Amazon’s Echo and Alexa, helping us rhyme since 2016. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

The latest update to the Amazon Echo adds a host of new news sources to the smart speaker’s Flash Briefing feature — and also gives it some mad rhyming skills.

Three wants to banish bad ads. Photo: Killian Bell/Cult of Android

Who needs ad-blockers when your carrier has your back?

Three has unveiled plans to begin blocking “excessive and irrelevant” mobile ads at the carrier level so users on its network don’t have to endure them when browsing the web on their smartphones and tablets.

Facebook Messenger’s about to get ads.

Rely on Facebook Messenger to keep in touch with friends and family? Still wondering why Facebook split it out into its separate app? To the first question, it’s about to get more annoying. And to the second? It’s because Facebook’s about to let companies start messaging you in Messenger.

The ReFlex, a prototype flexible smartphone, might make you want to get the bends. Photo: Queens University

I’ve never really understood the appeal of flexible smartphones before I saw this video. Now it’s changed things forever to me. I want a Flexible iPhone! Or, better yet, an iPad! Because it’s going to open up whole new ways to interact with a device.

Google CEO Sundar Pinchai thinks Apple is doing the right thing on Encryption. Photo: Google

Google and Apple don’t always see eye-to-eye, but in the matter of encryption, they’re total allies.

Today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai today tweeted words of support to Apple in the aftermath of Tim Cook’s open letter, explaining why Apple was defying a federal order to provide backdoor access to a terrorism suspect’s iPhone 5c.