Amazon is axing the program that lets Prime members share their free shipping perk with people outside their household. In an update to its support page, Amazon says it will cut off Prime benefit sharing on October 1st, 2025, prompting invitees who don’t live with the account holder to sign up for their own subscription at a discounted $14.99 rate for an entire year (and then $14.99 per month after that).

Instead, Amazon is replacing this program with Amazon Family, which lets account holders share Prime benefits — but only with people they live with. Amazon says everyone in a “Family” must live at the same primary residential address, defined as “the address you consider to be your home and where you spend the majority of your time.”

As we’ve seen with several streaming services that have cracked down on password sharing, Amazon is likely ending the program as a way to shore up new subscribers. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Amazon didn’t meet Prime signup goals in the US during its extended Prime Day event in July, though the company reportedly said it had record signups in the 25 days surrounding the event.

Launched in 2015, Amazon Family (formerly Amazon Household) offers access to free shipping, along with additional perks like Prime Video, Prime Reading, third-party benefits like GrubHub, shared ebooks, Amazon Music, and more. You can only add up to one other adult that you live with to your account, up to four teens (but only if you added them before April 7th, 2025), and up to four child profiles.

Daily squirts of a safe, over-the-counter allergy nasal spray may prevent COVID-19 infections from taking hold, according to results published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine. In a mid-staged trial, the spray appeared to reduce infections by promising 67 percent, though a larger trial will need to confirm that robust efficacy.

The trial was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 trial conducted by researchers at Germany's Saarland University between March 2023 and July 2024. The study included 450 healthy adults, about half of whom (227) spritzed their noses three times a day with the generic antihistamine nasal spray, azelastine, which can be purchased over the counter in the US. The placebo, meanwhile, was a spray with an identical composition except for the absence of the antihistamine. The two groups had similar mixes of previous COVID-19 vaccination and infection statuses.

After about 56 days of frequent mistings, only five people using the allergy spray (2.2 percent) caught a SARS-CoV-2 infection, while 15 people using a placebo (6.7 percent) got the pandemic infection. That 4.5 percentage-point drop represents a 67 percent reduction in COVID-19 cases, though the numbers here are small. Still, the researchers noted that the five people using the allergy spray who contracted COVID-19 took more time to get the infection than the 15 in the placebo group (31 days versus 19.5). This could hint that the spray held off some infections from exposures early in the trial. And when the allergy spray users did get COVID-19, they were positive on a rapid antigen test for less time than those infected in the placebo group (3.4 days versus 5.1 days), suggesting they cleared the virus a bit faster.

Intriguingly, people using the allergy spray also had fewer respiratory infections overall compared with those in the placebo group (21 infections versus 49 infections). This was particularly the case for rhinovirus infections, the cause of the common cold. These findings are backed by several earlier studies suggesting that azelastine can fight off various viruses that try to invade our noses. Overall, the findings suggest that the allergy spray may protect against COVID-19 using a general antiviral mechanism that can guard against other respiratory viruses. But what that mechanism might be on the mucus membrane of the nose is unclear for now.

COVID context

Like all trials, there are limitations. As mentioned, the number of infections here is small—the impressive efficacy numbers could potentially vanish in a larger trial with more infections. And, while the trial had a high-quality design, it was undertaken in just one location in Germany and mostly involved healthy white women between the ages of 20 and 46, so the findings are not generalizable. The study was also funded by a pharmaceutical company that makes an azelastine nasal spray (though not the one that is sold over the counter in the US).

Still, with the previous studies, the trial offers some hope that this accessible nasal spray could be used as a viral prophylactic for respiratory seasons in the future. And the results land at a time when access to COVID-19 vaccines—which have firmly proven to be safe and highly effective—has been severely restricted in the US by health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

As it stands now, it appears that only people ages 65 and over, and those at higher risk of COVID-19 will have access to the shots this year, though some aspects of that access are murky, including how people will prove they're at high risk. For healthy children, teens, and adults under 65, there may be no access or extremely limited access. That includes groups that medical experts recommend get vaccinated, namely healthy pregnant people and children ages 6 months to 23 months, both of which are considered at high risk from COVID-19 by medical experts, but not federal guidance under Kennedy. Experts also recommend access for healthy people who have contact with vulnerable people, such as cancer doctors, people who live with immunocompromised family members, and people who work in nursing homes.

