Privacy in the digital age is more important than ever, and using a strong VPN can help keep your internet behavior safe from prying eyes. We write a lot about VPNs, and one provider has been making moves over the past two weeks to expand its global coverage. 

Proton VPN is the privacy tool in question, and the Swiss-based company’s network, which has the best free VPN option on the market, now spans roughly 20,000 servers across 145 countries — with new server locations in Lebanon, Nicaragua, Gabon, Papua New Guinea, Kyrgyzstan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo — making it the top provider on our best VPN list for worldwide coverage. 

VPNs, or virtual private networks, operate by masking your actual IP address with one from a remote server, allowing you to disguise your location and keep your internet activity secure.

There are a multitude of ways a VPN can enhance your experience, whether you’re looking to access streaming titles from another country or get around oppressive government firewalls that can block important information and communication pathways, and impede an open, uncensored internet.

Proton VPN now has the biggest global footprint out of all the VPNs CNET has tested. It has a vastly larger number of servers than NordVPN (9,300), and its reach exceeds NordVPN’s (135 countries), ExpressVPN’s (105 countries) and Surfshark’s (11 countries). 

There is one caveat in all of this expansion: Proton VPN doesn’t have a server presence in all 50 US states, unlike NordVPN. That said, it’s still an excellent choice for watching streaming TV shows and movies — especially if you’re traveling internationally.

A Proton VPN spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.

Popular gaming platform Roblox agreed to pay more than $12 million and implement new safety features as part of a settlement with the state of Nevada. This settlement comes amid several lawsuits accusing the company of an alleged lack of protection of children on the platform. 

The agreement resolves potential litigation over allegations that Roblox failed to adequately safeguard children while they played the online game, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said in a press release on Wednesday. 

As part of the deal, Roblox will spend $10 million over three years to encourage children to engage in non-digital activities, as well as institute age verification for all users. This will include “facial age estimation technology and government-issued ID for age assurance, and will use behavioral monitoring to identify users who may have been aged incorrectly,” according to the press release. 

“The injunctive relief that Roblox has agreed to will give parents the tools they need to protect their children on the platform; institute default protections to block predators from engaging with children; and ensure that messages involving minors are not encrypted,” Ford said in the press release.

Roblox also committed to spending $1 million over two years on a campaign to educate minors and adults about online safety and another $1.5 million to develop a law enforcement liaison position to work with state law enforcement agencies over concerns about the platform. 

Roblox Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman said it’s part of the company’s “work to establish a new standard for digital safety.”

“This resolution creates a blueprint for how industry and regulators can work together to protect the next generation of digital citizens,” Kaufman said Thursday. “We have no finish line when it comes to safety.”

Roblox is under significant legal pressure amid more than 140 lawsuits, according to Reuters. The suits, filed in 2025, allege the company knowingly created a gaming platform that allowed child predators to target minors. 

The company also faces lawsuits from state attorneys general in Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and Florida over similar accusations.

Age-based accounts coming soon

Two days before the settlement announcement, Roblox CEO and founder David Baszucki revealed new accounts for younger Roblox users.

Roblox Kids will be available for children between the ages of 5 and 8, and Roblox Select is for those ages 9 to 15. Roblox is reportedly used by nearly half of US children under 16. Children who are older than 16 will be in their own age group, simply called “Roblox.”

Kids and Select accounts would be available in those age groups as determined by Roblox’s age-check technology or by a verified parent.

Unmonitored chat in the game has been a point of criticism for the platform, as it allows predators to chat with children. Kids’ accounts will have chat turned off by default, with limited access to Minimal or Mild games as determined by the platform. Select accounts will have chat with safeguards and access to games with Moderate content, which is described by the platforms as having “moderate violence, light realistic blood, moderate crude humor, unplayable gambling content, and/or moderate fear.”

These new age-based accounts will roll out sometime in early June. 

A recent cosmological model combines two of the most eccentric ideas in contemporary physics to explain the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe. To understand it, it’s necessary to look beyond the Big Bang we all know and consider two concepts that rarely intersect: cyclic universes and primordial black holes.

A Different Kind of Multiverse

There are different versions of the “multiverse.” The most popular model—that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—proposes that there are as many universes as there are possibilities and that these versions of reality are parallel. Physics proposes something more sober and mathematically consistent: the cosmic bounce.

In this model, the universe is not born from a singularity, but expands, contracts, and expands again in an endless cycle. Each “universe” is not parallel, but sequential—that is, one arises from the ashes of the previous one.

