Amazon Great Summer Sale 2023 is currently live for Amazon Prime members in India. The new sale will be accessible to all users on May 5. This year, the sale brings discounts on a range of smartphones. The sale brings no-cost EMI options and exchange discounts on various smartphones in all price segments.
Sonos speakers rarely go on sale, but there are some decent discounts right now on speaker sets, including bundles with the new Era 100 and Era 300 speakers.
Amazon is rolling out a substantial Matter update by expanding support to more hardware, improving the compatibility between the smart home standard and Alexa.
A big part of the overall package is all the changes coming to the company’s Echo line. Starting today, the “second generation Echo, Echo Plus, and Echo Dot” speakers will upgrade into proper Matter controllers for your at-home network.
The Echo (4th Gen) now supports the Thread protocol giving it another category of gadgets to control in addition to those on Wi-Fi, Zigbee, and Bluetooth Low Energy Mesh.
Put everything together, you now have “over 100 million Echo devices across 20 models” supporting the smart home standard, according to a post on the Amazon Developer Blog. And to help out any newfound customers, the update will also allow people to “set up their Matter devices with iOS”.
The other half of the roll out involves smart home brand Eve Systems integrating its own products with Amazon’s platform.
Eve systems adopts Matter standard
First, Eve Systems devices will now support the Matter standard as well as the Thread protocol, running contrary to the brand’s previous decisions of only operating with “certain smart home systems.” Additionally, Eve products being sold on Amazon will have a Works with Alexa (WWA) badge slapped on product listings. Gadgets with the WWA certification are confirmed to work with Alexa, promising to “deliver a great experience” with the digital assistant.
The last update has Eve System is enabling Frustration Free Setup (FFS) to its Matter lineup. FFS, if you don’t know, is the Amazon's attempt at simplifying the “device setup experience”.
For example, customers can ask the tech giant to enter Wi-Fi credentials into a Fire TV at checkout. That way, when the Fire TV gets to your house, it’s already set up and all you have to do is plug it in. With regards to Eve Systems, the first batch getting this feature consists of the Eve Energy smart plug, Eve Motion, and the Eve Door & Windows smart contact sensor.
The FFS upgrade will be released later this month, running contrary to the rest of the update. And when it does, those products will work right out of the box the moment they get turned on.
Amazon states Eve Systems has plans to expand “FFS to all its Matter-enabled devices” seemingly hinting at another round, but didn’t give any further details. We asked Amazon for more information on the future release, and we will update this story if and when we hear back from the company.
If you've taken advantage of Google Chrome's nifty tool that makes it the default browser for Windows — without even needing to open your PCs app settings! — we regret to inform you that Microsoft's most recent update introduces an annoying bug that seems to only go away if you switch your default back to Microsoft Edge.
Weird, huh?
The April Windows update in question, KB5025221, has been causing no small amount of trouble for enterprise users, according to Gizmodo.
Since July 2022, Google Chrome came with a function that would let you change your default browser with the click of a button, typically along the top end of the window, but also in the browser's settings menu as well.
Since the April 2023 Windows update however, Windows enterprise customers have been having an especially tough time of things as the Windows Default App settings page reportedly opens up every time Chrome is opened, forcing the user to close the settings page.
"After today's cumulative update for Windows 10 and 11, 2023-04, every time I open Chrome the default app settings of windows will open," one frustrated user on the Microsoft support forums wrote. "I've tried many ways to resolve this without luck. This is happening to all 600 systems with the update."
Another user of the r/sysadmin subreddit found that just clicking on a link shortcut was enough to trigger the issue.
"If Chrome is set as the default browser clicking on the link shortcut wil[l] open the link in chrome, but also open the windows settings on the default apps," the user, azaaza0909, writes. Tellingly, they also note: "It doesn't happen if we change the default browser to edge."
The Windows update doesn't give much in the way of concrete details as to what it is fixing beyond saying up top that "This update addresses security issues for your Windows operating system."
It's not just enterprise users
(Image credit: Microsoft)
While enterprise users seem to be the most severely impacted by this bug, they aren't the only ones. Consumer versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11 also seem to have been impacted by the April update, though its impact is more annoying than actively frustrating.
For regular customers, the update seems to have disabled Google Chrome's ability to set the default browser through the browser itself. I can confirm that going into Chrome's settings and trying to set the default browser will force the Default App settings to open, but not actually change anything. You'd have to navigate down the app list, select Chrome, and at the top click the button that says Set Default.
After setting Google Chrome as the default browser, I tried to do the same thing through the Settings menu on Microsoft Edge. With Microsoft Edge though, clicking the Set Default button in the Default Browser menu did in fact reset the default browser to Edge.
