Month: March 2020

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  The new Google Pixel Slate. [credit: Valentina Palladino ]

The Google Pixel Slate Chrome OS tablet, which is over a year old now, is getting a price drop. Google has new regular prices for the various models, with discounts ranging from $300-$700 off the MSRP at several retailers, including its own online store. Buy a Slate sometime soon, and Google is also throwing in a free Pixelbook Pen (originally $99) and a keyboard ($199) for free. It's a fire sale.

The entry-level 8th Gen Intel Core m3 version, with 8GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, now starts at $499, down from the $799 price at launch. The Core i5 version with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage launched at $999, but now it's reduced to $599. The highest-end Core i7 version with 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 4K display is $899, down from a whopping $1,599 at launch. If you get the highest-end version with the free pen and keyboard, you're saving $1,000 off the MSRP.

Like many Google hardware products, the Pixel Slate has had a rough life. The device was widely criticized for being too expensive—you could get the same specs in an HP Chromebook x2 for less money, and most Slate models with the keyboard easily blasted into Macbook pricing territory. The sales pitch with the Slate was Chrome OS' new tablet features, but they weren't fully baked at launch, resulting in buggy split-screen modes and strange UI decisions. The original entry-level $599 version used an Intel Celeron CPU, which was so thoroughly panned in reviews for being too slow that Google delayed the model and eventually canceled it. About six months after the release, Google quit the tablet business altogether and decided to focus on laptops going forward, eventually leading to the development of the Pixelbook Go.

Enlarge / Stay safe, work from home, don't get COVID-19. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Networking giant Cisco is getting into the coronavirus monitoring and mitigation game with its Webex remote meeting property. The company notes that in the wake of mandates issued to employees to halt travel plans and/or work from home, traffic across its Webex backbone has increased significantly.

Webex meeting traffic connecting Chinese users to global workplaces has increased by a factor of 22 since the outbreak began; traffic in other Asian countries is up by 400 percent or more, and free signup rates in impacted countries have increased 700 percent or more.

In response, Cisco is offering temporarily unlimited usage (with no time restrictions) in all countries, not just the ones worst hit by coronavirus. The company is also offering free 90-day licenses to businesses that are not currently Webex customers and offering free upgrades to customers whose current plan is insufficient to accommodate increased traffic due to the outbreak.

Enlarge / Unfortunately, most if not all Let's Encrypt users will need to manually force-renew their certificates before Wednesday. It's at least an easy process. (credit: Adobe)

On Leap Day, Let's Encrypt announced that it had discovered a bug in its CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) code.

The bug opens up a window of time in which a certificate might be issued even if a CAA record in that domain's DNS should prohibit it. As a result, Let's Encrypt is erring on the side of security and safety rather than convenience and revoking any currently issued certificates it can't be certain are legitimate, saying:

Unfortunately, this means we need to revoke the certificates that were affected by this bug, which includes one or more of your certificates. To avoid disruption, you'll need to renew and replace your affected certificate(s) by Wednesday, March 4, 2020. We sincerely apologize for the issue.

If you're not able to renew your certificate by March 4, the date we are required to revoke these certificates, visitors to your site will see security warnings until you do renew the certificate.

Let's Encrypt uses Certificate Authority software called Boulder. Typically, a Web server that services many separate domain names and uses Let's Encrypt to secure them receives a single LE certificate that covers all domain names used by the server rather than a separate cert for each individual domain.