As local governments adopt new technologies that automate many aspects of city services, there is an increased likelihood of tension between the ethics and expectations of citizens and the behavior of these “smart city” tools. Researchers are proposing an approach that will allow policymakers and technology developers to better align the values programmed into smart city technologies with the ethics of the people who will be interacting with them.

“Our work here lays out a blueprint for how we can both establish what an AI-driven technology’s values should be and actually program those values into the relevant AI systems,” says Veljko Dubljević, corresponding author of a paper on the work and Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University.

At issue are smart cities, a catch-all term that covers a variety of technological and administrative practices that have emerged in cities in recent decades. Examples include automated technologies that dispatch law enforcement when they detect possible gunfire, or technologies that use automated sensors to monitor pedestrian and auto traffic to control everything from street lights to traffic signals.

“These technologies can pose significant ethical questions,” says Dubljević, who is part of the Science, Technology & Society program at NC State.

“For example, if AI technology presumes it detected a gunshot and sends a SWAT team to a place of business, but the noise was actually something else, is that reasonable?” Dubljević asks. “Who decides to what extent people should be tracked or surveilled by smart city technologies? Which behaviors should mark someone out as an individual who should be under escalated surveillance?

“These are reasonable questions, and at the moment there is no agreed-upon procedure for answering them. And there is definitely not a clear procedure for how we should train AI to answer these questions.”

To address this challenge, the researchers looked to something called the Agent Deed Consequence (ADC) model. The ADC model holds that people take three things into account when making a moral judgment: the agent, which is the character or intent of the person who is doing something; the deed, or what is being done; and the consequence, or the outcome that results from the deed.

In their paper now published in Algorithms, the researchers demonstrate that the ADC model can be used to not only capture how humans make value judgments and ethical decisions, but can do so in a way that can be programmed into an AI system. This is possible because the ADC model uses deontic logic, which is a type of imperative logic.

“It allows us to capture not only what is true, but what should be done,” says Daniel Shussett, first author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at NC State. “This is important because it drives action, and can be used by an AI system to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate orders or requests.”

“For example, if an AI system is tasked with managing traffic and an ambulance with flashing emergency lights approaches a traffic light, this may be a signal to the AI that the ambulance should have priority and alter traffic signals to help its travel quickly,” says Dubljević. “That would be a legitimate request. But if a random vehicle puts flashing lights on its roof in an attempt to get through traffic more quickly, that would be an illegitimate request and the AI should not give them a green light.

“With humans, it is possible to explain things in a way where people learn what should and shouldn’t be done, but that doesn’t work with computers. Instead, you have to be able to create a mathematical formula that represents the chain of reasoning. The ADC model allows us to create that formula.”

“These emerging smart city technologies are being adopted around the world, and the work we’ve done here suggests the ADC model can be used to address the full scope of ethical questions these technologies pose,” says Shussett. “The next step is to test a variety of scenarios across multiple technologies in simulations to ensure the model works in a consistent, predictable way. If it passes those tests, it would be ready for testing in real-world settings.”

VPNs, Compared

Other VPNs We’ve Tested

EventVPN is the new hotness in the VPN world. It’s a free, ad-supported VPN that comes from ExpressVPN. Ads and VPNs don’t really mix, but EventVPN says it’s able to offer a free service via Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), basically allowing it to serve ads without harvesting your personal data. The problem is the pervasiveness of ads. A banner lives at the top of the app at all times, and you’ll need to sit through a 30-second ad each time you connect or disconnect; a big problem when some servers posted unreasonably slow speeds. I’ll admit that EventVPN is a unique concept, but I see nothing about it that’s better than ProtonVPN or Windscribe for a free VPN service. And when it comes to the inconvenience of sitting through ads, it’s straight-up worse.

Private Internet Access (PIA) has a long history in the VPN space, and it’s maintained a track record of defending user privacy—even in the face of actual criminal activity. In 2016, a criminal complaint was filed in Florida against Preston Alexander McWaters for threats made online. McWaters was eventually convicted and sentenced to 42 months in prison. Investigators traced the online threats back to PIA’s servers and subpoenaed the company. As the complaint reads, “A subpoena was sent to [Private Internet Access] and the only information they could provide is that the cluster of IP addresses being used was from the east coast of the United States.” McWaters engaged in several other identifying activities, according to the complaint, but PIA wasn’t among them. Despite such a clear view of a VPN provider upholding its no-logging policy, PIA didn’t impress me during my tests. It’s slightly more expensive than a lot of our top picks, and it delivered the worst speeds out of any VPN I tested, with more than a 50 percent drop on the closest US server. (Windscribe, for context, only dropped 15.6 percent of my speed.)

MysteriumVPN is the go-to dVPN, or decentralized VPN, as far as I can tell. The concept of a decentralized VPN has existed for a while, but it’s really gained traction over the last couple of years. The idea is to have a network of residential IP addresses that make up the network, routing your traffic through normal IP addresses to get around the increasingly common block lists for VPN servers. Mysterium accomplishes this network with MystNodes. It’s a crypto node. People buy the node to earn crypto, and they’re put into the Mysterium network. It’s not inherently bad, but routing your traffic through a single residential IP is a little worrisome. Even without the decentralized kick, Mysterium was slow, and it doesn’t maintain any sort of privacy materials, be it a third-party audit, warranty canary, or transparency report.

