCP, which makes connections more stable, and UDP, which is usually faster and should be your first resort with OpenVPN. Windscribe supports OpenVPN on all platforms. Windscribe rounds out the selection with two unique protocols, both focused on hiding your VPN traffic from firewalls and censors. Stealth uses the same connection ports as HTTPS, so it can't be blocked by shutting certain ports down entirely. WStunnel obfuscates connections even further by using the extremely common WebSocket technology to establish VPN connections. Both these proprietary protocols are much slower than the other options, but can save you if you find yourself repeatedly blocked while using Windscribe. Leak test I started my leak tests by using ipleak.net to check several Windscribe servers for IP leaks of all sorts. Each time I connected and checked my location, I only saw the VPN server's IP address, never my real one. I tried to trip Windscribe up by switching servers while remaining connected, even changing continents, but my true location never once slipped out. This puts its security solidly above CyberGhost, Norton VPN and many others. I couldn't find any holes in Windscribe's armor. Sam Chapman for Engadget Windscribe automatically blocks IPv6 traffic while connected, so IPv6 leaks weren't going to be a thing. I finished the test by checking five servers using browserleaks.com/webrtc, finding no issues each time. Encryption test The final step is to make sure Windscribe is applying encryption properly through its VPN protocols. For this test, I used a free packet sniffer app called Wireshark to look directly at what my computer was sending out. Windscribe's encryption looks solid. Sam Chapman for Engadget It's a bit hard to tell what's going on, but to summarize, I've loaded a website without HTTPS protection and checked whether Windscribe managed to apply that protection. The lack of readable information in the data stream proves that its encryption is indeed working as expected. How much does Windscribe cost? Windscribe has three subscription options (not counting its free plan, which I'll discuss in a moment). One month of Pro service costs $9.00 after Mullvad, the second-cheapest monthly subscription to a top-tier VPN. You can also pay $69 for a 12-month Pro subscription, working out to $5.75 per month. Both of these tiers give you the exact same set of Pro features and can be used on unlimited simultaneous devices. The cost of Windscribe Pro at publication time. Sam Chapman for Engadget The third option is to build your own plan. Build-A-Plan is an interesting beast that's unique to Windscribe. When you choose a custom plan, you must spend at least $3 per month. Gaining access to all the Pro servers in a country costs $1. For each country you add, you get an additional 10GB of data per month on top of the 10GB already included for free. If you'd rather not budget your data at all, you can pay another $1 for unlimited data, plus 10 custom rules for the R.O.B.E.R.T. content blocker (I'll untangle the tortured acronym soon). It's a little convoluted, but wonderfully flexible. You can even change your Build-A-Plan in the middle of the subscription period. Windscribe also offers shared static IPs for an extra fee. You can add a datacenter IP to any plan for $2 per month or a residential IP (usually better at getting around restrictions) for $8 per month. Team billing is also available through ScribeForce at $3 per seat per month, including a centralized management panel. The Windscribe free plan Windscribe isn't the overall best free VPN hide.me wins that honor with its more flexible data limit but it's close. Free users get access to servers in 10 countries: the US, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Germany, Switzerland, Romania and Hong Kong. If you plotthat on a map, you'll see that the Windscribe free plan is most useful in North America and Europe. Free users start with a data allotment of 2GB per month. The monthly limit rises to 10GB if you sign up with a confirmed email address and 15GB if you post about Windscribe on Twitter/X. That's enough for casual browsing, but streaming in standard definition takes about 1GB per hour, so you won't be doing much binge-watching. On the upside, a free plan gives you access to all Windscribe's features except for dynamic port forwarding. You can set three R.O.B.E.R.T. rules and use your free account on an infinite number of devices (subject to the usual restrictions about exploiting that for commercial purposes as Windscribe itself states, no one person has 30 devices that need a VPN). Windscribe side apps and bundles Windscribe doesn't have any add-ons of its own except for static IP addresses. However, it does offer discount codes for a group of "partners in privacy" that share its business ethics. The coupon codes are available here and don't require a Windscribe subscription to use. The five members of Windscribe's gang. Sam Chapman for Engadget There are currently five allies in the gang. Control D offers DNS filtering for organizations to block unwanted websites; the Windscribe coupon gives you 50 percent off. You can get 25 percent off a one-year subscription to addy.io, an open-source email anonymizer, and Ente, an encrypted storage space for photos and videos. Rounding out the team are Kagi, a private search engine which you can use for three months free with the Windscribe coupon, and Notesnook, an encrypted notes app. Windscribe's coupon gives you a 10% discount on Notesnook's yearly plans in perpetuity. Close-reading Windscribe's privacy policy Windscribe's marketing positions it as serious about user independence, so I came into this section hoping for a privacy policy that backs those words up. An early green flag is that the policy is short, succinct and obviously written to be read by the users themselves. It's also fantastic that you can sign up without an email address (though you will need one to get the full