Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It’s the weekend, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a discount on Nintendo eShop gift cards. As of this writing, you can get a $50 digital gift card to Nintendo’s online game store for $45 at Amazon. We saw this same deal pop up last month; it’s still not a massive price drop, but it’s hard to complain about what is essentially a free $5, provided you planned to pick up a digital Switch game or two in the near future anyway. This deal could also be useful if you want to grab a last-minute Wii U or 3DS game before Nintendo shuts down the online stores of those aging consoles next year.

Apart from that, we’re still seeing a number of notable discounts on Apple devices, with the Apple Watch SE, Apple Watch Series 7, 10.2-inch iPad, iPad Air, iPad Mini, AirPods, and AirPods Pro all currently available for less than their recent street prices. We’ve also got a new low price on a recommended 128GB microSD card from Samsung, a bundle at Dell that gives a $40 store gift card with Logitech’s excellent MX Master 3 wireless mouse, and tons of video game deals, including the best price we’ve tracked for Halo Infinite and ongoing “buy two, get one free” sales at several retailers. You can check out our full curated roundup below.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

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If you want to know how worried an industry is about a piece of pending legislation, a decent metric is how apocalyptic its predictions are about what the bill would do. By that standard, Big Tech is deeply troubled by the American Innovation and Choice Online Act.

The infelicitously named bill is designed to prevent dominant online platforms—like Apple and Facebook and, especially, Google and Amazon—from giving themselves an advantage over other businesses that must go through them to reach customers. As one of two antitrust bills voted out of committee by a strong bipartisan vote (the other would regulate app stores), it may be this Congress’ best, even only, shot to stop the biggest tech companies from abusing their gatekeeper status.

Enlarge / Kites could make it possible to build wind farms on land that isn’t windy enough for conventional wind turbine towers. (credit: Peter Cade | Getty Images)

Any kid who’s ever flown a kite has learned the lesson: Once you can get the kite off the ground and high into the air, you’re more likely to find a steady breeze to keep it aloft.

A fledgling wind power industry is taking that lesson to heart. Flying massive kites 200 meters or more above the ground, companies are using the wind they find there to generate electricity.

At least 10 firms in Europe and the United States are developing variations of this kind of kite power. If they succeed, kites could make it possible to build wind farms on land that isn’t windy enough for conventional wind turbine towers. Kites might also be a better choice for offshore wind power, and one day could even replace at least some anchored towers now in use.

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Researchers on Friday said that hackers are exploiting the recently discovered SpringShell vulnerability to successfully infect vulnerable Internet of Things devices with Mirai, an open source piece of malware that wrangles routers and other network-connected devices into sprawling botnets.

When SpringShell (also known as Spring4Shell) came to light last Sunday, some reports compared it to Log4Shell, the critical zero-day vulnerability in the popular logging utility Log4J that affected a sizable portion of apps on the Internet. That comparison proved to be exaggerated because the configurations required for SpringShell to work were by no means common. To date, there are no real-world apps known to be vulnerable.

Researchers at Trend Micro now say that hackers have developed a weaponized exploit that successfully installs Mirai. A blog post they published didn’t identify the type of device or the CPU used in the infected devices. The post did, however, say a malware file server they found stored multiple variants of the malware for different CPU architectures.