Is it possible for something to survive the end of its universe and endure into the next? According to a paper published in Physical Review D, yes. Author Enrique Gaztanaga, a research professor at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, shows that any structure larger than about 90 meters could pass through the final collapse of a universe and survive the rebound. These “relics” would not only persist, but could also seed the formation of giant, unexplained structures observed in the early stages of the present-day universe. Moreover, they could be the key to understanding dark matter.

For decades, the dominant explanation for dark matter has been that it is an unknown particle or particles. But after years of experiments without direct detections, physicists have begun to explore alternatives. One of them proposes that dark matter is not an exotic particle, but an abundant population of small black holes that we overlook.

The idea is appealing, but it has a serious problem. For these black holes to explain dark matter, they would have to exist from the earliest moments of the universe, long before the first stars could collapse. There are indications that these objects could exist, but a convincing physical mechanism to explain their origin is lacking.

A Universe Born With Black Holes

This is where Gaztanaga’s newly proposed model shines. If cosmic bouncing allows compact structures to survive the collapse of the previous universe, then the current universe would have already been born with pre-existing black holes. They would not have to have been generated by extreme fluctuations or finely tuned inflationary processes, but would simply have been there from the first instant.

The assumption has the potential to solve two riddles at once: the origin of black holes and the nature of dark matter. If this model is correct, dark matter would not be a mystery of the early universe but rather a legacy of a cosmos that predates our own.

“Much work remains to be done,” Gaztanaga, also a researcher at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, said in an article for The Conversation. “These ideas must be tested against data—from gravitational-wave backgrounds to galaxy surveys and precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background.”

“But the possibility is profound,” he added. “The universe may not have begun once, but may have rebounded. And the dark structures shaping galaxies today could be relics from a time before the Big Bang.”

This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

More than 75,000 individuals using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) platforms for disruptive attacks have been warned through emails and letters during the latest phase of the Operation PowerOFF international law enforcement action.

The ongoing operation is supported by Europol and involves authorities in 21 countries. Coordinated efforts led to the arrest of four people, taking offline 53 domains, and issuing 25 search warrants.

“Leading up to the action week, a series of operational sprints took place, gathering experts from national authorities across the globe to carry out actions against high-value target users of DDoS-for-hire platforms and raise awareness about the illegality of these activities,” Europol says.

“During these sprints, the participating countries disrupted illegal booter services, dismantling the technical infrastructure that supports illegal DDoS.”

The operation has a global span, and includes multiple European Union countries as well as Australia, Thailand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Brazil.

“Booter services” are DDoS-for-hire platforms that allow users to pay for renting the firepower of DDoS swarms, typically consisting of compromised routers and IoTs, and directing it to their intended targets.

Some operators of these services attempt to hide their real goal by claiming they are used for legitimate stress testing, but lack verification of target ownership and hence are still used for illegal attacks.

The latest Operation PowerOFF action was built on previous phases that resulted in dismantling key infrastructure and seizing databases with more than 3 million criminal accounts.

Europol states that the operation is now entering its prevention phase, which includes launching awareness campaigns and disruption measures.

These involve placing search engine ads aimed at young people seeking DDoS tools, removing from search results more than 100 URLs that promote these illegal services, and adding on-chain warning messages tied to illicit payments.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

Claim Your Spot

A Call of Duty movie is still happening, but don’t hold your breath for it to hit screens any time soon. Today, the popular FPS’ social media revealed that the movie’s theatrical release date will be June 30, 2028.

A film adaptation of the game franchise was first revealed last year, and shortly after, we learned that Taylor Sheridan and Peter Berg would be serving as the producers. The duo, whose past credits include Friday Night Lights and Yellowstone, will also be co-writing the project under Berg’s direction. We still haven’t heard anything about the cast, or even what era of the long-running series will be depicted, so it seems like a safe bet that there’s still a ways to go before this wraps. But CoD is nothing if not a money-maker, so reimagining it as a summer blockbuster seems pretty expected.

In short: Roblox is upgrading its built-in AI assistant with agentic capabilities including a planning mode that analyses game code before proposing action plans, procedural 3D model generation, mesh generation, and self-correcting loops that test and refine outputs. The update also adds MCP client integration with third-party tools like Claude and Cursor, with a roadmap toward multi-agent parallel workflows in the cloud.

Roblox is upgrading its built-in AI assistant with agentic capabilities that let it plan, build, and test games rather than just answer questions about how to make them. The update adds a planning mode that analyses a game’s code and data model before proposing action plans, procedural model generation that creates editable 3D objects through prompts, and a self-correcting loop that lets the assistant test its own work and incorporate the results into future iterations.

The changes turn Roblox Assistant from a code-suggestion tool into something closer to a junior development partner: one that can examine an existing project, ask clarifying questions, propose an approach, execute it, test the results, and refine its work based on what it finds. For a platform whose 380 million monthly active users include a vast number of creators with limited programming experience, the implications are significant.