data allotment on the free plan). Windscribe gathers information on its website using Piwik, an open-source analytics tool that it manages itself; no third parties are involved. The Windscribe app itself collects no information except for the amount of data used in a month, the time of your last connection and the number of devices you have online at once. When actively connected, it also gives you an anonymized username necessary for the OpenVPN and IKEv2 protocols. My only quibble is that Windscribe is oddly reluctant to identify which third-party payment processors it uses. The information does exist elsewhere an article in the knowledgebase states that payments are handled by "trusted third party processors such as PayPal and Stripe," and another page says that CoinPayments handles cryptocurrency transactions. It's a small thing, but the rest of the policy is so airtight that it stands out. Independent privacy audits Windscribe's apps are fully open-source (you can find them on Github here). In addition to this general exposure, it's also undergone three intensive audits from security firms. Leviathan Security looked into its desktop apps in 2021 and its mobile apps in 2022. The auditors made a total of five high-severity recommendations, all of which Windscribe claims to have addressed. More recently, Windscribe had its entire codebase audited by PacketLabs. The auditors' June 2024 report found that some of Windscribe's code was storing more user information than it strictly needed to. Windscribe also claims to have handled this risk. More importantly, PacketLabs found no intentional subversions of Windscribe's no-logs policy, so its privacy statements can likely be trusted. Further corroboration of the latter came from a 2025 court case in which Windscribe founder and CEO Yegor Sak was indicted in Greece and charged with a crime committed by a Windscribe user through an IP address in Finland. This case is obviously absurd like charging the head of GM with a single instance of vehicular manslaughter committed by someone driving a Buick but Sak was obliged to appear in court anyway. As Sak writes in the linked post, he could have turned over the logs and shown who actually committed the crime, but he couldn't since Windscribe doesn't keep that information. Had there been an alternative to waging an expensive and inconvenient legal campaign in another country, Sak would surely have taken it. The fact that he didn't is strong proof of Windscribe's no-logging policy. Can Windscribe change your virtual location? Changing your IP address with a VPN can do more than just anonymize your internet activity. A service like Windscribe can give you an IP address associated with a certain country or region, letting you use the internet like you were there. This has applications ranging from the serious (break out of a nationwide firewall to document human rights issues) to the fun (get new titles on streaming platforms without paying for a new subscription). Netflix is a great tool for testing whether a VPN can change your virtual location. Like most streamers, it tries to block all VPN access to protect the copyrights it holds. Consequently, if a VPN can crack Netflix, it must be serious about keeping its server network fresh to foil any potential blockers. A successful location change on Netflix using Windscribe. Sam Chapman for Engadget For this test, I tried to access Netflix three times each through five different Windscribe server locations, refreshing the connection to use different servers each time. I looked for successful Netflix access, plus differnt content to prove my location had actually changed. Server location Unblocked Netflix? Changed content? Vancouver, Canada 3/3 3/3 Queretaro, Mexico 3/3 3/3 Tokyo, Japan 3/3 3/3 London, UK 3/3 3/3 Auckland, NZ 3/3 3/3 Windscribe got a perfect score. Netflix loaded easily every time, and the content was always localized to the country I chose. With this performance combined with its fairly consistent speeds over long distances, Windscribe makes a nearly perfect streaming VPN. The only downside is that the data limits on the free plan mean you'll probably have to pay for serious streaming time. Investigating Windscribe's server network Windscribe has 193 server locations in 71 countries, which it insists on listing as "69+" (again, hilarious). Although 193 sounds like a lot, many of them are duplicate locations in the same city. This isn't necessarily a problem, but for accuracy's sake, the total number of cities with Windscribe servers is 122. Region Countries with servers Cities with servers Total server locations Virtual server locations North America 6 40 61 0 South America 7 7 9 0 Europe 38 47 75 0 Africa 3 3 5 0 Middle East 2 2 2 0 Asia 12 16 28 1 Oceania 2 6 12 0 Antarctica 1 1 1 1 Total 71 122 193 2 (1 percent) The bigger story here is Windscribe's spurning of virtual servers. A virtual server location is physically located in a different region than the one it outwardly displays. For example, a server with an Indian IP address might really be in Singapore. Throughout the entire Windscribe network, only two servers are virtual: one in India and one in Antarctica. This is both good and bad. On the positive side, the near-total lack of virtual servers means you can be sure of how any server will perform. If it says it's in Buenos Aires, it'll run like it's in Buenos Aires you won't be surprised with lagging speeds because it's really in Miami. This also makes it clear that Windscribe isn't interested in pumping up its network size for marketing purposes. Windscribe's server selection list on the Mac app. Sam Chapman for Engadget On the other hand, virtual locations aren't an inherently bad thing. Windscribe acts as though advertising hype is the only reason any VPN would employ them, but there are real use cases. Virtual servers can be used to place locations inside countries where real servers would risk confiscation by the