Technology

Echo smart speakers and smart displays have a handy feature that can show and tell you when there’s a package sitting on your doorstep and even what’s in it. While this can be helpful most of the time, around the holidays it could seriously ruin some surprises. Avoid making any Grinch-like moves this holiday and manage your Amazon shopping notifications in the Alexa app to help keep the magic alive. Alongside options for tailoring package announcements, the notifications section of the app also has a number of settings you can toggle on or off to help make the voice assistant a little more helpful when it comes to purchases you make on Amazon. Below are a few of the most useful that you might want to tweak this holiday season. How to turn off package notifications on Alexa Open the Alexa a...

Halo Infinite is getting Slayer, Free-For-All (FFA), Tactical Slayer (SWAT), and Fiesta playlists, according to a Reddit post from u/ske7ch343, otherwise known as 343 Industries’ community director Brian Jarrard (via Windows Central). Jarrard confirmed that the four playlists are coming to the game via an update on December 14th. 343 Industries previously said that Fiesta, SWAT, and FFA playlists would be coming to the game by the end of the year, while a Social Slayer playlist wouldn’t arrive until sometime in 2022. In his post, Jarrard acknowledges that developers promised a Social Slayer playlist with “a variety of new variants.” But since this wouldn’t get done before the holidays, 343 has decided to launch a basic Slayer playlist first, and will “look to bolster and expand with more v...

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced on Friday that it will now recognize individuals who reach space on its website instead of issuing Commercial Space Astronaut Wings. “The U.S. commercial human spaceflight industry has come a long way from conducting test flights to launching paying customers into space,” FAA Associate Administrator Wayne Monteith said in a statement. “The Astronaut Wings program, created in 2004, served its original purpose to bring additional attention to this exciting endeavor. Now it’s time to offer recognition to a larger group of adventurers daring to go to space.” The FAA anticipates that the commercial human spaceflight industry will continue to grow in the coming years, reducing the feasibility of handing out individual wings. Before the program ...

This morning, space tourism venture Blue Shepard successfully launched its third crew of passengers to space and back on the company’s New Shepard rocket, the first time a group of six people has flown together on the vehicle. The crew included GMA host Michael Strahan and Laura Shepard Churchley, the eldest daughter of Alan Shepard — the first American in space and the namesake for the New Shepard rocket. New Shepard lifted off just after 10AM ET on Saturday morning from Blue Origin’s launch facility in Van Horn, Texas. The entire flight lasted just over 10 minutes from liftoff to touch down. Riding inside a crew capsule on top of the New Shepard rocket, the six-person crew climbed to an altitude of 351,225 feet, or more than 66 miles above the Earth, what is considered to be above the bo...

The new smart home standard Matter is making a lot of grand promises, chief among them are fixing the interoperability mess the smart home is currently in and making Apple, Samsung, Google, and Amazon talk to each other. Big jobs. But it’s also tackling one of the other pain points in the connected home: TV control. One part of the new connectivity protocol is a specification for televisions and streaming video players. This means that Matter could become yet another way to control content in our homes. But, with its promise of platform agnosticism, Matter’s TV spec has the potential to replace proprietary casting systems, like Apple’s AirPlay or Google’s Cast, and finally free our TVs. Matter TV, as we’ll call it for wont of an official name, will allow control of a television’s core func...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has provided an explanation as to what caused the outage that downed parts of its own services, as well as the third-party websites and online platforms that utilize AWS. In a post on the AWS website, the company explains that an automated process caused the outage, which began around 10:30AM ET in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) region. The spike in congestion prevented the company’s operations team from using its real-time monitoring system “An automated activity to scale capacity of one of the AWS services hosted in the main AWS network triggered an unexpected behavior from a large number of clients inside the internal network,” Amazon’s report says. “This resulted in a large surge of connection activity that overwhelmed the networking devices between the int...

Former Apple employee Cher Scarlett says the company didn’t adequately live up to its half of a settlement, so she won’t withdraw her complaint to the National Labor Relations Board as agreed, according to Forbes. Scarlett says that her settlement with Apple required it to post “a company-wide memo clarifying employee rights including discussing pay & working conditions,” “in a prominent and visible location on the People site.” She says that the company did post a notice to its site, but that it was only up during the week that Apple employees were given off for Thanksgiving. “I’d argue all day that 7 days while no one is online for a holiday is absolutely not prominent and visible,” Scarlett tweeted on Thursday. Despite the fact that there was no requirement for a time period, the ag...

Bitcoin mining has rebounded after China’s recent cryptocurrency crackdown, according to data from Blockchain.com and BTC.com. Prior to the crackdown, China represented the largest average monthly hashrate share, or computational power required to mine Bitcoin. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI), China’s global hashrate share was around 34.2% in May of this year. And in 2019, the country accounted for about 75% of the average monthly hashrate share — a significant portion of the world’s Bitcoin mining. In May of this year, China began to clamp down on crypto, banning financial institutions and payment companies from providing services related to crypto transactions. In September, China’s top financial regulators vowed to work together to prevent “illeg...

Blue Origin on Saturday successfully completed its third human spaceflight, launching six people, including former NFL player Michael Strahan, into near space. Saturday’s mission, referred to as NS-19, was the first time the company had six passengers aboard its New Shepard rocket. Besides Strahan, other passengers included Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, and paying customers Dylan Taylor, Evan Dick, Lane Bess and Cameron Bess. The view from #NewShepard at apogee is something our #NS19 astronauts will never forget. Today’s flight featured a full capsule of six astronauts, each with their own window seat. pic.twitter.com/MOUT4YgnLC — Blue Origin (@blueorigin) December 11, 2021 The New Shepard rocket achieved liftoff from its spaceport in West Texas at a...

Microsoft is sponsoring an esports competition with prizes totaling $10,000. The game? Well, it’s not exactly a game — it’s Microsoft Excel. Every year, the top Microsoft Excel users (players?) from around the world face off in the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC) (via PCWorld). The qualifying rounds already took place, leaving just eight Excel masters to compete for the FMWC crown. The quarter-finals, semifinals, and final round all take place today at 12PM ET via a YouTube livestream and the ESPN app. [embedded content] According to the FMWC rules, competitors are presented with a one to five-page long case study during each round. Case studies contain real-world problems, along with six to 15 questions that vary in complexity — the more complex a question, the more points are awarded...