With limited vaccine access and the normal slew of respiratory viruses on the horizon, a simple nasal spray is an appealing addition to the defenses. The main side effects are fairly minor, including bitter taste in the mouth, nosebleeds, and tiredness.

Read full article

Comments

Dolby has announced the features of Dolby Vision 2, its successor to the popular Dolby Vision HDR format.

Whereas the original Dolby Vision was meant to give creators the ability to finely tune exactly how TVs present content in HDR, Dolby Vision 2 appears to significantly broaden that feature to include motion handling as well—and it also tries to bridge the gap between filmmaker intent and the on-the-ground reality of the individual viewing environments.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, Dolby says one of the pillars of Dolby Vision 2 will be "Content Intelligence," which introduces new "AI capabilities" to the Dolby Vision spec. Among other things, that means using sensors in the TV to try to fix the oft-complained-about issue of shows being too dark.

Many editors and filmmakers tweak their video content to be best viewed in a dark room on a high-end TV with strong peak brightness, contrast, color accuracy, and so on. Unfortunately, that sometimes means that some shows are laughably dark on anything but the most optimal target setup—think Apple TV+'s Silo, or the infamous Battle of Winterfell in the final season of Game of Thrones, both of which many people complained were too dark for clear viewing.

With Content Intelligence, Dolby Vision 2 will allegedly make the image "crystal clear" by "improving clarity in any viewing environment without compromising intent." Further, it will use ambient light detection sensors in supporting TVs to adjust the content's presentation based on how bright the viewer's room is.

Fixing motion smoothing—or making it worse?

There's plenty that's going to be controversial in Content Intelligence with some purists, but it's another feature called Authentic Motion that's probably going to cause the biggest stir for Dolby Vision 2.

Dolby calls this "the world’s first creative driven motion control tool to make scenes feel more authentically cinematic without unwanted judder on a shot-by-shot basis."

Some years ago, TV manufacturers began including motion smoothing (sometimes called "the soap opera effect") as a feature in almost all their TVs. This feature basically makes it appear as if video content has a higher frame rate than it actually does (like 60 frames per second instead of film's usual 24), and to adjust for the judder that may occur because 24 fps doesn't map neatly to 60Hz display.

Many casual viewers love it. Most cinephiles despise it, as it comes with artifacts and makes cinematic content seem more like a 60 fps home video. Furthermore, many filmmakers have also spoken out loudly against it, saying it undermines artistic intent.

Here, Dolby is positing that it has solved the issue by allowing filmmakers scene-by-scene control over when and how much this software and hardware feature is leveraged.

At this point, it's unclear how that will play out. Will it look meaningfully different from current motion smoothing options? What benefit is there to offering it on a scene-by-scene basis? What, if anything, does it do to address artifacting?

We'll likely have to wait until the Consumer Electronics Show in January to find out. So far, Dolby has announced that Hisense plans to support it in its new TVs, and CANAL+ will support it on the content creation side. It will be offered in two tiers: Dolby Vision 2 for low-end and mid-range TVs, and Dolby Vision 2 Max for high-end sets—though it's not entirely clear what all the finer points of distinction will be. No launch dates have been set.

Read full article

Comments

The remedies ruling in the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google finally landed on Tuesday. Last year, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google was a monopolist in the search and advertising markets, but while today’s ruling says that Google will have to share some search data with competitors, Google doesn’t have to spin off Chrome and it can keep paying for deals like the one that lets it be the default search in Safari.

Many Google critics aren’t happy with the remedies that have been handed down, saying that they don’t go far enough to slow Google’s dominance and restore competition in the market. Here are some statements from critics:

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN):

Today’s ruling is a reminder of Google’s sweeping power over the online economy, but the limited remedies ordered by the court demonstrate why we need additional rules of the road for Big Tech. That’s why we must pass my bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act to stop dominant platforms like Google from continuing to unfairly preference their own products over competitors’ — which hurts consumers and entrepreneurs, and stifles innovation. Through three administrations, our antitrust enforcers have proven that Google’s tactics endanger the future of a free and open internet and risk choking off innovation in critical areas like artificial intelligence. I will continue to work across the aisle to ensure even the most powerful tech companies have to play by the rules.

