CNET’s Cheapskate scours the web for great deals on PCs, phones, gadgets and much more. Questions about the Cheapskate blog? Find the answers on our FAQ page. Find more great buys on the CNET Deals page and follow the Cheapskate on Facebook and Twitter! The Fluance AB40 packs a home-theater sound system into an under-TV stand. Sarah …
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The speed boost and new features coming to the next version of Firefox are dramatic enough that Mozilla has given it a brand-new name: Firefox Quantum. The idea, of course, is that the upcoming version 57 is a quantum leap over predecessors — or, in the words of Mozilla CEO Chris Beard, a “big bang.” Company executives acknowledged they let Firefox …
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For a long while, Yelp has been my go-to tool for finding good restaurants while traveling. Now I’m using it locally as well, because there’s financial incentive to do so. Yelp Cash Back pays you back a percentage — up to 10 percent, which is not nothing — of your meal price when you visit a participating restaurant. It’s a …
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Chinese authorities have apparently squelched another service — Facebook‘s WhatsApp text-messaging service. The popular app — more than a billion people use WhatsApp, at least until the China ban — opens up an encrypted communication channel between two people. That encryption protects your privacy but also makes life hard for law enforcement, spies, and other forms of government snooping. China started …
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For the police, unlocking your iPhone X could be the same as taking your mugshot, thanks to Face ID. One of the marquee features of Apple’s latest flagship phone, Face ID uses multiple scanners for facial recognition. That’s great for preventing people from snooping, but as its Touch ID counterpart has shown, biometric technology doesn’t hold up in court as …
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Can the police locate suspects by scanning through all the phone numbers that pass through a certain area? Sure, but they’ll need a warrant first. That’s according to a federal appeals court, which ruled Thursday that police must get permission from a judge to use “Stingray” devices, also called cell-site simulators, as part of their investigations. The simulators act like …
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iOS 11 adds a bevy of new features and interface tweaks to your iPhone (and even more changes for your iPad). After opening your new iPhone or upgrading your current iPhone, here are the settings to check or change straight away. Do Not Disturb While Driving Given the frightening number of drivers I see each and every day with their eyes …
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Editors’ note, September 8: Equifax’s hack checker seems to be broken. We recommend that anyone with a credit history assume they were affected. One of the largest data breaches in history has left 143 million people wondering if their highly personal data has been exposed to hackers. For now, Equifax doesn’t explicitly tell you if you were a victim, and …
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When Safari 11 arrives on iPhones and Macs later this month, Apple‘s browser will come with a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention that makes it harder for advertisers and publishers to track what you do online. Surprise! Advertisers hate it. Six advertising groups published a letter Thursday asking Apple to “rethink” the technology, warning that it will “sabotage the economic model for …
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Apple has unequivocally rejected an ad industry request to “rethink” a privacy-protecting browser feature set to arrive this month in the newest version of its Safari web browser. Six ad industry groups said Thursday that a Safari 11 feature called intelligent tracking prevention breaks existing browser conventions and “will … sabotage the economic model for the internet.” On Friday, Apple …
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