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Amazon orders William Gibson series from the creators of ‘Westworld’

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The series has been in development at Amazon since early 2018, but it’s only now getting the go-ahead. Joy and Nolan both signed a larger deal with Amazon in April. Other executive producers include Westworld‘s Athena Wickham as well as In the Tall Grass veterans Steven Hoban and Vincenzo Natali.

This isn’t the Neuromancer show you might have hoped for, and there are numerous unknowns like the cast or release date. The combination of Gibson and Westworld alumni is still promising. If nothing else, it suggests the Amazon series will tackle Gibson’s world building and idea-driven storytelling with some degree of seriousness.

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Apple’s AirPods Pro are on sale just weeks after their release

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Normally $249, the AirPods Pro are Apple’s best and most expensive true wireless earbuds yet. They offer refined design, better sound and more features, like active noise cancellation (ANC). They add transparency mode, on-board controls and silicone ear tips. They’re rated as sweatproof (IPX4), and of course, they have hands-free Siri.

There are still a few drawbacks to this model: the touch controls are a bit awkward, the settings are buried in iOS and not everyone is a fan of the silicone tips, which are essential for ANC.

While you might save $14 ordering through Amazon, the listing says these usually ship between one and three months. That will likely be a deal breaker for most people. You could also tempt fate and wait for any Black Friday sales that may or may not materialize.

Buy Apple AirPods Pro on Amazon – $235

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Siri can add items to your Walmart grocery order

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Walmart Voice Order learns from your past orders so that users don’t have to specify exactly which item they want. According to Walmart, if the customer has ordered “Great Value organic orange juice with no pulp” before, they can just say “orange juice” and the app will figure out the user’s preferences.

The feature — which was previously exclusive to Google Assistant — is available pretty much anywhere if you’re steeped in Apple’s ecosystem; you can tell Siri to add to your cart via iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, HomePod or in your CarPlay-enabled vehicle. While iOS users probably weren’t turning green with envy over Android users’ ability to order groceries with voice controls, some of them will likely find the feature to be an easier way to get their weekly shopping done. Fans of Alexa probably shouldn’t hold their breath, though — Walmart’s direct competition with Amazon means Voice Order will likely only work with Siri and Google Assistant.

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Apple Music Replay highlights your favorite tunes of the year

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Apple Music has been around for long enough that you can start reminiscing about years past, and Apple is banking on that nostalgia for its latest addition. It’s debuting an Apple Music Replay feature that highlights your favorite tunes not just from the past year, but every year you’ve been a subscriber. It creates custom, shareable playlists for each year and tells you which artists, albums and songs dominated your ears. In my case, that’s a whole lot of trance, jazz and ambient.

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Netflix renews ‘The Witcher’ more than a month before it debuts

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The Witcher hasn’t even arrived on Netflix, and it’s already being renewed. Netflix shared the news on Twitter today, and Deadline reports that production of the eight-episode second season will begin in early 2020. The second season could debut in 2021.



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Adobe Lightroom for iPad and iOS will directly import photos

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When you plug an SD card or drive into your Apple device (via dongle, of course), Lightroom will auto-detect the media. You can choose to import files individually or just dump the whole lot of them into your library. Once they’ve been transferred to Lightroom’s library, the app will ask if you want to delete the source files on your external media. The correct answer is “no,” but as an additional safeguard, the photos will also be automatically backed up to Creative Cloud, if you have that feature enabled.

This is just the latest feature Adobe has previewed — there were several others revealed earlier this month that creatives can look forward to. At Adobe MAX, the company teased integrated streaming, automatically inserting people into photos, animating still images and more. While those updates won’t be available for some time, directly importing images to Lightroom will be available by the end of the year.

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Apple’s Phil Schiller says Chromebooks won’t help kids succeed (updated)

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We’ve asked Apple and Google for comment.

There are already plenty of people who disagree with Schiller’s assessment, mind you. As we found out through the teachers themselves, Apple’s ideal and the practical reality can be two very different things. While some educators do see value in iPads, tight school budgets frequently make them impractical. An iPad costs $299 for education customers versus roughly $150 for starter Chromebooks, and that’s before factoring in accessories. In many cases, it’s not a question of choosing between Chromebooks and iPads — it’s between Chromebooks and nothing at all. And when the Google-based laptops can frequently do many of the same things, there’s not as much incentive to splurge on iPads unless there are class-specific advantages.

As it stands, teachers have made their preferences clear through what they buy. Chromebooks represented 60 percent of all laptops and tablets purchased for K-12 classrooms in the US during 2018, according to Futuresource Consulting estimates. Apple accounted for 18 percent. If Apple wants iPads to thrive in the classroom, it may have to compete more on the schools’ terms.

Update 11/13 4:10PM ET: Schiller has followed up on the interview with a tweet elaborating his stance. He said that “every child has the ability to succeed” and that the full CNET chat discussed giving kids and educators the resources they need to “learn, explore and grow.” Technology should be there “not just to take a test,” he said.



