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With Amazon’s annual Big Spring Sale right around the corner, we’re starting to see prices drop on Amazon devices. That includes the newest model of the Echo Spot, which combines smart home and speaker perks with an alarm clock. Right now, there’s a 38% discount on this device, bringing it to $49.99 (down from $79.99).

Amazon Echo Spot

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$79.99
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$49.99
at Amazon

$79.99
Save $30.00

The Echo Spot is a reasonably compact smart alarm clock. In fact, the screen is slightly smaller than you’d expect. Although it looks like it takes up half of the device, the screen itself is only a 2.83-inch square portion of the entire half-circle panel. Despite its size, the display does show a number of different data points, including the time, weather, and calendar events. It’ll show you the name of any songs that are currently playing, and you can set it to transition to your favorite music after the alarm goes off.

Like Amazon’s other Echo devices, this is compatible with Alexa for hands-free use. If the rest of your home is part of the Alexa ecosystem, you can use the Echo to make calls or set up custom routines like turning off all the smart lights in your home before you go to bed. As PCMag notes in its review, the speaker quality is surprisingly loud and dynamic for a smart alarm clock, and while you might prefer a larger speaker, this gets the job done. PCMag also mentions that when streaming over wifi, the audio quality is better than when connecting your phone via Bluetooth). Importantly, the Echo Spot lacks a camera and cannot play video.

The Echo Spot is a simple, easy-to-use smart clock that also doubles as a casual speaker with basic smart home features (not to mention Alexa compatibility). If that’s what you’re looking for, the Amazon Echo Spot is a worthwhile buy, especially at its current $49.99 price point.

The White House has been promising a set of national rules to guide artificial intelligence since late last year, and today Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) fired the first volley. The senator shared a discussion draft for codifying the executive order signed by President Donald Trump in December calling for an AI bill. Her stated goal is a policy that “protects children, creators, conservatives and communities from harm.”

Blackburn has called for tougher policies for AI safety, and one of the core messages in this discussion draft is that it “places a duty of care on AI developers in the design, development and operation of AI platforms to prevent and mitigate foreseeable harm to users.” It also draws a line on the many copyright infringement questions raised by creative industries: “an AI model’s unauthorized reproduction, copying, or processing of copyrighted works for the purpose of training, fine-tuning, developing, or creating AI does not constitute fair use under the Copyright Act.” 

Some of the other notable provisions are:

• Requires covered online platforms, including social media platforms, to implement tools and safeguards to protect users under the age of 17 against online harms.

• Protects the voice and visual likenesses of individuals and creators from the proliferation of digital replicas without their consent.

• Sets new federal transparency guidelines for marking, authenticating and detecting AI-generated content.

• Requires certain companies and federal agencies to issue reports on AI-related job effects, including layoffs and job displacement to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) on a quarterly basis.

It includes ending Section 230, marking the latest attempt to retire a law that has been questioned as a possible loophole for AI companies to escape liability when their tools cause harm. While AI critics might see positive signs here, remember that this is just the initial version of the framework. Lawmakers will likely spend a lot of time negotiating over the eventual result, which may be notably de-fanged from its current state. It could wind up with a lot more requirements echoing this Republican complaint: “Combats the consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures demonstrated by AI systems by requiring third-party audits to prevent discrimination based on political affiliation.” Despite the claims of suppression and censorship, we’ve consistently seen this conservative argument to be false — or at the very least misleading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/senator-blackburn-introduces-the-first-draft-of-a-federal-ai-bill-202509852.html?src=rss

A recent change in how the US Postal Service handles shipping partners appears to have forced Amazon to make alternative plans. The company reportedly plans to cut the number of packages it ships through USPS by at least two-thirds later this year. It says the decision came after USPS ended negotiations “at the eleventh hour” in favor of a new bidding process.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon plans to reduce the shipments it hands off to USPS. Last year, the company accounted for nearly 15 percent of the Postal Service’s package deliveries. Cutting that by nearly two-thirds diminishes one of the USPS’s most reliable sources of revenue. In fiscal 2025, the agency reported a net loss of $9 billion.

