TCL’s new LCD panel could push gaming monitors to 1000Hz
120 hertz? Kid’s stuff. 240? Barely competent. eSports players won’t take a second, super-fast glance at a new gaming monitor unless it’s 300hz, preferably 500hz and worth a mortgage payment. But a new TCL panel might just blow every gaming monitor on the market out of the water. At the Display Week conference, the company showed off a 1000Hz LCD for the first time.
Details on the new display tech are sparse. The 4K panel was spotted on the show floor by Blur Busters and posted to their X profile. (Someone on Twitter got really mad at me for calling it Twitter the other day. Sorry, Twitter user). According to the writeup, this is indeed an LCD panel and seeing it debut at such a high resolution is a bit of a shocker — typically these super-speedy panels start at 1080p before expanding to higher resolutions.
Since this is a trade show display and presumably prototype hardware, there’s no telling how long it’ll take to actually make it into production LCD panels seen in TCL monitors and elsewhere. And I suppose it’s just as well — currently there are no graphics cards on the market that can actually output a 1000Hz, 4K video signal. The newest and most powerful GPUs use HDMI 2.1a and DisplayPort 2.1, which might just have the technical bandwidth to hit that using compression, but probably require a bit of tweaking in order to make it happen.
And, of course, you’d need a GPU and a gaming PC actually capable of rendering 1000 frames per second in a game to make that practical. You can do it in DOOM or Team Fortress, but getting 1K FPS in something people are actually playing competitively would be a struggle for any machine.
As Blur Busters points out, OLED tech is rapidly catching up with LCDs in terms of speed. They’re expected to hit the market in 1000Hz capacities sometime in 2027.
Monitors 
© 2024 PC World 3:25am  
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DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro review: A simple, but effective privacy bundle
At a glanceExpert's Rating
ProsVPN works with streamingData removal service is faster than advertisedFrom a trustworthy privacy-focused companyConsVPN is very simple and bare-bonesPaying for an identity theft service you may never useOur VerdictDuckDuckGo’s PrivacyPro service is a decent privacy-focused bundle option. The VPN is admittedly rather bare-bones, but with promises to improve in the future. The data removal service is handy and works quickly as well. Fans of DuckDuckGo’s mission will see good value here, but those who don’t use the browser are better suited looking for alternatives.
Unlike rivals such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing search engine, DuckDuckGo unquestionably puts privacy first. Its popular search engine is based on user privacy, forgoing ad-trackers and never logging search history.
Recently, DuckDuckGo released an additional service called PrivacyPro to add to its growing collection of privacy-focused features. Consisting of a VPN, personal information removal tool, and identity theft restoration service, PrivacyPro hopes to offer a comprehensive set of privacy protections in one convenient bundle.
Is the PrivacyPro subscription bundle worth it? I took the new service for a spin to find out.
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro in brief:
Device connections: 5 simultaneous connections
Business location: Pennsylvania, USA
Number of servers: 13
Number of country locations: 7
Cost: About $9.99 per month, or $100 for one year
Further reading: See our roundup of the best VPNs to learn about competing products.
What are DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s features & services?
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro offers three services in one: a browser-based VPN, personal-data removal tool, and identity-theft restoration service. For the purposes of this review, I’ll mainly be focusing on the VPN and personal-data removal service.
Fortunately I was not a victim of identity theft while testing this service so I can’t personally speak to the effectiveness of the identity-theft restoration service. However, for this service DuckDuckGo has partnered with Iris — a leading identity-theft protection company. It offers 24/7 advisor support assistance.
For what it’s worth, the advisors promise to repair your credit after fraudulent activity, replace important documents, fix fraudulent medical claims, provide some travel assistance if you’re out of the country, and cover certain out-of-pocket expenses. Hopefully you never have to use it, but the service is included should you need it.
As for the VPN, compared to other standalone services such as ExpressVPN or NordVPN, it’s pretty spartan. Part of this can be attributed to the newness of the service, and part to the fact that it’s only browser-based and not a standalone application — it’s only available with the DuckDuckGo browser.
When you open up a new DuckDuckGo browser, you’ll see a globe icon with a lock in the upper right-hand corner — this is the VPN. If the lock is unlocked it means you’re not currently connected and it locks itself when you connect.
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s brower-based VPN can be accessed in the upper right-hand corner of the DuckDuckGo browser.