So, is this a matter of Microsoft dinging its web browser rival? There's no way to assign that kind of motivation to a company of many thousands of people, but I'm inclined to believe that the issue with Default Browser-Gate isn't purely malice on Microsoft's part.
What's behind the bug?
In order to set the default app on Windows the user just toggles a couple of switches and goes about their browsing journey, but behind the scenes, the record of which app is the default app for opening files with specific extensions (like .html) is recorded in the OS's registry file system.
This is not the kind of thing you mess around with willy-nilly, since screwing up your registry settings can cause all kinds of havoc and even brick your Windows install. Google, meanwhile, would have to make edits to your OS registry files in order to set Chrome as the default web browsing app, and even though programs do this all the time when installing or uninstalling components, it's usually not as easy as a single button click outside of a Windows settings menu.
And while Google might have gotten away with its tool for several months, this is the kind of vector for security threats that will catch the attention of software security pros.
Changing your default web browser from inside the browser itself isn't likely to pose any kind of threat, but good information and software security is preventative rather than reactive. So, Microsoft likely just determined that it needed to keep these kinds of registry changeable actions contained within Microsoft's own settings system, which is far more likely to be secure than some future version of Google Chrome.
This is probably what Microsoft is referring to when it writes in one of the few notes on the update that "This update addresses a compatibility issue. The issue occurs because of unsupported use of the registry."
As for why Edge can make the registry changes denied to Google? Well, Edge is Microsoft's product, so it is obviously going to be far more compatible and understood by the Windows OS developers themselves who can work together internally to create a safe way for its browser to do things normally requiring higher level privileges when attempted by a third-party app. This absolutely makes it easier to ensure security is being maintained since Microsoft is in control of both of the actors in the exchange.
Could Microsoft also be acting petty and making it just a teensy bit harder to use its competitor's product while making its own much easier as an alternative? Who's to say; it's not like Microsoft got into a very famous anti-trust battle with the US government (and lost!) over this exact issue of the company giving system-level preference to its own web browser over a competitor's, right?
Given the increasing intensity of Microsoft's push to increase Edge adoption (including its increasingly grating attempts to get you to switch to its browser), at a minimum, the best you can say is that Microsoft wouldn't go out of its way to necessarily make it easier for Google to win the latest browser war. In the end, it's likely a little of column A, a little of column B, but this one is at least more defensible from a security perspective.
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The FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) wars are heating up, with Amazon today announcing that it will add more than 100 Amazon Originals from Prime Video to its Freevee streaming option. More than 50 movies and TV shows, are now available to stream on Freevee, and each month more Amazon Originals will be added to the list.
Freevee highlights now include Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, The Grand Tour, Mozart in the Jungle, Bosch, Modern Love, Savage X Fenty, Sylvie’s Love, Troop Zero, and Late Night, from Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling.
Amazon Originals scheduled to launch in May on Freevee include The Summer I Turned Pretty and the first three episodes of A League of Their Own, along with The Terminal List, Paper Girls, Goliath, The Tick, full seasons of Homecoming and Upload, and The Vast of Night. According to the company’s release, all shows will simultaneously remain available on Prime Video for ad-free viewing.
Amazon further announced that the entire first seasons of Amazon Originals Reacher and The Wheel of Time will also be available for viewing on Freevee later this year.
Analysis: Freevee is a gateway to Prime Video
Streamer maker Roku was early to jump on the FAST track with its The Roku Channel and Amazon has since been playing catch-up with Freevee, the name it gave to its re-branded IMDb TV channel back in 2022. If you can deal with commercial interruptions while watching movies and TV shows, FAST options like Freevee provide a massive amount of free-to-stream programming.
With other FAST apps like Pluto and Tubi available on most smart TVs, along with the built-in free TV portals that many set brands provide (Samsung’s TV Plus, for example), there is no shortage of options for accessing ad-supported movies and shows without having to pay a subscription fee.
What is there to watch on FAST platforms? You’ll typically find a mix of national news programs, old movies and TV shows (Gunsmoke, anyone?), reality series, and much more, all of it presented in a cable TV-style grid. And while I personally don’t find free ad-supported TV worth my time, I’m also keenly aware that the best streaming services are getting more expensive, and some viewers are no longer willing to pay big bucks to have a bundle of ad-free subscriptions to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu and the like at their disposal.
Freevee is one of the better free options I’ve checked out, and with the addition of the company’s Amazon Originals to the mix, it’s going to provide strong competition for its FAST rivals. Right off the bat, I’d recommend streaming The Vast of Night and, later on this year, the visually sumptuous TheWheel of Time.
Making a limited amount of Amazon Original programming available to stream for free is also a great way for the company to acquaint viewers with the best Prime Video TV shows and best Prime Video movies, which will doubtless encourage more viewers to subscribe to its paid streaming service.
