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So does the Overwatch 2 beta live up to all of the hype and anticipation? This week, Jessica Conditt joins Devindra to chat about Blizzard’s long-awaited sequel and why she thinks it’s worth the wait. Also, we discuss why you should care about data privacy given the current wave of anti-abortion legislation, and why the Embracer Group is gobbling up so many developers.

Listen above, or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcasts, the Morning After and Engadget News!

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Topics

• Overwatch 2 beta brings some freshness to a stale game, but is it enough? – 1:15

• What does the potential overturn of Roe v. Wade mean for online privacy in the US? – 13:28

• Swedish game company Embracer buys several Square Enix studios – 17:47

• Sonos is reportedly working on a $250 sound bar called the Ray – 21:46

• Obi-Wan trailer drops for May the 4th – 23:19

• Engadget’s coverage of Formula-E races in Monaco – 24:53

• Working on – 27:14

• Pop culture picks – 29:59

Video livestream

Credits
Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Jessica Conditt
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien
Livestream producers: Julio Barrientos
Graphic artists: Luke Brooks and Brian Oh

Microsoft has partnered with Epic Games to make Fortnite playable, for free, on Xbox Cloud Gaming. No subscription required. So long as you have a Microsoft account in one of 26 streaming-enabled countries, you can play the battle royale title through the web browser on an iPhone, iPad, Android device or Windows PC.

The streaming version supports both controllers and touch. Creative mode is also free although you'll need to pay if you want to fight AI villains in the Save the World campaign. Microsoft also said it would "look to bring" other free-to-play titles to Xbox Cloud Gaming.

It’s not the first workaround — NVIDIA has also allowed its cloud gaming subscribers to stream Fortnite on Apple devices. Microsoft, however, has a bigger audience of casual gamers, making this a bigger deal. It also sided with Epic when the company went toe-to-toe with Apple over App Store restrictions and costs.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• Apple, Google and Microsoft commit to 'end-to-end' password-free sign-ins

• Apple's AirTag 4-pack has never been cheaper

• 'Star Trek: Picard' could only exist on a streaming service

• The best work-from-home and office essentials for graduates

• Meta will limit hiring this year due to slowing revenue growth

• DuoVox Mate Pro: A fun but imperfect night vision camera

• Google Assistant can now automatically change passwords

• Google acquires MicroLED startup Raxium to help boost its AR ambitions

The maker of TurboTax owes customers $141 million

It 'cheated' them out of free tax services.

TurboTax maker Intuit will pay $141 million "for deceiving millions of low-income Americans into paying for tax services that should have been free," the New York Attorney General's office wrote in a press release.

The company must refund nearly 4.4 million consumers who used TurboTax's Free Edition between 2016 and 2018, then discovered they had to pay to file. Many didn't realize they could have used the IRS Free File program available in a separate product, which costs nothing. Intuit released a statement expressing no regret and said the required ad changes would have little impact on its business.

Continue reading.

'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' says the quiet part out loud

It's done with being subtle.

The long-awaited third live-action Star Trek series in recent years makes its debut on Paramount+. But, while Discovery carried the burden of being the first Star Trek show in 12 years and Picard saw the return of a beloved character after 17 years, Strange New Worlds appears to pitch itself, in many ways, as a return to the Star Trek of the past, beyond just more episodic storytelling.

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Lenovo's new Slim series laptops feature updated AMD or Intel processors

There's also a laptop that Lenovo claims is carbon neutral.

Engadget

Lenovo's big spring laptop refresh includes a new generation of Slim clamshell laptops in the US (which confusingly share the Slim branding with older, unrelated models). These include the Slim 9i, the Slim 7i and Slim7i Pro X, the Slim 7i Carbon and the Slim 7. The last of those come with an AMD Ryzen 6000 Series processor rather than the Intel chips inside its sisters, while the Slim 9i claims to be carbon neutral.

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Starlink users can now take their internet terminal on the road

That connected ‘vanlife.’

