Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) plans to join Netflix and Disney in preventing Max users from sharing their passwords with friends and family who don't live in the primary household. According to The Wrap, the company's CEO and president of global streaming and games JB Perrette said at a conference that the account sharing crackdown will start later this year ahead of a more widespread effort in 2025.

The aim, of course, is to improve Max's bottom line. WBD doesn't make any money when a user lets someone else use their Max account. As of the end of 2023, WBD had 97.7 million subscribers across Max, Discovery+ and HBO on cable. That was an increase of 1.8 million from the previous quarter.

It's unclear how WBD plans to implement the password sharing crackdown. Last year, Netflix started making users who shared their account with people outside of the main household pay extra to do so. The initiative had a positive impact on Netflix's financial results. Disney+ then followed suit with its own password restrictions, which it first introduced in Canada. Disney says users in the US will have to stop sharing passwords by March 14.

The Marshall Middleton Bluetooth speaker has a list price of $300, but right now Amazon is selling it for $236. That's a 21 percent discount and the lowest price we've tracked since it's launch last March, beating the former low of $260 it hit last December. It's also on sale for $250 at B&H Photo. We named the Middleton one of the best mid-range ($200 to $400) Bluetooth speakers you can buy in our guide. It combines good sound quality with a IP67 rating, meaning it's dust-tight and can survive a dip in a meter of water for up to 30 minutes. Plus there's a handy carry strap to drag it around.   

Marshall markets the Middleton as their flagship Bluetooth speaker — and the company's largest portable with a waterproof rating. At four pounds, it's still small enough to toss in a backpack, but large enough to house three battery cells adding up to 9,600mAh of charge to enable a 20-hour run time. You can even siphon off some of that juice to charge a phone thorough the USB-C port. 

It puts out 360-degree sound from two 15-watt woofers, two 10-watt tweeters and a pair of passive radiators. We found the output to be respectable, handling low frequencies well. Marshall's sound tends to have a good dynamic range combined with significant depth, and that's what you get here. 

The Middleton is also the biggest model to support Stack Mode which lets you pair up with another Middleton or the smaller Emberton II or Willen. Pairing happens using the app and double pressing the speakers' Bluetooth buttons.  

Speaking of other music boxes, the Emberton II speaker, which we named one of the best picks under $200 in that same speaker guide, is also on sale. It's 21 percent off and down to $134, which isn't an all-time low — it went for $14 less last Black Friday. It's not the loudest speaker in it's size range, but the sound is pleasantly balanced and a good accompaniment to small gatherings. 

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Hades is a major get for Netflix as a mobile exclusive. The dungeon crawler is one of the best games in recent memory and it could help bolster the growing audience Netflix has built for its strong library of games. Subscribers will be able to play Hades on their iPhones and iPads at no extra cost on March 19. You can preregister so you're ready to go when the game hits the App Store.

You play as Zagreus, the son of Hades, as you battle through a randomized set of chambers and enemies in an attempt to escape from the Underworld. This is a roguelite game. Every time you die, you'll go back to the start and lose most of the perks you picked up during a run, but you'll gradually unlock permanent upgrades that will help Zagreous make it to Mount Olympus. You may also be equipped with extra knowledge about a certain enemy or trap that caused your demise.

In addition, Zagreus will receive gifts from other Olympians to help him hack and slash through his enemies. It's his interactions with the other characters that form the backbone of the story and help make Hades stand out.

Developer Supergiant Games had long thought of Hades as a good fit for mobile, given its pick-up-and-play nature. Although Netflix's games are typically available on both iOS and Android, that won't be the case for Hades, at least for now. Supergiant has stuck with iOS for the mobile versions of its games (already having a Mac version of Hades helped here since that platform and iOS both use the Metal API). Not only that, the studio is made up of a small team. While Supergiant was preparing the mobile port of Hades, it was also working on the sequel to the 2020 hit.

It took over a year of extra development time to get Hades ready for mobile devices. "The foremost goal was to make this an uncompromising version of Hades," while making sure the game was "as performant and smooth as possible," Supergiant creative director Greg Kasavin recently told reporters.

