Enjoy your favorite music in a whole new way with Sony thanks to this discount.

Apple’s AirPods 4 earbuds are on sale via Amazon for just $100. This is a new record low price, representing a discount of $29. The deal is for the standard model and not the one with ANC. However, that model is also on sale for $149, which is a discount of 17 percent.

These earbuds are generally considered some of the best AirPods on the market. The sound quality is improved over the previous generation, as is the overall design. This leads to a legitimately comfortable fit, which is something of a rarity in the earbud space. We noted in our official review that they don’t fall out when moving around.

This model features the H2 chip, which was introduced for the AirPods Pro. The H2 chip opens up plenty of high-tech features, like Personalized Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking. These earbuds also offer 48kHz audio for FaceTime calls and Adaptive EQ. Speaking of calls, Apple’s newly introduced Voice Isolation feature helps remove unwanted ambient noise when speaking on the phone.

There are some features missing from these earbuds when compared to the company’s higher-end models. These AirPods don’t have onboard volume controls and there’s no wireless charging. Also, there’s no ANC on the entry-level buds. Again, the ANC-equipped version is also on sale today.

Check out our coverage of the best Apple deals for more discounts, and follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/apples-airpods-4-drop-to-a-record-low-of-100-152213060.html?src=rss

A joint WHO/UNICEF report this week shows that measles has made a dramatic comeback across Europe and Central Asia.

Windows Defender has begun identifying WinRing0 — a kernel-level driver used by numerous hardware monitoring applications — as malicious software, causing widespread functionality issues for affected tools. The driver, which provides low-level hardware access necessary for reading fan speeds, controlling RGB lighting, and monitoring system components, is being quarantined due to potential security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malware.

WinRing0 gained popularity among developers because it’s one of only two freely available Windows drivers capable of accessing the SMBus registers needed for hardware monitoring functions. The affected applications include Fan Control, OpenRGB, MSI Afterburner, LibreHardwareMonitor, and multiple others that rely on this driver to communicate with system hardware.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The government recently shut down the program that would mail four free COVID tests to anyone who requested them, but a lesser-known program for community groups is still running. If you have a plan to distribute tests for free, you can request them by the hundreds. 

Individual COVID tests are no longer available by mail for free

Just to bring everyone up to speed: The government program that sent free COVID tests through covidtests.gov is not currently taking orders. A message on that page states that “Tests ordered before 8:00 PM EDT, Sunday, March 9, 2025, will be shipped.” This is the program that would send a package of four tests, per household, per round of the program. There were several rounds, the last one beginning in September 2024.

There’s no indication of whether the program may resume at some later date. Some news articles had stated or speculated that the government’s stockpile of COVID tests was going to be destroyed, but so far there has been no confirmation that any usable tests are being destroyed.

If you, personally, need a free test, you can try these locators to find places that provide government-funded COVID tests: 

• HRSA health center locator 

• Test-to-treat locations 

• ICATT testing locations (free if you are uninsured and have been exposed to COVID)

Community groups can request bulk orders of COVID tests for free

While the program for individuals has shut down, a lesser-known one for community groups is still going strong. There isn’t an official government website that explains the program or provides an order form, but mutual aid groups have been passing around a spreadsheet and instructions for requesting tests from a government email address. 

For example, this Instagram post from Clean Air KC includes several comments from groups who placed successful orders and are sharing information about the brands, expiration dates, and even the size of the boxes they come in. Reportedly, the minimum order is 300 tests. Clean Air KC has successfully placed orders of 3,000 tests, and a person from that group also showed me a thank-you note from someone who used their information about the program to place an order of, and receive, 360 tests.

How to request free COVID tests in bulk

Officially, the way to get information about this program is by emailing tdx@hhs.gov. I didn’t get a response when I reached out to that address, but I did hear back from the media contact for the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, which maintains COVID test stockpiles. They confirmed today (March 14, 2025) that the program is still running, and that any community group with a plan to distribute the tests for free “can request a one-time or recurring shipment of 400 over-the-counter tests for free distribution.” 

It’s unclear if 400 is a new minimum, or just a recommended amount. My contact at Clean Air KC said that they placed an order for 3,000 this week, after the USPS individual test program shut down, and received confirmation that the requested tests are on the way. 

To order tests, send an email to tdx@hhs.gov with the following information:

• The number of tests you’re requesting

• The address to send them to

• Contact information for the person receiving the tests

• The name or purpose of your group 

Food banks, libraries, faith based organizations and others can request tests, but so can informal groups so long as they intend to distribute the tests for free. You cannot resell tests received through this program.

