Month: May 2022

Enlarge / An artist's rendering of Google's current reputation. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google finally launched a solution for people with "legacy" GSuite Google accounts. After initially threatening to shut down free GSuite accounts if users didn't start paying for the service, Google has completely backed off. Once users jump through some sign-up hoops, Google will allow their ~16-year-old accounts to continue functioning. You'll even get to keep your email address.

The saga so far, if you haven't been following, is that Google has a custom-domain user account service, currently called "Google Workspace" and previously called "G Suite" and "Google Apps." The service is mostly a normal Google account that lets you use an email that ends in your custom domain name rather than "@gmail.com." Today this service is aimed at businesses and costs money each month, but that was not always the case. From 2006 to 2012, custom domain Google accounts were free and were even pitched at families as a geeky way to have an online Google identity.

In January, some bean counter at Google apparently noticed this tiny group of longtime users was technically getting a paid service for free and decided this was unacceptable. Google posted an announcement in January declaring these people "Legacy GSuite users" and basically told them, 'Pay up or lose your account.' These users signed up for a free Google service and stored data on it for as long as 16 years, and there were no indications it would ever be charged. Google held this decade-plus of user data hostage, telling users to start paying business rates for Workspace or face an account shutdown.

Enlarge / Just drive carefully, okay? (credit: Getty Images)

We had an inkling that the traffic statistics for 2021 would be bad. In November last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published data for the first half of that year, showing the greatest ever six-month rise in road fatalities since people kept records. On Tuesday, the other shoe dropped, with NHTSA's estimate of the entire year's toll: 42,915 people killed in crashes, an increase of 10.8 percent compared to 2020.

The rise in road deaths began with the pandemic in 2020. Despite a big reduction in the number of miles we drove, road deaths went up that year—8 percent year-over-year, after a period of gently declining traffic fatalities. Sadly things haven't gotten better.

Most kinds of driving became more dangerous last year. Deaths on rural interstates and urban arterial roads increased by 15 percent. And local and urban collector road deaths went up by 20 percent, belying the idea of "Vision Zero". Both daytime and nighttime deaths went up by 11 percent compared to 2020, with weekends seeing a slightly larger increase than weekdays (11 percent versus 10 percent).

The Boys is coming back to Prime Video for its third season, and the streaming platform has released the official trailer. Our crew of misfits had arrived at some closure in their battle against the "supes" and gone their separate ways at the end of the second season. But it looks like that uneasy peace is about to be shattered, given the number of exploding bodies and glowing laser eyes showcased in the trailer.

(Spoilers for S2 below.)

As I've written previously, the show is based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. The Boys is set in a fictional universe where superheroes are real but are corrupted by corporate interests and a toxic celebrity-obsessed culture. The most elite superhero group is called the Seven, operated by the Vought Corporation, which created the supes with a substance called Compound V. The Seven is headed up by Homelander (Antony Starr), a violent and unstable psychopath disguised as the All-American hero. Homelander's counterpart as the head of the titular "Boys" is Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), a self-appointed vigilante intent on checking the bad behavior of the Seven—especially Homelander, who brutally raped Butcher's wife, Becca (Shantel VanSanten).

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

The time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a handy deal for Apple's newest iPad Air, which is down to $559 at Amazon and Walmart. Outside of a very brief drop to $549 last month, this is the lowest price we've seen for the 10.9-inch tablet, which only launched in March and goes for an MSRP of $600.

As we've noted before, the new Air is a good middle ground between the cheaper 10.2-inch iPad and the higher-end iPad Pro. It lacks the higher refresh rate, better speakers, and greater storage space (at 128GB) of the latter, but its M1 chip makes it virtually as fast, its USB-C port and front-facing camera are improved over the previous generation, and its ample display and accessory support keep it well-suited to both media consumption and casual work. The base iPad is still the best value for most, but if you'd prefer to avoid that tablet's more dated design and lower performance ceiling, the M1-equipped Air should be a better buy than the Pro until the latter receives a refresh. You can read our review for a deeper dive.

