Month: May 2022

Enlarge / The intrepid crew of the USS Orville. (credit: Hulu)

The Dealmaster is back with another wallet-friendly PSA: If you’ve been meaning to watch The Dropout, catch up on What We Do in The Shadows before season four comes out, or check out the upcoming season of The Orville, Hulu is currently offering three months of its ad-supported streaming plan for $3, or $1 per month.

The popular streaming service technically kicked off this promotion last week to celebrate “National Streaming Day“—which, no, we don’t consider a real thing, either—but the offer is still active and will last through May 27. Either way, this is the kind of deal we typically see reserved for holiday season promotions; this past Black Friday, for instance, Hulu offered a full year of service for the same $1-per-month rate.

Like that deal, this offer is only for new Hulu subscribers and anyone who canceled their membership more than a month ago. So sadly, current subscribers can’t take advantage. (This does mean the Dealmaster’s serial canceling has paid off, however.) After the three-month promotional period, you’ll be charged the plan’s regular $7 per month if you choose not to cancel. This deal is for the ad-supported version of the service, which is annoying, but the ads might be a little more palatable given the discounted rate. Also note that this plan allows for up to two simultaneous streaming sessions, which is the limit for all of Hulu’s plans unless you pay an extra $10 per month for unlimited screens.

Enlarge / A building at Apple Park, the company’s Cupertino, California, HQ. (credit: Apple)

Apple has reportedly been working on self-driving car technology since 2014, but it has faced a series of prominent employee departures over the past year. As reported Wednesday by Bloomberg, the latest is CJ Moore, who had only just joined the company last August.

Before joining Apple, Moore was Tesla’s director of autopilot, where he worked on self-driving cars even as he contradicted Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s bold timeline for the project when speaking with California regulators. It’s unclear exactly what Moore’s work has been at Apple since joining the company.

In any case, he’s now moving to lidar company Luminar Technologies, which has been aggressively hiring prominent directors and executives from tech and automobile giants. At Luminar, Moore will lead the global software development for lidar-based features to ensure passengers’ safety in autonomous vehicles.

Enlarge / A selection of apps from the Microsoft Store. (credit: Microsoft)

Among the announcements made at Microsoft’s Build developer conference yesterday was a new service for organizations that want to offer preconfigured, virtualized developer workstations on demand. Microsoft Dev Box is intended to simplify the process of getting new developer workstations up and running quickly, with all necessary tools and dependencies installed and working out-of-the-box (so to speak), along with access to up-to-date source code and fresh copies of any nightly builds.

Dev Box is built on Windows 365, a service that IT admins can use to provide preconfigured virtual PCs to users. Admins can build operating system images and offer hardware configurations with different amounts of CPU power, storage, and RAM based on what particular users (or workloads) need. Windows 365 virtual machines, including but not limited to Dev Box VMs, can be accessed from other Windows PCs, or devices running macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, or ChromeOS.

Virtualized development environments could offer many benefits to developers and testers beyond the ability to access a preconfigured dev box from anywhere. If you install software or make a change that breaks your development environment, you could easily roll back to a known-working version. Your administrator could offer different environments for different apps to prevent software conflicts or offer multiple environments for different versions of your app so you could easily maintain, test, and provide support for multiple versions at a time.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

The time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web is led by various deals on PlayStation games and gear. That’s because Sony kicked off its annual late-spring “Days of Play” sale, which the company says will run through June 8.

In general, the number of noteworthy deals here isn’t quite as vast as what we highlighted from Epic’s PC-focused Mega Sale over the weekend: Unlike years past, there are no discounts on PlayStation Plus subscriptions—likely due to Sony’s ongoing revamp of that online service—some well-regarded PS5 exclusives like Returnal and Demon’s Souls aren’t on sale, and a few of the included PS4 games are at prices we’ve seen fairly frequently. Many of them will be included with PS Plus’ new upgrade tiers, if you plan on paying for that.

Still, there are some deals worth your attention. If you need a spare DualSense controller for the PS5, for instance, all colors of that gamepad are down to $59, which is a $10 or $15 discount depending on which model you choose and only a couple of dollars from the lowest price we’ve tracked. The colorful action game Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is down to a new low of $40, while Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, another PS5 exclusive that remasters the action flick-style shooters Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, is discounted to $30, another new low. Other hits like MLB The Show 22 (Nintendo Switch version included), the PS5 version of Final Fantasy VII Remake, and The Last of Us Part II have received substantial discounts, too; you can see our full list of worthwhile deals from Sony’s sale below.

Enlarge / A pro-choice demonstrator in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on May 11, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Stefani Reynolds)

More than 40 Democratic members of Congress called on Google to stop collecting and retaining customer location data that prosecutors could use to identify women who obtain abortions.

“[W]e are concerned that, in a world in which abortion could be made illegal, Google’s current practice of collecting and retaining extensive records of cell phone location data will allow it to become a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care. That’s because Google stores historical location information about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies,” Democrats wrote Tuesday in a letter led by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.). The letter was sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Specifically, Google should stop collecting “unnecessary customer location data” or “any non-aggregate location data about individual customers, whether in identifiable or anonymized form. Google cannot allow its online advertising-focused digital infrastructure to be weaponized against women,” lawmakers wrote. They also told Google that people who use iPhones “have greater privacy from government surveillance of their movements than the tens of millions Americans using Android devices.”