Specializing in Computer Repair, Networking, Internet Solutions, Web Designing, Hybrid App Designing and Windows Operating systems.
Lauren Goode / Wired:
Interview with Panos Panay and other Microsoft execs on how the Surface Go got made, and why they think the device has the edge over Chromebooks and the iPad — PANOS PANAY IS the betting type. You can see the evidence in Microsoft's Building 37, where two $1 bills stick out from beneath a Surface tablet sitting on a shelf.
Rory Smith / New York Times:
How widespread use of translation apps like Google Translate helped bring international fans and locals together during the World Cup in Russia — MOSCOW — On a warm, sticky morning in Kazan, Russia, a couple of weeks ago, a British journalist decided to brave the heat and go for a run.
The Verge:
DOJ's appeal against AT&T-Time Warner merger probably won't succeed but the appeal itself could have a chilling effect on vertical merger bids in the short term — It probably won't succeed, but it could still put companies on notice — Yesterday, the Department of Justice appealed …
Taylor Lorenz / The Atlantic:
As Facebook and Instagram crack down on explicit content, Twitter has become the platform of choice for nudists as it allows content with full or partial nudity — As platforms like Facebook and Instagram crack down on explicit content, Twitter has allowed nudity to thrive.
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro review: the best Wear OS smartwatch, combination of OLED and LCD displays gives two days of battery life, but has average performance — When you look at the smartwatch market you really only need to look at the Apple Watch and Samsung's Gear lineup to know what's good.
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Following the latest Mueller indictments, Twitter bans DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 accounts, says it is reviewing company policies and expects to make updates soon — The US' indictment of Russian officers over the DNC hacks is having an effect... at least, on Twitter.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
eMarketer estimates Amazon will account for $258.22B or 5% of US retail sales in 2018, which will work out to 49.1% of total online retail spend in the country — Amazon has already been in the crosshairs of the White House when it comes to threats of antitrust investigations …
On Tuesday, July 10, the DOJ announced a landmark settlement with Austin-based Defense Distributed, a controversial startup led by a young, charismatic anarchist whom Wired once named one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world.
Hyper-loquacious and media-savvy, Cody Wilson is fond of telling any reporter who’ll listen that Defense Distributed’s main product, a gun fabricator called the Ghost Gunner, represents the endgame for gun control, not just in the US but everywhere in the world. With nothing but the Ghost Gunner, an internet connection, and some raw materials, anyone, anywhere can make an unmarked, untraceable gun in their home or garage. Even if Wilson is wrong that the gun control wars are effectively over (and I believe he is), Tuesday’s ruling has fundamentally changed them.
At about the time the settlement announcement was going out over the wires, I was pulling into the parking lot of LMT Defense in Milan, IL.
LMT Defense, formerly known as Lewis Machine & Tool, is as much the opposite of Defense Distributed as its quiet, publicity-shy founder, Karl Lewis, is the opposite of Cody Wilson. But LMT Defense’s story can be usefully placed alongside that of Defense Distributed, because together they can reveal much about the past, present, and future of the tools and technologies that we humans use for the age-old practice of making war.
Karl Lewis got started in gunmaking back in the 1970’s at Springfield Armory in Geneseo, IL, just a few exits up I-80 from the current LMT Defense headquarters. Lewis, who has a high school education but who now knows as much about the engineering behind firearms manufacturing as almost anyone alive, was working on the Springfield Armory shop floor when he hit upon a better way to make a critical and failure-prone part of the AR-15, the bolt. He first took his idea to Springfield Armory management, but they took a pass, so he rented out a small corner in a local auto repair ship in Milan, bought some equipment, and began making the bolts, himself.
Lewis worked in his rented space on nights and weekends, bringing the newly fabricated bolts home for heat treatment in his kitchen oven. Not long after he made his first batch, he landed a small contract with the US military to supply some of the bolts for the M4 carbine. On the back of this initial success with M4 bolts, Lewis Machine & Tool expanded its offerings to include complete guns. Over the course of the next three decades, LMT grew into one of the world’s top makers of AR-15-pattern rifles for the world’s militaries, and it’s now in a very small club of gunmakers, alongside a few old-world arms powerhouses like Germany’s Heckler & Koch and Belgium’s FN Herstal, that supplies rifles to US SOCOM’s most elite units.
