Fandango has revealed that Vudu is merging with its parent company's own streaming service, FandangoNow, to form a single platform that'll take on Vudu's name. The change comes more than a year after it purchased the streaming platform from Walmart. New submitter echopulse writes: The new Vudu service will have more than 200,00 movies and TV shows available to buy, and many for free with ads. It will also be the official movie store for Roku devices, replacing the FandangoNow store. If you have a Fandango account, you can move your movies over to the new service by going to FandangoNow.com

Netflix will stream a documentary next month which will follow the story of the world's first private all-civilian space orbit. Sky News reports: The group will board a SpaceX capsule next month and spend three days orbiting the Earth, becoming Netflix's first documentary "to cover an event in near real-time." The privately chartered flight will be commanded, funded and led by 38-year-old billionaire Jared Isaacman, and aim to support St Jude Children's Research Hospital to the tune of $200 million. He will be joined on board by Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and former NASA candidate, Christopher Sembroski, a US Airforce veteran, and Hayley Arceneaux, a doctor's assistant at St Jude and childhood cancer survivor.

The group will apparently reach a higher altitude than the International Space Station as they orbit the planet in the SpaceX Dragon capsule, dubbed Inspiration4. The quick-turnaround documentary will be made in five parts, with the first two premiering on 6 September. Viewers have been promised behind the scenes access of the mission -- from their selection, to footage from inside the spacecraft while it orbits Earth.

One of Amazon's most anticipated originals to date, a yet-unnamed Lord of the Rings original series, will officially debut on Prime Video on Friday, September 2nd, 2022. The Verge reports: Along with a premiere date, Amazon Studios released an official first image from the forthcoming series, which will be set in Middle-earth's Second Age. The series will take place thousands of years before the events chronicled in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books, and it will follow characters "both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth."

The image release is tied to the series's production wrap after filming in New Zealand. Fans quickly speculated that the series will be set in Valinor, as the image depicts what appear to be the Two Trees. The untitled project is a huge investment by Amazon in its Prime Video streaming service. The series's first season alone reportedly cost around $465 million to produce. For context about what a massive creative undertaking this series has been for Amazon Studios, the final season of Game of Thrones was reported to have cost as much as $15 million per episode (though its budget was originally around $5 million per episode).

"Since its own brush with antitrust regulation decades ago, Microsoft has slipped past significant scrutiny," argues a new article from The Atlantic.

But it also asks if there's now a case for another antitrust action — or if we're convinced instead that "The company is reluctantly guilty of the sin of bigness, yes, but it is benevolent, don't you see? Reformed, even! No need to cast your pen over here!" Right now, it's not illegal to be big. It's not illegal to be really big. In fact, it's not even illegal to be a monopoly. Current antitrust law allows for the possibility that you might be the sole player in your industry because you're just that well managed and your product is just that good, or it's just cost-prohibitive for any other company to compete with you. Think power utilities, such as Duke Energy, or the TV and internet giant Comcast. Antitrust law comes into play only if you use your monopoly to suppress competition or to charge unfairly high prices. (If this feels like a legal tautology, it sort of is: Who's to know what's a fair price if there isn't any competition? Nevertheless, here we are...) Yet if bigness alone is enough to draw scrutiny, Microsoft must draw it. Courts have disagreed on what size market share a product or company must own to be considered a monopoly, but the historical benchmark is about 75 percent. Estimates vary as to what percentage of computers run Microsoft's Windows operating system, but Gartner research puts it as high as 83 percent...

Biden, Khan, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and others are asking whether consumers suffer any nonfinancial harm from this lack of competition. Is switching from Windows to Apple's Mac OS unnecessarily hard? Is Windows as good a product as it would be if it faced more robust competition? When Windows has major security flaws, for example, billions of customers and companies are impacted, because of its market share. If we're wondering whether crappy airline experiences are a competition problem, should the same question apply to crappy computer security? In fact, in areas where Microsoft faces strong competition, it's reverting to some of the behaviors that got it sued in the '90s — namely, bundling. Microsoft and Amazon are essentially a duopoly when it comes to cloud services... Microsoft offers its big business customers an "integrated ecosystem" of Windows, Office, and its back-end cloud services; some analysts even point to this as a reason to keep buying Microsoft stock. That's just smart business, right? Yes, unless you're at a disadvantage by not taking the bundle. Some customers have complained that Microsoft charges extra for some Windows licenses if you're not using its cloud-computing business, Azure...