What the new tools do

Planning Mode transforms the assistant into a collaborative planner. Rather than responding to individual prompts with code snippets, it analyses a game’s existing codebase and data model, asks the developer clarifying questions about what they want to achieve, and translates the conversation into an editable action plan. The developer can review, modify, and approve the plan before the assistant begins implementation. It is the difference between asking an AI to write a function and asking it to design an approach to a problem.

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Procedural Models, coming soon, will let developers create 3D objects that are defined by code rather than static meshes. A developer can prompt the assistant to generate a bookcase and then adjust its attributes, the number of shelves, the height, the material, through parameters rather than manual modelling. The objects understand physical relationships: a staircase knows how its steps relate to its height, and a table knows that its legs support its surface. This is not generative art; it is parametric design driven by natural language.

Mesh Generation adds the ability to place fully textured 3D objects directly into a game world through prompts, building on Roblox’s Cube foundation model. The company introduced 4D generation in February 2026, powered by Cube, which adds an interactivity dimension to generated objects so they behave correctly in-game rather than sitting as static props. More than 160,000 objects were generated during early access, and Roblox says players using 4D generation showed a 64% increase in play time on average.

The agentic loop

The most consequential change is the self-correcting system. The assistant can now test different aspects of a game, identify problems, surface suggested solutions, and feed those results back into its planning process. This creates what Roblox describes as agentic loops: cycles of planning, execution, testing, and refinement that the AI performs with decreasing human intervention over time.

The roadmap extends this further. Roblox is working on enabling multiple AI agents to work together in parallel, running long and complex workflows in the cloud rather than within the constraints of a local Studio session. The company is also building integration with third-party tools, including Claude, Cursor, and Codex, and has added a built-in MCP client to Roblox Studio’s assistant, letting it connect to external AI services through the Model Context Protocol standard.

The long-term vision, which Roblox has been articulating since it open-sourced the Cube foundation model in March 2025, is that a developer should be able to describe a game in natural language and have AI generate the assets, environments, code, animations, and interactive behaviour to make it real. The agentic tools announced today are incremental steps toward that goal, but they represent a meaningful shift from AI as autocomplete to AI as collaborator.

The vibe-coding parallel

Roblox’s update arrives in the middle of a broader shift in how software is made. Vibe coding, the practice of describing what you want in natural language and letting AI generate the code, drove an 84% jump in App Store submissions earlier this year and prompted Apple to crack down on low-quality AI-generated apps. The same dynamic is playing out in game creation, where the barrier to building something playable is dropping rapidly.

For Roblox, this is both an opportunity and a quality problem. More creators making more games drives engagement on the platform, but only if those games are worth playing. The planning mode and self-correcting loops are, in part, a response to this tension: they are designed to produce better outputs than a single-shot prompt, guiding creators through a structured process rather than letting them generate and publish whatever the AI produces on the first try.

Third-party AI tools for Roblox game creation have already emerged, including Lemonade, SuperbulletAI, and BloxBot. By building agentic capabilities directly into Roblox Studio, the company is trying to ensure that the primary creation experience remains on its own platform rather than fragmenting across external tools that it does not control.

The business context

Roblox’s investment in AI creation tools is backed by strong commercial momentum. The company’s daily active users reached 144 million in Q4 2025, up from 85 million a year earlier. Monthly active users grew from 280 million to 380 million through the year. Full-year 2025 revenue was $4.9 billion, a 36% increase, with 2026 guidance projecting $6 to $6.2 billion. Total Robux purchases reached $6.79 billion in 2025.

These numbers matter because they determine how much Roblox can invest in AI infrastructure and how large the creator ecosystem is that benefits from better tools. A platform with 380 million monthly users and nearly $5 billion in revenue can afford to build foundation models, train agentic systems, and absorb the compute costs of running AI-assisted game creation at scale. Smaller platforms cannot, which means AI creation tools become a competitive moat rather than just a feature.

The Roblox Developers Conference, scheduled for September in San Jose, will likely showcase the next stage of this roadmap. For now, the agentic assistant update positions Roblox as one of the first major platforms to move beyond AI-assisted coding into AI-assisted product development, where the AI does not just write code but plans, builds, tests, and improves what it creates. Whether that produces better games or just more of them is the question that the next year of Roblox development will answer.

Elizabeta Gjorgievska Joshevski’s career spans multiple continents and leadership roles, yet her current focus reflects a consistent theme: understanding how technology translates into business outcomes. As founder and CEO of EverCognitive, she brings that perspective into an AI landscape where many organizations are still defining their AI transformation and how to apply it in practical ways. 