The offices of LMT Defense, in Milan, Ill. (Image courtesy Jon Stokes)
LMT’s gun business is built on high-profile relationships, hard-to-win government contracts, and deep, almost monk-like know-how. The company lives or dies by the skill of its machinists and by the stuff of process engineering — tolerances and measurements and paper trails. Political connections are also key, as the largest weapons contracts require congressional approval and months of waiting for political winds to blow in this or that direction, as countries to fall in and out of favor with each other, and paperwork that was delayed due to a political spat over some unrelated point of trade or security finally gets put through so that funds can be transfered and production can begin.
Selling these guns is as old-school a process as making them is. Success in LMT’s world isn’t about media buys and PR hits, but about dinners in foreign capitals, range sessions with the world’s top special forces units, booths at trade shows most of us have never heard of, and secret delegations of high-ranking officials to a machine shop in a small town surrounded by corn fields on the western border of Illinois.
The civilian gun market, with all of its politics- and event-driven gyrations of supply and demand, is woven into this stable core of the global military small arms market the way vines weave through a trellis. Innovations in gunmaking flow in both directions, though nowadays they more often flow from the civilian market into the military and law enforcement markets than vice versa. For the most part, civilians buy guns that come off the same production lines that feed the government and law enforcement markets.
All of this is how small arms get made and sold in the present world, and anyone who lived through the heyday of IBM and Oracle, before the PC, the cloud, and the smartphone tore through and upended everything, will recognize every detail of the above picture, down to the clean-cut guys in polos with the company logo and fat purchase orders bearing signatures and stamps and big numbers.
The author with LMT Defense hardware.
This is the part of the story where I build on the IBM PC analogy I hinted at above, and tell you that Defense Distributed’s Ghost Gunner, along with its inevitable clones and successors, will kill dinosaurs like LMT Defense the way the PC and the cloud laid waste to the mainframe and microcomputer businesses of yesteryear.
Except this isn’t what will happen.
Defense Distributed isn’t going to destroy gun control, and it’s certainly not going to decimate the gun industry. All of the legacy gun industry apparatus described above will still be there in the decades to come, mainly because governments will still buy their arms from established makers like LMT. But surrounding the government and civilian arms markets will be a brand new, homebrew, underground gun market where enthusiasts swap files on the dark web and test new firearms in their back yards.
The homebrew gun revolution won’t create a million untraceable guns so much as it’ll create a hundreds of thousands of Karl Lewises — solitary geniuses who had a good idea, prototyped it, began making it and selling it in small batches, and ended up supplying a global arms market with new technology and products.
In this respect, the future of guns looks a lot like the present of drugs. The dark web hasn’t hurt Big Pharma, much less destroyed it. Rather, it has expanded the reach of hobbyist drugmakers and small labs, and enabled a shadow world of pharmaceutical R&D that feeds transnational black and gray markets for everything from penis enlargement pills to synthetic opioids.
Gun control efforts in this new reality will initially focus more on ammunition. Background checks for ammo purchases will move to more states, as policy makers try to limit civilian access to weapons in a world where controlling the guns themselves is impossible.
Ammunition has long been the crack in the rampart that Wilson is building. Bullets and casings are easy to fabricate and will always be easy to obtain or manufacture in bulk, but powder and primers are another story. Gunpowder and primers are the explosive chemical components of modern ammo, and they are difficult and dangerous to make at home. So gun controllers will seize on this and attempt to pivot to “bullet control” in the near-term.
Ammunition control is unlikely to work, mainly because rounds of ammunition are fungible, and there are untold billions of rounds already in civilian hands.
In addition to controls on ammunition, some governments will also make an effort at trying to force the manufacturers of 3D printers and desktop milling machines (the Ghost Gunner is the latter) to refuse to print files for gun parts.
This will be impossible to enforce, for two reasons. First, it will be hard for these machines to reliably tell what’s a gun-related file and what isn’t, especially if distributors of these files keep changing them to defeat any sort of detection. But the bigger problem will be that open-source firmware will quickly become available for the most popular printing and milling machines, so that determined users can “jailbreak” them and use them however they like. This already happens with products like routers and even cars, so it will definitely happen with home fabrication machines should the need arise.
Ammo control and fabrication device restrictions having failed, governments will over the longer term employ a two-pronged approach that consists of possession permits and digital censorship.
