Tag: amazon

Amazon’s Audiobook Narrators Can Now Make Their Own AI Voice Clones

[ad_1]

Synthetic voices have been proliferating for years, and the generative AI boom of the new ’20s has sped that process right along. AI voices are everywhere—in podcasts, in political campaigns, and in chatbots where they maybe-not-so-subtly replicate celebrity voices. Soon, they’ll be all up in your audiobooks too.

Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook company, announced a trial program for generating AI voice clones to read works in its audiobook marketplace. The announcement came via a post in ACX—Audiobook Creation Exchange—Audible’s service that lets authors and publishers turn written books into audiobooks.

“We’re taking measured steps to test new technologies to help expand our catalog,” says the post, “and this week we are inviting a small group of narrators to participate in a US-only beta enabling them to create and monetize replicas of their own voices using AI-generated speech technology.”

Audible says both the narrators and authors will have control over which projects their AI voices are used for and that final narrations will be reviewed as part of ACX’s production process to check for mispronunciations or other errors.

Still, this might seem a tad incongruous with Audible’s current approach to narrated audiobooks, given that even after this announcement, ACX’s submission requirements still say that audiobook narrations, “must be narrated by a human.” But Amazon has already been bullish on AI, and implemented a similar AI audio program for its Kindle direct publishing operation last year.

Right now the Audible program is limited, with a select group of narrators participating. But it’s easy to see where this could go from here, and soon Audible could be opened up to let any author capable of generating an AI voice that can read their own book. Other companies are playing in this space as well; the startup Rebind is enlisting authors to allow their voices to be cloned so an AI version of them can “guide” readers through their texts. Fans of audiobooks are on the fence about all of it.

Personally, I cannot wait until these dulcet yet uncanny voices fall into the hands of the dinosaur eroticists.

Here’s some other consumer tech news from this week.

Papers, Please

Google is letting users digitize even more of their personal information. Up next: passports.

Google added digital drivers’ licenses to its Wallet platform last year, enabling Android users to store identification details on their phones. Soon (Google doesn’t say exactly when) users will be able to do the same with their US passports.

There are some caveats, of course. A Google Wallet version of your passport will be accepted only at specific TSA checkpoints where digital IDs are allowed. (Here’s a map.) Also, Google makes sure to recommend that you keep your passport on hand anyway. Digital IDs aren’t typically accepted anywhere outside of airports, so if you get into a pinch while abroad you’ll want to have your physical documentation. But for a lucky subset of travelers, this will solve the problem of needing to take yet another thing out of your bag when going through airport security.

Keepin’ Tabs

Hey speaking of Google, the company also announced some good news for all of us filthy browser tab hoarders. Tab grouping is a feature in Google Chrome that lets you squirrel away all your browser tabs under group folders for easier sorting. (I’ll read them later, I swear!) Google says its grouping feature will soon be made to sync across platforms. That means you can seamlessly continue your desktop browsing journey on your mobile device, where you will definitely not just continue ignoring them.

Tab grouping will also soon be available on Chrome in iOS, and should be able to sync across desktops as well. How soon is all this coming? Well, again Google wasn’t quite clear about that. Regardless, better start collecting all those browser tabs now. Never know when you might need them again.

Menlo-Upon-Tyne

Meta—the Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp company that also does AI—has announced that its AI services are set to colonize a new cultural realm: the Brits. Meta announced it will be training its AI models off data from the users of its platforms in the UK.

Specifically, the data will be collected from anyone who uses Facebook or Instagram in the UK, and then used to train Meta’s AI accordingly. In its announcement, Meta says it hopes this move will help its AI tools more accurately reflect British culture and speech.

[ad_2]

Source link

September 14, 2024
Amazon’s Shipping and Delivery Emissions Just Keep Going Up

[ad_1]

“Amazon prides itself on being an ambitious and innovative company, but it’s making quite a problem for itself with its air freight cargo growth,” Archer says. “If Amazon is serious about climate progress, that’s a really easy place to start: stop flying so much.”