Originally from North Macedonia, Elizabeta began her career in programming and technology education, where she developed both technical expertise and early leadership experience. According to her, those early roles were shaped by building relationships and expanding capabilities, which eventually connected her to global technology ecosystems. That period, she explains, formed her understanding of how organizations adopt technology beyond theory and into real operations.

Her move into Cisco marked a turning point, opening the door to a global career spanning 19 years that would take her from the Balkans to Vienna and later to Dubai to lead multicultural EMEA teams. From her perspective, progression came through exposure to different markets and business challenges rather than a predefined trajectory. She notes that working across regions required constant adaptation, particularly in aligning customer needs with evolving technology strategies.

In Vienna, she led telecom operations across Eastern Europe, managing teams that combined sales leadership with technical execution. She frames this phase as one that demanded both operational discipline and strategic clarity. Elizabeta promotes Servant Leadership principles as a way to elevate the team to connect effectively with C-suite executives. This is what guided her to lead global teams to deliver exceptional results.

Her relocation to Dubai reflected a deliberate choice. Elizabeta explains that Dubai offered a setting where opportunity is closely tied to capability, creating space to continue building her leadership profile. She notes that the region’s pace of development and openness to innovation shaped how she approached large-scale initiatives and organizational transformation.

Over time, her roles expanded to include overseeing enterprise-level operations across EMEA, where she was responsible for a business portfolio. She explains that this level of responsibility requires coordination across global teams and alignment with product and strategy functions. According to Elizabeta, the experience provided her the opportunity to shape the decisions made on a corporate level to accelerate growth across the regions while managing execution complexity at scale.

A gradual shift in perspective began during a leadership program at Harvard between 2013 and 2014. Elizabeta explains this period as a moment of reflection, when she evaluated her career and experiences both professionally and personally, which planted the seed of her next chapter. “I knew my next challenge would be to take all of my experience and the immense knowledge I gained from my time at Harvard to build my own company,” she says. 

That idea remained in the background and started to grow as artificial intelligence became the front and center of every technology conversation. She explains that this was the catalyst for her stepping away from the corporate world. It was during this time that allowed her to focus on understanding Generative AI more deeply, including completing a program at MIT in 2024 and studying how organizations could apply AI to their ongoing digital transformations. According to Elizabeta, she recognized the gap between the rapid development of AI tools and the market readiness of implementing AI, which is where she saw her opportunity. 

She states, “The starting point should always be the business outcome, to understand the client and how their AI ambition can convert into operational reality and growth.”

EverCognitive was built around that principle. The company operates as an AI transformation firm that works with organizations to assess organizational health, perform AI readiness audits, and build and select AI solutions to map out the client’s business outcomes. Elizabeta explains that this includes executive advisory, organizational assessments, and frameworks designed to implement architecture that operators can execute.

Her approach reflects her experience working within large organizations. She notes that decisions around technology are often shaped by leadership alignment, organizational structure, and operational priorities. From her perspective, this is where many companies require guidance when approaching AI.

“I have spent years working with the companies that are now trying to leverage AI,” Elizabeta explains. “My deep understanding of the digital transformation journeys different vertical markets went through gives me the leverage to be able to accelerate their AI transformation with confidence and tangible business outcomes.”

Today, EverCognitive is engaging with organizations on AI leadership and strategy, focusing on translating technological potential into measurable outcomes. For Elizabeta, the emphasis remains on applying experience to a space that is still developing.

Elizabeta maintains that while AI will continue to evolve, the ability to guide its application will remain essential. Technology will continue to advance, but the way it is applied within organizations will determine its real impact over time. 

She states, “The question is not if but when. And in the age of the AI revolution, those who adopt quickly and wisely won’t just survive; they will win.” 

Bluesky is once again having a wobble. The platform said some of its systems are down and that it’s “investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos” (that’s Bluesky’s typo, not mine). The issue appears to have started at 1:42AM ET and was still persisting as of 11AM when this story was originally published. Since then, the site has been experiencing intermitent interuptions, including at times to its status page where users should be able to monitor outages.

At 7:47PM ET, the platform explained that it’s been attempting to mitigate “a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which intensified throughout the day.” It said the attack had caused interruptions to users’ feeds, notifications, threads and search, all of which the Engadget team experienced first-hand at various points through the day. While DDoS attacks are frequently used as virtual smokescreens for hacks, Bluesky says it has “not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private user data.” The social media service had another brief outage earlier this month.

The outage is ongoing, but due to its intermittent nature it’s more of a rolling blackout than a power outage. Bluesky says it will provide another update on the situation by 1PM ET on April 17.

Update, April 16, 8PM ET: This story was updated after publish with an of the outage from Bluesky.