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg:

We do not believe the remedies ordered by the court will force the changes necessary to adequately address Google’s illegal behavior. Google will still be allowed to continue to use its monopoly to hold back competitors, including in AI search. As a result, consumers will continue to suffer. We believe Congress should now step in to swiftly make Google do the thing it fears the most: compete on a level playing field.

News / Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey:

We are disappointed in today’s decision. Judge Mehta’s ruling did not address the ability of Google to further cement its market power through its AI offerings. Google is forcing content creators to give away their content to be used in its AI offerings in order to remain in Google Search. This is a no-win scenario that will continue to harm publishers that invest in high-quality, journalistic and creative content. Giving publishers the ability to opt out of Google’s AI is critical to preserving an open internet free from anti-competitive behavior, and preserving a fair playing field for companies across a variety of industries. This ruling is not the end, but it is a missed opportunity.

The Tech Oversight Project executive director Sacha Haworth:

While Judge Amit Mehta’s decision blocks some of Google’s predatory practices, it fails to meet this historic moment and shows that his decision was made based on speculative arguments about generative AI, in which Google, because of its interlocking monopolies and distribution advantage, is already a dominant player. Search is one of the largest avenues for future AI queries, and it’s crystal clear that rather than doing the hard thing, Judge Mehta was far more willing to let Google continue bending the internet and our economy to its will than enforcing the law, which is designed to create a level playing field that benefits the American people and innovative, new companies.

American Economic Liberties Project executive director Nidhi Hegde:

The Court found Google liable for maintaining one of the most consequential and damaging monopolies of the internet era, yet has bizarrely decided to leave its power almost fully intact. Imposing liability in name only is pure judicial cowardice. This ruling leaves the public unprotected, crucial and evolving markets concentrated, and worse, sends a signal that will embolden monopolists everywhere.

Not everyone is fully opposed, with some speaking in favor of Judge Mehta not breaking up Google. However, some have also expressed concerns over the data-sharing portion of the remedies.

Computer & Communications Industry Association president and CEO Matt Schruers:

The District Court’s ruling rightly rejected the drastic breakup proposed by the DOJ regarding Chrome and Android, which would have altered antitrust precedent and harmed competition and consumers. As the Court stated, the DOJ overreached in seeking the forced divestiture of these key assets. For consumers, the ruling means that Google will be compelled to share search queries and other data with certain competitors, which could significantly impact privacy and national security.

Competitive Enterprise Institute Center for Technology and Innovation director Jessica Melugin:

Today’s ruling in the Google search case wisely avoids most of the requests from the Department of Justice, including a forced divestiture of Chrome and Android, overly broad payment bans, and other requested overreaches. But the mandated data sharing introduces questions about who might qualify as a ‘qualified competitor’ and if that benefits consumers, or just Google competitors.

NetChoice vice president of public affairs Robert Winterton:

The court’s nuanced approach has prevented the DOJ from dismantling a leading American tech company at a pivotal time in history, ensuring President Trump’s administration stays true to its promise to empower American innovation.

Chamber of Progress CEO Adam Kovacevic:

Google’s rivals wanted Judge Mehta to throw the book at Google, but he repeatedly cited the Microsoft antitrust precedent that remedies should be narrowly tailored to fit the offense. He spent 29 pages discussing how generative AI is now a competitive threat to traditional search engines. Innovation is a hare while antitrust law is a tortoise.

Google plans to appeal the first ruling that found the company was an illegal monopolist.

Disney has agreed to pay $10 million to settle allegations from the Federal Trade Commission that it violated federal law by misleadingly labeling cartoons on YouTube so it could illegally collect children’s personal data.

The FTC alleges that Disney failed to label some videos of its popular kids cartoons it uploaded to YouTube as “Made for Kids” — a designation that makes such videos ineligible for certain features, like the collection of personal information. It’s a way YouTube makes it harder to target kids with personalized ads. But rather than mark individual videos as either “Made for Kids” or “Not Made for Kids,” the FTC alleges, Disney left the default designation at the channel level, so any video uploaded to a “Not Made for Kids” channel would bear that “Not Made for Kids” label instead. 

