Is your Virtual Private Network spying on your browser activity? According to a bombshell study by private email provider Proton, many VPNs installed in the U.S. are actually tracking users instead of helping them. Even worse, some of these offenders are registered to companies in China. Here’s what you can do to keep yourself safe.
VPNs are meant to encrypt your web traffic so that third parties — like your internet service provider, digital marketers, and hackers — can’t see which websites you visit. In order for this to work, though, a user has to trust that the VPN installed on his device does what it claims to do, and the VPN provider then has to deliver on its promise to shield web activity from outside sources.
Many Americans are being tracked by the VPN on their devices, and they don’t even know it.
Proton says that many VPN providers are failing to fulfill their side of the bargain.
In a statement published to its website, Proton says, “After a months-long survey of over 7,000 mobile VPN apps around the world, Proton has found that 85% of those downloaded in the U.S. contain trackers, and around a quarter of those actively track users’ physical location.”
Many of the trackers were found to send data back to foreign nations, including China, Russia, Israel, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Even more alarming, some of the tested VPNs were either outright owned by organizations based in China, or they were registered to shell companies intended to provide a facade of security.
In other words, many Americans are being tracked by the VPN on their devices, and they don’t even know it.
Unfortunately, Proton didn’t list all of the VPNs that are most likely to spy on users. The company also makes its own VPN service, which it’s trying to promote over competitors, regardless of their actual stance on user privacy. That said, if you use a VPN on your phone, tablet, or computer, it’s a good idea to understand how it works and whether or not you can trust it to shield your web activity from prying eyes.
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There are several important factors to look for when shopping for a VPN you can trust.
Now that you know what to look for, you should have a good idea if the VPN on your device works as advertised. If for any reason you suspect your VPN is collecting, storing, or sharing your data, remove it from your device immediately. You’re better off not having a VPN at all than to trust one that’s actually compromising your safety, security, and privacy.
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The New York Times’ reporting on AI is like its reporting in general: partisan, erroneous, sensationalist, and misleading in the extreme.
The tone is apocalyptic, characterizing AI as an imminent threat, much like the Times’ characterization of Iraq’s alleged WMDs. Worse still is the wokeness of it all, the politicization of AI, in which everything — including the survival of the United States — depends on the wisdom and selflessness of the anointed.
Consumer protection, monopoly, economic opportunity, enforcement of existing law, the Constitution — about these things, the Times is silent.
Call it a sign of the times, or a sign that the Times is in decline, because when the supposed newspaper of record soft-pedals the work of rationalists and effective altruists, the result is propaganda with a corporate caption.
That the Times not only “skews left” but skews its coverage in favor of specific policies, that it champions export controls on technology, and that it portrays Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as a champion of AI safety are reasons the paper reads like a rag with a games section.
Safety is the watchword of the Times’ emphasis on control. All other issues, such as liberty, opportunity, privacy, and democracy, are irrelevant. Or so the Times would have us believe. But first we must believe that AI is a doomsday device, that it is more destructive than the hydrogen bomb and cleaner than the neutron bomb, that it can end mankind not with a bang but a whimper.
Such is the reasoning of rationalists and effective altruists, whose views the Times legitimates.
Whatever else these views are, they are not politically neutral. But because the Times puts “safety” first, and thus sacrifices liberty on the altar of security, there is no room for criticism.
Consumer protection, monopoly, economic opportunity, enforcement of existing law, the Constitution — about these things, the Times is silent. So is Anthropic, which is no accident.
The two, the Times and Anthropic, would use export controls to stifle competition, not promote it. The two would restrict the sale of Nvidia chips to China. Never mind that China continues to buy these chips through intermediaries or on the gray market. Put aside, too, the fact that export controls only serve to goad China into subsidizing the manufacture of its own chips. Or that companies like DeepSeek and Huawei have their own chip ambitions.
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Chatham House similarly concludes that hardware export controls alone will not stop China’s advancements in AI. If the controls were effective, policymakers would not have to continually redraw them: banning this or that chip, policing third-country affiliates, responding to smuggling networks, only to authorize new sales anyway. The result is not a technological blockade but a prolonged game of whack-a-mole, which encourages China to be more self-reliant at our expense.
Consider, too, the expense of having the Bureau of Industry and Security involved in this issue in the first place.
Like most government agencies, BIS has a reputation for dysfunction, little productivity, and low morale. Perhaps the New York Times should do a series of stories on BIS instead. Or maybe the paper should stop printing nonsense about “AI safety,” as the term is a catchall for more regulation and higher prices.
A newspaper committed to rigorous journalism would interrogate the interests served by these narratives, confront the failures and contradictions embedded in them, and give serious attention to workers, consumers, civil liberties, democratic accountability, and America’s capacity to out-innovate its rivals.
Instead the Times too frequently amplifies the assumptions of the powerful leftist institutions and woke agendas it should be challenging.
Vice President JD Vance recently drew criticism for questioning the benefits of the dollar’s reserve currency status. In a 2023 interview, he argued that it encourages Americans to consume too much, describing it as a “resource curse.”
If you’ve followed Vance during his time in Congress, these comments are not particularly surprising. He has been one of the biggest proponents of rebalancing America’s relationship with the global economy through targeted industrial policy, much to the chagrin of the GOP establishment.
Sufficient industrial capacity gives a nation options in a crisis; dependence on foreign powers — especially China, our main adversary — is a path to decline and ruin.
Naturally, the response from Vance’s free-trade critics was immediate and severe. They argued that cheap imports increase consumers’ purchasing power, while an economy organized around offering high-value services is not necessarily a sign of economic weakness. In their eyes, what Vance proposed amounts to a command-and-control economy, snuffing out economic opportunity and raising prices at a time when families can least afford it.
Contrary to his critics, Vance had the right general diagnosis, even if his prescription risks creating problems of its own.
The dollar’s reserve-currency status means that every country on earth wants to hold dollars, mainly to facilitate international commerce and to buy Treasury bonds as a safe place to store its money. That demand keeps the dollar’s value higher than it would be otherwise. A stronger dollar, in turn, means cheaper imported goods for Americans, but it makes U.S.-made goods less competitive, both at home and abroad. This is one of the major reasons America stopped making so many things.
it’s also why Donald Trump’s long-standing emphasis on targeted tariffs and reindustrialization remains crucial today. An economy too dependent on foreign products can threaten national security and a country’s long-term health.
As demonstrated by the vehemence of Vance’s critics, the Trump administration’s economic refocus has elicited strong pushback. Libertarian dogma has dominated the Republican Party since the Reagan era, elevating consumer choice and being “free to choose” as the highest economic goods. The dominant theory before Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy was that greater economic freedom broadly spreads prosperity and raises living standards.
But that view captures only part of what an economy is supposed to accomplish. Economic freedom ultimately depends on the prudent use of national power. A nation that lacks the capacity to build ships, aircraft, energy infrastructure, and advanced technology — a nation that can easily have its supply chains interrupted, as we saw during COVID — cannot maintain freedom for itself or adequately protect its allies.
Sufficient industrial capacity gives a nation options in a crisis; dependence on foreign powers — especially China, our main adversary — is a path to decline and ruin.
History shows this to be the case.
For almost 200 years, Great Britain protected its shipping and textile industries before becoming one of the world’s leading advocates of free trade. It dropped its own tariffs in 1846 only after it became the most powerful industrial and naval power on earth. By then, British manufacturers were in a far stronger position to compete in an increasingly global market.
The United States followed the same path. In his "Report on Manufactures," Alexander Hamilton pushed the nation to industrialize rapidly rather than remain dependent on European powers for goods. Had the country followed Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a more agrarian-based economy, America would likely have become a vassal state of a far stronger country for the foreseeable future.
For nearly two centuries after the founding, tariffs were a key component of America’s industrial growth, alongside plentiful natural resources, geographic advantages, hemispheric hegemony, and a rapidly expanding population. Only after two world wars left American factories standing while much of the rest of the world lay in ruins did Washington establish the framework for a global free-market economy, backed by a military and an industrial base nobody else could match.
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Free trade became a key Cold War strategy. Lower trade barriers let the U.S. pull more nations into its orbit than the Soviet Union ever managed. But Washington paid a price, accepting a hit to its own industrial base to win the fight against communism.
A persistently strong dollar tends to make foreign goods cheaper for Americans to buy while making American exports more expensive for everyone else. Following that playbook for four decades, even after the Soviet Union’s defeat, led to exactly the economic problem that Trump and Vance now have to contend with: the decline of domestic manufacturing and the hollowing out of the American heartland. The result is a service-based economy heavily dependent on consumption, with a much-diminished industrial capacity and a working class that has borne the brunt of American economic statecraft.
The consequences are clear in shipbuilding, as the United States produces fewer than a dozen commercial ships a year while China turns out more than a thousand. China controls around 60% of the world’s shipbuilding market, with a total capacity more than 200 times ours.
China isn’t the second-most powerful country in the world because it practices free trade. It has rapidly developed industries that strengthen its national power while taking advantage of the United States’ determination that more open trade would encourage political liberalization in Beijing. China is a blatant currency manipulator, artificially lowering the price of its exports while maintaining state control over its economy. For these reasons, the Trump administration was right in principle to begin imposing tariffs on China to counter its blatant abuses while reinvigorating U.S. domestic manufacturing.
The United States must maintain demand for our $40 trillion in debt, and there is no reason to risk that demand drying up, forcing us to pay higher interest rates or, in the worst-case scenario, default.
But America should take the core of JD Vance’s prescription seriously. Invest deliberately in building real, finished goods again. Use targeted tariffs to encourage that rebuilding. And yes, let the dollar’s value come down some as a result.
Editor's note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.
Why would anyone cheer for a woman accused of killing her own children?
That’s the question on BlazeTV hosts Sara Gonzales' and Dave Landau’s minds as women across the country raise money for, post supportive TikToks of, and send letters to alleged child murderer Lindsay Clancy.
“Who cheers for an [alleged] child killer?” Dave asks.
