Author Archives: Engadget

ProtonVPN plans are up to 60 percent off in a Black Friday deal

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ProtonVPN is running a Black Friday Sale on its VPN services, including a 30-month plan for 60 percent off, or $120 total. That works out to $4 per month for two and a half years of access, saving you $180 over paying full price. Proton VPN is our favorite VPN service and, unlike most VPN services that continually run promotions, Proton rarely hosts sales. Their email and other services are seeing discounts, too. 

In our tests, ProtonVPN passed with high marks — but so did most of the other services. What sets ProtonVPN apart is its overall security and privacy safeguards. The Swiss-based company employs an independently audited no-logs policy and has proven they don't comply with law enforcement requests to reveal data. It's also based on an open-source code and discloses potential vulnerabilities through an official peer-review program. Plus, we found it easy to use. 

While there is a free version, the Plus plan that's on sale grants access to more servers, with locations in more than 65 countries and lets you run the service on 10 devices at a time. Compare that to the free version which only has servers in three countries and protects just one device at a time. 

It's worth noting that Proton’s Black Friday sale extends to all of its services, including Proton Mail, which we've recommended in our guides, and Proton Unlimited, which gives you access to VPN, Mail, Calendar, Drive and Pass, the company's password manager. The everything plan is down to $105 for the year, which works out to just under $9 per month.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/protonvpn-plans-are-up-to-60-percent-off-in-a-black-friday-deal-153355317.html?src=rss

The best white elephant gift ideas to exchange in 2024

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Whether or not you’ve heard of a white elephant gift exchange before, there’s a good chance you have the wrong idea of what it is, how it actually works and where the idea came from. According to legend, the King of Siam would give a white elephant to courtiers who had upset them. It was a far more devious punishment than simply having them executed. The recipient had no choice but to simply thank the king for such an opulent gift, knowing that they likely could not afford the upkeep for such an animal. It would inevitably lead them to financial ruin.

This story is almost certainly untrue, but it has led to a modern holiday staple: the white elephant gift exchange. Picking the right white elephant gift means walking a fine line: the goal isn’t to just buy something terrible and force someone to take it home with them. Rather, it should be just useful or amusing enough that it won’t immediately get tossed into the trash. The recipient also shouldn’t be able to just throw it in a junk drawer and forget about it. So here are a few suggestions that will not only get you a few chuckles, but will also make the recipient feel (slightly) burdened.

A white elephant gift exchange is a party game typically played around the holidays in which people exchange funny, impractical gifts.

A group of people each bring one wrapped gift to the white elephant gift exchange, and each gift is typically of a similar value. All gifts are then placed together and the group decides the order in which they will each claim a gift. The first person picks a white elephant gift from the pile, unwraps it and their turn ends. The following players can either decide to unwrap another gift and claim it as their own, or steal a gift from someone who has already taken a turn. The rules can vary from there, including the guidelines around how often a single item can be stolen — some say twice, max. The game ends when every person has a white elephant gift.

The term “white elephant” is said to come from the legend of the King of Siam gifting white elephants to courtiers who upset him. While it seems like a lavish gift on its face, the belief is that the courtiers would be ruined by the animal’s upkeep costs.

Check out the rest of our gift ideas here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/white-elephant-gift-ideas-2024-150516683.html?src=rss