Technology

You&d be forgiven if you thought Amazon was finished announcing new hardware after last monthmassive Echo event. The retail giant has at least a few more announcements up its sleeve, starting with updates to the Fire TV line. The new TV Stick 4K and refreshed Alexa Voice Remote are up for pre-order today.

At $50, the revamped Fire TV Stick 4K features a new quad core processor, promising faster streaming and quick loading. The updated TV dongle also adds Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos and features access to 500K movies/TV episodes, an array of apps and an Alexa voice interface via remote or nearby Echo.

The news follows Rokurecent move to bring down the cost of its 4K-ready streamers, with its new $40 and up Premiere line of players.

Therealso a new Alexa Voice Remote on the block. The new peripheral sounds like much more of a universal remote than its predecessor. The device sports Bluetooth and multi-directional infrared, letting users control TVs, AV equipment and cable boxes, among others.

There are buttons for power, volume and mute, but the voice is really the thing here, naturally. Itcompatible with just about all of AmazonFire products. It ships as part of the $40 Fire TV Stick 4K package, or comes bundled with the Fire TV Cube for $120. You also can buy it solo for $30.

The Fire TV Stick 4K starts shipping on Halloween in the U.S. and Canada. It will arrive in the U.K., Germany and India in November and Japan before end of year.

Honda will commit $2.75 billion as part of an agreement with GM&sself-driving technology subsidiary Cruise to develop a new autonomous vehicle.

The vehicle will be produced at high volume for global deployment, the companies said in announcement Wednesday.

As part of the agreement, Honda will invest$2 billion over the next 12 years into the effort. Honda&sinvestment of $750 million values Cruise at $14.6 billion.

The three companies plan to &explore global opportunities for commercial deployment of the Cruise network.&

&This is the logical next step in General Motors and Hondarelationship, given our joint work on electric vehicles, and our close integration with Cruise,& GMChairman and CEO Mary Barra said in a statement. &Together, we can provide Cruise with the worldbest design, engineering and manufacturing expertise, and global reach to establish them as the leader in autonomous vehicle technology — while they move to deploy self-driving vehicles at scale.&

Jigsaw, the division owned by Google parent Alphabet, has revealed Intra, a new app aimed at protecting users from state-sponsored censorship.

Intra is a new app that aims to prevent DNS manipulation attacks. Whenever you visit a website, the easy-to-remember web address is converted to a less-than-memorable IP address — often over an unsecured connection. That makes it easy for oppressive governments — like Turkey, which has used this techniquebefore — to intercept web addresses requests and either kill them in their tracks to stop sites from loading, or redirect to a fake site.

By passing all your browsing queries and app traffic through an encrypted connection to a trusted Domain Name Server, Intra says it ensures you can use your app without meddling or get to the right site without interference.

&Intra is dead simple to use. Just download the app and turn it on,& Jigsaw said. &Thatit.&

Jigsaw has already seen some successes in parts of the world where internet access is restricted or monitored. The government in Venezuela reportedly used DNS manipulation to prevent citizens from accessing news sites and social networks.

The app uses Googleown trusted DNS server by default, but users can also funnel their browsing requests through Cloudflare, which also hosts its own publicly accessible secure DNS server, or any other secure DNS server.

Admittedly, that requires a bit of trust for Google and Cloudflare — or any third party. A Jigsaw spokesperson told TechCrunch that Intrause of GoogleDNS is covered by its privacy policy, and Cloudflare also has its own.

Jigsaw said it will bake the app into Android Pie, which already allows already allows encrypted DNS connections. But Jigsaw is also making the app available for users in parts of the world with weaker economies that make upgrading from older devices near-impossible so they can benefit from the security features.

Itthe latest piece in the security and privacy puzzle that Jigsaw is trying to solve.

The little-known Alphabet division is focused on preventing censorship, threats of online harassment and countering violent extremism. The incubator focuses on empowering free speech and expression by providing tools and services that make online safer for higher-risk targets.

Jigsaw has also invested its time on several other anti-censorship apps, including Project Shield, which protects sites against distributed denial-of-service attacks, as well as Outline, which gives reporters and activists a virtual private network that funnels data through a secure channel.