Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Netflix is planning to purge its service of subscribers whose accounts are no longer actively being used—but you may have a chance to save your precious streaming data if you resubscribe before it’s wiped.

In a very uncommon move by a subscription-based service, Netflix announced Thursday that it will begin canceling the accounts of users who have not watched anything on the platform for a year since they joined, as well as anyone who hasn’t used the service in two years. The company said it will begin sending these subscribers emails and in-app notifications this week giving them the chance to keep their accounts active, but if they don’t receive a response, those accounts will automatically be deactivated.

The good news is that if a user does decide that they’d rather reactivate their account, they can do so within 10 months and still have access to their profile data.

“We’ve always thought it should be easy to sign up and to cancel,” Eddy Wu, the company’s director of product innovation, said in a statement. “So, as always, anyone who cancels their account and then rejoins within 10 months will still have their favorites, profiles, viewing preferences and account details just as they left them.”

To be clear, the number of people who aren’t watching Netflix is small. According to Netflix, the number of inactive users on its platform represent less than half of one percent of its total number of subscribers, or “a few hundred thousand.” To put that into perspective, Netflix reported in April it had nearly 183 million total subscriptions, a number that includes the roughly 16 million new subscriptions it’s added in recent months during the coronavirus pandemic. The company said it’s already factored the soon-to-be deleted accounts into its financial guidance.

In other words, this is merely a drop in the bucket for the king of streaming. And you probably should have killed that unused subscription anyway.

After shutting down its US-based repair centers over two months ago as a result of the pandemic, Nintendo is starting to reopen them again, which is good news for Switch owners still dealing with Joy-Con drift. Hacker Matteo Pisani came up with a different solution: a Switch without joysticks is a Switch that never experiences drift problems, so he upgraded his console with a touchpad instead.

End-to-end encryption for RCS appears to finally be in the pipeline for Google’s messaging app. That’s according to code spotted in an upcoming version update by the folks at APKMirror, as first reported by 9to5 Google this weekend.

Rich communication services, or RCS, is a type of messaging protocol that puts its predecessor, SMS, to shame. It offers a lot of the modern conveniences found on apps like Apple’s iMessage and WhatsApp that users have already come to expect: group chats, read receipts, typing indicators, an 8,000 character limit (as opposed to SMS’ measly 160), and the ability to tap into both wifi or data to send messages.

While far from groundbreaking, these features have been a long-time coming for Google Messages. After promising a successor to SMS as far back as 2016, Google finally finished its stymied rollout of RCS on Android phones in the U.S. at the end of last year. Many international markets are still waiting on it.

And even with how much of a mess widespread adoption has been, Google Messages still lacks a key security feature already supported by competitors like Signal and iMessage: end-to-end encryption. This keeps third-parties from possibly snooping on your messages, and has been a hot-button issue in recent years as more and more of our daily (and potentially sensitive) communications bleed onto online platforms.

The code for an internal build of Google Messages version 6.2 includes 12 new strings that reference encryption, according to an analysis by 9to5 Google. Details are scarce, though, and it’s still unclear whether both the message’s sender and recipient would need to be using Google Messages app for it to be successfully encrypted.

If so, that could change once more apps gain support, 9to5 Google notes. To that effect, the update’s code suggests that users may be able to toggle permissions to allow other Android apps that have access to messages view these encrypted messages as well.

Of course, there’s no telling when such a feature might materialize. While Google’s indicated that it’s exploring development of end-to-end encryption, no timeline exists as of yet for when users can expect to get their hands on it.

After shutting down indefinitely in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Universal announced last week that its Orlando parks will reopen their gates beginning on June 5. Universal Studios Florida, Islands of Adventure, and Volcano Bay have been empty for months following several other high-profile theme park closures. To abide by federal guidelines, Universal outlined the additional health precautions it’s adopting during this first phase of reopenings in a blog post.

There are plenty of ways to use your phone to pay with stuff: You can use your face, your fingerprint, a passcode, and, now, simply your voice.

Google just rolled out a limited pilot program that will let a few lucky people make purchases with nothing but their voice, according to The Verge. You can only make purchases through the Google Play store and at restaurants, which seems like it could help limit accidental purchases.

Unfortunately, the Voice Match feature is not enabled on my phone, but there is a Google Assistant help page that guides you through the setup process if you think you might have it. Android Police originally spotted the feature and also provides a (better) step-by-step guide to see if you have it. This new feature has not been officially announced by Google, but the company did confirm to Android Police that it has officially started a pilot test. It’s possible Google was going to announce it at its now canceled I/O 2020 event, which was set to take place this month.

If you are able to get to the set-up screen, take special note of Google’s ‘Keep in mind’ message: “Someone with a similar voice or recording may be able to confirm purchases on devices you’re logged into.”

I can see how this feature could be beneficial to individuals with a disability that would make it hard for them to confirm purchases with a fingerprint or a face scan. However, that warning makes it clear that Assistant Voice Match is the least secure option out of the three. As Google notes, it could be easy for someone to trick its Assistant into thinking it’s your voice.

It seems like it would be easy and smart to add another security measure like Amazon’s Alexa, which gives you the option to set up a voice-activated PIN number to confirm purchases. However, there’s a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that clearly lays out the worst possible scenario for something like that: Data takes control of the Enterprise by mimicking Captain Picard’s voice and locks the entire crew out of the computer with a long, numeric encryption. While I don’t foresee anyone getting locked out of their Google or Amazon accounts in the same way, anyone in your household with a recording of your voice, especially of you saying your pin number, could order something using your stored credit card information.

Voice assistants aren’t that secure in general. Professionals who deal with sensitive client information have been advised to turn off their smart speakers while working from home; Google or Amazon employees could be listening in on your recordings, but you’ll have no idea if they actually are or not. You can always change your credit card and password information if it gets stolen, but you can never get your dignity back if you find out someone has listened to you confirming, ahem, adult purchases.

Facebook announced last week that it would be completely rebranding the wallet for its long-anticipated cryptocurrency—perhaps in an attempt to shake off its troubled reputation.

That sure was quick. Last weekend, the hacking group unc0ver released a new tool that can jailbreak Apple’s newest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 13.5, just days after its initial debut. Per multiple reports, the tool works on all versions of iOS from 11 onward and doesn’t drain battery life or impinge on your device’s other apps and baked-in security measures. “This jailbreak basically just adds exceptions to the existing rules.

Long before Spotify was a thing, I collected music on my computer during my college days. That collection, which had everything from Cradle of Filth to Dashboard Confessional, to Reverend Horton Heat, easily surpassed 10,000 songs by the end of my first semester as a freshman. By the time I graduated, I had close to 40,000 songs, which are still on that old external hard drive.

After three days of negotiations, House lawmakers have struck a deal on an amendment to protect innocent Americans from being spied on by their own government online.

Unless you’re completely irresponsible and utterly lacking in empathy, wearing a face mask is going to be a routine part of life well into 2021. In a questionable attempt to make masks more comfortable, a YouTuber has shared his custom creation that can automatically open to let fresh air in when no one’s around—at the cost of looking like a Batman villain.