Photo courtesy of Getty Images: Jeremy Saltzer / EyeEm
First, governments will look to gun control schemes that treat guns like controlled substances (i.e. drugs and alchohol). The focus will shift to vetting and permits for simple possession, much like the gun owner licensing scheme I outlined in Politico. We’ll give up on trying to trace guns and ammunition, and focus more on authorizing people to possess guns, and on catching and prosecuting unauthorized possession. You’ll get the firearm equivalent of a marijuana card from the state, and then it won’t matter if you bought your gun from an authorized dealer or made it yourself at home.
The second component of future gun control regimes will be online suppression, of the type that’s already taking place on most major tech platforms across the developed world. I don’t think DefCad.com is long for the open web, and it will ultimately have as hard a time staying online as extremist sites like stormfront.org.
Gun CAD files will join child porn and pirated movies on the list of content it’s nearly impossible to find on big tech platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. If you want to trade these files, you’ll find yourself on sites with really intrusive advertising, where you worry a lot about viruses. Or, you’ll end up on the dark web, where you may end up paying for a hot new gun design with a cryptocurrency. This may be an ancap dream, but won’t be mainstream or user-friendly in any respect.
As for what comes after that, this is the same question as the question of what comes next for politically disfavored speech online. The gun control wars have now become a subset of the online free speech wars, so whatever happens with online speech in places like the US, UK, or China will happen with guns.
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg:
Counterpoint Research: Apple sold less that 1M iPhones in India in the first half of 2018; sources: three key Apple India sales executives have left — - Recent exits are said to include sales and distribution heads — The iPhone maker struggles to compete in a fast-growing market
Fortnite Battle Royale has swept the gaming world. Alongside its 125 million users and record-breaking Twitch streams, the game has also drawn many competitive players away from their usual titles to try their hand at Battle Royale.
Today, that competitive play reaches at inflection point. At 4pm ET, Fortnite Battle Royale’s Summer Skirmish will kick off, with $8 million going to tournament winners over the course of the competition, with a whopping $250K going to the winners of today’s tournament.
This isn’t the first competitive Fortnite tournament we’ve seen. Celebrity Twitch streamer Ninja held a charity tournament in April, and Epic held a ProAm tournament combining competitive players and celebs who play Fortnite in June. Plus, sites like UMG and CMG have been holding smaller tournaments since Fortnite first rose to popularity. And then there are $20K Fortnite Friday tournaments for streamers held by UMG.
But today, the ante has most certainly been upped. This will be one of the highest paying Fortnite tournaments to date, and is yet just a small fraction of Epic Games’ promised $100 million prize pool for competitive play this year.
For some context, Dota 2 (previously the biggest competitive esports title out there) had a $25 million payout for the International Championship tournament in 2017, with the winners taking home $10.8 million. Call of Duty, one of the most popular titles over the last decade, is only paying out $1.5 million for its own Champs tournament this summer.
In other words, Fortnite is catching up quickly to the competitive gaming scene, not only in terms of talent but money. Epic Games’ Fortnite pulled in a record-breaking $318 million in June alone. In fact, Battle Royale is generating so much revenue for Epic that the company is now only taking a 12 percent share of earnings from its Unreal Marketplace.
But with that growth comes increased scrutiny. Though the company is passing along its fortunes to developers on the Unreal Engine and competitive players, some have noticed situations in which Epic might have been a bit stingy.
The stream for Fortnite Summer Skirmish begins at 4pm ET and is embedded below:
Watch live video from Fortnite on www.twitch.tv
Apple released a refreshed MacBook Pro this week and top among the new features is a tweaked keyboard. Apple says its quieter than the last version and in our tests, we agree. But iFixit found something else: thin, silicone barriers that could improve the keyboard’s reliability.
This is big news. Users have long reported the butterfly switch keyboard found in MacBook Pros were less reliable than past models. There are countless reports of dust and lint and crumbs causing keys to stick or fail. Personally, I have not had any issues, but many at TechCrunch have. To date Apple has yet to issue a recall for the keyboard..
iFixit found a thin layer of rubberized material covering the new butterfly mechanism. The repair outlet also points to an Apple patent for this exact technology that’s designed to “prevent and/or alleviate contaminant ingress.”
