Geek News

Amazon's Prime Exclusive phones have great prices , but there was a big catch. You had to allow ads on your home screen and if you changed your mind later, it cost $50 to opt out. Buyers got a bonus last week when Amazon decided to eliminate the ads , saying they could interfere with facial recognition and cause other issues. That's great, but it what about folks who paid the fee to get rid of them? Amazon has agreed to refund it in the form of a gift card, essentially closing the chapter on its Prime Exclusive phone ad experiment. Putting bloatware on devices in return for a lower price is a time-honored tradition in the PC world, famously used by Lenovo and others. It's also de rigueur with carriers like Verizon on locked phones, and you could even argue that apps from handset makers like Samsung are bloatware (*cough* Bixby), since nobody actually uses them. As proof of much those ads can be worth, Amazon jacked the Prime Exclusive phone prices by $20 when it r...

Intel recently admitted that its latest patch for "Spectre" was essentially worse than the bug it was supposed to fix, as it was causing computers to spontaneously reboot. Now, Microsoft has taken action by issuing an out-of-band patch for Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 that disables that fix for Spectre variant 2. If you're experiencing the problem you'll need to download the update, as it won't yet install automatically. Microsoft said that its internal testing shows the patch will stop the rebooting until Intel gets a new update together. Intel had already recommended that customers stop deploying the original patch, but that's obviously impossible for individual Windows users, as the fixes come bundled in Microsoft's own security updates. Intel dodged a bullet when its latest earnings report showed minimal financial impact from Spectre and Meltdown. However, it has been criticized by security experts over its lack of forthrightness about the scope of the...