Amazon has announced that they are working on Alexa enabled wireless earbuds (Echobuds? Alexabuds? Earechos?), and that they should be available as soon as the second half of 2019 (Alexa enabled headphone and earphones have been around for a while). However, the term ‘Alexa-enabled’ may be misleading.

Countless organizations have found, to their dismay, that they must buy all new wireless mic equipment, or be dead in the water when it comes to their sound system, owing to a decision by the FCC.

SnapChat has just unveiled SnapChat Spectacles – sunglasses which have an embedded video camera so that you can record video Snaps from a truly first-person perspective. To enhance the perspective, the video is shot in a circular frame rather than a more traditional rectangular frame. SnapChat has also rebranded itself to just Snap Inc..

We recently had an opportunity to review this wireless bluetooth selfie remote for iPhone and Android, and its selfie remote app, and it’s a great addition to your selfie-taking bag of tricks! And it does so much more than just selfie remote shutter control – you can switch between front and back cameras, zoom in and out, turn the flash on and off, even switch between photo and video! Of course, a selfie stick also allows you to hold your phone, with the remote, you need to prop it up somewhere or use a tripod. The best combination is one of each!

If you’ve stayed in a major hotel in the past several years, you know the drill for connecting to the hotel wireless network: connect to their wifi, try to connect somewhere with your browser, and the hotel wifi network login splash page will show up, so that you can agree to their terms of service, enter a password, etc.. But what if you can connect to the hotel wifi but you can’t get the login splash screen? Here’s what may be going on, and how to fix it so that you can connect to the hotel wifi network and get out to the internet.

If you run in certain circles, you may be hearing people swooning over the Starry Wireless Internet appliance and service. “Starry is a radical new Internet service!” “The Starry router requires no cable, no contract, no technician.” Starry “will revolutionize how we connect to the internet.” “When you move, you just take it with you!” Not so much, at least not yet.

By now you’ve probably heard about Andy Greenberg’s expose in Wired about driving a Jeep while hackers – wireless carjackers – hacked into it. Of course, Internet Patrol readers who read our Can Your Car Be Hacked Through its Onboard Wireless were probably not surprised by this turn of events, because they already knew that the answer to that question was “yes”.

General Motors (GM) has announced that many 2015 Chevrolet automobiles will have native, on-board 4G LTE wifi next year. The list of cars that will have onboard wireless hotspots includes the Chevrolet Corvette, Chevy Impala, Malibu, Volt, Equinox, Silverado, Silverado HD, Spark and Spark EV, and in Canada the Chevrolet Trax.

If you haven’t heard about the Zooka wireless (bluetooth) speaker bar (the speakers are at either end of a single bar), it’s a wireless bluetooth speaker for your iPhone or Android phone, or iPad or other tablet (or, even, your laptop). But the Zooka wireless bar instructions leave a lot to be desired in terms of explaining how to hook up your Zooka bluetooth speakers, so here are clearer instructions.

If you are wondering “Why won’t my Macbook Air connect to my home wifi network anymore?” or “How come my Macbook stopped connecting automatically to my wireless network?”, like many other people, here are a couple of things you can try to fix it.

Verizon Wireless has announced that it will be adding cookies to the web browser of anyone who visits the Verizon Wireless website, and then Verizon will track you across the web, and sell the data it collects on you to marketers. What’s more, they are selling the data to marketers to whom they are giving marketing access to your Verizon Wireless device!

Some iPhone 4, 4s, and 5 users who are running iOS6 are finding that they have a rather annoying issue – iTunes music or podcasts automatically starting to play after they receive a phone call.

Are smart meters (or as some call them “smartmeters”) the next great energy saver, or are they a privacy risk for someone hacking your wifi, Internet, or electricity usage data? Maybe both. Some are calling them a great way to save energy and money on our monthly energy bills, some are saying they are a sign that big brother is tightening his grasp, but either way, smart meters are stirring up some serious controversy. From public meetings in Vermont, to gun-toting homeowners chasing utility company workers who are aiming to install smart meters off their property, these tiny little devices have not arrived quietly.

Usually ones thinks of the Internet as encouraging you to sit at your computer for hours on end, turning into an amorphous, overweight, lazy blob of jelly, much like the adults in the movie “Wall-E”. But not so if one has the FitBit Wireless Activity Tracker (get that? Activity Tracker, not just a pedometer) – and particularly if one also pairs it with the FitBit Aria Wireless Scale. In fact, with these two devices together, you basically have an Internet personal trainer – one that, with apologies to the Police, is with you every step you take and every move you make. In fact, it will even monitor your sleep patterns for you, if you like!

Tech news and forums this week have been overrun by chatter about the legislative proposal for net neutrality that Verizon and Google jointly released on Monday. The proposal, which both Google and Verizon posted to their blogs at 1:38 p.m. EST and 1:47 p.m. EST, respectively, was, they say, intended to spark discussion, and spark discussion it did. If your head is spinning with this week’s discussions of network neutrality, wireline, wireless, a private Internet, and “differentiated online services”, read on.