Amazon is no stranger to climate criticism. Its overall emissions have skyrocketed since it rolled out the Climate Pledge in 2019, despite an incremental drop in 2023. Last year, Amazon lost the support of a key UN-backed global climate organization, the Science Based Targets Initiative, for not meeting certain deadlines to set targets to reduce emissions; it was one of nearly two dozen companies axed by SBTI from its list of climate-conscious companies. In July, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an employee group, released a report criticizing the company’s calculations around its claim that it had met a sustainable energy goal. In 2023, Amazon quietly eliminated a goal to make half its shipments carbon neutral by 2030—a goal which, the company says, was superseded by the larger Climate Pledge.

Part of the issue in calculating emissions for Amazon is just how sprawling the challenges it faces are, thanks to its relentless vertical integration: the Wall Street Journal reported in May that in order to expand its control over its logistics processes, the company had already leased, bought, or announced plans to expand warehouse space in the US by 16 million square feet this year. Kelly said in an email in response to WIRED’s request for comment that the vast network of logistics the company has built allows it to deliver packages closer to their destination and avoid driving long miles.

Reading the company’s sustainability report is an exercise in understanding a variety of different ambitious technical and sociological climate goals across different industries involved in its supply chain. In response to WIRED’s request for comment, Kelly listed out Amazon’s membership in two business organizations advancing sustainable shipping, its membership in a buyers’ alliance encouraging the adoption of sustainable aviation fuel, and its investment in electric trucking: in May, the company put 50 electric trucks on the road in Southern California.

“I think it creates a lot of challenges for the broader transportation industry if every company just does what Amazon does and brings air freight in house,” Archer says. “Then you’ll have a situation where a lot of people are flying a lot of planes.”

There’s a real question of whether or not the company making significant changes would just move emissions from one company’s balance sheet to another’s as the rest of the industry keeps growing. Atlas Air, a subcontractor of Amazon Air, announced in May that it would stop domestic flights carrying Amazon parcels in favor of concentrating on other customers, including Chinese e-commerce titans Shein and Temu.

Still, with Amazon dominating so much of the US market—and with the capacity to kick off trends that other suppliers then follow, like expedited shipping—the company has an opportunity to set an aggressive example, like throwing a substantial effort into decreasing plane use and helping the US build out infrastructure for more sustainable long-haul trucking. (The company didn’t provide figures on how much it has spent on partnerships, research, lobbying, or other activities to decarbonize the trucking sector in the US.)

As for that splashy electric van pledge? The Stand.earth report projects that at Amazon’s current growth rates, if the company puts all the electric vans it promises on the roads by the end of the decade, that would still only account for a third of the company’s deliveries. If Amazon’s sales keep growing on pace, it would need 400,000 EVs to deliver all its packages.

“The 100,000 vans by 2030 is way too little, way too late,” Archer says.

[ad_2]

Source link

September 12, 2024
Could This Be the Start of Amazon’s Next Robot Revolution?

[ad_1]

In 2012, Amazon quietly acquired a robotics startup called Kiva Systems, a move that dramatically improved the efficiency of its ecommerce operations and kickstarted a wider revolution in warehouse automation.

Last week, the ecommerce giant announced another deal that could prove similarly profound, agreeing to hire the founders of Covariant, a startup that has been testing ways for AI to automate more of the picking and handling of a wide range of physical objects.

Covariant may have found it challenging to commercialize AI-infused industrial robots given the high costs and sharp competition involved; the deal, which will also see Amazon license Covariant’s models and data, could bring about another revolution in ecommerce—one that might prove hard for any competitor to match given Amazon’s vast operational scale and data trove.

The deal is also an example of a Big Tech company acquiring core talent and expertise from an AI startup without actually buying the company outright. Amazon came to a similar agreement with the startup Adept in June. In March, Microsoft struck a deal with Inflection, and in August, Google hired the founders of Character AI.

Back in the aughts, Kiva developed a way to move products through warehouses by having squat robots lift and carry stocked shelves over to human pickers—a trick that meant workers no longer needed to walk miles every day to find different items. Kiva’s mobile bots were similar to those employed in manufacturing, and the company used clever algorithms to coordinate the movement of thousands of bots in the same physical space.