Besides iPads, our deals roundup includes a strong discount on Terraforming Mars, a popular board game we've previously recommended in our ultimate board game gift guide. It's available for $38 as of this writing, which is the lowest price we've tracked in well over a year. We included this one in the "heavier fare" section of our gift guide, so it'll likely be a bit too complex, lengthy (at two-plus hours a game), and challenging for relative newbies. But for more involved players, it should provide an engaging and deeply replayable card-drafting game, one where players are tasked with turning the red planet green. Again, you can have a look at our review for more details.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

The time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a handy deal for Apple's newest iPad Air, which is down to $559 at Amazon and Walmart. Outside of a very brief drop to $549 last month, this is the lowest price we've seen for the 10.9-inch tablet, which only launched in March and goes for an MSRP of $600.

As we've noted before, the new Air is a good middle ground between the cheaper 10.2-inch iPad and the higher-end iPad Pro. It lacks the higher refresh rate, better speakers, and greater storage space (at 128GB) of the latter, but its M1 chip makes it virtually as fast, its USB-C port and front-facing camera are improved over the previous generation, and its ample display and accessory support keep it well-suited to both media consumption and casual work. The base iPad is still the best value for most, but if you'd prefer to avoid that tablet's more dated design and lower performance ceiling, the M1-equipped Air should be a better buy than the Pro until the latter receives a refresh. You can read our review for a deeper dive.

Besides iPads, our deals roundup includes a strong discount on Terraforming Mars, a popular board game we've previously recommended in our ultimate board game gift guide. It's available for $38 as of this writing, which is the lowest price we've tracked in well over a year. We included this one in the "heavier fare" section of our gift guide, so it'll likely be a bit too complex, lengthy (at two-plus hours a game), and challenging for relative newbies. But for more involved players, it should provide an engaging and deeply replayable card-drafting game, one where players are tasked with turning the red planet green. Again, you can have a look at our review for more details.

Enlarge / NASA's Space Launch System rocket is seen on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in April. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

NASA has published a list of potential launch dates for the Artemis I mission (see PDF), starting as early as July 26 and running through June of next year. During this time period, due to various constraints, the space agency has preliminarily identified 158 launch opportunities.

The Artemis I mission will encompass the debut launch for NASA's large Space Launch System rocket and the second orbital flight of its Orion spacecraft. Depending on when the uncrewed demonstration mission launches, it could last from 26 to 42 days as Orion flies into a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon.

In its news release, NASA helpfully explains the various constraints behind these dates, including orbital mechanics. For example, NASA says, "The resulting trajectory for a given day must ensure Orion is not in darkness for more than 90 minutes at a time so that the solar array wings can receive and convert sunlight to electricity and the spacecraft can maintain an optimal temperature range. Mission planners eliminate potential launch dates that would send Orion into extended eclipses during the flight."

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

There are two things to like about version 2.0 of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling tech, which finally began appearing in actual games late last week. The most important is that the quality of the upscaled image is dramatically better than in FSR version 1.0. The second is that FSR 2.0 is compatible with all kinds of GPUs, including not just AMD's but older GeForce GPUs that aren't compatible with Nvidia's proprietary deep learning super sampling (DLSS).

New testing from Tom's Hardware has also revealed another unlikely beneficiary: Intel's recent integrated GPUs. Using an Iris Xe laptop GPU in a Core i7-1165G7, FSR 2.0 was able to bump the average frame rates in a 720p version of Deathloop by around 16 percent, nudging it from just under 30 fps to just over 30 fps and helping to offset the low resolution with its built-in anti-aliasing. Not bad for a nearly two-year-old laptop GPU playing a demanding modern game.

There are caveats, some of which apply to all upscaling technologies and some that are specific to Intel's GPUs. FSR 2.0 and DLSS are generally good enough to let you bump up your resolution or quality settings a bit while maintaining a playable frame rate. They can also make borderline-unplayable games playable, and they can help you squeeze a little more life out of your current GPU if you don't want (or can't afford) to spring for an upgrade.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Carol Yepes)

Elon Musk has cast more doubt on his willingness to buy Twitter, criticizing the company's CEO and saying the "deal cannot move forward" until Twitter provides data behind its estimate of spam accounts. Musk also said this week that renegotiating the deal at a lower price is "not out of the question."

Musk says he thinks at least 20 percent of Twitter accounts are fake or spam, while Twitter said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that fewer than 5 percent of monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) are spam or fake. Those numbers are not incompatible, as Musk seems to be talking about all accounts, while Twitter's 5 percent stat refers to accounts that are logged in and can see ads each day.

But Musk has insisted that Twitter's data is wrong, and he demanded to see proof and ratcheted up his claims in a tweet on Tuesday: