Continue Reading

Alexa’s Celebrity Voiceovers Taking a Final Bow: Amazon’s Star-Studded Feature Set to Fade Out

Amazon has announced its decision to retire the celebrity voices feature for Alexa, a service that has been delivering weather forecasts, telling jokes, and much more.

Continue Reading

Amazon Shareholders Reject Record 18 Proposals Amid Labor Unrest

At Amazon’s annual shareholders meeting held several days ago, investors rejected a record 18 outside proposals, indicating a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the company’s operations. The company reported that a majority of Amazon’s shares voted against all these proposals.

Amazon Music Changes Lead to Empty Amazon Prime Music Libraries and Playlists
Continue Reading

Amazon Music Changes Lead to Empty Amazon Prime Music Libraries and Playlists

Is your Amazon Prime Music library missing music and playlists that you paid for? Here’s why, straight from an Amazon Music customer service representative. You see the Amazon Music changes that you are seeing are Amazon ransoming your purchased music: if you ever want to see it again, you have to sign up for Amazon Music Unlimited, Amazon’s paid music streaming service.

Continue Reading

Amazon Drops AirPod Prices Just in Time for Summer

Amazon has kicked off the summer season by announcing a massive discount on Apple’s wildly popular AirPods earbuds. If you have been waiting for the right time to purchase a pair of AirPods, this is your chance to take advantage of the best price cuts since Black Friday or Prime Day. Apple’s AirPods are known for their superior sound quality, long battery life, and ease of use.

Continue Reading

Even BIG-Tech Players Are a Little Creeped Out by ChatGPT

In a move to safeguard confidential information, big tech companies like Apple, have recently imposed restrictions on the use of AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GitHub’s Copilot by its employees. This decision stems from the concern that sensitive data entered into these systems may be leaked or collected, potentially compromising valuable proprietary information.

Apple shifts focus to iPad media editing software
Continue Reading

Holy Moly, It’s May 2023: The Best iPad Deals Right Now!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I’ve got some news that’ll make you drop your bagels: it’s the season of the iPads! Yes, indeed, your favourite tablet from the folks at Apple is gracing us with some delightful deals. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Another tech sale?” But let me tell you, when it comes to Apple’s iPad, it’s no ordinary tablet, and these are no ordinary deals. So grab your eyeglasses and let’s dive into these digital delicacies.

Continue Reading

Palm-Scans for Bread-Bowls: Amazon and Panera’s Dystopia

Panera Bread has announced that it will be integrating Amazon One checkout technology into its loyalty program to enhance customer experience and speed up checkout time. With this new technology, customers will be able to make purchases without the need for credit cards, loyalty cards or mobile devices. After enrollment, customers will simply need to scan their palm to checkout, with their loyalty account and saved payment method used for the transaction.

amazon tracking shows delivered but shipment not received
Continue Reading

What to Do if Your Amazon Order Never Arrives but They Say it Was Delivered

What should you do if Amazon says that your order was delivered but you never actually receive it? For the most part an Amazon delivery happens when they say it will. But sometimes an Amazon order will be marked as having been delivered even though the order has never been received by the person who ordered it. Here’s what to do if your order from Amazon hasn’t shown up even though Amazon says that it was delivered.

New "Your Account is Locked" SMS Text Message Scam Phishing for Amazon, Venmo, and More
Continue Reading

New “Your Account is Locked” SMS Scam Text Messages Phishing for Amazon, Netflix, Venmo, and More

A huge batch of scam text messages with links going to onlinehome.us have been going out, phishing for your Amazon, Netflix, Venmo, and other credentials. Many of them appear to include the strings “membershpspprt” or “mailspprtaccnt” in the ‘from’ field, suggesting that they are all part of a bot effort using the same script or scripts.

How to Contact Amazon Through Customer Service Chat Chatbot
Continue Reading

How to Contact Amazon Through Chat

“Where is the Amazon chat button?” and “How do I contact Amazon customer service through chat?” are questions we get a lot here at the Internet Patrol. Here’s how to contact Amazon through chat, and while at first you will get the Amazon chatbot, if you persevere you will get through to a real person.

Amazon to charge Prime customers $3 per month to keep ads out of movies and tv shows
Continue Reading

Amazon Fresh Raises Free Delivery Threshold from $35 to $150, Tacks on Big Extra Fees

Amazon Fresh, Amazon’s grocery delivery service, has announced that they are raising the amount to get free delivery from, get this, $35 to $150. That’s not a typo. We’re including the full text of the announcement, but the bottom line is that if you don’t spend at least $150 on your Amazon Fresh order, you’re going to incur a delivery fee (they are calling it a “service fee”) of as much as $9.95. And that’s on top of the tip you give to the delivery driver.

Amazon discontinues charitable Amazon Smile program
Continue Reading

Amazon Discontinues Charitable ‘Amazon Smile’ Program – We Call Foul

Last evening, without warning, Amazon sent an email to its customers notifying customers that they were discontinuing the AmazonSmile program, saying that “the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped.” We call foul. We personally know of many smaller charities that counted on Amazon Smile contributions as part of their budget.

How to Watch a Movie Together Online for Free Using Amazon Prime Watch Party
Continue Reading

How to Watch a Movie Together Online for Free Using Amazon Prime Watch Party

Here’s how to watch a movie together apart, as it were. In other words, how to watch a movie together online using the Amazon Watch Party feature. The Amazon movie watching party feature not only lets you watch movies together long distance, but also has a built-in chat feature! The best part of Amazon watch parties is that if you both have Amazon Prime then it’s free (unless you pick a movie that has a rental fee attached, then you each pay the rental fee through your own Amazon Prime account). But as with so many other things Amazon, the concept is cool, and it actually works well, but the directions for how to do it are lacking at best, confusing at worst. Plus there are things you need to know to keep you from being frustrated. So here’s what you need to know!

Amazon Alexa Skills Suddenly Not Working? This May Be Why and How to Fix It
Continue Reading

Amazon Alexa Skills Suddenly Not Working? This May Be Why and How to Fix It

If your Amazon Echo Alexa skill is not working, this may be why Alexa is not working for you, for example your Alexa news briefing not working. And especially if the symptom is Alexa responding “unable to play”. Using the NPR news briefing skill as an example, if you say “Alexa play NPR” (or “Alexa news” if you have the NPR skill set up that way), your Echo Alexa responds “unable to play NPR” instead of playing it as it has always done for years. If that is the issue you are having (whether with the NPR skill or any other skill) read on.

amazon logo blank
Continue Reading

Is Amazon Down? Yes, Amazon Web and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Services Down on July 28, 2022

Certain Amazon web and cloud services are down, and sites are unreachable, as we post this on Thursday, July 28, 2022. According to a notice from Amazon, the outage started at 10:11 AM PDT, when they issued a notice saying that “We are investigating network connectivity issues for some instances and increased error rates and latencies for the EC2 APIs within the US-EAST-2 Region.”