Amazon’s mobile robot army grew from around 10,000 in 2013 to 750,000 by 2023, and the sheer scale of the company’s operations meant that it could deliver millions of items faster and cheaper than anyone else.

As WIRED revealed last year, Amazon has in recent years developed new robotic systems that rely on machine learning to do things like perceive, grab, and sort packed boxes. Again, Amazon is leveraging scale to its advantage, with the training data being gathered as items flow through its facilities helping to improve the performance of different algorithms. The effort has already led to further automation of the work that had previously been done by human workers at some fulfillment centers.

The one chore that remains stubbornly difficult to mechanize, however, is the physical grasping of products. It requires adaptability to account for things like friction and slippage, and robots will inevitably be confronted with unfamiliar and awkward items among Amazon’s vast inventory.

Covariant has spent the past few years developing AI algorithms with a more general ability to handle a range of items more reliably. The company was founded in 2020 by Pieter Abbeel, a professor at UC Berkeley who has done pioneering work on applying machine learning to robotics, along with several of his students, including Peter Chen, who became Covariant’s CEO, and Rocky Duan, the company’s CTO. This week’s deal will see all three of them, along with several research scientists at the startup, join Amazon.

“Covariant’s models will be used to power some of the robotic manipulation systems across our fulfillment network,” Alexandra Miller, an Amazon spokesperson, tells WIRED. The tech giant declined to reveal financial details of the deal.

Abbeel was an early employee at OpenAI, and his company has taken inspiration from the story of ChatGPT’s success. In March, Covariant demonstrated a chat interface for its robot and said it had developed a foundation model for robotic grasping, meaning an algorithm designed to become

[ad_2]

Source link

September 4, 2024
An AWS Configuration Issue Could Expose Thousands of Web Apps

[ad_1]

A vulnerability related to Amazon Web Service’s traffic-routing service known as Application Load Balancer could have been exploited by an attacker to bypass access controls and compromise web applications, according to new research. The flaw stems from a customer implementation issue, meaning it isn’t caused by a software bug. Instead, the exposure was introduced by the way AWS users set up authentication with Application Load Balancer.

Implementation issues are a crucial component of cloud security in the same way that the contents of an armored safe aren’t protected if the door is left ajar. Researchers from the security firm Miggo found that, depending on how Application Load Balancer authentication was set up, an attacker could potentially manipulate its handoff to a third-party corporate authentication service to access the target web application and view or exfiltrate data.

The researchers say that looking at publicly reachable web applications, they have identified more than 15,000 that appear to have vulnerable configurations. AWS disputes this estimate, though, and says that “a small fraction of a percent of AWS customers have applications potentially misconfigured in this way, significantly fewer than the researchers’ estimate.” The company also says that it has contacted each customer on its shorter list to recommend a more secure implementation. AWS does not have access or visibility into its clients’ cloud environments, though, so any exact number is just an estimate.

The Miggo researchers say they came across the problem while working with a client. This “was discovered in real-life production environments,” Miggo CEO Daniel Shechter says. “We observed a weird behavior in a customer system—the validation process seemed like it was only being done partially, like there was something missing. This really shows how deep the interdependencies go between the customer and the vendor.”

To exploit the implementation issue, an attacker would set up an AWS account and an Application Load Balancer, and then sign their own authentication token as usual. Next, the attacker would make configuration changes so it would appear their target’s authentication service issued the token. Then the attacker would have AWS sign the token as if it had legitimately originated from the target’s system and use it to access the target application. The attack must specifically target a misconfigured application that is publicly accessible or that the attacker already has access to, but would allow them to escalate their privileges in the system.

Amazon Web Services says that the company does not view token forging as a vulnerability in Application Load Balancer because it is essentially an expected outcome of choosing to configure authentication in a particular way. But after the Miggo researchers first disclosed their findings to AWS at the beginning of April, the company made two documentation changes geared at updating their implementation recommendations for Application Load Balancer authentication. One, from May 1, included guidance to add validation before Application Load Balancer will sign tokens. And on July 19, the company also added an explicit recommendation that users set their systems to receive traffic from only their own Application Load Balancer using a feature called “security groups.”

[ad_2]

Source link

August 20, 2024
The 30 Best Energy Drinks, Tested and Reviewed

[ad_1]

Buying energy drinks in public is embarrassing. Every time I see someone scanning the cooler for their favorite flavor of Monster or Ghost, I guess which accompanying vape flavor they’ve picked out, and I know others are making the same assumption about me when I’m scoring a can of Celsius to beat back a hangover or get lifted before a 10-hour bartending shift.

The good news is that it’s easier than ever to purchase your favorite cans from Amazon, and the great news is that you don’t need to put on your Crocs and Cookie Monster jammies to do it. Throw in a nice little discount for buying in bulk and setting up auto-delivery, and you’re basically being paid to not leave your house. The future is here, and it is jacked up on B vitamins, red dye, and taurine.

As a devoted coffee drinker, I often feel like the misquoted New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael when I see neon-colored tallboys of high-octane energy drinks usurping shelf space from my favorite Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew variants at my local Sheetz. Energy drinks are big business—they raked in close to $20 billion in the US alone in 2023—yet I don’t know a single person who drinks them on a regular basis.

A good cup of coffee is hard to find at odd hours in the middle of nowhere. Energy drinks, on the other hand, are as no-fuss as it gets. At any hour of the day you can pick out an eye-catching can that boldly advertises its caffeine content, plunk down a few bucks, and shoot into space in just a few swigs. Homebodies and deal junkies don’t even need to leave their domiciles to cop excellent deals with lightning-fast shipping on their most beloved brands, provided they’re Amazon Prime members.

I love value, convenience, and caffeine, so I finally caved.

Still thirsty? Check out our other drink-related guides, including Best Coffee Subscriptions and Best Nonalcoholic Wines.

Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting that’s too important to ignore for just ~~$2.50~~ $1 per month for 1 year. Includes unlimited digital access and exclusive subscriber-only content. Subscribe Today.

How We Tested

Across the span of 21 days I sampled 30 different energy drinks from an amalgamation of readily available gas station staples, brands the Amazon algorithm was pimping extra hard that day, everything in the Whole Foods end cap that advertised its caffeine content, and a couple oddballs from the past you probably don’t remember.

I graded on taste, which is obviously subjective, and the palpable effects of the caffeine after knocking back a can at 8:30 am every day, after my daily 1.5-mile run with my dog. The extra cans were deployed two hours into shifts at my part-time bartending gig. I took one day off from the experiment due to gut-wrenching stomach pain and horrible night sweats. If there’s a Ghost-addled gamer in your basement as you read this, please consider offering them a wellness check, or a refill on their tendies at the very least.

1. Celsius Functional Essential Energy Drink

Though it has less carbonation than most energy drinks, Celsius is punchy without a cloying aftertaste and it does wonders in masking the medicinal notes that are present in similarly potent drinks. This is an absolute unit when it comes to the caffeine-to-volume ratio, and not a single flavor I tried was objectively bad.

Celsius is a hot up-and-comer for a reason, and it’s not shocking to see entire fridges stocked with its whole portfolio right next to the checkout counter at a growing number of gas stations. The can has a whole lot of text I will never read, but it’s attractive and not too much in the extreme gaming or health-nut quackery camps to dissuade potential buyers who care about being seen in public with an energy drink. Like the Beatles or In-N-Out, this is a consensus pick everyone agrees on.

[ad_2]

Source link

August 8, 2024
Echo Spot Review (2024): Small and Surprisingly Helpful

[ad_1]

Amazon added onscreen ads to the Echo Show slideshows and even the weather report on my Echo Show 8, and they’re almost impossible to turn off. The Echo Spot, so far, is ad-free. There’s a chance Amazon could add these in the future, but I’m crossing my fingers this screen is too small to make it worth it. I would’ve said the same about the tiny real estate available on the Show 8’s weather page, though, so I know it’s not a guarantee.

The Echo Spot can also display your calendar when you ask, scrolling through your four upcoming events in a little list while talking you through it. Again, it’s a nice visual companion to the voice assistant, without a large cluttered screen. It is a small screen, so you can’t read it from super far away, but I found it handy to read while at my desk or listen to while I got dressed.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The only thing missing is smart home control. Unlike regular smart displays or the newer Hub (8/10, WIRED Recommends), the Echo Spot doesn’t have a smart home control area on the menu, and I can access rooms or devices only via voice request. It does pull up a little power button onscreen when you ask to control a specific room or device, like “turn on my kitchen,” which you can then tap on and off. But there’s no way to access devices or rooms without first using your voice.

While I like seeing the widgets and having smart home control on my larger smart displays, I don’t love how distracting a smart display can be in my office or my living room. The scrolling screen is constantly catching my eye when I’d rather not look at it, and often isn’t showing me something I need to see right then. The Echo Spot’s balance of screen info without rolling clutter makes it a great addition almost anywhere in the house.

Sound Off

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The only thing that the Echo Spot lacks is, unfortunately, good sound.

[ad_2]

Source link

August 2, 2024
Amazon Has to Recall More Than 400,000 Dangerous Products

[ad_1]

Amazon failed to adequately alert more than 300,000 customers to serious risks—including death and electrocution—that US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) testing found with more than 400,000 products that third parties sold on its platform.

The CPSC unanimously voted to hold Amazon legally responsible for third-party sellers’ defective products. Now, Amazon must make a CPSC-approved plan to properly recall the dangerous products—including highly flammable children’s pajamas, faulty carbon monoxide detectors, and unsafe hair dryers that could cause electrocution—which the CPSC fears may still be widely used in homes across America.

While Amazon scrambles to devise a plan, the CPSC summarized the ongoing risks to consumers:

If the [products] remain in consumers’ possession, children will continue to wear sleepwear garments that could ignite and result in injury or death; consumers will unwittingly rely on defective [carbon monoxide] detectors that will never alert them to the presence of deadly carbon monoxide in their homes; and consumers will use the hair dryers they purchased, which lack immersion protection, in the bathroom near water, leaving them vulnerable to electrocution.

Instead of recalling the products, which were sold between 2018 and 2021, Amazon sent messages to customers that the CPSC said “downplayed the severity” of hazards.

In these messages—”despite conclusive testing that the products were hazardous” by the CPSC—Amazon only warned customers that the products “may fail” to meet federal safety standards and only “potentially” posed risks of “burn injuries to children,” “electric shock,” or “exposure to potentially dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.”

Typically, a distributor would be required to specifically use the word “recall” in the subject line of these kinds of messages, but Amazon dodged using that language entirely. Instead, Amazon opted to use much less alarming subject lines that said, “Attention: Important safety notice about your past Amazon order” or “Important safety notice about your past Amazon order.”

Amazon then left it up to customers to destroy products and explicitly discouraged them from making returns. The e-commerce giant also gave every affected customer a gift card without requiring proof of destruction or adequately providing public notice or informing customers of actual hazards, as can be required by law to ensure public safety.

Further, Amazon’s messages did not include photos of the defective products, as required by law, and provided no way for customers to respond. The commission found that Amazon “made no effort” to track how many items were destroyed or even do the minimum of monitoring the “number of messages that were opened.”

Amazon still thinks these messages were appropriate remedies, though. An Amazon spokesperson told Ars that Amazon plans to appeal the ruling.

“We are disappointed by the CPSC’s decision,” Amazon’s spokesperson said. “We plan to appeal the decision and look forward to presenting our case in court. When we were initially notified by the CPSC three years ago about potential safety issues with a small number of third-party products at the center of this lawsuit, we swiftly notified customers, instructed them to stop using the products, and refunded them.”

Amazon’s “Sidestepped” Safety Obligations

The CPSC has additional concerns about Amazon’s “insufficient” remedies. It is particularly concerned that anyone who received the products as a gift or bought them on the secondary market likely was not informed of serious known hazards. The CPSC found that Amazon resold faulty hair dryers and carbon monoxide detectors, proving that secondary markets for these products exist.

“Amazon has made no direct attempt to reach consumers who obtained the hazardous products as gifts, hand-me-downs, donations, or on the secondary market,” the CPSC said.

[ad_2]

Source link

July 31, 2024
How to Avoid Scams and Shoddy Wares on Amazon

[ad_1]

Step 2: Amazon’s search should choose the right Department automatically, but if needed, you can navigate to the top of the left rail and click on a Department that fits.

Step 3: Once the page refreshes, scroll to the bottom of the left rail and choose “Amazon.com” as your Seller.

Step 4: Now you will only see “Pixel 8A” products sold directly by Amazon.com.

If you still don’t see “Amazon.com” as a seller, try hitting the “See More” button. It will bring up a dense but readable alphabetical page of sellers. If Amazon is one of those sellers, it will show up in the list. You can use CTRL+F (Command+F on Mac) to search for the word “Amazon.com.” Sometimes you’ll see “Amazon Warehouse,” but that only sells used and refurbished items.

Avoid Fake Discounts

When people see that a product they like is on sale, a little wave of excitement washes over them. Instead of thinking about how much we’re spending, we start to think about how much we’re saving. Coupons and discounts exist because they create a sense of urgency that causes many people to buy things they normally wouldn’t. Some sellers abuse that pricing power. There are a lot of products on Amazon that are endlessly on “sale” and that makes it hard to know if you’re getting an actual bargain.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to check. Just copy the URL and paste it into CamelCamelCamel. You’ll get a page with a graph on it showing every price fluctuation in the past year. A lot of products have deceptive sale prices like this, to varying degrees. Knowing what the actual going rate is for a product puts you in charge.

Alternatively, the Keepa extension for Chrome will add a similar box right into Amazon.com pages for you, though it does try and get you to register for free, and it might slow your browsing down.

Photograph: Louryn Strampe

Tools like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel may also help you determine the best time to buy an item. Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Max, for instance, consistently fluctuates between its normal $60 price down to $40, like it is now. And that all-time-low includes special sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, meaning you (probably) don’t need to wait to score a good deal. The tools can help you spot similar trends in other products, like televisions, which tend to get a lot cheaper when Christmas draws near.

Don’t Trust Every Review

Amazon’s 5-star review system is supposed to make choosing products simpler, but it’s easily gamed. If you’re looking at an expensive product from a company you’ve never heard of, or if there are hundreds or thousands of very positive reviews, do a little sleuthing. Many sellers try to manipulate reviews to get their products listed more prominently on Amazon.

Fakespot is an excellent tool to help you spot deceptive reviews. Just plug in an Amazon URL and it’ll give you a report. It isn’t a flawless tool, but it will give you a hint at whether a lot of reviews are fake or suspicious, and it spits out an AI-generated summary to try and help you parse the information further. We’ve got more advice on detecting fake Amazon reviews here.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 20, 2024
STEM Students Refuse to Work at Google and Amazon Over Project Nimbus

[ad_1]

More than 1,100 self-identified STEM students and young workers from over 120 universities have signed a pledge to not take jobs or internships at Google or Amazon until the companies end their involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services and infrastructure to the Israeli government.

The pledgers included undergraduate and graduate students from Stanford, University of California Berkeley, the University of San Francisco, and San Francisco State University. Some students from those schools also participated in an anti-Project Nimbus rally on Wednesday outside Google’s San Francisco office with tech workers and activists.

Amazon and Google are top employers for graduates from top STEM schools, according to data from career service College Transitions, which was compiled using publicly available data from LinkedIn. According to the data, as of 2024, 485 University of California Berkeley graduates and 216 Stanford graduates work at Google.

The pledge, which marks the latest backlash against Google and Amazon, was organized by No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a coalition of tech workers and activists with Muslim grassroots movement MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace. Since 2021, the group has advocated for Google and Amazon to boycott and divest from Project Nimbus and any other work for the Israeli government.