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Spotify’s new scripted fiction podcast stars Pedro Pascal and Carrie Coon

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The series features big names, including Alan Cumming (The Good Wife), Carrie Coon (Fargo, Gone Girl), Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones), Lucas Hedges (Manchester By The Sea), Tavi Gevinson (Rookie Magazine founder) and more. It also has an original score by the indie-rock band Warpaint. The plot follows a single mother who starts phishing over the phone as part of an identity theft ring.

Scripted fiction podcasts haven’t made it to the mainstream yet, but there have been some breakout successes — Welcome to Night Vale and Limetown. Spotify is clearly trying to make the model work and betting that its star-studded cast will help. All Motherhacker episodes are available today on Spotify.

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Don’t underestimate the power of Facebook Pay

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The pitch for Facebook Pay is pretty simple: Connect your chosen card or PayPal to your Facebook account. Agree to connect it to Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram and you’ll be able to send and receive money from any of those platforms from anywhere in the world. It is the logical extension of Facebook’s plan to unify the infrastructure powering its various networks.

In March, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained how this would work in his “privacy-focused vision” for the platform. “A person discovers a business on Instagram and easily transitions to their preferred messaging app for secure payments and customer support,” he wrote. The missing part was a platform-wide commerce platform that would mean you never have to leave Facebook.

The benefit for consumers is convenience, especially once you’ve set up your payment details within the system. There’s no need to fiddle with usernames or bank details, just find your friend’s profile on their chosen (Facebook-owned) messenger and send them the cash. With ease of use, you would think, comes trust, something that Facebook is badly lacking in right now.

Adding payments helps justify Facebook’s decision to aggregate its platforms into one and makes it easier to build new systems in the future. If commerce is embedded within Facebook’s platform, then it’ll be a cinch to recruit new users for any potential homegrown Twitch, Patreon or YouTube rival. After all, one of the biggest problems with hooking up new customers is the friction around signing up.

It’s likely that each platform will sell the benefits of Facebook Pay to its users in different ways too. Facebook and Messenger will focus on Marketplace and Fundraisers. Messenger and WhatsApp will focus on peer-to-peer payments, and Instagram will be all in on commerce.

Advertisers, especially online-only businesses that use Instagram as a storefront, are going to love this. If you see something on your feed that you like, you could buy it with a single push of a button from inside the same app. That will not only reduce the ever-worrying friction but also allow advertisers to see the benefits of their targeting.

WhatsApp already lets you use it like this, but expect to see more companies go all in on Facebook as their only storefront. After all, you can use Instagram as a catalog, Facebook Pay to handle payments and WhatsApp for customer service. Combine that with Facebook’s ad-targeting database and you’ll be able to find and buy ads only for the people who want your product.

Facebook Pay may finally allow the company to make money on the back of WhatsApp’s 1.6 billion users. WhatsApp isn’t as popular in the US as other platforms, but it’s huge in the rest of the world, and Facebook hasn’t begun to exploit its potential. If Facebook Pay, with WhatsApp, becomes the de facto messenger-and-payments platform outside the US, it’ll be worth a fortune.

Naturally, Facebook has outsourced the nuts and bolts of its system to Stripe and PayPal in the US and other processors elsewhere. It will offer fraud detection, biometric security and live support between the hours of 6 AM and 6 PM (PT). And it has pledged to not store or share your payment information with third parties, although it will still be able to examine your transaction history.

That, however, may not matter to the people who feel like Facebook is already beyond being trustworthy. After all, the company initially pledged to leave WhatsApp as a standalone app, but it changed its mind, resulting in CEO Jan Koum leaving the company. Actually, that’s the same thing that Facebook said about Instagram, committing to “building and growing Instagram independently.” So perhaps folks have a reason to be nervous.

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Intel fixes CPU security flaw it said was patched in May

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The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam researchers who alerted Intel to the problems have told the New York Times that Intel apparently ignored key proof-of-concept exploits when developing the May update, and should have found the relevant flaws even without those ready-made examples. The team refused to stay quiet with the November patch knowing that there were still issues. There are also criticisms of Intel’s overall approach — instead of tackling the underlying problem, it’s allegedly focused more on patching variants of that problem as they pop up.

The initial problem affected many processors released since 2011 and applied regardless of your operating system. Software-level patches have mitigated some of the security problems on top of Intel’s microcode solutions.

We’ve asked Intel for comment. This isn’t a great look for the chip giant, whatever its response. As the researchers warned, the usual secrecy that governs vulnerability disclosures could hurt users here. Hackers could take advantage of security holes that people don’t realize are still open, and the flaw itself wasn’t all that secret — it leaked to the point where the researchers were told about their own discovery. There may be substantial work ahead (including possible chip design changes) before Intel’s CPUs are more trustworthy.

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