Month: December 2019

Enlarge / A Ring camera doorbell. (credit: Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images)

Amazon's aggressive push to grow its surveillance-camera company Ring is working, and adoption has skyrocketed in the past two years thanks to deals with hundreds of police departments. A new set of reports highlights the ways Amazon convinces police to join those partnerships—and the amount of data that users can inadvertently reveal.

Integral to the Ring system is an app called Neighbors, kind of like an over-eager NextDoor with everything except the crime stripped out. Neighbors generates a map of your local area, based on your address, and then populates it with crime reports. Those reports include comments from other Neighbors users, as well as reports of burglaries, vehicle break-ins or theft, shots fired or shootings, stabbings, hostages taken, and arson imported from real-time 911 dispatcher data.

Anyone can install the app and create an account, but owners of Ring devices can also upload video snippets to the service, either when they have something they want to share or when police request it using the companion portal for law enforcement. Gizmodo this week published a new report delving into video data available on Neighbors to identify precisely how many Ring cameras are deployed, and where.

Enlarge / The 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

As has become a custom, Apple has simultaneously released software updates for nearly its entire suite of consumer products today—including iOS 13.3, iPadOS 13.3, macOS Catalina 10.15.2, watchOS 6.1.1, tvOS 13.3—and an update for HomePods. All updates should be available to all users by the end of the day.

iOS 13.3 and iPadOS 13.3 together make for arguably the most notable update. They introduce yet another feature that was originally pitched by Apple as part of iOS 13 but delayed before that annual update's release this September: Communication Limits in ScreenTime. Parents can now whitelist contacts for their kids' accounts, which allows them to block their kids from communicating with anyone outside the list on Apple-made apps like Messages and FaceTime, with exceptions for emergency calls and services like 911.

These two updates also introduce new layouts for certain publications in Apple News+, adds a new interface for liking or disliking stories in News, and expands on the news options and coverage in the Stocks app.

Enlarge / A child received a vaccination against influenza A (H1N1). (credit: Getty | BSIP)

The 2019-2020 flu season is up and running—and so far, it's off to a weird start.

Flu activity has been elevated since the start of November and is only expected to continue climbing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports in its latest flu update. That's a few weeks earlier than in past years.

Flu season in the United States can ramp up in the fall and peak anywhere between December and March, then drag itself out as late as May. In the last 36 years, flu most often ramped up in December and January and peaked in February. But for this winter, the CDC says there's a 40 percent chance the flu will peak in December based on activity so far.

Enlarge / A DirecTV satellite dish seen outside a bar in Portland, Oregon in October 2019. (credit: Getty Images | hapabapa)

AT&T announced another round of DirecTV and U-verse TV price increases, saying that monthly rates will rise by up to $8 per month starting on January 19. "Because our programming costs went up, we have to raise our monthly prices for select packages," AT&T said in a notice titled "TV price changes for 2020." An additional $2 increase on the Regional Sports Network fee means that some customers will pay another $10 per month.

The $8-per-month increase will apply to the DirecTV Premier plan that currently costs $189. A $7 increase will apply to the Ultimate package that costs $135 and to the Xtra package that costs $124; a $5 increase will apply to the Choice plan that costs $110; a $4 increase will apply to the Select package that costs $81 a month and to the Entertainment package that costs $93; and increases of $1 or $3 will apply to basic plans.

Customers who have promotional pricing will "keep that discount until it expires" and pay the new, higher price afterward, AT&T said. The promotional pricing generally lasts for one year and has discounts ranging from $21 to $55 a month.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back today with more holiday deals to share. Of note are a few deals on the newest model of the Nintendo Switch. Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart all have Nintendo Switch deals right now that include up to $30 in gift cards or promotional credit when purchasing the console at its regular price of $299.

At Amazon, you can get the Nintendo Switch plus a $30 promotional credit (to be issued within one week of the console shipping) for $299. Best Buy has a similar offer, including a $30 Best Buy e-gift card with the purchase of a Nintendo Switch for $299. Walmart's deal includes the Nintendo Switch, $20 Nintendo eShop credit, and a carrying case for $299.

Aside from console-and-game bundles, these are the best kinds of deals you can expect on the Nintendo Switch. The console rarely dips below its regular price of $299, so the more additional things you can get in a bundle price, the better. Retailers typically include games, accessories, and credit in such bundles, and we saw similar deals on the Nintendo Switch during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It's likely that these deals from Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart will be the best deals on the Nintendo Switch that we'll see between now and the end of 2019.

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  The Pixel 4 is getting some new features. (The rest of the images in this gallery are gifs provided by Google.) [credit: Google ]

Google is going to start giving the Pixel line more than just monthly security updates and yearly major OS updates. Yesterday, Google announced the first "Feature Drop" for the Pixel 4, and according to a new report from The Verge, this is the first of several planned quarterly feature updates for Google's flagship smartphone.

There are four big updates included in this first feature drop. The most important sounds like an update to the Pixel 4's memory management, which Google says "proactively compresses cached applications so that users can run multiple applications at the same time—like games, streaming content and more." The Pixel 4's 6GB of RAM is less than most of its Android competition, which means it can't run as many apps in the background as other phones. This feature is also coming to older Pixel devices like the Pixel 3; with only 4GB of RAM, these devices are definitely RAM starved compared to other Android phones.

The Pixel line has long had a "Call Screen" feature that allows the Google Assistant to pick up a call and ask the caller who they are and what they want. Their answer would then be transcribed on your phone screen, allowing you to see what that call was about without having to actually pick up the call. Before, this was a manually activated feature—your phone would ring, and instead of pressing the "answer" button, you could send the call to the Google Assistant. With this new update, the Google Assistant can now screen calls automatically. Robocalls can be automatically declined, and unknown numbers can get sent to the Google Assistant, where the caller can identify themselves, and then the phone will ring, showing the caller's statement on the call screen.