The result was that videos with content from kid-friendly movies like “The Incredibles,” “Toy Story,” and “Frozen” would be marked as “Not Made for Kids,” according to the government, circumventing YouTube’s heightened restrictions, including allowing YouTube to autoplay other “Not Made for Kids” videos after the Disney ones finished. That resulted in Disney collecting information on kids and serving them targeted ads on videos that were technically designed at not for kids, the FTC alleges, in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection (COPPA) Rule, which requires parental consent to collect information on kids under 13. 

YouTube implemented the labeling system after its own 2019 settlement with the FTC over alleged violation of the COPPA Rule. 

Disney should have known that some of its videos were marked incorrectly, the government alleges, since YouTube already told Disney in 2020 that it was labeling its videos incorrectly,  changing the labels on over 300 of its videos from “Not Made for Kids” to “Made for Kids” at that time, according to the complaint. But Disney continued to upload videos with only the default designation at the channel level, the FTC says.

Under the proposed settlement, Disney will pay a $10 million civil settlement, obtain parents’ consent for collecting data from kids under 13 as required by law, and create a new program to review whether videos uploaded to YouTube should be marked as made for kids or not which it must maintain for the next ten years — unless YouTube comes up with its own system “to determine the age, age range, or age category of all YouTube users.” If so, Disney will no longer need its own system to figure out how videos should be labeled.

The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well. There have been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess.

As U.S. news outlets fire staffers and editors, cut corners, and endlessly compromise integrity and standards, they’re also apparently being increasingly duped by people using AI to generate bogus stories and reporting. Like this freelancer for Business Insider and Wired, who apparently tricked editors at both publications into publishing several completely fabricated stories written mostly by LLMs.

The freelancer, who called herself Margaux Blanchard, apparently doesn’t exist. She pitched both outlets on a story about a town called Gravemont, “a decommissioned mining town in rural Colorado” that was purportedly repurposed into “one of the world’s most secretive training grounds for death investigation.” Except the town in question, like the author, apparently doesn’t exist.

The Press Gazette did a little digging and found that “at least” six publications published various articles by the fake person using AI, which all kind of piggybacked on each other to give the fake journalist credibility to get future stuff published. Including one article about a couple who met in Roblox, fell in love, and got married. But the couple, and nobody else in the article, appears to exist:

“The interviewees in the article do not seem to match up to any people about whom information is publicly available on the internet. For example the article cites “Jessica Hu, 34, an ordained officiant based in Chicago” who it says “has made a name for herself as a ‘digital celebrant,’ specialising in ceremonies across Twitch, Discord, and VRChat”. However, no such officiant appears to exist.”

This is less surprising for Business Insider (which increasingly traffics in clickbait and recently fired 25% of its staff) and more surprising for Wired, which has been doing a lot of great journalism during the second Trump term. It’s particularly embarrassing given the parade of extremely talented writers and editors that have repeatedly been shitcanned by many of these same outlets over the last decade.

Wired was at least transparent about the fuck up, publishing an article explaining how they were tricked, noting they only figured things out when the freelancer refused payment via traditional systems. But they acknowledge they didn’t adhere to traditional standards for fact checking (who has the time, apparently):

“We made errors here: This story did not go through a proper fact-check process or get a top edit from a more senior editor. First-time contributors to WIRED should generally get both, and editors should always have full confidence that writers are who they say they are.”

This country has taken an absolute hatchet to quality journalism, which in turn has done irreparable harm to any effort to reach reality-based consensus or have an informed electorate. The rushed integration of “AI,” usually by media owners who largely only see it as a way to cut corners and undermine labor, certainly isn’t helping. Add in the twisted financial incentives of an ad-based engagement infotainment economy, and you get exactly the sort of journalistic outcomes academics long predicted.

That, in turn, creates an environment rich for exploitation by the shittiest people imaginable, including random fraudsters, and the weird extremist zealots currently running what’s left of the United States.