According to Apple, which held a big media unveiling for new models, the changes to the keyboard were designed to address the loud clickity-clack and not the keyboard’s tendency to get mucked up by dust. And that makes sense, too. If Apple held an event and said “We fixed the keyboards” it would mean Apple was admitting something was wrong with the keyboards. Instead Apple held an event and said “We made the keyboards quieter” admitting the past keyboards were loud, and not faulty.
We just got our review unit and will report back on the keyboard’s reliability after a day or two at the beach. Because science.
#PlaneBae
You should cringe when you read that hashtag. Because it’s a reminder that people are being socially engineered by technology platforms to objectify and spy on each other for voyeuristic pleasure and profit.
The short version of the story attached to the cringeworthy hashtag is this: Earlier this month an individual, called Rosey Blair, spent all the hours of a plane flight using her smartphone and social media feeds to invade the privacy of her seat neighbors — publicly gossiping about the lives of two strangers.
Her speculation was set against a backdrop of rearview creepshots, with a few barely there scribbles added to blot out actual facial features. Even as an entire privacy invading narrative was being spun unknowingly around them.
#PlanePrivacyInvasion would be a more fitting hashtag. Or #MoralVacuumAt35000ft
And yet our youthful surveillance society started with a far loftier idea associated with it: Citizen journalism.
Once we’re all armed with powerful smartphones and ubiquitously fast Internet there will be no limits to the genuinely important reportage that will flow, we were told.
There will be no way for the powerful to withhold the truth from the people.
At least that was the nirvana we were sold.
What did we get? Something that looks much closer to mass manipulation. A tsunami of ad stalking, intentionally fake news and social media-enabled demagogues expertly appropriating these very same tools by gamifying mind-less, ethically nil algorithms.
Meanwhile, masses of ordinary people + ubiquitous smartphones + omnipresent social media feeds seems, for the most part, to be resulting in a kind of mainstream attention deficit disorder.
Yes, there is citizen journalism — such as people recording and broadcasting everyday experiences of aggression, racism and sexism, for example. Experiences that might otherwise go unreported, and which are definitely underreported.
That is certainly important.
But there are also these telling moments of #hashtaggable ethical blackout. As a result of what? Let’s call it the lure of ‘citizen clickbait’ — as people use their devices and feeds to mimic the worst kind of tabloid celebrity gossip ‘journalism’ by turning their attention and high tech tools on strangers, with (apparently) no major motivation beyond the simple fact that they can. Because technology is enabling them.
Social norms and common courtesy should kick in and prevent this. But social media is pushing in an unequal and opposite direction, encouraging users to turn anything — even strangers’ lives — into raw material to be repackaged as ‘content’ and flung out for voyeuristic entertainment.
It’s life reflecting commerce. But a particularly insidious form of commerce that does not accept editorial let alone ethical responsibility, has few (if any) moral standards, and relies, for continued function, upon stripping away society’s collective sense of privacy in order that these self-styled ‘sharing’ (‘taking’ is closer to the mark) platforms can swell in size and profit.
But it’s even worse than that. Social media as a data-mining, ad-targeting enterprise relies upon eroding our belief in privacy. So these platforms worry away at that by trying to disrupt our understanding of what privacy means. Because if you were to consider what another person thinks or feels — even for a millisecond — you might not post whatever piece of ‘content’ you had in mind.
For the platforms it’s far better if you just forget to think.
Facebook’s business is all about applying engineering ingenuity to eradicate the thoughtful friction of personal and societal conscience.
That’s why, for instance, it uses facial recognition technology to automate content identification — meaning there’s almost no opportunity for individual conscience to kick in and pipe up to quietly suggest that publicly tagging others in a piece of content isn’t actually the right thing to do.
Because it’s polite to ask permission first.
But Facebook’s antisocial automation pushes people away from thinking to ask for permission. There’s no button provided for that. The platform encourages us to forget all about the existence of common courtesies.
So we should not be at all surprised that such fundamental abuses of corporate power are themselves trickling down to infect the people who use and are exposed to these platforms’ skewed norms.
Viral episodes like #PlaneBae demonstrate that the same sense of entitlement to private information is being actively passed onto the users these platforms prey on and feed off — and is then getting beamed out, like radiation, to harm the people around them.
The damage is collective when societal norms are undermined.
#PlaneBae
Social media’s ubiquity means almost everyone works in marketing these days. Most people are marketing their own lives — posting photos of their pets, their kids, the latte they had this morning, the hipster gym where they work out — having been nudged to perform this unpaid labor by the platforms that profit from it.
The irony is that most of this work is being done for free. Only the platforms are being paid. Though there are some people making a very modern living; the new breed of ‘life sharers’ who willingly polish, package and post their professional existence as a brand of aspiration lifestyle marketing.
Social media’s gift to the world is that anyone can be a self-styled model now, and every passing moment a fashion shoot for hire — thanks to the largess of highly accessible social media platforms providing almost anyone who wants it with their own self-promoting shopwindow in the world. Plus all the promotional tools they could ever need.
Just step up to the glass and shoot.
And then your vacation beauty spot becomes just another backdrop for the next aspirational selfie. Although those aquamarine waters can’t be allowed to dampen or disrupt photo-coifed tresses, nor sand get in the camera kit. In any case, the makeup took hours to apply and there’s the next selfie to take…
What does the unchronicled life of these professional platform performers look like? A mess of preparation for projecting perfection, presumably, with life’s quotidian business stuffed higgledy piggledy into the margins — where they actually sweat and work to deliver the lie of a lifestyle dream.
Because these are also fakes — beautiful fakes, but fakes nonetheless.
We live in an age of entitled pretence. And while it may be totally fine for an individual to construct a fictional narrative that dresses up the substance of their existence, it’s certainly not okay to pull anyone else into your pantomime. Not without asking permission first.
But the problem is that social media is now so powerfully omnipresent its center of gravity is actively trying to pull everyone in — and its antisocial impacts frequently spill out and over the rest of us. And they rarely if ever ask for consent.
What about the people who don’t want their lives to be appropriated as digital windowdressing? Who weren’t asking for their identity to be held up for public consumption? Who don’t want to participate in this game at all — neither to personally profit from it, nor to have their privacy trampled by it?
The problem is the push and pull of platforms against privacy has become so aggressive, so virulent, that societal norms that protect and benefit us all — like empathy, like respect — are getting squeezed and sucked in.
The ugliness is especially visible in these ‘viral’ moments when other people’s lives are snatched and consumed voraciously on the hoof — as yet more content for rapacious feeds.
#PlaneBae
Think too of the fitness celebrity who posted a creepshot + commentary about a less slim person working out at their gym.
Or the YouTuber parents who monetize videos of their kids’ distress.
Or the men who post creepshots of women eating in public — and try to claim it’s an online art project rather than what it actually is: A privacy violation and misogynistic attack.
Or, on a public street in London one day, I saw a couple of giggling teenage girls watching a man at a bus stop who was clearly mentally unwell. Pulling out a smartphone, one girl hissed to the other: “We’ve got to put this on YouTube.”
For platforms built by technologists without thought for anything other than growth, everything is a potential spectacle. Everything is a potential post.
So they press on their users to think less. And they profit at society’s expense.
It’s only now, after social media has embedded itself everywhere, that platforms are being called out for their moral vacuum; for building systems that encourage abject mindlessness in users — and serve up content so bleak it represents a form of visual cancer.
#PlaneBae
Human have always told stories. Weaving our own narratives is both how we communicate and how we make sense of personal experience — creating order out of events that are often disorderly, random, even chaotic.
The human condition demands a degree of pattern-spotting for survival’s sake; so we can pick our individual path out of the gloom.
But platforms are exploiting that innate aspect of our character. And we, as individuals, need to get much, much better at spotting what they’re doing to us.
We need to recognize how they are manipulating us; what they are encouraging us to do — with each new feature nudge and dark pattern design choice.
We need to understand their underlying pull. The fact they profit by setting us as spies against each other. We need to wake up, personally and collectively, to social media’s antisocial impacts.
Perspective should not have to come at the expense of other people getting hurt.
This week the women whose privacy was thoughtlessly repackaged as public entertainment when she was branded and broadcast as #PlaneBae — and who has suffered harassment and yet more unwelcome attention as a direct result — gave a statement to Business Insider.
“#PlaneBae is not a romance — it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent,” she writes. “Please continue to respect my privacy, and my desire to remain anonymous.”
And as a strategy to push against the antisocial incursions of social media, remembering to respect people’s privacy is a great place to start.
Google has incorporated Morse code into Gboard for Android and iOS. This is an attempt to help people with limited mobility communicate using their smartphones. However, Morse code is something everyone should learn in case they ever need to use it.
