Month: February 2020

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is highlighted by a couple of deals on Xbox subscriptions, as 3-month membership codes for both Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate are on sale. The former is down to $15 from its usual $25, while the latter is down to $25 from its usual $45. Neither deal is an all-time low, but they're still good prices that we typically see whenever these memberships get discounted from reputable retailers.

For the unfamiliar, an Xbox Live Gold subscription is required to access the online components of most Xbox games and nets you a couple bonus games every month, much like Sony's PlayStation Plus service. Game Pass Ultimate, meanwhile, bundles a Gold membership with subscriptions to Microsoft's pseudo-Netflix-style Xbox Game Pass service for console and PC. We generally consider Game Pass to be a good deal on its own—its library has grown to include several worthwhile games, and Microsoft makes its own first-party games available on the service at launch. The company is heavily pushing Game Pass with its upcoming Xbox Series X console, but since it plans to make all of its "next-gen" games available on the current Xbox One for the first year or so of the Series X's life, Game Pass subscribers who don't plan on upgrading their hardware right away should still be able to get the most out of their membership.

Of note: if you already pay for Game Pass Ultimate, Microsoft says that buying a 3-month Xbox Live Gold membership will convert to 50 days of Ultimate service. If you've never subscribed to Game Pass Ultimate, though, know that it's still possible to save hundreds of dollars on up to three years of service by stocking up on Gold memberships first, then grabbing an Ultimate of the latter for $1 extra, converting all that Gold subscription time to an Ultimate subscription in the process. We've gone over how this deal works before, but if you plan to use an Xbox for the next couple of years, it's still a great deal worth considering.

Enlarge / Encrypted communication has gone from "only if it's important" to "unless you're incredibly lazy" in four short years—and Let's Encrypt deserves a lot of the credit for that. (credit: nternet1.jpg by Rock1997 modified.)

Let's Encrypt, the Internet Security Research Group's free certificate signing authority, issued its first certificate a little over four years ago. Today, it issued its billionth.

The ISRG's goal for Let's Encrypt is to bring the Web up to a 100% encryption rate. When Let's Encrypt launched in 2015, the idea was pretty outré—at that time, a bit more than a third of all Web traffic was encrypted, with the rest being plain text HTTP. There were significant barriers to HTTPS adoption—for one thing, it cost money. But more importantly, it cost a significant amount of time and human effort, both of which are in limited supply.

Let's Encrypt solved the money barrier by offering its services free of charge. More importantly, by establishing a stable protocol to access them, it enabled the Electronic Frontier Foundation to build and provide Certbot, an open source, free-to-use tool that automates the process of obtaining certificates, installing them, configuring webservers to use them, and automatically renewing them.

Enlarge / The logo of Deutsche Telekom, owner of T-Mobile, seen at Mobile World Congress in February 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

T-Mobile "has laid off a number of employees" in its prepaid business, Light Reading reported yesterday. Light Reading said three sources confirmed layoffs in the Metro by T-Mobile prepaid business, but "the extent of the layoffs is unclear." We contacted T-Mobile about the reported layoffs and will update this article if we get a response.

A federal judge approved T-Mobile's $26 billion acquisition of rival Sprint about two weeks ago, rejecting a lawsuit by 13 state attorneys general who warned that the merger will reduce competition in the wireless telecommunications market and harm consumers with higher prices.

New York Attorney General Letitia James decided not to appeal the ruling, and the merging firms say they expect to be one company by April 1. California telecom regulators still have not approved the deal, a potential factor that could delay the merger closing.

Enlarge / A virtual plague spreads from a virtual China in Plague Inc.

Plague Inc. maker Ndemic Creations says the game has been removed from sale on the iOS App Store in China because the relevant authorities say it “includes content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China.”

The popular game—which asks players to shepherd a virus' deadly spread around the world—has been available on the Chinese App Store for years without issue. Ndemic says it's "not clear to us if this removal is linked to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that China is facing," but it certainly seems like the most likely proximate cause.

"This situation is completely out of our control," Ndemic writes. "We are working very hard to try and find a way to get the game back in the hands of Chinese players—we don’t want to give up on you—however, as a tiny independent games studio in the UK, the odds are stacked against us. Our immediate priority is to try and make contact with the Cyberspace Administration of China to understand their concerns and work with them to find a resolution."