“Palestinians are already harmed by Israeli surveillance and violence,” the pledge reads. “By expanding public cloud computing capacity and providing their state of the art technology to the Israeli occupation’s government and military, Amazon and Google are helping to make Israeli apartheid more efficient, more violent, and even deadlier for Palestinians.”

Sam, who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of professional repercussions, says that he signed the letter as a 2023 graduate of Cornell University’s master’s program for computer science and recent member of the tech workforce.

He tells WIRED that he was moved to act after watching friends from graduate school who “think one way privately,” but then “went on to take careers in these big tech firms.”

“I know a lot of people who, not to say they have a price, but when somebody looks at a starting salary, it’ll test your principles a little bit,” Sam said.

Naomi Hardy-Njie, a communications major and computer science minor at the University of San Francisco, said she heard about the letter while participating at the school’s three-week encampment demanding disclosure and divestment from companies funding the war in Gaza.

Hardy-Njie said that she signed the letter because Google and Amazon executives have been reticent to address protesters’ demands. But change, she said, “has to start from the bottom up.”

NOTA has organized several actions targeting Project Nimbus over the past several months. Eddie Hatfield, a NOTA organizer, was fired from Google in March after he interrupted the Google Israel managing director at a Google-sponsored tech conference in New York. More than 50 Google workers were later fired following a sit-in protest against Project Nimbus in Google offices in the company’s New York and Sunnyvale offices, which was also organized by NOTA.

Google has claimed that Project Nimbus is “not directed” at classified or military work, but various document leaks have tied the contract to work for Israel’s military. Google and Amazon did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 18, 2024
20 Amazon Prime Perks You Might Not Be Using

[ad_1]

Prime Video is also included with your membership. There are some killer originals, like Fallout and The Boys in addition to other movies and shows. Purchased separately, Prime Video costs $9 per month. Note that these plans are with commercials. If you’re a Prime member and you want to go ad-free, it’ll cost another $3 per month.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about Amazon’s members-only event, Prime Day. The annual “holiday” has outperformed both Black Friday and Cyber Monday in years past, but not every Prime Day deal is actually a bargain. The WIRED Gear team always covers the event to make good deals easier to find—our coverage is unique in that we only write about deals on products we have personally tested and can verify are great buys rather than flooding our posts with questionable random brands. This year, Prime Day is in July. Official dates have not yet been announced, though we anticipate the sale will fall on a Tuesday and Wednesday in the middle of the month. Early Prime Day deals are usually available in the days leading up to the sale, and we’ll have the best for you here.

Amazon Day

Overwhelmed by the sheer number of boxes at your door? (Honestly, as a product reviewer, same.) Amazon Day lets you schedule all of your deliveries to arrive on a certain day of the week. Rather than dealing with a box or two at a time on multiple days, you can get one package with all of your orders on whichever day you prefer. If you use Amazon Day, you aren’t locked in. That means if you’re ordering something you need quickly, you can still opt for the fastest shipping method. Amazon Day is a good way to cut back on cardboard (and your carbon footprint).

Exclusive Deals

Even outside of Prime Day, Amazon Prime members are eligible for special members-only discounts. That might mean a few bucks off your portable charger purchase, a 20 percent off coupon to use on dog food, or better prices on new Amazon devices. Individual discounts vary, but we see these sorts of promotions pretty frequently—and, as with Prime Day, not all of them are good.

Early-Access Lightning Deals

Both during and outside of special events like Prime Day and Black Friday, Prime members get early access to select Lightning Deals. You will be able to shop 30 minutes before other customers. Whether Lightning Deals are worth your money is another discussion entirely, but it’s a perk worth checking out.

No-Rush Rewards

If you don’t need your order to arrive right away, sometimes at checkout you’ll see the option for free No-Rush Shipping. Usually, choosing No-Rush Shipping gets you a free $1 digital credit to use on things like ebooks, digital games, movies, and the like. The rewards sometimes expire after a certain duration. I’ve used No-Rush credits to get as much as $10 off digital games on release day. Since video game discounts are rare, especially right after release, this can be lucrative if you time it correctly (and don’t mind waiting for your purchases to arrive).