A major focus of that work was making sure to get the touch controls just right. The buttons have haptic feedback. You can resize and reposition the controls and save your configuration. What's more, the buttons are customized for each action. So, when you go to pet the adorable multi-headed devil dog Cerberus, there'll be a dedicated button just for that. Don't worry if you prefer to use a Bluetooth controller or a plug-in gamepad such as the Backbone One, since Hades will be compatible with those. Other features include 60 fps gameplay, cloud saves, achievements and offline play.

Hades is coming to Netflix Games at an ideal time for Supergiant. It will both bring new eyes to the game and give longtime fans an excuse to revisit the classic ahead of the sequel's arrival. Hades II is set to go into early access on PC this spring.

Here's a quick PSA for anyone who has been meaning to add more storage to a gaming handheld, GoPro, security camera or cheaper Android device: A handful of Samsung microSD cards we recommend are back on sale. The discounts include the 256GB Samsung Pro Plus and 128GB Samsung Pro Ultimate for $20 and $17, respectively. Neither of those are all-time lows, but they both come within $2 of the best deals we've tracked, and they're both a few bucks cheaper than the cards' usual street prices over the last two months. The Pro Plus is the top overall pick in our microSD card buying guide, while the Pro Ultimate is a faster upgrade pick. These deals are also available at other retailers, including B&H and Samsung.com.

If you're willing to trade some performance for more space, the 512GB Samsung Evo Select, the top value pick in our guide, is also down to $25 at Amazon. We saw this deal last month, but it still matches the card's lowest price to date. Typically, it's retailed around $30 over the last few months.

Which one of these is the "best" deal depends on what you're looking to do. The Pro Ultimate may be worth it if you plan to regularly stress the card in a device that can take advantage of its higher speeds. It was faster than the Pro Plus across the board in our benchmark tests, so it can save you some time if you often have to, say, move files to and from a computer. That said, the Pro Plus' sequential and random speeds weren't too far off, so it'll still be quick for recording 4K video, loading video game levels and the like. If you need a higher-capacity card but still value performance, it'll probably be worth the extra $3. For reference, the 256GB version of the Pro Ultimate is now going for $35, which is a fair bit extra.

If you just want a big chunk of space on the cheap, meanwhile, just go with the Evo Select. It's a clear step down from the other two cards in both read and write speeds, but it's performant enough for more casual tasks, and this deal gets you much more space per dollar. Many devices, such as the Nintendo Switch, can't fully take advantage of the faster transfer speeds of cards like the Pro Plus anyway. Like the higher-end cards, the Evo Select also comes with a 10-year limited warranty. None of the cards on sale here will be as fast as Samsung's upcoming SD Express models, but we'd expect those to be relatively expensive when they arrive later this year.

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This year’s edition of MLB The Show is just a couple of weeks away, and Sony's San Diego Studio has shed more light on what to expect. For the first time in the series, you’ll be able to create and play as women ballplayers in the Road to the Show mode.

In Road to the Show: Women Pave Their Way, there will be a dedicated story in which you can build a career as a pro female baseball player. While it includes all the usual features of Road to the Show, this version of the mode will have a buddy character and depict a “unique-to-women storyline following a lifelong friendship as it develops in professional baseball,” according to a PlayStation Blog post.

Your career path will likely be different on each playthrough. San Diego Studio added fresh commentary, MLB Network segments and other features tied to this new addition to the game.

Other major sports games have added women players over the last several years, including FIFA (now EA Sports FC), the NHL series and NBA 2K. It's good to see MLB The Show joining them.

In addition, MLB The Show 24 will continue to showcase stories from the Negro Leagues under a partnership with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. The latest edition of the series will feature 10 new Negro League Legends, each of whom has their own storyline. Among those players is Toni Stone, who was the first woman to play full time in the leagues.

Meanwhile, MLB The Show will remain in the odd position of being a Sony-developed and published game that's coming to Game Pass on its release date. Subscribers will be able to play MLB The Show 24 via Xbox consoles and the cloud at no extra cost starting on March 19.

Meta apps Facebook, Instagram and Threads are all currently experiencing outages. The service issues seem to have started at around 10AM ET, with outage reports for the services (and WhatsApp) spiking on Down Detector at that time.