Microsoft does much more that we're happy to call "evil" when other companies are involved. It defied its own workers in favor of contracts with the Department of Defense; it's been quietly doing lots of business with China for decades, including letting Beijing censor results on its Bing search engine and developing AI that critics say can be used for surveillance and repression; it reportedly tried to sell facial-recognition technology to the DEA.

So why does none of it stick? Well, partly because it's possible that Microsoft isn't actually doing anything wrong, from a legal perspective. Yet it's so big and so dominant and owns so much expensive physical infrastructure that hardly any company can compete with it. Is that illegal? Should it be?
It's now the world's second largest tech company by market valuation — over $2 trillion and even ahead of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla (and behind only Apple). For the three months ended in June, Microsoft's net income rose 47% over the same period a year ago, according to TechCrunch, with a revenue for just those three months of $46.2 billion.

The Atlantic argues Microsoft has successfully rebranded itself as nice and a little boring, while playing up the fact that it lost a decade in consumer markets like smartphones because it was distracted by its last antitrust lawsuit. Yet meanwhile it's acquired major tech brands like LinkedIn, Minecraft, Skype, and even attempted to buy TikTok, Pinterest, and Discord (as well as "almost two dozen game-development studios to beef up its Xbox offerings"). And of course, GitHub.

"YouTube has barred Sky News Australia from uploading new content for a week, saying it had breached rules on spreading Covid-19 misinformation," writes the BBC.

Long-time Slashdot reader Hope Thelps shares their report: YouTube issued a "strike" under its three-strike policy, the last of which means permanent removal. It did not point to specific items but said it opposed material that "could cause real-world harm".

The TV channel's digital editor said the decision was a disturbing attack on the ability to think freely. Sky News Australia is owned by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and has 1.85 million YouTube subscribers. The ban could affect its revenue stream from Google.

A YouTube statement said it had "clear and established Covid-19 medical misinformation policies based on local and global health authority guidance". A spokesperson told the Guardian it "did not allow content that denies the existence of Covid-19" or which encouraged people "to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus". Neither has been proven to be effective against Covid.

Slashdot reader Dave Knott quotes the BBC's Doctor Who site: Having been in charge of the TARDIS since filming for the Thirteenth Doctor began in 2017, Showrunner Chris Chibnall and the Thirteenth Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, have confirmed they will be moving on from the most famous police box on Earth.

With a six-part Event Serial announced for the autumn, and two Specials already planned for 2022, BBC One has now asked for an additional final feature length adventure for the Thirteenth Doctor, to form a trio of Specials for 2022, before the Doctor regenerates once more.

In what is, at least so far, the biggest cybersecurity blunder of the Tokyo Olympics, an Italian TV announcer did not realize he was on air when he asked the password for his computer. Motherboard reports: "Do you know the password for the computer in this commentator booth?" he asked during the broadcast of the Turkey-China volleyball game, apparently not realizing he was still on air. "It was too hard to call the password Pippo? Pippo, Pluto or Topolino?" he complained, referring to the Italian names for Goofy, Pluto and Mickey Mouse. The snafu was immortalized in a video posted on Twitter by cybersecurity associate professor Stefano Zanero, who works at the Polytechnic University of Milan. A source who works at Eurosport, the channel which was broadcasting the volleyball game, confirmed that the video is authentic.

A colleague of the announcer can be heard in the background saying the password depends on the Olympics organizers, and asking the announcer if it's on a paper or post it close-by. Turns out the password was "Booth.03" after the number of the commentator's booth. "Even the dot to make it more complicated, as if it was NASA's computer," he said on the air. "Next time they will even put a semicolon." "Ma porca miseria," he concluded, using a popular italian swearing that literally means "pork's misery" but is more accurately translated to "for god's sake."