“Like her lawyer said that she has gotten enough letters to support three bankers' boxes,” he continues. “So it’s basically like 'Miracle on 34th Street,' letters to a woman who [allegedly] murdered her children.”
“This is fan mail,” Gonzales agrees. “This is not like a sternly worded letter to the manager telling her how terrible of a person she is.”
And Dave wants to know why.
“Some [women] are like, ‘Well, it’s hormonal, you don’t understand how hard it is.’ And you know, you’re a woman, what is this supposed to mean?” Dave asks.
“What it means is that we now have a culture that hates motherhood,” Gonzales answers. “These women, they have been struck by the feminist bug, and they just hate motherhood because there really is no defense to this.”
And it’s not just the letters to Clancy that bother Dave and Gonzales.
“We are living in this sort of TikTok generation of people getting their advice on how to be mentally sound through a dopamine hit-app run by China,” Dave says.
“Seems like a bad idea,” Gonzales says. “Seems like a really bad idea ... I just think that TikTok has made especially white liberal women, I just think it’s made them just worse people. It’s brain rot."
“They get one there. They, you know, like think that it’s cool now to hate motherhood. So now you’ve got all of these TikTokers that are going on and throwing ice in bathtubs to control their rage that they have at their children so that they won’t get in a screaming match with their toddlers. I kid you not,” Gonzales says, referencing a recent trend of women who have been filming themselves trying not to freak out at their kids by throwing ice cubes.
“And I’m just like, what is happening to us?” she asks.
“The only reason why you would get into a screaming match with your toddler is because you were at the same mental level with your toddler,” Dave says.
But this issue doesn’t begin with the Lindsay Clancy case or even postpartum.
“When you say that it’s OK to kill innocent babies in the womb, and then you say it’s OK to kill innocent babies in the womb up until the point of birth,” Gonzales says, “can you really be surprised that you find yourself in a place in society where now women are like, ‘OK, but not just up to birth. What about the first couple years?’”
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The "global public square" known as X.com, and Twitter before that, has had a bot problem dating back at least a decade, maybe more. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that X’s Global Government Affairs team just uncovered a huge Chinese bot network packed with approximately 200,000 accounts, and they’re trying to influence the things you think and believe.
The official Global Government Affairs team on X sent out a post in late August detailing a shocking revelation. According to the team, “We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.”
Whoever leads the AI race can control the world, so it has to be us.
Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic in the United States, partially because America is home to the leading frontier models that serve as the basis for China’s mainstream AI platforms, and partially because there are still big debates happening over government regulations, model review processes, and data centers taking up local land and resources.
If X’s Global Government Affairs team is correct, though, some of these debates may not be completely legitimate. X found that at least 200 of the bot accounts have engaged users online to turn Americans against AI, but why?
Thinking critically, there are two sides to this story that explain what’s happening here.
For the bots, the Chinese government has a clear stake in convincing Americans to reject AI. If enough of the American people turn against LLMs and data centers, our leading AI developers will be forced to slow down and possibly even bring the breakneck pace of model development to a standstill. In doing so, competing Chinese developers will have a chance to continue to innovate, ultimately leapfrogging the United States as the new dominant figure in the AI race.
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Our latest models, like Anthropic’s Mythos, have already proven that they can detect digital vulnerabilities better than humans and break existing cybersecurity systems that have protected our data for ages. So far, this power has been nestled firmly in the hands of the good guys. Now imagine if this technology was wielded by a superpower that has long wanted to steal American intelligence, influence our political system, and reign as the premier world power. Even worse, we wouldn’t have any means to battle more sophisticated AI if our models were frozen in the past.
Whoever leads the AI race can control the world, so it has to be us.
From X’s perspective, the company also has a clear reason to shine a light on the Chinese bot farm. X is linked to SpaceXAI, the company behind Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok. Unlike the Chinese, who could benefit from convincing the American people that AI should be stopped, X has a lot to gain by doing the opposite. More data centers mean more computing power and faster development that will improve Grok’s capabilities and secure its position as a leading AI platform.
In retrospect, only a scant 0.1% of the discovered Chinese bot accounts were caught promoting anti-AI messages. That’s hardly worth mentioning, yet X’s Global Government Affairs team specifically highlighted AI as the main talking point in the post. What would be more interesting is what the other 99.9% of the bots had to say, especially since China recently interfered with U.S. elections. Unfortunately, we may never know.
We reached out to X for comment, but we did not receive a response before the deadline. We’ll add an update if anything changes.
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U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) announced Tuesday it destroyed five Iranian crude oil vessels in retaliation for targeting a U.S. Navy warship, but notably, four of the ships appear to have been sailing under the flags of random African and small island nations. “Iran has used the tankers as part of a multibillion-dollar shadow network that […]
Once again, Beijing seems to prioritize power and control over the well-being of its citizens.
There is zero link between the deadly flood and Trump. But Freedman nonetheless tries to find a way to link the stories.
The U.S. needs data centers, and right now Silicon Valley is making Americans hate them because they don't know how to speak to Americans.
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