Facebook booted several members of the Engadget team back to the site's login screen and left them unable to sign back in. Feeds on the other services were not loading for many users. However, fellow major Meta service WhatsApp was working for some, including me. 

Meta is surely working to resolve the issues. In the meantime, you might have to turn to TikTok or (shudder) X for your Tuesday morning time-wasting needs.

Apple has upgraded the 13 and 15-inch MacBook Airs with the M3 and a few new bells and whistles. But while I expected the company to keep the M1 around as its budget option, it swapped it out for the base model M2. Someone at Cupertino’s going to regret that, because the M2 Air is, despite its limitations, a damn fine machine. I don’t know if anyone needs the added performance the M3 Air provides, but I do know you can’t afford to ignore the base model M2.

Historically, Apple has kept a MacBook below a thousand dollars to hook price-sensitive buyers. A grand is a lot to spend on a machine if you’re broke, especially if there are cheaper low-end Windows machines (even if they are crap). Even then, the $999 MacBook is the “cheap” option, and Apple will hobble it just enough to upsell you to the $1,200 model it really wants you to buy.

That’s why I cynically expected the M1 to remain in place, because the slower chip and decade-old chassis was a nice compromise in exchange for a cheaper machine. Yes, the M1 would allow you to join the Apple SIlicon world, but you’d have to deal with a design that’s barely changed since 2017. The M2, by comparison, is less than two years old and is regarded as one of Apple’s best ever machines: The fact it’s available as the budget option is almost a flex.

This morning, I reread my colleague Devindra Hardawar’s great review of the M2 Air from 2022, and I still want one. The M2 has a wonderfully sleek design and comes equipped with plenty of great hardware. A fantastic 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display with a 500-nit backlight, a 1080p webcam, quad-speakers with support for Spatial Audio and Atmos. The better quality of stuff you got was probably Apple’s rationale for holding on to the M1, and charging $1,200 for the base M2 (which itself could be upsold for more with the better add-ons).

Then there’s the M2 silicon itself which, in this variation, has an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. Look, I know that 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD are both major drags on the M2’s overall performance. But I can’t stress enough that this is an ultraportable without a fan designed for lower power tasks. If you buy a machine this thin and get annoyed that it can’t render a two hour 4K movie as efficiently as a Pro model, the computer isn’t the problem, no matter what it's running.

Of course, the sticks you could use to beat the M2 MacBook Air are the same ones for a lot of Apple Silicon machines. Limited external display support, limited port selection, no ability to add upgrades further down the road and nonexistent repair support. But some or all of those issues are probably not top of your list if you’re looking for a good machine to live your life with.

Ah, but what about the AI performance which Apple says is so much better on the M3 than its immediate predecessor? I’ll be honest, I don’t know how many people are doing AI-intensive tasks on a machine like this, or even beefier ones. After all, most people are more than happy to engage with generative AIs through a web client, which requires no local grunt at all.

Not to mention that the M2 has often been offered with a hefty discount through sellers like Amazon. I’d reckon that while the $999 is a bargain, someone will probably knock another hundred off that figure the next time there’s a shopping holiday. Who needs an M3 Air?

Oregon is set to become the latest state to pass a Right to Repair law. The Oregon House of Representatives passed the Right to Repair Act (SB 1596) on March 4, two weeks after it advanced from the Senate. It now heads to Governor Tina Kotek's desk, who has five days to sign it.

California, Minnesota and New York have similar legislation, but Nathan Proctor, the Public Interest Research Group's Right to Repair Campaign senior director, calls Oregon's legislation "the best bill yet." (It's worth noting that Colorado also has its own Right to Repair legislation that has a different remit around agricultural equipment rather than around consumer electronics.)

If made into law, Oregon's Right To Repair Act would be the first to ban "parts pairing," a practice that prevents individuals from swapping out a piece for another, theoretically equivalent one. For example, a person might replace their iPhone battery with an identical one from the same model, but they'll likely receive an error message that it either can't be verified or used. The system forces people to buy the part directly from the manufacturer and can only activate it with their consent — otherwise users will have to buy an entirely new device altogether. Instead, under the new bill, manufacturers would be required to:

• Prevent or inhibit an independent repair provider or an owner from installing or enabling the function of an otherwise functional replacement part or a component of consumer electronic equipment, including a replacement part or a component that the original equipment manufacturer has not approved.