PrivadoVPN is one of the popular options to recommend as a free VPN. It offers a decent free service, with a handful of full-speed servers and 10 GB of data per month. You’ll have to suffer through four—yes, four—redirects begging you to pay for a subscription before signing up, but the free plan works. The problem is how new PrivadoVPN is. There’s no transparency report or audit available, and although the speeds are decent, they aren’t as good as Proton, Windscribe, or Surfshark. PrivadoVPN isn’t bad, but it’s hard to recommend when Proton and Windscribe exist with free plans that are equally as good.

VPNs to Avoid

You’ll find dozens of free VPNs all claiming to protect your privacy. Most of them don’t. There are plenty of VPNs I don’t recommend, but these are a few I’ve tested worth mentioning.

Hola is an infamous name in the VPN industry, but it’s been close to a decade since its very public debacle. Hola is free, and it’s able to stay free because it uses a peer-to-peer network. Hola also owns Bright Data (formerly Luminati), which is a data collection company. In 2015, Hola sold access to the network of its free users (via Luminati), which was used in a distributed denial-of-service attack on 8chan. It’s been a decade since that incident, but Hola still operates in a similar way. If you don’t pay, you could be used as an exit node in Bright Data’s network, and the privacy policy makes it clear that Hola logs data about your usage, including your IP address, the pages you visit, and timestamps.

X-VPN is available on desktop, but it primarily shows up in results on the Apple App Store and Google Play, targeting mobile users with a free offering. X-VPN hasn’t done anything explicitly wrong like Hola, but it has way too many inconsistencies to recommend. For starters, it uses a proprietary VPN protocol, which it obfuscates within the app. Proprietary protocols like NordVPN’s NordLynx and ExpressVPN’s Lightway are based on existing, open source protocols. Further, X-VPN was highlighted in a Tech Transparency Project report about free VPNs with links to the Chinese government; X-VPN is based in Hong Kong. There’s no smoking gun with X-VPN, but there doesn’t need to be. The speeds aren’t the best, the app lacks basic features like split tunneling, and the pricing for a paid plan is in line with top providers.

How We Test VPNs

Functionally, a VPN should do two things: keep your internet speed reasonably fast, and actually protect your browsing data. That’s where I focused my testing. Extra features, a comfy UI, and customization settings are great, but they don’t matter if the core service is broken.

Speed testing requires spot-checking, as the time of day, the network you’re connected to, and the specific VPN server you’re using can all influence speeds. Because of that, I always set a baseline speed on my unprotected connection directly before recording results, and I ran the test three times across both US and UK servers. With those baseline drops, I spot-checked at different times of the day over the course of a week to see if the speed decrease was similar.

Security is a bit more involved. For starters, I checked for DNS, WebRTC, and IP leaks every time I connected to a server using Browser Leaks. I also ran brief tests sniffing my connection with Wireshark to ensure all of the packets being sent were secured with the VPN protocol in use.

On the privacy front, the top-recommended services included on this list have been independently audited, and they all maintain some sort of transparency report. In most cases, there’s a proper report, but in others, such as Windscribe, that transparency is exposed through legal proceedings.

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One of the founding directors of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure provider Nscale has exited the company, in the wake of it securing $1.1bn in Series B funding, Computer Weekly has learned.  

According to a Companies House filing dated 8 October 2025, Nathan Townsend has stepped down as a director of Nscale, which he co-founded with company CEO Josh Payne in May 2024.

The company was created through a spin-off from cryptocurrency mining and renewably powered infrastructure provider Arkon Energy, which Townsend originally founded with Payne. It is unclear if Arkon Energy still exists, as the company’s website is no longer accessible on the internet, but Townsend’s LinkedIn Page states that he remains the company’s chief operating officer.  

Companies House also confirmed that another director, investment banker Barry Kupferberg, departed the company on 8 October 2025.

Meanwhile, the names of two other directors have now been added to the company’s roster, according to Companies House, including Øyvind Eriksen, who is the president and CEO of Aker ASA, the Norwegian industrial investment company that led Nscale’s recent funding round.

In a statement to Computer Weekly, a spokesperson for Nscale said the recent reshuffle of the company’s board of directors is connected to the Series B funding the company closed in late September 2025. As reported by Computer Weekly at the time, Nscale claimed the $1.1bn investment it received through its Series B funding round is the largest ever secured in the UK and Europe.

“In connection with this closing, Nscale implemented some governance changes, including modifications in the directors appointed to the board,” a company spokesperson told Computer Weekly. “We believe our new board composition will set the group up for success as Nscale continues to grow.”

Within days of the company switching up its board of directors, it announced – on 15 October 2025 – that it had signed an “expanded deal” with software giant Microsoft to supply 200,000 NVIDIA GB300 graphics processing units (GPUs) to stand-up hyperscale AI infrastructures across Europe and the US.

This is in addition to another deal announced in September 2025 that committed the two companies to work together to create the UK’s largest AI supercomputer at Nscale’s site in Loughton, Essex, which will also play host to Microsoft Azure services.

The delivery of the October 2025 deal, billed by Nscale as one of the largest AI infrastructure contracts ever signed, will be done in collaboration with Dell Technologies, the company confirmed.

“This agreement confirms Nscale’s place as a partner of choice for the world’s most important technology leaders,” said Payne in a statement announcing the deal. “Few companies are equipped to deliver GPU deployments at this scale, but we have the experience and have built the global pipeline to do so.

“The pace with which we have expanded our capacity demonstrates both our readiness and our commitment to efficiency, sustainability and providing our customers with the most advanced technology available. It’s a clear signal that Nscale is setting a new standard for how the next wave of AI infrastructure will be delivered.”