Ratings for the Olympic Games opening ceremony were down 36% compared to 2016, according to preliminary numbers from NBC Universal. From a report: The figures for the Tokyo Games event mark the lowest audience for an Olympics opening ceremony event in over three decades, per Reuters. Roughly $1 billion has been spent on advertising around the Olympics. Ratings are the only real metric marketers can use to justify much of that spend. About 17 million people watched the event on broadcast and streaming, according to NBC. Early broadcast numbers suggest some 10 million people watched the event on linear TV. By comparison, about 26.5 million people and 27.8 million people tuned in to the Olympic opening events in Rio in 2016 and Pyeongchang in 2018, respectively. Some of this is out of NBC's hands. Without fans in the stands, the content may not be as compelling to viewers this year as it has been in the past. Some reviews of the opening ceremony pegged it as downbeat compared to previous ceremonies, others described it as boring.

The nation's big TV companies are calling for a new yardstick. From a report: A trade organization representing Disney, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, Fox Corp. and other media giants is calling for the organization that signs off on Nielsen's methodology for measuring TV viewership to yank accreditation, an aggressive maneuver in an era when media outlets and the advertisers who support them are scrambling to figure out how to count viewer eyeballs across an increasingly unwieldy array of new entertainment venues, digital behaviors and screens. The trade group, the VAB, on Wednesday sent a ten-page letter to the Media Rating Council urging the group to pull its backing of Nielsen's ratings, citing Nielsen's diminished ability to count viewership during the coronavirus pandemic. "Nielsen's COVID-period conduct as a ratings service violated at least five minimum standards," the VAB said in its letter, "with the damage done to their largest subscriber clients still creating material negative impact into July 2021."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dish Network has agreed to pay AT&T at least $5 billion over 10 years for network access amid a feud between Dish and T-Mobile. Dish is in the early stages of building a 5G network and in the meantime is serving customers as a reseller using network capacity that it purchases from T-Mobile. But Dish and T-Mobile are fighting over T-Mobile's plan to shut down its 3G CDMA network earlier than it originally intended, with Dish accusing T-Mobile of anticompetitive behavior. Against that backdrop, Dish today announced "the signing of a transformative, long-term strategic Network Services Agreement with AT&T, making AT&T the primary network services partner for Dish MVNO [mobile virtual network operator] customers."

The AT&T network capacity will serve customers on Dish's "retail wireless brands, including Boost Mobile, Ting Mobile, and Republic Wireless," Dish said. Dish also said the agreement will accelerate its "expansion of retail wireless distribution to rural markets where Dish provides satellite TV services" and that AT&T will provide transport and roaming services to support Dish's future 5G network. Dish revealed the $5 billion price in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that also notes that the roaming and transport services from AT&T will not be limited to areas where Dish doesn't build 5G infrastructure. The deal "provides Dish's retail wireless customers with voice and data roaming services throughout the US on the AT&T network and access to AT&T's network, even within the markets where Dish is deploying its own 5G network," Dish told the SEC. Today's deal between AT&T and Dish is nonexclusive, so Dish can use both T-Mobile and AT&T capacity to serve customers. But Dish's statement that AT&T will become the "primary" network provider for Dish MVNO customers shows that Dish is trying to minimize the use of T-Mobile's network. Dish's MVNO deal with T-Mobile lasts until 2027. As part of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger-and-divestment proceedings, Dish committed to the government that it would build a 5G network serving 70 percent of Americans by June 2023.

Nvidia's Shield TVs are some of the best streaming video boxes on the market, but following a recent update to Android TV, Shield TV users are starting to see ads on their home screen and they aren't happy about it. From a report: The latest update to Android TV on Shield TV devices began rolling out earlier this month and featured a small UI redesign that added large banner images to Android TV's home screen, similar to what you get when using Google TV devices like the Chromecast with Google TV. Now technically, Google calls these banner images "recommendations," as they are regularly updated and rotated to help users find new streaming content Google thinks they might enjoy. However, a number of Shield TV users consider these images to be advertisements (especially when they recommend shows on services users aren't even subscribed to), and as such, have taken to showing their displeasure with the recent update by review bombing the listing for the Android TV Home app, which now has a one-star rating across more than 800 reviews.

Earlier this week, Netflix announced that it is planning an expansion into video games and has hired a former EA and Facebook executive to lead the effort. Now, according to a recent datamine, the streaming giant may be forming a partnership with PlayStation to bring some of the biggest PlayStation brands to Netflix. IGN reports: Reported by VGC, dataminer Steve Moser appears to have uncovered PlayStation brand imagery and content in the Netflix app code. Moser shared the information via a tweet, including images of both the Ghost of Tsushima box art and some PS5 controllers. It's unclear exactly what this means for Netflix, but if there is a burgeoning partnership between Netflix and PlayStation, it could see Ghost of Tsushima content come to the streaming service in some form.

Moser suggests that the gaming section of Netflix currently has the codename 'Shark', and the placement of PlayStation IP within that suggests a collaborative approach. This wouldn't be the first major deal between Sony and Netflix, as the two companies agreed a deal earlier this year that means movies from Sony Pictures Entertainment will come to Netflix first after their theatrical run. [...] Given that many first-party PlayStation games are narrative-driven adventure games with a focus on cinematic stories, it makes sense to try and adopt games like Ghost of Tsushima and the last of us into movies and TV. Whilst PlayStation already has a games streaming service, PlayStation Now, it could also potentially be looking to push gaming content beyond the PlayStation console ecosystem, as Microsoft has done with Xbox Game Pass.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: LG's futuristic rollable TV has arrived. The LG Signature OLED R TV is now available in the US for $100,000 -- costing roughly 50 times more than your average 4K OLED TV. But this isn't your average TV. It has a thin, flexible 65-inch OLED screen. The "wow factor" is the TV's ability to roll down into its housing unit when you're not watching a movie or playing a video game in 4K. It also comes with a sound system with Dolby Atmos and Sound Pro, and has Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa built-in for voice control. The TV has three viewing modes: LG calls them "full view," "zero view" and "line view." In full view, the TV is completely unrolled from the base. In zero view, it's wrapped back up, letting you take advantage of just the Dolby Atmos speaker. In line view, part of the TV is unrolled, roughly a quarter of the screen. This unrolled section could show a clock, the weather or photos. If you're interested in purchasing this TV, LG requires you to contact a representative in your region via their website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Netflix, marking its first big move beyond TV shows and films, is planning an expansion into video games and has hired a former Electronic Arts and Facebook executive to lead the effort. Mike Verdu will join Netflix as vice president of game development, reporting to Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters, the company said on Wednesday. Verdu was previously Facebook's vice president in charge of working with developers to bring games and other content to Oculus virtual-reality headsets. The idea is to offer video games on Netflix's streaming platform within the next year, according to a person familiar with the situation. The games will appear alongside current fare as a new programming genre -- similar to what Netflix did with documentaries or stand-up specials. The company doesn't currently plan to charge extra for the content, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Twitter did something that I would not have thought possible: It stole reading from me," argues a former New Yorker writer (who was once nominated for the Pulitzer Prize). In a new piece in the Atlantic this week, they argue that Twitter "hacked itself so deep into my circuitry that it interrupted the very formation of my thoughts..."

"For the past few years, I've felt a strange restlessness as I read, and the desk in my bedroom is piled with wonderful books I gave up on long before the halfway mark. I had started to wonder if we were in a post-reading age, or if reading loses its pleasure as we age — but I knew that wasn't really true... I had suspected for a while that my reading problems had something to do with Twitter, and several times I'd tried leaving the phone in another room — but it was no good. Twitter didn't live in the phone. It lived in me."

Maybe it all comes back to brain plasticity — the idea that our brains adapt to whatever activities we're doing the most, in a kind of "accidental optimization." But what happens if we feed our minds a continual diet of quick bursts of information? It's what I call hit-and-run reading — skimming headlines, comments, comment headlines, tweets, pictures on Instagram... Doesn't it seem like that would have some kind of impact?

I once spoke to a trial attorney who complained about the ever-shortening attention spans of juries...

I'm still haunted by a free 37-minute documentary I saw two years ago on YouTube called Bookstores: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content. It followed Max Joseph, the former host of the TV show Catfish (and the documentary's director) as he spoke to several reading experts (including a speed reader) about how he could form better habits. But at one point he calculates he was spending 20 minutes a day just on news, plus another 30 minutes a day on social media — which adds up to 304 hours a year that could've been spent reading books. (Enough time to read 30 books a year.)

And along with that goes the mental exercise of retaining an entire books' worth of material in your brain at one time. (The documentary even suggests that in our busy world, reading becomes a kind of "forced meditation.") So does your focus come back if you just keep on reading books?