Groups have been using this spreadsheet as an order form, although it’s not clear if the spreadsheet is strictly necessary. Older web pages from nursing home organizations (like this one) describe a similar program that required requesters to be long term care facilities with CLIA certification or a CLIA waiver, but this appears to be no longer necessary. ASPR confirmed to me that “any organization” that agrees to distribute the tests for free can order them.

The ninth episode of season two, ‘The After Hours,’ is now streaming on Apple TV+.

“The rapid pace of [DOGE’s] actions…requires the quick release of information about its structure and activities. That is especially so given the secrecy with which USDS has operated.”

Active-duty service members, military families, and veterans get more cellular benefits for less with T-Mobile’s exclusive offers.

The Retina display, long battery life, 2.4GHz quad-core processor, and Touch ID are all here for just $425 at StackSocial.

Reddit has shown a growing commitment to promoting ads on its platform, especially since going public a year ago. But in the interest of not completely alienating customers with incessant, irrelevant, or personally offensive ads, the social media company is giving users the ability to block advertisers for a year.

In a Reddit post last night, a Reddit employee known as cozy_sheets said that clicking “Hide” on an unwanted ad on Reddit will soon result in Reddit automatically hiding “future ads from that advertiser account for at least a year (you can re-hide the ad after that period of time).” The change will debut on the Reddit website and Reddit’s iOS and Android app throughout “the next several weeks,” according to the announcement.

Reddit didn’t detail what limits it will use to ensure that users don’t block every single advertiser for an ad-free Reddit. Some users have already reported seeing a daily limit for hiding ads, though.

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After raising rates last June for customers on some of its older plans, T-Mobile is pushing up costs again — but it’s not entirely clear how many people are affected. From a report: According to a memo obtained by CNET and sent to T-Mobile employees early this morning, some people will see a $5 per-line increase beginning with their April or May bills.

The memo by Jon Freier, president of T-Mobile’s consumer group, states that customers affected by the price hike should be notified by the end of today, March 13. Only those who receive a notice will see the rate increase.

Freier cites the “rising costs over the past several years” as the impetus behind the price push. Other carriers are facing the same headwinds, such as Verizon last December and this January, and AT&T last January and June.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Netflix’s streaming era began way back in 2007, right around the time the company had delivered its billionth DVD by mail (a copy of Babel to a woman in Texas). That’s the year when the company began development of an app that would allow you to watch video-on-demand content on your actual TV, rather than in a window on your PC via Internet Explorer—or whatever the hell browser you happened to be using during the George W. Bush administration.

Internet speeds and interest built and, by 2011, the company had moved fully away from its DVD-by-mail business as streaming took on a life of its own. While distribution rights for streaming content were, and remain, wildly different than for physical copies, the potential of streaming was obvious: Netflix would offer something like the breadth and depth of its DVD library, minus the “mailing things back and forth” part.

There was a value proposition there, too: As cable prices skyrocketed and we were all forced to pay for endless channels that we mostly didn’t watch, Netflix (and Hulu, which grew more slowly, but debuted around the same time), the promise of a vast library of movies to watch whenever you wanted was irresistible—and cheap: In 2011, you could get an all-streaming subscription for about $8 a month. Which was a good deal, even during the Obama administration.

Despite a few caveats—you might’ve needed to bump your internet connection to a higher, pricier bandwidth, and you still needed a separate DVD subscription to watch some older movies, it seemed like the future was in sight, filled with endless possibilities.

A decade and a half later, we all know that future was a lie—especially if you’re a movie lover.

The rise of “streaming originals”

Netflix’s first foray into original programming was a straight-to-series order for the Kevin Spacey-led, David Fincher-produced political thriller House of Cards, which debuted in 2013. The decision to pursue the show—and to outbid every traditional cable and broadcast network for it—was almost entirely data-driven, and a harbinger for what would come: Netflix saw that viewers liked Kevin Spacey (it was a different era, obviously), and David Fincher movies! House of Cards had both.

Data has always been the Holy Grail of entertainment programming, but Netflix had data that was better, more specific, and more current than any focus group could hope to provide. Gone were the days of extrapolating from surveys—Netflix knew who was watching what and when with unheard-of specificity, and thus the streamer’s ability to give people what they want would become unprecedented. It would also lead them to focus more on developing their own proprietary series and films, rather than negotiating massive licensing deals for stuff other studios owned.

And the deals were massive—Netflix would spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to fill its servers with “content.” But as time went on, and other studios launched their own streaming services, chasing cash they used to make selling movies to cable, Netflix’s library started to shrink, going from 11,000 titles in 2015 to just 6,000 by 2022.

