Starting on April 10, Amazon Prime subscribers will pay $5 per month for ad-free Prime Video without ads, up from the current $3 per month on top of their Prime subscription, Amazon announced today. On that date, Amazon will introduce a new ad-free Prime Video subscription tier called “Prime Video Ultra.” Amazon will also increase the number of simultaneous streams supported by the tier from three to five and the…

Within hours of the US and Israel launching airstrikes on Iran two weeks ago, security professionals warned organizations around the world to be on heightened watch for destructive retaliatory hacks. On Wednesday, the predictions appeared to come true as Stryker, a multinational maker of medical devices, confirmed a cyberattack that took down much of its infrastructure, and a hacking group long known to be aligned with the Iranian government claimed…

Members of the International Imaging Technology Council (Int’l ITC) are calling out HP for issuing firmware updates that brick third-party ink and toner functionality in its printers. HP calls this Dynamic Security and has been doing it for years; however, the Int’l ITC is taking new issue with the practice, considering that it is explicitly prohibited for devices registered under the General Electronics Council’s (GEC’s) Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool…

Apple’s MacBook Neo is the company’s first serious effort to break into the sub-$1,000 laptop business, challenging midrange Windows laptops and Chromebooks with its $599 starting price and its focus on build quality rather than high-end performance. One less-advertised change that may make the Neo more appealing to businesses, schools, and the accident-prone is that its internal design is a bit more modular and easier to repair than other modern…

Researchers say they have uncovered a takedown-resistant botnet of 14,000 routers and other network devices—primarily made by Asus—that have been conscripted into a proxy network that anonymously carries traffic used for cybercrime. The malware—dubbed KadNap—takes hold by exploiting vulnerabilities that have gone unpatched by their owners, Chris Formosa, a researcher at security firm Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, told Ars. The high concentration of Asus routers is likely due to botnet…

Buying a cheap laptop is easy. You just go to Best Buy or Newegg or Amazon or Walmart or somewhere, you pick the cheapest one (or the most expensive one that fits whatever your budget is), and you buy it. For as little as $200 or $300, you can bring home something new (as in, “new-in-box” not as in, “was released recently”) that will power up and boot Windows or…

Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max make deceptively large changes to how Apple’s high-end laptop and desktop chips are built. We’ve already covered those changes in some depth, but in essence: The M5 Pro and M5 Max are no longer monolithic chips with all the CPU and GPU cores and everything else packed into a single silicon die. Using an “all-new Fusion Architecture” like the one used to combine two…

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ordered federal agencies to patch three critical iOS vulnerabilities that were exploited over a 10-month span in hacking campaigns conducted by three distinct groups. The hacking campaigns came to light on Thursday in a report published by Google. All three campaigns used Coruna, the name of an advanced hacking kit that amassed 23 separate iOS exploits into five potent exploit chains. While some…

If the only thing you had to go off was Apple’s string of product announcements this week, you’d have little reason to believe that there is a historic AI-driven memory and storage supply crunch going on. Some products saw RAM and storage increases at the same prices as the products they replaced; others had their prices increased a bit but came with more storage than before as compensation. And there’s the…

Meta’s approach to user privacy is under renewed scrutiny following a Swedish report that employees of a Meta subcontractor have watched footage captured by Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses showing sensitive user content. The workers reportedly work for Kenya-headquartered Sama and provide data annotation for Ray-Ban Metas. The February report, a collaboration from Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, and Kenya-based freelance journalist Naipanoi Lepapa, is, per a machine translation, based on…