Month: October 2018

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share with you today. Headlining the list today is an Audible deal for Amazon Prime members: select Prime members can now get three free months of Audible, the company's audiobook subscription service. That includes three credits for three audiobooks of your choosing that you can keep even if you decide to cancel after the trial.

Another great deal saves you $200 on a gaming laptop. Now you can get an Acer Predator Helios 300 notebook, featuring a hexacore Core i7 CPU, a GTX 1060 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD, for $1,099. We also have the lowest price we've seen on a SanDisk Ultra 128GB microSD card with adaptor: $23.25, down from its list price of $33.79.

Check out those and a bunch of other deals on mesh router systems, robot vacuums, gaming consoles, printers, and more below.

Firefox 63, out today, includes the first iteration of what Mozilla is calling Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP), a feature to improve privacy and stop your activity across the Web from being tracked.

Tracking cookies store some kind of unique identifier that represents your browser. The cookie is tied to a third-party domain—the domain of the tracking company, rather than the site you're visiting. Each site you visit that embeds the tracking cookie will allow the tracking company to see the sites you visit and, using that unique identifier, cross-reference different visits to different sites to build a picture of your online behavior.

The new option to block third-party tracking cookies but permit other third-party cookies. (credit: Mozilla)

Firefox has long had the ability to block all third-party cookies, but this is a crude solution, and many sites will break if all third-party cookies are prohibited. The new EPT option works as a more selective block on tracking cookies; third-party cookies still work in general, but those that are known to belong to tracking companies are blocked. For the most part, sites will retain their full functionality, just without undermining privacy at the same time.

Enlarge / Chris Anderson (left) doing drone stuff. (credit: Chris Anderson & 3D Robotics / WikiMedia Commons)

This week, we’re serializing another episode of the After On Podcast here on Ars. Our guest was the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine for twelve years—until he did something quite unusual for an editor and started a high-profile, venture-backed startup. Specifically, 3D Robotics—which played a genuinely historic role in the rise of consumer drones (if a phenomenon that young gets to have historic players).

Chris Anderson doesn’t have the background you might expect from someone with his résumé. For one thing, he dropped or failed out of multiple schools when he was young. For another, he played bass for R.E.M. (and there’s something of a twist to this fact—but you’ll need to hear to our conversation to find out what it is). We’ll be running this interview in three installments this week. You can access today’s installment via our embedded audio player, or by reading the accompanying transcript (both of which are below).

Today, Anderson and I open by talking about his path from being a bohemian layabout to studying computational Physics at Berkeley, and finally to the pinnacle of the magazine world. We then discuss how a weekend LEGO Mindstorm project with his kids led him cobble together a very early consumer-class drone. Doing this led him to discover the emerging realm of homebrew drone makers. Their online community fascinated him, and he soon became a leader within it.

Enlarge / The Pixel 3 XL and Pixel 3. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google's Pixel 3 smartphone is shipping out to the masses, and people hoping to take advantage of the new Qi wireless charging capabilities have run into a big surprise. For some unexplained reason, Google is locking out third-party Qi chargers from reaching the highest charging speeds on the Pixel 3. Third-party chargers are capped to a pokey 5W charging speed. If you want 10 watts of wireless charging, Google hopes you will invest in its outrageously priced Pixel Stand, which is $79.

Android Police reports that a reader purchased an Anker wireless charger for their Pixel 3, and, after noticing the slow charging speed, this person contacted the company. Anker confirmed that something screwy was going on with Google's charging support, saying "Pixel sets a limitation for third-party charging accessories and we are afraid that even our fast wireless charger can only provide 5W for these 2x devices."

Normally we would chalk this up to some kind of bug, but apparently Google told Android Police that this was on purpose. The site doesn't have a direct quote, but it writes that, after reaching out to Google PR, it was "told that the Pixel 3 would charge at 10W on the Pixel Stand [and that] due to a 'secure handshake' being established that third-party chargers would indeed be limited to 5W." We've asked Google why it is doing this and will update this article if we hear back, but it's hard to imagine a justification for this.

Bethesda Softworks has a bit of a reputation for epic-scale worlds that are chock full of spectacular glitches—we noted that Fallout: New Vegas was "buggy as hell" way back in 2010, for instance. With the impending launch of the online-only Fallout 76, including a private beta test starting today, Bethesda seems to be leaning into this image a bit.

In a Twitter post yesterday evening, Bethesda seemed to be explicitly lowering expectations with a warning that "all new spectacular issues" will surely pop up come opening day: