You can save big on a Disney+ subscription if you can live with some ads. New and returning customers can get a Disney+ Basic (with ads) subscription for $2 monthly for three months. That tier is currently $8 per month and includes all Disney+ content. A Disney+ Basic (with ads) subscription unlocks all of the platform’s series and movies. That includes Disney-branded originals, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, The Simpsons and National Geographic (among others). It even has Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version) for the Swiftie in your life. As for the fine print, the subscription will auto ..read more

Following a beta test earlier this year, Steam Families is now live with a new way for relatives to be connected on the gaming portal. Up to five family members can be invited into a group, which will grant access to a shared family library. Each person can create their own save files and collect their own achievements for games in the family library. The marquee development with the new family feature is that multiple people within the group will be able to play games from the shared library at the same time. And if you own multiple copies of a game, then multiple people can be playing that t ..read more

Xbox is changing its process for forming connections on the gaming platform. Its new method works like, well, just about every other social platform, where you'll send a friend request that is either accepted or denied. That sounds like the obvious way for this feature to function, but Xbox adopted a more passive approach to friends for the recent console generation. The way it works in the current system is that anybody can add another Xbox account to their follow list. When two accounts followed each other, they were upgraded to friends. Microsoft The change shouldn't yield much of a differ ..read more

Nevada has a new helper in its quest to plow through a backlog of unemployment claims: Google AI. Gizmodo reports that the initiative will task one of the company’s cloud-based AI models with analyzing appeals hearing transcripts and suggesting whether cases should be approved. Welcome to the future, where a robot weighs in on whether you get the government money you requested. The Nevada Independent wrote in June that the AI model, trained on the state’s unemployment law and policies, will analyze transcripts of virtual appeals hearings. It will then spit out a ruling, which a state employee ..read more

It’s easy to forget that there’s another social network besides Threads for people tired of Elon Musk’s totally normal X platform. Bluesky is a fine alternative, as it definitely “feels” like Twitter. However, it has been lacking some of the features that made Twitter such an internet hotspot back in the day. Well, we just got a big one. The company just announced that users can now upload video content. There are some caveats. First of all, the videos have to be under a minute. That’s a fairly huge hurdle for just about every piece of content other than TikTok-style shorts. As a comparison, M ..read more

On Wednesday, Adobe unveiled Firefly AI video generation tools that will arrive in beta later this year. Like many things related to AI, the examples are equal parts mesmerizing and terrifying as the company slowly integrates tools built to automate much of the creative work its prized user base is paid for today. Echoing AI salesmanship found elsewhere in the tech industry, Adobe frames it all as supplementary tech that “helps take the tedium out of post-production.” Adobe describes its new Firefly-powered text-to-video, Generative Extend (which will be available in Premiere Pro) and image-to ..read more

Most early impressions of the Apple Watch Series 10 are quite positive. Not only does it have the biggest display yet on any Apple Watch (despite a smaller overall case size than the 49mm Ultra 2), but it weighs less and is somehow thinner than before. The display isn’t just bigger, either — it has improved brightness when viewed at an angle, and the always-on screen can refresh once a second when at rest, rather than once a minute as it did before. Beyond the updated display and some lovely new case options (the new polished titanium and jet black aluminum look pretty fabulous), the Apple Wat ..read more

Earlier this year, Google said goodbye to its cached web page feature, saying it’s no longer needed. While many were sad to see it go, we can now rejoice as Google is partnering with the Internet Archive to bring something substantially similar back. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, you can now look at archived web pages easily. Clicking on the three dots beside any search result will let you begin to access cached pages. Next, look for the “About this Result” panel and click “More About This Page.” Doing so will lead you to the Wayback Machine, allowing anyone to see snapshot ..read more

Ultimate Ears has a history of building loud and rugged portable Bluetooth speakers with features to simplify the listening experience. Whether it's a party mode that supports over 100 speakers at once, or the ability to remotely power off the unit with your phone, the company’s devices have consistently been among the best. Enter the Everboom ($250), a new option from UE that sits in the middle of its lineup in terms of size and power. Those handy Ultimate Ears features return, but so does the company’s lack of clarity and fidelity. Design The Everboom is slightly smaller than the midpoint of ..read more

With even Fox News and senior Republican figures admitting that Vice President Kamala Harris won Tuesday night’s presidential debate, some supporters of former president Donald Trump are desperately seeking crumbs of comfort. Cue the predictable conspiracy theories. A frequent refrain that has emerged from conservatives (but curiously, not Democrats) over the last decade or so is that their guy's opponent was wearing an earpiece during debates. These baseless accusations were slung at President Joe Biden in 2020, at Hillary Clinton in 2016 and at Barack Obama in 2012. The theory was debunked o ..read more