Amazon’s current contract with USPS ends on September 30. In a public response to the WSJ story, the company said it notified USPS in October 2025 that it would need to complete a new deal by December. “You can’t add capacity for hundreds of millions of packages overnight — it requires major capital investment, long-term infrastructure planning, hiring, and logistics coordination,” Amazon wrote.

According to Amazon, USPS then pulled the plug on negotiations at the last second. “We negotiated with [USPS] in good faith for more than a year to reach a deal that would bring them billions in revenue and believed we were heading toward an agreement,” Amazon wrote in a statement. “Our goal was to increase our volumes with USPS, not reduce them — until USPS abruptly walked away at the eleventh hour in December.”

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That’s when Postmaster General David Steiner implemented a new bidding process for last-mile deliveries, replacing a long-established one where USPS negotiated with shipping partners individually. He described the move as “a fair bidding process that enables the marketplace to find the best mix of local shipping attributes for the best volume-driven pricing.” Steiner was appointed to the post in May 2025, following the departure of former head Louis DeJoy.

Amazon said it submitted a bid in February using the new system but hasn’t heard back. “This creates significant uncertainty for our long-term network planning,” the company said. “Despite this, we participated in good faith and submitted a bid in February 2026. We’ve received no response.”

USPS plans to announce the bidding results in Q2 2026. Contracts are expected to be finalized by Q3. Despite apparently moving forward with the contingency plan, Amazon said it’s still “ready to continue this partnership.”

As for Postmaster Steiner, he spent Tuesday asking Congress to loosen USPS regulations and let him raise prices. Warning that the agency will “run out of cash” in about a year, he told a House subcommittee that he wants to raise the agency’s current $15 billion debt cap. He also asked for the ability to increase postage prices and reform its retiree pension obligations.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazon-will-reportedly-cut-its-usps-shipments-by-at-least-two-thirds-200915702.html?src=rss

Apple’s next big update, iOS 26.4, is nearly here. While it won’t include the company’s long-awaited AI Siri upgrade, you will find new emojis, AI-generated playlists in Apple Music, and support for end-to-end encryption for RCS. But perhaps most welcome of all, to at least some iOS users, is one key patch: Apple is finally fixing the iPhone’s buggy keyboard.

iOS 26.4 patches this iPhone keyboard glitch

In the release notes for iOS 26.4’s Release Candidate, Apple lists many of the new additions we’ve already seen in previous beta updates. But buried at the bottom of Apple’s list of “enhancements” is the following: “Improved keyboard accuracy when typing quickly.” That’s…pretty underwhelming sounding, at least by itself. But this marks the first time since iOS 26’s release that Apple has directly addressed a widespread issue with the iPhone’s keyboard.

iPhone 17 (256GB)

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Across the internet, users have been complaining about inaccurate typing since that update launched back in September. That negative feedback has persisted with Apple’s subsequent updates, and, in fact, may have only gotten louder. When Apple dropped iOS 26.3, one Redditor posted the following to r/iPhone: “iOS 26.3 keyboard completely unusable—anyone else?” Another commenter concurs, writing, “Literally as of today it’s becoming completely unusable for me. Like it’s been bad for about [two-to-three] months and now it’s [truly] unusable.” In the same vein, there’s currently a lot of attention on r/Apple over the news of the keyboard patch. The top comment on this post reads: “I’ll beliebe it when insee it.” (The typos are presumably a joke, but not unusual for anyone typing too fast on a buggy iPhone keyboard.)

Whether the fix will satisfy these Redditors or not, it is likely not going to be the cure-all that every iOS user is looking for. This bug patch likely only addresses the specific bug that causes missed characters when a user types too fast—even though the key displays an animation when pressed. Hopefully, that issue is totally resolved here, but the iPhone’s keyboard was a source of contention before iOS 26 was even announced.

