The sale event of the summer is here, and the Amazon Prime Day Kindle deals (and other Amazon device deals!) are ones you can count on being great to shop. As someone who tests Amazon gear for a living--Echo speakers, Kindles, Amazon's smart plugs, you name it--I'm always tracking what in Amazon's lineup is worth buying. I have a ton of favorites, from the best of the best, like the Kindle Paperwhite and Echo Show 8, to the Kindle Scribe and Echo Spot. It's the perfect time to shop all of those and more. Not only is everything in this guide WIRED-tested and WIRED-approved, but it's on sale right now.

The sale event of the summer is here, and the Amazon Prime Day Kindle deals (and other Amazon device deals!) are ones you can count on being great to shop. As someone who tests Amazon gear for a living--Echo speakers, Kindles, Amazon's smart plugs, you name it--I'm always tracking what in Amazon's lineup is worth buying. I have a ton of favorites, from the best of the best, like the Kindle Paperwhite and Echo Show 8, to the Kindle Scribe and Echo Spot. It's the perfect time to shop all of those and more. Not only is everything in this guide WIRED-tested and WIRED-approved, but it's on sale right now.

If you're subscribed to Amazon Prime Video, it's likely you've seen'Space Cadet' promoted at the top of your feed this week. The movie has raced to the top of the charts and sees Emma Roberts star as a trainee astronaut at NASA. In the film, Roberts' character, Rex, manages to make it on to NASA's training programme by faking her CV. However, in reality, it's much trickier to be selected, with just 360 lucky candidates making the cut at the US space agency since the 1960s. So, do you have what it takes to become an astonaut?

If you had asked director Jonathan Nolan what his favourite film of the year was in the late 00s, more often than not he would have given you the name of a video game instead. "Having grown up with the entire history of the medium – I started playing Pong with my brother Chris many, many years ago – that was when games started to take on this level of audacity in their storytelling, their tone, the things they were doing," he says. "That's what I felt with [2008's] Fallout 3: the audacity. Nolan, who has just finished directing the first series of Amazon Prime's Fallout TV show, is sitting next to Todd Howard, the video-game director who led development on Fallout 3 and 4, talking to me a few hours before the premiere of the first two episodes. It is evident within minutes that Nolan understands games almost as well as Todd does. He says he's drawn to games where your options are open, you decide who you want to be and your decisions have an effect on the world around you: in other words, a game like Todd Howard's. The two come across like old friends, easy in each other's company, and enthusiastic about each other's work. "I talked to a lot of people about doing a Fallout movie or TV show and I kept saying no to everybody," Howard says. "I loved the work that Jonah had done in movies and in TV, and in a couple interviews he did, he mentioned his love of games ... I said to somebody, he's perfect.

The United States Federal Trade Commission has accused Amazon.com of enrolling millions of consumers into its paid subscription Amazon Prime service without their consent and making it hard for them to cancel, the latest action by the agency against the e-commerce giant in recent weeks. The FTC sued in Amazon in federal court in Seattle on Wednesday, alleging that "Amazon has knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime." The FTC said Amazon used "manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as'dark patterns' to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions." The lawsuit is one of several actions taken by President Joe Biden's administration intended to rein in the outsized market power of Big Tech firms as it tries to increase competition to create greater consumer protection. The FTC said Amazon Prime is the world's largest subscription programme, generating $25bn in revenue annually.

Oscar Isaac gets quite naked, and then he gets quite dead. Timothée Chalamet, as Paul Atreides, falls in love with a girl, played by Zendaya, who's on screen for all of seven minutes. They barely speak; most of their courtship proceeds in visions and hazy dreams--the safest of social distances. Not that most real-world teens would even play Seven Minutes in Heaven these days. If they didn't already prefer to achieve sexual awakening as Paul does--remotely--then the past two years of Covid-19 protocols will have inculcated in their psyches the belief that a policy of No Touching is not only law-abiding but, for a lot of them, ideal.

Every month, tons of new movies and TV shows become available to stream for free for U.S. subscribers to Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. With so many different streaming services, it can be hard to keep track of them all--especially if you belong to more than one. We'll let you decide which service has the best new titles. Good Watch Air Force One Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery Boogie Nights Born to Play Charlie's Angels The Game Midnight Run Star Trek (2009) The Strangers Sword of Trust Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby Zathura: A Space Adventure Snowpiercer (July 2) The Beguiled (July 16) Milkwater (July 20) 9 to 5: The Story of a Movement (July 22) Django Unchained (July 24) Fantastic Fungi (July 28) The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

We all are aware of AI and all the amazing things it is capable of. We have seen how it has helped us solve the most complex problems like they were no big thing and become more productive by reducing human error. However, AI also brings along the challenges of data privacy and security. In one way or another, we are trading our personal information for comfort. Sure, we are safeguarded by encryption.

While the circumstances were hardly ideal, 2020 was a big year for cord cutting. Streaming services like Netflix and Disney saw their subscriber numbers soar as people looked for ways to pass the time at home, and the temporary suspension of live sports accelerated the decline of traditional pay TV bundles. While not coronavirus-related, this year introduced two major new streaming services in HBO Max and NBC's Peacock, and we saw some bold attempts to rethink the streaming device with Google's new Chromecast and the TiVo Stream 4K. I've been writing this weekly column (and newsletter) on cord-cutting through it all, so in accordance with annual tradition, I'd like to cap off 2020 by recounting my favorite developments of the year. Here are TechHive's fifth-annual cord-cutter awards: At the start of the year, I wrote that unified streaming TV guides would be one of cord-cutting's biggest trends, and no streaming device delivers on that idea quite like the Chromecast with Google TV.

At its best, the Chromecast with Google TV represents how streaming is supposed to work. You shouldn't have to sift through a dozen apps--Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney, HBO Max, and so on--just to figure out what to watch. Everything should instead be accessible from one menu that acts as a universal guide to streaming. Google's new $50 4K streaming dongle tries to deliver on that ideal. But because the new Chromecast often works so well, it's all the more glaring when it doesn't.