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Samsung is kicking off the new month by releasing Astrophotography Mode to the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy S21 series following a similar update to the Galaxy S22 line several months ago.
Users of those Samsung devices will now have an easier time taking high-quality pictures of the night sky without, for the most part, needing any fancy equipment or extensive experience. Astrophotography Mode comes with a Sky Guide for pointing out the exact location of constellations by “drawing [an outline] on the screen”. You will also be able to choose how long those outlines stay up on screen by dragging an in-app slider from four minutes up to 10, according to SamMobile.
All you need to do is install the latest update for the Expert RAW app from Samsung’s Galaxy Store in order to get the feature on your Z Fold 4. For the S21 phones, you will need to download the April 2023 security patch first before you can try out Astrophotography Mode. Once everything is squared away, a new icon for the mode will appear on the far side of the in-app toolbar.
Be aware the tech isn’t foolproof. You will need to have a clear night sky (although a few passing clouds won’t ruin the effect) plus little to no light pollution which may be difficult to avoid if you live in a city. But if you’re able to make it work, the images you can capture are pretty stunning. We do recommend getting a phone tripod. Taking long exposure shots of the stars requires you to hold the camera steady for several hours so save your arms the trouble.
Potential expansion
It’s unknown if other Galaxy phones will get Astrophotography Mode. However, it’s worth mentioning a leak back in February by Twitter user GaryeonHan that did correctly predict that the Z Fold 4 and S21 Ultra would get the feature. That same leak also claimed the Galaxy S20 Ultra, N20 Ultra, and Z Fold 2 would see the same update. As it turns out, all three are listed as devices that have recently obtained support for Expert RAW on the app's Galaxy Store listing. So it’s possible this isn’t the last we see of Astrophotography Mode coming to older Galaxy models. We did reach out to Samsung to see if we could get any hints at a future rollout. This story will be updated at a later time.
In the meantime, be sure to check out TechRadar's roundup of the best Galaxy S21 deals for May 2023 if you’re looking for a deal on this now more feature-rich phone.
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About half of Indians surveyed said that they are unable to differentiate between the real and cloned voice of a person while 83 percent of the victims of voice scams have faced the loss of money, online security firm McAfee said in a report. The survey of 7,054 people was conducted in seven countries, including 1,010 respondents from India, around artificial intellig...
Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti graphics card is set to be on shelves by the end of May, according to the latest from the rumor mill – but Team Green still isn’t sure when it’ll launch the vanilla RTX 4060.
This fresh leak from VideoCardz shows us a purported embargo timeline document which clearly marks the RTX 4060 Ti as shipping on May 5 – later this week – ahead of a product announcement and on-sale date both marked as ‘end of May’.
That could mean a product launch with simultaneously availability, or perhaps a short period between the reveal and the GPU actually being on shelves.
As for the base RTX 4060, that’s marked as ‘To Be Determined’, so we can assume that it’s going to be a bit later to arrive that the 4060 Ti, as the rumor mill has already suggested.
Of course, take all this with plenty of seasoning, and naturally what Nvidia intends right now could change, meaning the 4060 Ti launch could still slide. That said, the GPU has been rumored for a Computex launch (end of May) for some time now.
Analysis: Pricing will be key
This is yet more evidence that we’re about to see the RTX 4060 Ti go on sale, and we’ve been seeing quite a bit lately – including a purported picture of the GPU shared on Twitter. This graphics card has also been spotted in some MSI PCs recently (in product listings at a Dutch online retailer which were mistakenly aired, but have now been yanked down).
In short, at this point, we’d be surprised if we don’t see the RTX 4060 Ti popping up at the end of the month. However, it looks like we’re in for a longer wait with the RTX 4060.
With all the chatter being around worries that the RTX 4060 Ti won’t be all that impressive in the spec department – particularly the purported 8GB of VRAM, which is looking like a meager allocation these days, even for 1080p gaming – we still have to see where Nvidia will pitch the price of this GPU.
Some truly affordable pricing could still save the day, but the latest rumor around the cost isn’t promising, theorizing that the RTX 4060 Ti might pitch in at $450, which would be disappointing to say the least. That’s from a YouTube leaker, not one with the strongest track record mind you – and another rumor has suggested a $399 price tag (from a shakier source still, MyDrivers in China).
We’re not confident on either of those pieces of speculation to be honest, and it could be that Nvidia is still making the final decision on pricing itself. We shall see, but if the rumored specs are correct including that 8GB of VRAM, Team Green will need to make this a reasonably compelling value proposition.
Cost-wise, Nvidia will also need to factor in the rival RX 7600, which AMD purportedly plans to sneak in for a launch on May 25, perhaps stealing Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti thunder.
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