Tech
How to read a TV spec sheet without being upsold
The panel and its processing decide how a television looks in your living room. Most of the numbers printed on the box are there to justify a higher price.
Best VPN services
Ownership, jurisdiction, audited no-logs claims and measured speed loss — privacy claims checked, not repeated.
Research in progressPublished rankings appear only after testing is complete.
When you buy through links on THRYV we may earn a commission. This never affects our testing or rankings. How this works.
Our picks
Nothing published until testing is finished.
VPN marketing is unusually detached from what a VPN does. We treat the privacy claim as the primary specification: who owns the provider, which jurisdiction it answers to, whether the no-logs policy has been independently audited, and what the audit actually covered. Speed is measured second, on a fixed route set.
No picks published yet
This guide is in the research stage. We will not list a "best" product before the testing round behind it is complete — an unranked page is more useful than a ranked guess. When picks go live, each one will state what we tested, how long for, what it is good at, and who should buy something else instead.
What we score, and why
Written down before any product is considered.
- Corporate ownership and operating jurisdiction
- Independent audit scope, date and publisher
- Logging policy read against the privacy policy, not the homepage
- Measured throughput loss across several regions
- Leak testing: DNS, IPv6 and kill-switch behaviour
- Renewal pricing rather than first-term promotional price
How we will decide
- 01
Criteria before candidates
We write down what would make a product the right pick — and how each criterion is measured — before we look at what is on sale.
- 02
Documented specifications only
Anything we state about a product comes from our own testing or from the manufacturer's published documentation, linked on the page.
- 03
Real-world testing
Where a category can be tested, we test it over weeks rather than an unboxing session, and we publish the conditions we tested under.
- 04
Pricing checked, not quoted
We do not print a price we have not verified, and we do not treat an RRP as evidence of a discount.
- 05
Commercial relationships disclosed
Affiliate links, if present, are labelled on the page. No partner can buy a placement, a rank or a verdict.
The full process is documented in our review methodology and testing process.
Related Tech coverage
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How to judge a laptop spec sheet without being sold to
Four numbers decide how a machine feels after a year. Most of the others exist to differentiate models that are otherwise identical.
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