This is all up in the air until iOS 26.4 comes out, of course. Apple doesn’t have a release date yet, but now that the Release Candidate is here, the update could arrive imminently. In the meantime, there are some steps you can take to make your keyboard work a bit better for you—but if your issues are baked into the software, only Apple can really fix it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Britain plans to consider requiring labels on AI-generated content to protect consumers from disinformation and deepfakes, the government said on Wednesday, as it outlined other areas of focus to tackle the evolving global challenge. Technology minister Liz Kendall stressed the need to strike the right balance between protecting the creative industries and allowing the AI sector to innovate, saying in a statement that the government would take time to “get this right.”

The next phase of the government’s work on copyright and AI would also look at the harms posed by digital replicas without consent, ways for creators to control their work online and support for independent creative organizations, she said. […] Louise Popple, a copyright expert at law firm Taylor Wessing, noted that the government had not ruled out a broad exception that would allow AI developers to train on copyright works. “That’s a subtle difference of approach and could be interpreted to mean that everything is still up for grabs” she said. “It feels very much like the hard issues are being kicked down the road by the government.”

In 2024, Britain proposed easing copyright rules to let developers train models on lawfully accessed material, with creators able to reserve their rights. On Wednesday, Kendall said that having engaged with creatives, AI firms, industry bodies, unions and academics, the government had concluded it “no longer has a preferred option.” “We will help creatives control how their work is used. This sits at the heart of our ambition for creatives – including independent and smaller creative organizations — to be paid fairly,” she said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloudflare said it has appealed a fine issued by Italy over the company’s refusal to block access to websites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The appeal is the latest step in Cloudflare’s fight against Italy’s Piracy Shield law.

Piracy Shield is “a misguided Italian regulatory scheme designed to protect large rightsholder interests at the expense of the broader Internet,” Cloudflare said in a blog post this week. “After Cloudflare resisted registering for Piracy Shield and challenged it in court, the Italian communications regulator, AGCOM, fined Cloudflare… We appealed that fine on March 8, and we continue to challenge the legality of Piracy Shield itself.”

Cloudflare called the fine of 14.2 million euros ($16.4 million) “staggering.” AGCOM issued the penalty in January 2026, saying Cloudflare flouted requirements to disable DNS resolution of domain names and routing of traffic to IP addresses reported by copyright holders.

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There have been many different models of Echo smart speakers over the years, but the newest Echo Studio is one of the first that feels like a true smart speaker—offering premium sound and features that can compete with the best smart speakers in the market—rather than just a glorified Amazon accessory. Right now, you can get the 2nd-generation Echo Studio for $189.99 (originally $219.99), the lowest price it has been, according to price tracking tools.

Our best Echo Studio yet, with immersive spatial audio and Dolby Atmos, designed for Alexa+, Graphite

Amazon Echo Studio

$189.99
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$219.99
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$189.99
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$219.99
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A replacement for the slightly larger 4th generation Amazon Echo, and with a different form factor than the first-generation Echo Studio, the second-generation Echo Studio is compact, and doesn’t look out of place among other recent Alexa-enabled smart speakers, but you can hear the difference right away. The audio is powerful enough to fill a whole room, despite its small size, with detailed mids and highs. Like every small speaker, its bass is rather limited, but it performs well enough for its size. As you can see from its design, the sound is not directional, so it will travel to all directions, making spatial audio come to life (it can play Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio content).

The speaker comes with Alexa+, the new AI smart assistant, which is free to Amazon Prime members. It supports Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity, and can be chained to serve as a soundbar replacement for your home theater if you buy multiple speakers. Like most Alexa speakers, it supports multi-room playback, where you can play music from all your Alexa speakers at the same time. You can read more details on PCMag’s “excellent” review.

It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a “safe” gathering point near our planet.

The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed “New Moon” mission to capture and relocate an asteroid approximately the size of a house, with a mass of about 100 metric tons.