Morse code was developed in the 1800s to enable the sending of messages by way of electrical telegraphs. Its simplicity makes Morse code one of the most versatile forms of communication around, and it has been used in countless ways over the years.
The latest use for Morse code is as an assistive technology. Morse code consists of a series of dots and dashes which are then converted into letters. Which makes it perfect for people with disabilities, who can find themselves locked out of modern technology.
Google is now offering Morse code as an input method in Gboard, its keyboard app. The company has partnered with Tania Finlayson, an expert in Morse code assistive technology. Finlayson has cerebral palsy, and so knows the value of assistive technology.
All her life, Tania Finlayson has worked to help people find a voice through Morse code. With her help, now everyone can use Morse code on #Gboard ? https://t.co/x4Mwh4k54C pic.twitter.com/KaSUoZSwmV
— Google (@Google) July 11, 2018
Finlayson explained the value of Morse code in a blog post on The Keyword, saying:
“Most technology today is designed for the mass market. Unfortunately, this can mean that people with disabilities can be left behind. Developing communication tools like this is important, because for many people, it simply makes life livable.”
The Morse code keyboard on Gboard means you can now use dots and dashes instead of the QWERTY keyboard to input text. Gboard will then convert these dots and dashes into words and sentences. You can even connect external switches to your Android.
Google has also developed a Morse Typing Training game (available on Android, iOS, and desktop) which the company claims can help you learn Morse code in less than an hour. And that has to be worthwhile, whether or not you have mobility issues.
If you’re interested in learning more about accessibility options on modern operating systems, we have previously published guides to Windows 10’s accessibility options, macOS’s accessibility options, and Chrome OS’s accessibility options.
Read the full article: You Can Now Use Morse Code on Google’s Gboard
Free shipping and free 2-day deliveries: these two Amazon Prime benefits are the main reasons why over 20 million users have an ongoing subscription. It’s true, Amazon Prime is a fantastic deal!
But those features barely scratch the surface. Amazon has gone above and beyond with Amazon Prime, offering many more benefits that people have forgotten about (or simply never realize existed).
Here’s how to extract the most value from an Amazon Prime membership. If you don’t have a Prime membership yet, perhaps these extra benefits will be enough to justify the annual subscription. Why not grab a 30-day free trial and try it out for yourself?
Did you know that Amazon Prime members in certain cities can get free 1-day shipping and free same-day shipping? To qualify for 1-day or same-day shipping:
Did you know that you can share your Prime membership’s shipping benefits with up to four other people? Yes, that’s right: four others can make use of your shipping benefits without you needing to give them direct access to your account (i.e. giving them your account password, which might breach the Amazon Terms of Service).
The only stipulation is that these people must live at the same address as you. Or, in other words, membership can only be shared with actual members of the same household. To invite somebody, you’ll need to know their name, birthday, and email address. When they accept the invitation, they’ll need to know your birthday.
All Amazon customers start with 5GB of free data storage with Amazon Drive. This includes anything from photos to videos, documents to music files, and whatever else you might want to store on there.
As an Amazon Prime member, your free cloud storage plan is expanded and allows for unlimited photo files storage as part of the Prime Photos program. All photos—whether previously uploaded or uploaded in the future—do not count against your cloud storage data limit.
Note: Photos must be smaller than 2GB. Supported formats include JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, and RAW formats for Nikon (NEF), Canon (CR2), and Sony (ARW) cameras. Prime Photos is only meant for personal, non-commercial use.
Prime Video is a top contender to both Netflix and Hulu, packed with excellent TV shows worth watching and all kinds of movies ranging from classics to modern hits.
And while Prime Video has long been seen as inferior to Netflix and Hulu, lately it’s gotten a lot better. Amazon Studios recently reached new heights, winning two Academy Awards—Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay—for the Amazon Original film, Manchester by the Sea. Other notable originals include Sneaky Pete, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and The Man in the High Castle.
Note that Prime Video can be extended with “add-on channels,” which grant access to specific types of content that you may be interested in: Anime Strike, BritBox, Broadway HD, HBO, Horror TV, PBS KIDS, Showtime, STARZ, and many more.
While there’s a lot of entertainment value in Prime Video, it’s not the only streaming service offered by Amazon. If you listen to a lot of online music streams, then Prime Music will flip your world upside down.