I've been forcing myself to stay offline for one day a week, to at least create the time for revisiting that stack of unfinished books by my bed. But is that enough? The Atlantic's author titled their piece, "You Really Need to Quit Twitter." After describing how it had somehow stolen the joy of reading, the piece closes by asking, "What is it stealing from you?"
What's been the experience of Slashdot readers? Share your own thoughts and stories in the comments.

Are we reading fewer books because of social media?

A potential cyber attack on Iran's state railway company created "unprecedented chaos" at stations across the country and led to cancellations and delays on hundreds of lines, state TV reported. From a report: Departure notice boards showed blanket cancellations and carried the message "long delay following cyber attack," the national broadcaster said, adding that the disruption to Islamic Republic of Iran Railways' computer systems also affected station entrances and exits as well as ticket booths. The national rail company's website, www.rai.ir, wasn't loading as of 7.50 p.m. in Tehran. Iranian state TV didn't say where it got the information.

Nintendo is announcing a new Switch model today with a larger 7-inch 720p OLED display. While rumors had suggested this new Switch would ship with a new Nvidia chip inside, it doesn't look like that's the case. From a report: Nintendo lists this Switch OLED model as only supporting 1080p via TV mode, and rumors had suggested 4K support, thanks to a rumored Nvidia chip upgrade. The Switch OLED model will go on sale for $350 starting on October 8th. Other than the new screen, this revised model includes an adjustable stand for tabletop play, 64GB of built-in storage (up from 32GB), a new dock with a wired ethernet port built in, and improved audio for handheld or tabletop play. Nintendo only mentions "up to 1080p via HDMI in TV mode" for the TV dock, so the rumored 4K mode isn't part of this OLED Switch.

League of Legends developer Riot Games released a 37-track album of ambient tunes (now on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music) "that will let gamers stream their sessions accompanied by music that doesn't infringe copyright protections," reports Bloomberg.

And that's just one response to aggressive copyright enforcement: For example, a new Guardians of the Galaxy game to be released later this year will be loaded with a soundtrack with songs by Iron Maiden, KISS, Wham!, Blondie and more. To stay on the good side of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the studio behind the game, Eidos Montreal, has created a toggle switch that will allow gamers to turn off the soundtrack when live streaming, Venturebeat has reported. Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt SA also created an option for players to turn off certain songs that could cause trouble and replace them with an alternative.

After largely ignoring streaming platforms for years, last spring the music industry suddenly bore down on Twitch, owned by Amazon.com Inc. and started sending users thousands of DMCA takedowns for copyright violations. Twitch responded by telling users they could no longer use copyrighted material and also had to remove old posts that violated the rules. Some games are still struggling to adapt. Earlier this month, a number of music publishers, including those that represent Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande, sued Roblox Corp. for copyright infringement, saying the company hasn't licensed the music many of its creators have used in their games. The lawsuit is seeking at least $200 million in damages, the Wall Street Journal reported...

The collection is just the beginning and Riot said it's committed to creating more projects like Sessions in the future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter has a history of sharing feature and design ideas it's considering at very early stages of development. Earlier this month, for example, it showed off concepts around a potential "unmention" feature that would let users untag themselves from others' tweets. Today, the company is sharing a few more of its design explorations that would allow users to better control who can see their tweets and who ends up in their replies.

The first of the new ideas builds on work that began last year with the release of a feature that allows an original poster to choose who's allowed to reply to their tweet. Today, users can choose to limit replies to only people mentioned in the tweet, only people they follow, or they can leave it defaulted to "everyone." But even though this allows users to limit who can respond, everyone can see the tweet itself. And they can like, retweet or quote tweet the post. With the proposed Trusted Friends feature, users could tweet to a group of their own choosing. This could be a way to use Twitter with real-life friends, or some other small network of people you know more personally. Perhaps you could post a tweet that only your New York friends could see when you wanted to let them know you were in town. Or maybe you could post only to those who share your love of a particular TV show, sporting event or hobby. Twitter says the benefit of this private, "friends only" format is that it could save people from the workarounds they're currently using -- like juggling multiple alt accounts or toggling between public to protected tweets.