“We envision it becoming a base for robotic research and development on materials processing and manufacturing,” said Joel Sercel, chief executive officer of TransAstra. “Long term, instead of building space hardware on the ground and launching propellant up from the Earth, we could harvest it from raw materials in space.”

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Meta is shutting down its VR social platform Horizon Worlds, which was once a key piece of the pivot to the metaverse. The company said the app will be taken off the Quest store at the end of March, and fully removed from Quest headsets by June 15. After that date, it will shift to a standalone “mobile-only experience.” CNBC reports: The shift for Horizon Worlds, which was once a central part of the company’s push into virtual reality, comes weeks after Meta cut over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the unit responsible for the metaverse. […] The social platform has never drawn more than a couple hundred thousand active users a month, CNBC previously reported.

The virtual 3D social network where avatars could interact and play games with other users officially launched in late 2021. It operated exclusively on the Quest VR platform until Meta launched a mobile app version in September 2023. The mobile version of Horizon Worlds was built to provide an entry point for users without VR headsets, functioning similarly to Roblox.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA and ESA have released new images from the Hubble Space Telescope of a comet breaking up as it exits the solar system, captured as part of study recently published in the journal Icarus. The images are notable not only because they offer a more detailed view of the inside of a comet, which could offer new information about the early days of the universe, but also because they were taken by accident.

Photographing K1, or “Comet C/2025 K1” as it’s officially known, wasn’t the original intention of the study. “This comet [was] observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal,” John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama said. “We had to find a new target — and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances.”

The comet broke up over a period of days into “at least four pieces,” each with a “fuzzy envelope of gas and dust” around them, with Hubble specifically capturing the disassembly from November 8 through November 10, 2025. K1 was interesting before it started to crumble because at “around 8 kilometers across” (about 5 miles), it’s larger than the average comet, and having footage of it shattering will likely offer new insights into the physics of comets in general. Additionally, the lack of carbon in the gases released by the comet as it broke is apparently “chemically very strange,” which suggests the composition of K1 could bear scientific fruit, too.

Hubble has tracked comets of different sizes and compositions for years. Studying them remains a focus because comets are frequently made of ice and rock from the primordial period when solar systems were first forming. The ESA hopes to dramatically expand our understanding of that period with its “Comet Interceptor” mission, which is supposed to launch in 2028 or 2029, and aims to use photos captured from multiple angles to create a 3D model of a comet.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/hubble-catches-rare-view-of-a-comet-crumbling-185817544.html?src=rss

Perplexity’s Comet AI browser is now available as a standalone app for iPhone users. The tool initially debuted last summer on PCs, but cost $200 a month. The new app is free, as is the recently-released Android version.

Comet is an AI-powered browser, which has become a hot product category throughout the past year or so. This is basically a web browser combined with a chatbot that can perform some tasks on a user’s behalf. Like related tools, people can ask it to summarize a webpage or conduct additional research for more context about a subject.

Perplexity says that Comet “acts as a personal assistant and thinking partner” to “turn curiosity into momentum.” Those are certainly words. The company boasts that folks can use the tool to shop and make schedules. I advise some caution for both of these tasks, given that AI browsers are notorious marks that easily fall for various online scams.

One cool thing here is that the app takes full advantage of Apple’s Liquid Glass technology. It certainly looks easy on the eyes and that address bar really pops. The iOS version does suffer from some limitations inherent to Apple’s walled-garden approach, according to a preview by MacStories. Users cannot install third-party extensions here, though it can be made the default browser.

Finally, there’s a privacy concern worth considering. Perplexity has been open about the fact that it uses browsers in part to collect customer data for ad targeting. There’s a reason why something that used to cost $200 is now available for free.

The Comet browser is now available for iPhones, Android devices, Windows PCs and Macs. There isn’t a native iPad app yet, but the standard Perplexity app is available for Apple’s tablets so maybe the browser will follow suit.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/perplexitys-comet-ai-browser-is-now-available-for-iphones-183947569.html?src=rss