Grubhub+

Amazon Prime members get free access to Grubhub+, which includes free delivery on orders over $12, plus an assortment of Prime-exclusive discounts at various restaurants throughout the year.

Amazon Fresh

Amazon Fresh lets you order groceries via Amazon and get them delivered to your door. It’s not available in all areas, but it is a different way to shop if you’re trying to avoid in-person trips. You also get a selection of products from Whole Foods available through Amazon Fresh. Somewhat confusingly, there are similarly named physical Amazon Fresh grocery stores in some cities.

Since Amazon bought Whole Foods several years back, you can usually find picks from Whole Foods store brands within Amazon’s grocery services. It might make a good way to try something new or stock up on items you already like.

Amazon Household

For families, Amazon Household is a good way to share benefits between multiple people. You can share membership perks with two adults, four teens, and four adults. Parents can use Amazon Household to approve teens’ orders or set up parental controls on kids’ content.

Amazon First Reads

Each month, Prime members can check out Amazon First Reads. That’s two Kindle books from the selection for free. Non-Prime members can get their two books for $2 apiece. As a reminder, you can read Kindle books even if you don’t have a Kindle device, thanks to the free app available for phones and computers. We also have a buying guide to help you pick the right Kindle.

Prime Reading

In addition to First Reads, Prime members get access to tons of Kindle books via Prime Reading. There are more than a thousand items to choose from. Aside from books, you can access audiobooks and magazines, plus comics via Comixology. WIRED senior editor Michael Calore mentioned Prime Reading as one of his quarantine lifesavers in this Gadget Lab podcast episode.

Prime Gaming

Every month, Prime members are eligible for various rewards via Prime Gaming (formerly known as Twitch Prime). This includes in-game loot in a variety of popular games, free game downloads, free downloadable content (DLC) and expansions, and more. You also get a free Twitch subscription—which sounds like you can watch Twitch for free, but “Twitch subs” are actually subscriptions to individual Twitch streamers, and they normally cost money. With the free subscription you get from Amazon Prime, you can support channels you enjoy—creators make some money off the subscription, but it won’t cost you anything extra.

$10 off Game Preorders

This discount used to be much better, but it’s still worth looking into if you are in the market for a new video game. Occasionally, Prime members can receive $10 off when they preorder a game. Eligible titles show up here when they’re available. Some video games also have free Release Date Delivery—just look for that shipping option when preordering a game.

Prime Try Before You Buy

Buying clothes online can be an arduous process. Prime Try Before You Buy (formerly Prime Wardrobe) offers a selection of items you can try on at home before committing. Pick out what you want and you’ll get it for a week. If it’s a winner, you can keep it. If it’s not a perfect fit, you can return the items for free. I prefer to use this method when pieces are already discounted, since the price you’ll pay if you decide to keep something is whatever the price was at checkout.

Unlimited Online Photo Storage

Prime members get access to unlimited full-resolution photo storage, and 5 gigabytes of video storage as well. You can store, print, and share photos using the Amazon Photos app and back everything up to the cloud. If your account ever loses Prime status, you’ll need to pay at least $2 per month to keep storing your photos and videos, so this shouldn’t be your primary backup method. You might want to consider using one of these options as well.

Discounted Amazon Kids+

Amazon Kids+ (formerly FreeTime Unlimited) is Amazon’s content service for kids. The service is compatible with several iOS, Android, and Amazon devices, like Fire Tablets. It essentially provides a bevy of parental controls whilst giving kiddos access to age-appropriate shows, books, games, and the like. Kids+ costs $8 per month, but Prime members can snag the subscription for $6 per month (or $79 and $48 per year, respectively).

Additional Perks for Specific Customers

Expecting a new addition to your family? Select Prime members can claim a free Baby Registry Welcome Box by creating a registry that has at least $10 worth of purchases (by themselves or others). Learn more here.

Select wireless carriers have special cell phone plans for Prime members. Members also get 10 percent back as a credit each month. These plans aren’t for everyone—and your current provider may be cheaper—but they could be a good option for those seeking prepaid, inexpensive phone service.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 18, 2024