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s brower-based VPN can be accessed in the upper right-hand corner of the DuckDuckGo browser. Sam Singleton
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s brower-based VPN can be accessed in the upper right-hand corner of the DuckDuckGo browser. Sam Singleton
Sam Singleton
Clicking on this icon opens up a very small pop-out window with a toggle to connect to the VPN. If you turn on the toggle, it will automatically connect to the nearest available server.
Once connected, this window will display the connection time of your current connection, the location of the server you’re connected to, and the server’s IP address. You can either click on the location here or navigate to VPN Settings at the bottom of the window to change the server location.
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro VPN’s server list provides seven countries to choose from.
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro VPN’s server list provides seven countries to choose from.
Sam Singleton
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro VPN’s server list provides seven countries to choose from.
Sam Singleton
Sam Singleton
DuckDuckGo’s VPN currently offers 13 servers spread across seven countries, with the majority — seven — located in the U.S. Other country locations include Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK.
There are no real settings to speak of with the VPN. It’s not advertised, but the VPN comes with a built-in kill-switch feature, which worked well in my testing, blocking traffic when I manually forced a disconnection.
While not offered to Windows users, there is an additional split-tunneling feature available for Android. This allows you to pick and choose which apps run through the VPN and is a great way to optimize privacy for apps that need it while keeping others, such as games, from having their speed throttled by a VPN.
That’s about all there is to the VPN. There are no options for multi-hop, no fancy obfuscated servers, nor Onion-over-VPN connections — all things you’re apt to see with privacy-focused VPNs. I’ll try not to judge too harshly here as DuckDuckGo just released this VPN and to their credit, they are up-front about the improvements they hope to make in the future.
How is DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s Information Removal tool?
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s personal data removal service will search popular data broker websites for your info.
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s personal data removal service will search popular data broker websites for your info.
Sam Singleton
DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s personal data removal service will search popular data broker websites for your info.
Sam Singleton
Sam Singleton
DuckDuckGo acquired Removaly in 2022 to help them build their own in-house data removal service. It essentially scrapes a bunch of data broker websites for your personal information and then when found, sends requests to these sites to remove your records.
Even after the initial scan, the service will continually perform this function every so often to make sure no new records have been added.
The service is extremely straightforward. You initially tell DuckDuckGo your personal information such as names, pseudonyms and aliases, addresses, and year of birth. The service then quickly gets to work scanning websites — 53 sites in my case.
As it finds records of your personal data, it lists them so you can see what data each broker site has. After the scan, DuckDuckGo will send data-removal requests to all of the identified sites.
After identifying your info on data broker sites, DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s personal data removal service will then send removal requests.
After identifying your info on data broker sites, DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s personal data removal service will then send removal requests.
Sam Singleton
After identifying your info on data broker sites, DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s personal data removal service will then send removal requests.
Sam Singleton
Sam Singleton
You can keep tabs on the progress of any ongoing removals in the personal dashboard within the DuckDuckGo browser. They warn you that data removals can take “around 2-3 weeks to complete,” but I found the majority of mine were removed within the first week of testing.
These types of data removal services are popping up all over the place in recent years, with Surfshark’s Incogni and Mozilla’s Monitor Plus being a couple that come to mind.
Data brokers are still a rather unknown, but shady industry that makes tons of money off freely selling private user data online. Not only is it nice to see DuckDuckGo offering this type of removal service, but including it in an affordable bundle deal makes it even more appealing.
The inclusion of the data-removal service and identity-theft restoration make DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro worth the price.
How much does DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro cost?
The entire DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro bundle is offered either through a monthly subscription or a longer-term yearly subscription service.
The monthly subscription is $9.99 per month, and the yearly subscription is a one-time charge of $99.99.
If it was just the VPN we were talking about, I’d say that the service isn’t worth it. The VPN is still too much in its infancy to justify outlaying that kind of money when you could get so much more with other VPNs.
However, the inclusion of the data-removal service and identity-theft restoration make this worth the price. Individual subscriptions elsewhere can set you back the same price for each of these services — meaning you’d likely pay two or three times the price of PrivacyPro for the same features from a competitor.
How is DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s VPN performance?
When testing a VPN’s performance I typically measure connection speeds across its servers in six different countries around the world and then compare them to my baseline internet speed. Since DuckDuckGo’s VPN has so few servers, I just decided to test them in every country offered to get an average.
During the tests, DuckDuckGo’s VPN was able to manage 34 percent of the base download speed and a rather pedestrian 25 percent of the base upload speed. Those numbers aren’t terrible, but they put it well off the pace of the fastest VPNs I’ve tested.