government, like Russia, India and China. Windscribe chooses instead to place real servers in Russia and India, both of which have data retention laws that directly conflict with its own privacy policy. Does this mean that using Windscribe's Russian servers will earn you a midnight visit from the FSB? Probably not. Assuming Windscribe is following its no-logs policy (which appears to be the case), there won't be any user data on those servers if the government seizes them. But it does mean they're effectively running illegal data centers which could be raided and shut down at any time. Be aware of this if you depend on Windscribe's locations in Russia or India. Extra features of Windscribe As covered in the UI section, Windscribe has a lot going on in its apps. The Connection tab alone has 13 different features, including two submenus with several options of their own. With this many options, and so many of them highly situational, I won't be able to cover every nook and cranny without this review getting seriously bloated. I've instead chosen some of the most important and illustrative features to give you a clear sense of the whole picture. Network Options You'll find this feature at the top of te Connection tab. When you click Network Options, you should see the name of your current Wi-Fi network and all the others your Windscribe account has discovered. This feature lets you control how the VPN reacts to each network it encounters, not unlike CyberGhost's Smart Rules. Just switching around a few terms would make this a lot less confusing. Sam Chapman for Engadget The app does a remarkably poor job of explaining how this works, so I'll break it down for you here. When the Auto-Secure Networks switch is turned on, Windscribe will automatically mark each new network as Secured a word which here means "Windscribe turns on when it encounters the network." So far, so good. But if you turn Auto-Secure Networks off, things get weird. Without it, Windscribe tags every network you encounter as Unsecured. Whenever you connect to an Unsecured network, Windscribe immediately disconnects itself. This means it secures all Secured networks and does not secure any Unsecured networks. It feels backwards until you realize that Windscribe is referring entirely to itself here. "Secured" doesn't mean that the Wi-Fi network is password-protected or otherwise considered safe, and "Unsecured" doesn't mean that it's open to the public without a password. All that matters is whether or not you want Windscribe to activate or deactivate on that network. It's a useful feature that even lets you choose a VPN protocol for each network, but it would help to bring it more in line with mainstream terminology. R.O.B.E.R.T. This mouthful of a feature name allegedly stands for Remote Omnidirectional Badware Eliminating Robotic Tool. This is perhaps the apex of the VPN industry's unfortunate habit of saddling perfectly good features with word-salad names (yes, I'm aware it's supposed to be funny). R.O.B.E.R.T. is perhaps the most customizable content blocker on any VPN right now. To start with, it includes eight lists of sites it blocks at the DNS level: Malware, Ad + Trackers, Social Networks, Porn, Gambling, Clickbait, Other VPNs and Crypto. These vary in usefulness, and you can't determine the contents of each list, but it's nice to have such a range of choices. It eliminates all the badware, remotely AND omnidirectionally! Sam Chapman for Engadget Where R.O.B.E.R.T really shines, though, is in its browser-based customization dashboard. Each Free user can make three custom rules, and Pro upgrades that to 10. Each custom rule can be used to block a specific website or network or allowlist it from one of the other general blocklists. You can also set it to spoof a domain, though there's no practical reason to do this (Windscribe's idea of a "useful" application is making your friends think your post made the front page of Reddit). Split tunneling Split tunneling sends some of your internet requests through the VPN tunnel while others go unencrypted as normal. This can be useful if you get worse-than-usual speeds and want to minimize the amount of traffic going through the VPN, or for certain websites that refuse to work with any VPN server. You can split tunnel on Windscribe's apps for Windows, Mac and Android. Windows and Android users can split by app or website, while Mac users can only split by website. Windscribe lets you choose whether your split tunnel will be inclusive (only apps and IPs on the list will go through the VPN) or exclusive (the apps and IPs on the list will not go through the VPN). Note that R.O.B.E.R.T. rules apply to the entire system, even excluded apps and domains. Firewall and Always On VPN Instead of a kill switch, which it derides as an incomplete solution, Windscribe includes a Firewall feature on desktop and an Always On VPN feature on mobile. The Firewall can be considered a strong kill switch that prevents any internet traffic from going outside the VPN tunnel something doesn't have to go wrong for the blocks to activate. Always On VPN on iOS and Android is functionally the same. A more proactive defense has its advantages, but it would be nice if Windscribe included the weak kill switch option. Kill switches and firewalls can be overactive, and sometimes, you don't want the strongest level of security. Circumvent Censorship This feature is designed to let you access Windscribe on networks that don't want you to use a VPN, from school and work systems to entire censorious countries like China. Windscribe isn't forthcoming about how it works, but it's probably a deep-packet obfuscation that makes VPN traffic look like regular traffic. I didn't have time to pop over to China and test Circumvent Censorship, but I'm glad it exists. Windscribe customer support options Clicking the question mark tab on the Windscribe app shows you the full list of support options. You can peruse the