The golden age of streaming

Still, it was hard to complain too much when those Netflix rivals seemed willing to do anything to compete. Whereas Disney once kept tight control over its library, placing films into “the Disney Vault” so it could rerelease them to theaters and on video every decade or so, the launch of Disney+ in March 2020 saw the studio offering up hundreds of its classic films at once—a treat for animation buffs and a boon to parents who no longer had to endure their kids watching the same handful of DVDs on repeat (in theory, anyway).

Not to be outdone, when Warner Bros. launched what was then known as HBO Max in May 2020, it seemed like a pandemic-era gift: The studio went all-in on its massive catalogue—one of the largest and most enviable in Hollywood, encompassing classic films, more recent blockbusters, beloved animation, and shows culled from its array of cable networks. Alongside big gets—like securing the rights to all of the films from Japan’s revered Studio Ghibli, something its cranky co-founder Hayao Miyazaki swore would never happen—Warner Bros. leaned into its history, loading the service with hundreds of classics from across the decades.

For a while, perusing the lists of films coming to these services every month was a delight—sure, no one service offered every movie, but there was a decent chance what you wanted to watch was available somewhere, and monthly subscriptions were cheap enough that most people subscribed to a few of them.

But this golden age of streaming proved to be short-lived.

Shrinkflation comes for streaming

Even during this period of explosive growth, streamers started to follow the Netflix model of investing more money in original content, and leaving catalogue as an afterthought. It’s hard to build buzz around movies that are 50, 20, or even a decade old, after all, when you could instead promote something shiny and new.

Still, the reckoning didn’t truly come until 2022, when inflationary pressures, including rising interest rates, coupled with a surprising loss of subscribers, caused Netflix’s stock value to crater, dropping from more than $600 to less than $200 over the course of a few months.

Suddenly, every streaming service seemed concerned about the bottom line—and it seems the easiest way to cut costs, when it comes to digital offerings, is to reduce your library. Over the course of the next year, embattled entertainment companies announced plans to begin removing vast quantities of older content from their services—often even as they raised prices. Like spending more money for a smaller bag of chips at the grocery store, shrinkflation came for streaming too.

Where did all those movies go?

Remember the data I mentioned earlier? The downside is that the numbers apparently showed streamers that customers don’t care that much about older movies—or at least, not enough about any one movie for a lack of them to move the needle when it comes to subscriptions. So why give people free access to stuff most wouldn’t watch when you could instead make a little money?

While some of these films have gone to ad-supported services like The Roku Channel and Tubi, watching a movie with a bunch of ad breaks is no cinephile’s dream.

Enter digital rentals: For five years I’ve been writing streaming guides for Lifehacker, suggesting movies you can watch based on your mood or to fit a particular theme. And, anecdotally but undeniably, these film lists are increasingly less about “streaming” and more about reminding you of things you can pay to rent. Whereas I used to be able to point you to a few dozen films spread across the major services, these days my recommendations tend to include a lot more rentals.

Broad categories of films, usually anything more than a decade old, aren’t typically included with any streaming service. If you want to watch them, you’re going to have to pony up around $4 for a digital rental. This holds true no matter how beloved the movie: As of this writing, the likes of Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, All About Eve, The Shining, Back to the Future, Malcolm X, and The Iron Giant are all rental-only, meaning you have to pay extra on top of whatever streaming fees you’re already paying. That list of movies is entirely off the top of my head—I looked them up based on my confidence that, being older than a decade or two, they would only be available for a fee.

Netflix still has a classic movies section, but it’s pretty anemic. While the rotation changes, the oldest movie currently in the lineup is 1957’s An Affair to Remember—not ancient by classic film standards, but certainly venerable. It’s tagged as “Leaving Soon.” Beyond that, there are but a dozen movies from the 1970s (almost all of them Bollywood classics), and a few more than that from the 1980s and ‘90s. Of the dozen or so 1980s movies offered, several are marked as “Leaving Soon,” including The Karate Kid films. (They do have a James Garner movie from 1984 that I’ve never heard of called Tank, if you have a couple of hours to kill.)

New content has pushed classic movies to the back

I’m picking on Netflix here, with its relentless focus on original “content” and newer releases that sees the streamer churning through shows and movies, often before they have time to register. But the picture at Hulu, Paramount+, MGM+, etc. is roughly the same, even if those others have slightly better libraries of current-ish movies.