• Reduce the functionality or performance of consumer electronic equipment.

• Cause consumer electronic equipment to display misleading alerts or warnings, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss, about unidentified parts.

Along with restricting parts pairing, the act dictates that manufacturers must make compatible parts available to device owners through the company or an authorized service provider for the most favorable price and without any "substantial" conditions.

The parts pairing ban applies to any devices first built or sold in Oregon starting in 2025. However, the law backdates general coverage of electronics to 2015, except for cell phones. Oregon's mobile devices purchased starting July 2021 count — a stipulation in line with California's and Minnesota's Right to Repair bills.

Passkey availability has been on the rise and is only continuing to grow. The latest example comes from 1Password, the aptly named password manager, which has announced support for passkeys on Android devices. Now, anyone using a phone or tablet with Android 14 or higher can access 1Passwords's passkeys right on their device's apps. Last September, the company made passkeys available on iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 devices, along with browsers such as Chrome and Safari. 

So, what is a passkey anyway? Unlike a password that someone can guess or potentially obtain in a hack, passkeys consist of public and private keys. The public key belongs to whatever site an account is made with, while the private key exists solely on the device and is never seen by the involved company. Basically, it works as a puzzle of sorts, and instead of typing in a password, it uses an API to connect the private and public keys. 

Users will need to download the 1Password app and, when creating new accounts, choose to make one with a passkey instead of a password. To clarify, this function is currently only available for Android apps, not Chrome for Android. According to 1Password, Google is in the midst of building a new API that will allow for passkeys on mobile Chrome. 

Microsoft has filed a motion seeking to dismiss key parts of a lawsuit The New York Times filed against the company and Open AI, accusing them of copyright infringement. If you'll recall, The Times sued both companies for using its published articles to train their GPT large language models (LLMs) without permission and compensation. In its filing, the company has accused The Times of pushing "doomsday futurology" by claiming that AI technologies pose a threat to independent journalism. It follows OpenAI's court filing from late February that's also seeking to dismiss some important elements on the case. 

Like OpenAI before it, Microsoft accused The Times of crafting "unrealistic prompts" in an effort to "coax the GPT-based tools" to spit out responses matching its content. It also compared the media organization's lawsuit to Hollywood studios' efforts to " stop a groundbreaking new technology:" The VCR. Instead of destroying Hollywood, Microsoft explained, the VCR helped the entertainment industry flourish by opening up revenue streams. LLMs are a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, it continued, and Microsoft collaborated with OpenAI to "help bring their extraordinary power to the public" because it "firmly believes in LLMs' capacity to improve the way people live and work."

The company is asking the court to dismiss three claims, including one saying it's liable for end-user copyright infringement through the use of GPT-based tools and another that says it violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Microsoft also wants the court to dismiss the element of the case wherein The Times accused it of misappropriating time-sensitive breaking news and consumer purchasing recommendations. As an example, The Times argued in its lawsuit that it will lose revenue if users ask ChatGPT to research articles on Wirecutter, which the news company owns, because potential buyers will no longer click on its referral links. But that's "mere speculation about what The Times apparently fears might happen," and it didn't give a single real-world example in its complaint, Microsoft said.

"Microsoft doesn't dispute that it worked with OpenAI to copy millions of The Times's works without its permission to build its tools," Ian Crosby, lead counsel for The Times, told the publication." Instead, it oddly compares L.L.M.s to the VCR even though VCR makers never argued that it was necessary to engage in massive copyright infringement to build their products."

OpenAI and Microsoft are facing more lawsuits related to the content used to train the former's LLMs other than this particular one. Nonfiction writers and fiction authors, including Michael Chabon, George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult, accused the companies of stealing their work for AI training. More recently, The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet filed separate lawsuits against the company, because ChatGPT allegedly reproduces their content "verbatim or nearly verbatim" while removing proper attribution.