knowledgebase, ask their chatbot Garry, talk directly to a human or check out their user communities on Reddit and Discord. Most of these lead back to Garry. Sam Chapman for Engadget I started with the written FAQs. At the top of the knowledgebase, there's a row of buttons you can click to see only articles relating to a particular operating system. This is a good idea in theory, but it's not implemented very well there's no visible tagging system, so we can't see how it's deciding which articles to filter. The search bar is much more likely to get you where you need to go. It works instantaneously and always turns up relevant articles, though it's weirdly insistent on showing exactly 10 results. I have few complaints about articles themselves, which are written in a way any user should find useful (give or take yet more attempted humor). I tested the chatbot, Garry, by asking it about the mysterious Advanced Parameters tab of the Windscribe app. It explained each feature on that tab (none of which should be touched except by users with technical knowledge) in a spiel that was clearly pre-written but nonetheless useful. Garry was launched in 2018, when IBM Watson was the biggest thing in AI, and recently revamped into "Garry 2.0" whether this is based on OpenAI or another platform is anyone's guess at te moment. Live support Windscribe appears to handle all of its own support, without outsourcing to Zendesk or a similar third party. If you decide not to go through Garry, Windscribe does have the option of connecting directly to a human. However, the Contact Humans option on the app sends you directly back to Garry. It's eventually possible to get Garry to connect you to a real person, but that doesn't excuse Windscribe building an outright lie into its app. The Contact Support button on the knowledgebase, which I expected to lead to a ticket submission, also sends you straight to Garry. Windscribe really, really wants you to use Garry, in case that wasn't clear. You might have a better time going straight to the Windscribe Discord server or the r/Windscribe subreddit, both of which are linked to in the app. Windscribe background check Windscribe eschews a lot of the things we've come to expect from a VPN provider. It doesn't pay for ads anywhere. It has no affiliate relationships with news sites. The only thing resembling a Windscribe ad campaign is the free-plan data reward for Xeeting about it. It doesn't even have any venture capital investors it's completely self-funded and self-hosted. As a jaded and cynical reviewer who was already annoyed by Windscribe's memelord attitude, I was prepared to sniff out any hypocrisy in its background, which makes it all the more impressive that I didn't find any. Since its founding in Canada in 2016, Windscribe has never once been involved in any public doings that contradict its statements of ethics. It's even given free unlimited VPN access to every journalist working in Ukraine. The only thing I could find resembling a controversy was an incident in July 2021 when Ukrainian police confiscated two servers that weren't fully encrypted. Although this would only have posed a risk to users running a customized connection profile under very specific conditions, it was still a lapse. Windscribe responded appropriately in my view, ending the legacy OpenVPN implementation that caused the problem. Canadian headquarters Windscribe is based in Canada, which is one of the Five Eyes nations (along with the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand). This sounds scary, but it's not actually an issue, as Yegor Sak himself points out in a blog post I reference frequently. Five Eyes is not an organization, but an agreement between five allied countries to share necessary intelligence with each other. This can absolutely be misused. If the U.S. government wants to spy on someone without running into the 4th Amendment, it can ask the Brits to spy on that person instead and tell them what they find, knowing the Constitution can't determine what other countries do to our citizens. As bad as that is for our civil liberties, it doesn't actually change anything where VPNs are concerned. If a VPN isn't logging user data, there shouldn't be anything for any of the Five Eyes (or Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes) nations to find. And if it is keeping logs, you shouldn't be using it no matter where its headquarters are. Final verdict You might wonder, at this point, why my distaste for Windscribe's tryhard sense of humor has featured so prominently in this review. One reason is that I had to read a lot of it this week, and you must suffer as I have suffered. But it also makes Windscribe look very good by implication. Having no patience for the discount-4chan act that pervades Windscribe's brand, I was primed to dislike the VPN itself and I simply couldn't. This is not to say I had no problems at all with Windscribe. Its physical servers in Russia are difficult to trust. Its help options lean way too heavily on Garry the chatbot. Its app design and UI writing are significant faults. The free plan doesn't give you enough data for streaming. Having said all that, though, Windscribe does everything else right. It changes virtual locations and unblocks Netflix without breaking a sweat. Its servers keep latencies low, and download speeds remain solid across the world. The apps may look bad, but they never break down. Some features, like R.O.B.E.R.T. and Auto-Secure, are both useful to everybody and deeply customizable for power users. Windscribe may be best for privacy nerds who know how all its doohickeys work, but it's a VPN I recommend for everybody. In a world of predatory software, it's a relief to use an app that's unabashedly on the customer's side. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/windscribe-review-despite-the-annoyances-it-has-the-right-idea-120000837.html?src=rss
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