Amazon maintains a library of over 1 million songs and albums that can be accessed by any Prime member for free. Prime Music includes unlimited skips, no ads, and access to handcrafted Prime Playlists. Don’t like them? Feel free to create your own playlists instead.
Learn more in our in-depth look at Amazon Prime Music, or get started right now with 4 months of Prime Music for $0.99.
Love playing video games? Then you probably know about Twitch already. For the uninitiated, Twitch is like YouTube except with real-time live-streamed gameplay rather than pre-recorded videos. Twitch started as a platform for watching gaming tournaments and other events, but has since evolved into so much more.
While Twitch itself is completely free, it has bonus features you can unlock with a Twitch Turbo subscription (e.g. no advertisements). What you may not realize is, every Prime membership comes with Twitch Prime, which basically grants the same benefits as Twitch Turbo. But Twitch Prime offers one unique benefit: every month, certain commercial games are made free to acquire and download!
If you already have a Twitch account, you can connect your account to a 30-day free trial of Prime to start reaping the benefits right away.
Amazon has a program called Prime Pantry that allows you to order special “Prime Pantry” items that aren’t normally available. These items include household essentials and groceries that are too cost-prohibitive to ship individually.
With Prime Pantry, you can two options: either pay $7.99 for each shipment of Prime Pantry items or get a Prime Pantry subscription for $4.99/month for free shipping on any Prime Pantry order of $40 or more. (Orders under $40 are still charged $7.99 even with a Prime Pantry subscription.)
Due to air shipping regulations, Prime Pantry boxes can only be shipped by ground. Most orders arrive within 4 business days.
If you’re interested, you can grab a 30-day free trial of Prime Pantry and experience it for yourself. You may never need to visit your local grocery store ever again.
Amazon Prime members who own Kindle e-readers or Kindle Fire tablets can rent ebooks for free from the Kindle Owners Lending Library. Rented ebooks have no due dates and can be shared across any devices connected to your Amazon account. The only restriction is that you can only borrow one ebook per calendar month.
Amazon also offers Prime Reading, which grants unlimited access to over 1,000 ebooks in Kindle format, both fiction and nonfiction.
There’s also the Kindle First program, which allows Prime members to download one free ebook every month. Titles in the Kindle First program are not-yet-released ebooks that are made available as Kindle First picks one month prior to their official release.
Here’s a bit of fine print that you probably overlooked: on any order that qualifies for Guaranteed Accelerated Delivery but arrives after the guaranteed delivery date, you can contact Amazon’s support center and request a free one-month Prime extension.
There are a few conditions that must be met in order for the extension request to be validated, but most orders qualify without issue.
Also, if you’re currently enrolled in a college or university and you have a valid .edu email address, you can register as part of the Prime Student program, which grants a six-month free trial for Prime. When the trial ends, you can upgrade to a full Amazon Prime membership for 50 percent off.
Note: This free trial “only” includes free shipping, free 2-day delivery, and unlimited photo storage with Prime Photos. Prime Video, Prime Music, Kindle Owners Lending Library, and membership sharing are only available with a full Amazon Prime membership.
Did you know that Amazon has an awesome deals program called Lightning Deals? In short, a Lightning Deal is a discounted item that’s only available in a certain quantity for a certain amount of time.
The Lightning Deals program isn’t exclusive to Prime, but Prime members have something called Prime Early Access. This lets you get a 30-minute head start on most (but not all) Lightning Deals, which is great because these deals sell out surprisingly fast. Visit the Lightning Deals page to see what’s available at any time.
Prime members are also eligible to participate on Prime Day, which is an annual event where thousands of items across the entire site are marked down. If you’ve been thinking of buying an Amazon device, Prime Day is the best day for it. Check out the best Prime Day deals, or read more about it in our in-depth look at Amazon Prime Day.
To recap, here are all the notable Prime features that come with Amazon Prime:
At $119/year, that’s the equivalent of $9.92 per month. What other online subscription offers this much goodness for such an affordable price? (Amazon Prime is also available on a month-to-month basis for $13/mo.)
If you don’t have Amazon Prime yet, now is the time to grab a 30-day free trial because Amazon Prime Day is right around the corner and you’ll be eligible for all kinds of deals!
Read the full article: Prime Day Is Coming! 10 Amazon Prime Benefits You May Have Overlooked
