Tech News Today for July 10, 2017

Tech News for Monday July 10, 2017

Amazon has quietly started offering in-home installation of smart home devices, treading on Best Buy’s Geek Squad turf in the process. Amazon Smart Home Services is live in seven markets, and has a focus on smart home installations that integrate Amazon’s voice assistant platform into the home. News of the new service sent Best Buy stock plunging 6.3%, losing around a billion dollars in value. Read more at bloomberg.com.

Twitter announced new advanced filter settings for your personal war against trolls and bots. If you go to Settings > Notifications > Advanced Filters you can mute any user who doesn't follow you, or who has a brand-new account. This is an addition to the filters rolled out in March that let you mute users who you don't follow. All of these measures are designed to control how much hate speech and misinformation you see, while simultaneously not blocking anyone's free speech. Read more at axios.com.

Facebook has announced another drop in the price of the Oculus Rift VR headset down from $499 to $399. If you buy at that price, they’ll even throw in an Oculus Touch controller, normally $99, for free! That’s the same cost of PlayStation’s VR headset setup. However, this is for a limited time as the deal only lasts during the “Summer of Rift” promotion that should last through the Summer. Read more at cnet.com.

Amazon Prime Day is here, but with all Amazon deals, there's come greatness and some garbage. On the show to talk about how to find the greatness is Adam Burakowski from The Wirecutter. You can also read more about it at TheWirecutter.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are also joined today by Rob Reid, founder of Listen.com and Rhapsody, to talk about his publishing deal with Medium and Random House for his new science fiction book "After On." Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. Subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.