Another new feature under consideration is Reply Language Prompts. This feature would allow Twitter users to choose phrases they don't want to see in their replies. When someone is writing back to the original poster, these words and phrases would be highlighted and a prompt would explain why the original poster doesn't want to see that sort of language. For instance, users could configure prompts to appear if someone is using profanity in their reply. The feature wouldn't stop the poster from tweeting their reply -- it's more a gentle nudge that asks them to be more considerate. The third, and perhaps most complicated, feature is something Twitter is calling "Facets." This is an early idea about tweeting from different personas from one account. The feature would make sense for those who often tweet about different aspects of their lives, including their work life, their side hustles, their personal life or family, their passions and more. Unlike Trusted Friends, which would let you restrict some tweets to a more personal network, Facets would give other users the ability to choose whether they wanted to follow all your tweets, or only those about the "facet" they're interested in. This way, you could follow someone's tweets about tech, but ignore their stream of reactions they post when watching their favorite team play. Or you could follow your friend's personal tweets, but ignore their work-related content. And so on.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Like most Internet-of-things (IoT) devices these days, Amazon's Echo Dot gives users a way to perform a factory reset so, as the corporate behemoth says, users can "remove any... personal content from the applicable device(s)" before selling or discarding them. But researchers have recently found that the digital bits that remain on these reset devices can be reassembled to retrieve a wealth of sensitive data, including passwords, locations, authentication tokens, and other sensitive data. Most IoT devices, the Echo Dot included, use NAND-based flash memory to store data. Like traditional hard drives, NAND -- which is short for the boolean operator "NOT AND" -- stores bits of data so they can be recalled later, but whereas hard drives write data to magnetic platters, NAND uses silicon chips. NAND is also less stable than hard drives because reading and writing to it produces bit errors that must be corrected using error-correcting code.

Researchers from Northeastern University bought 86 used devices on eBay and at flea markets over a span of 16 months. They first examined the purchased devices to see which ones had been factory reset and which hadn't. Their first surprise: 61 percent of them had not been reset. Without a reset, recovering the previous owners' Wi-Fi passwords, router MAC addresses, Amazon account credentials, and information about connected devices was a relatively easy process. The next surprise came when the researchers disassembled the devices and forensically examined the contents stored in their memory. "An adversary with physical access to such devices (e.g., purchasing a used one) can retrieve sensitive information such as Wi-Fi credentials, the physical location of (previous) owners, and cyber-physical devices (e.g., cameras, door locks)," the researchers wrote in a research paper. "We show that such information, including all previous passwords and tokens, remains on the flash memory, even after a factory reset."

After extracting the flash contents from their six new devices, the researchers used the Autospy forensic tool to search embedded multimedia card images. The researchers analyzed NAND dumps manually. They found the name of the Amazon account owner multiple times, along with the complete contents of the wpa_supplicant.conf file, which stores a list of networks the devices have previously connected to, along with the encryption key they used. Recovered log files also provided lots of personal information. After dumping and analyzing the recovered data, the researchers reassembled the devices. The researchers wrote: "Our assumption was, that the device would not require an additional setup when connected at a different location and Wi-Fi access point with a different MAC address. We confirmed that the device connected successfully, and we were able to issue voice commands to the device. When asked 'Alexa, Who am I?', the device would return the previous owner's name. The re-connection to the spoofed access point did not produce a notice in the Alexa app nor a notification by email. The requests are logged under 'Activity' in the Alexa app, but they can be deleted via voice commands. We were able to control smart home devices, query package delivery dates, create orders, get music lists and use the 'drop-in' feature. If a calendar or contact list was linked to the Amazon account, it was also possible to access it. The exact amount of functionality depends on the features and skills the previous owner had used." Furthermore, the researchers were able to find the rough location of the previous owner's address by asking questions about nearby restaurants, grocery stores, and public libraries. "In a few of the experiments, locations were accurate up to 150 meters," reports Ars.

An Amazon spokeswoman said: "The security of our devices is a top priority. We recommend customers deregister and factory reset their devices before reselling, recycling, or disposing of them. It is not possible to access Amazon account passwords or payment card information because that data is not stored on the device." The threats most likely apply to Fire TV, Fire Tablets, and other Amazon devices, as well as many other NAND-based devices that don't encrypt user data, including the Google Home Mini.