Max remains a bright spot, with a reasonably well-curated selection of movies dating back to the silent era—but even that has shrunk. The streamer used to prominently feature its association with classic-movie network TCM as its own category. It’s still there, but now you have to dig. No one’s tracking exact month-to-month numbers of older (meaning, sigh, the ‘90s or earlier) movies included in streaming, but, again, anecdotally: whenever possible, I try to recommend movies from a cross-section of streaming services. I figure it’s nice if any list of suggestions includes options for everyone, and I know that for me, personally, that extra rental price (on top of all the streaming fees) is a big barrier—no matter how much I want to see a particular movie. And that’s a lot harder than it used to be.

A culture of relentless, exhausting new-ness has evolved around streaming, one in which shows and movies are considered out of date once the first-week drop window has passed. So we’re left with a (very) limited selection of old movies, or we’re stuck with rental fees on top of streaming charges.

It’s hard out there for a cinephile.

The best streamers for movie fans

Max

Though I still mourn the loss of HBO Max, Max—the app that replaced it—is still the mainstream streamer with the best classic film library, including a broad range of Warner Bros. stuff, from Casablanca to Goodfellas to Lord of the Rings; it includes popular favorites alongside some more artsy fare, including those Studio Ghibli films. A recent partnership with A24 films has also made it the destination of choice for the modern cinephile crowd. Cost: starting at $9.99/month with ads, or $99.99/year.

The Criterion Channel

An offshoot of boutique film distributor Janus Films, The Criterion Collection has billed itself as a purveyor of “important classic and contemporary films” for decades. The Criterion Channel streaming service is, thus, unsurprisingly the destination of choice for anyone who wants to watch movies older than the Reagan administration. It has a rotating library of a couple of thousand films, including many foreign and classic American films. You may never heard of many of them, which could be either a pro or a con, but it’s not all snooty art films. Last year, for example, the Channel ran a month of Razzie-nominated movies including Showgirls, Gigli, The Blair Witch Project, and even Freddy Got Fingered. Cost: $10.99/month or $99.99/year.

Mubi

Another boutique streamer, Mubi is similar in some ways to The Criterion Channel, but with a key difference: Since Mubi has more of a focus on its role as a distributor of newer films (including recent Oscar nominee The Substance), the catalog tends to be a bit newer, and a bit smaller, but with a steady and smartly curated rotation. Cost: $14.99/month or $119.88/year.

TCM (Turner Classic Movies)

TCM is the gold standard in classic film, particularly when it comes to Hollywood, and the curation is solid. TCM has introduced me to more classic films that I otherwise never might have heard of than any other service, but finding it is more complicated. Max has a limited selection of TCM-branded films but, to get the full experience, including “live” movies, interviews, host segments, etc., you need to either suck it up and subscribe to cable, or a rough equivalent: YouTube TV offers TCM as part of its lineup, including on-demand content, as do Hulu with Live TV and Sling TV. Sticker shock with these options is real, however. Cost: Sling TV: starts at $45.99/month, YouTube TV: starts at $82.99 per month; Hulu+Live TV starts at $82.99/month.

Several people have been arrested as part of a corruption investigation linked to the European Parliament and Huawei. The company is suspected of bribing European Union officials, according to the Associated Press.

A spokesperson for the federal prosecutors’ office in Belgium, where the European Parliament is located, said authorities are conducting “an ongoing investigation on preliminary charges of active corruption, forgery of documents, money laundering at the European Parliament.” Prosecutors stated that “the offences were allegedly committed by a criminal organization” and were carried out to promote “purely private commercial interests in the context of political decisions.”

“Corruption was allegedly practiced regularly and very discreetly from 2021 to the present day, under the guise of commercial lobbying and taking various forms, such as compensation for political positions or excessive gifts such as food and travel expenses, or regular invitations to [soccer] matches,” the office said in a statement. It later added that the “alleged bribery is said to have benefited Huawei.”

Police raided several addresses in Belgium and Portugal, according to reports. Two European Parliament offices linked to two assistants who are allegedly involved in the case have been sealed.

Those arrested were being questioned over their alleged involvement “in active corruption within the European Parliament,” prosecutors said. A spokesperson for the office told the BBC that no members of the parliament (MEPs) were directly targeted in these raids. However, reports suggest that around 15 current and former MEPs are “on the radar” of investigators.

Huawei said it would “urgently communicate with the investigation” to better understand the issue at hand, while the company is taking the allegations “seriously.” A spokesperson told The Guardian that “Huawei has a zero-tolerance policy towards corruption or other wrongdoing, and we are committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations at all times.”

A European Parliament spokesperson said the legislative body had “received a request for cooperation from the Belgian authorities to assist the investigation which the Parliament will swiftly honor.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/huawei-allegedly-benefited-from-european-parliament-bribery-scheme-142423000.html?src=rss