Accessing geo-restricted streaming content is another crucial feature that you want to have with a VPN. So how does DuckDuckGo’s VPN work with notoriously tough services such as Netflix? Good, but not great. Most of the servers I tested were able to access Netflix successfully. Unfortunately, access with U.S. servers was a hit-or-miss and sometimes I ran into speed issues.
Overall though, I’d say DuckDuckGo is a decent choice of VPN to unblock Netflix and other streaming services. The caveat being that you might need to test a few different servers in the U.S. before you find one that works.
How is DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro’s VPN security & privacy?
DuckDuckGo’s VPN provides the secure WireGuard protocol.
DuckDuckGo’s VPN provides the secure WireGuard protocol.
Sam Singleton
DuckDuckGo’s VPN provides the secure WireGuard protocol.
Sam Singleton
Sam Singleton
The DuckDuckGo VPN only offers the WireGuard protocol currently. I don’t really have an issue with this though. WireGuard is one of the fastest and most secure VPN protocols and it’s open source, meaning it’s reliable and trustworthy.
DuckDuckGo states, “We don’t keep logs of your VPN activity. We have no way to tie what you do while connected to the DuckDuckGo VPN to you as an individual. For example, we don’t have any record of website visits, DNS requests, IP addresses connected, or session lengths.”
It does keep anonymous performance metrics such as CPU load and errors, but they assure you that nothing is connected to an individual user.
The company only uses dedicated VPN servers, meaning they aren’t shared with anyone else. The servers are rented from hosting providers and DuckDuckGo makes sure to point out they are kept separate from the servers used for search infrastructure.
The VPN currently has not undergone any independent audits to verify these no-logs claims, but that’s to be expected as the service is so new. Still, it’s something that I believe is very important to solidify user trust in a VPN provider and I hope it’s carried out in the near future.
DuckDuckGo is headquartered in Pennsylvania, U.S.A., which means that it falls within the jurisdiction of the Five Eyes data sharing alliance. It’s probably unlikely to matter much to the average user, but privacy-conscious users should take this into consideration before subscribing to its PrivacyPro service.
Is DuckDuckGo PrivacyPro worth it?
DuckDuckGo’s PrivacyPro provides a basic, but reliable VPN, a helpful data-removal service, and a life-saving-if-you-need-it identity-theft restoration service. Whether or not you think the subscription cost is worth it will depend almost entirely on if you are a DuckDuckGo browser devotee or not.
The VPN is good, but as a standalone service it isn’t robust enough to justify the expense. However, its easy integration into the DuckDuckGo environment and the addition of the other two services make this a convenient choice for those already using the browser. If you prefer a different browser, or just can’t be bothered to switch, then you’re best sticking with another, more powerful VPN.
Editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.
VPN
© 2024 PC World 2:45am 
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Save $480 on EcoFlow’s portable power station and solar panels
If you’re looking for an eco-friendly power solution for your summer adventures, we found a great discount just for you. The EcoFlow Delta 2 Portable Power Station, paired with two 100W solar panels, is now available for just $819, down from $1,299.
The EcoFlow Delta 2 boasts a 1024Wh capacity and delivers an 1800W output (with a surge of up to 2700W), making it perfect for outdoor enthusiasts. Whether camping, traveling in an RV, or enjoying a weekend getaway, this portable power station can charge up to 15 devices simultaneously.
With its remarkable solar efficiency, boasting a 23 percent conversion rate, the Delta 2 allows you to recharge the unit in just 5.1 hours using the two included solar panels. Simply place them in the sun and you’ll have a full battery by the time you’re done with your daily trail through the forest, making your outdoor adventures more convenient.
Investing in the Delta 2 is a smart choice, as it features LFP batteries with a life cycle of about 3,000 charges. This means you can rely on its service for years, making it a durable and cost-effective power solution for your outdoor activities.
One of the coolest things about the Delta 2 is its ability to power nearly any appliance. With an output comparable to traditional outdoor generators, this solar-powered generator can easily handle 90 percent of your appliances, including a small fridge or some cooking gear.
The trips you have planned off the beaten path this summer will definitely take on new dimensions when you bring the EcoFlow Delta 2 portable power station. Before adding this one to the cart, remember to use the $480 coupon on the front page to get the best price.
Save $480 on a Delta 2 portable power station and two solar panels at Amazon
Power
© 2024 PC World 3:05am 
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