Starlink

A new Starlink feature called Portability allows users to temporarily use Starlink when they're away from home. In the US, Portability will cost $25 per month. That's on top of the regular service fee, which SpaceX recently bumped up to $110 per month. The hardware now costs $599 for those without a pre-order.

There are some caveats: It's not worth taking a terminal on a transatlantic trip. Starlink says the feature is only available when users are on the same continent as their registered service address. They’d also have to ship it…

Continue reading.

In its earnings report, Lucid has announced that it's boosting the prices of its luxury Air EV lineup as much as 13 percent, TechCrunch reported. The Air Grand Touring model will rise $15,000 to $154,000, the Air touring will jump $12,400 to $107,400 and the cheapest Air Pure model will go up $10,000 to $87,400. The new prices will not affect the 30,000 current reservation holders.

"Similar to many companies in our industry, we continue to face global supply chain and logistics challenges, including Covid-related factory shutdowns in China. We are working closely with our suppliers to mitigate the impact of disruptions," said Lucid CFO Sherry House in a statement. "While any extended disruptions could result in an impact to our production forecast, today we are reiterating our 12,000-14,000 vehicle production forecast for 2022 based on the information we have at this point combined with our mitigation plans."

Lucid still expects to start deliveries of the $179,000 Air Grand Touring Performance model in June (the price of that model remains the same), with the Air Touring and Air Pure models following later this year. Production on the Project Gravity SUV will commence in Q1 2024, said Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson. 

Rising prices for EVs are an industry-wide issue at the moment due to the Ukraine war, COVID-related factory shutdowns and more. Tesla recently raised prices on all models, with the base Model 3 rising $2,000 to $46,990. Rivian also hiked prices on its electric pickups, with the R1T rising $12,000 — but it backed off on applying them to pre-orders as it had planned, following an outcry. 

Lucid also announced that it made $57.7 million revenue last quarter thanks to deliveries of 360 vehicles, the most it's made so far. The company expects to keep losing money while it builds out its manufacturing plants in Arizona and Saudi Arabia, but it has $5.4 billion in cash as a buffer. 

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The astronauts that flew to the ISS as part of the SpaceX Crew-3 mission are back on Earth after almost six months on the orbiting lab. They splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the Crew Dragon Endurance, which made its debut flight with the same astronauts back in November 2021, on May 6th at 12:43am ET — and NASA has captured a pretty spectacular night video of the event.

As you can see, the Endurance capsule looks particularly glowy in infrared, most likely because it reached a temperature of around 3500 degrees Fahrenheit upon entering the atmosphere. The recovery team pulled out NASA astronauts Kayla Barron, Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, as well as ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer from the capsule shortly after splashdown. Marshburn is the only veteran astronaut out of the four, and he completed his fifth spacewalk during the mission. It was the first ISS mission for the other three, with Maurer being only the second ESA astronaut to fly aboard a Dragon capsule.

The Crew-3 astronauts spent 177 days in orbit and started their stay with a bang. Shortly after they arrived on the station, all the astronauts onboard had to seek safety on their transport craft when the ISS passed dangerously close to a field of orbital debris. The US State Department later said that the debris came from a Russian missile test that destroyed one of the country’s own satellites.

SpaceX's next manned mission to the ISS is scheduled to launch in September with two NASA astronauts, one JAXA astronaut and one Russian cosmonaut. It will be the fifth crewed NASA Commercial Crew flight so far after Crew-4 launched to the station back in April.

After teasing the feature last month, WhatsApp has starting rolling out emoji reactions to all users around the world, it announced. In the coming days, you'll be able to react with one of six emojis: Thumbs Up 👍, Red Heart ❤️, Face with Tears of Joy 😂, Face with Open Mouth 😮, Crying Face 😢, and Folded Hands 🙏. The messaging app also introduced two more features — 2GB file sharing and an increase in group members to 512 people. 

On top of the message reactions, WhatsApp will now allow you to send files a whopping 2GB in size, up 20 times from the previous 100MB limitation. That seems designed to support video files in particular "and we think [it] will be helpful for collaboration among small businesses and school groups," the company said. It also introduced the ability to create group chats with up to 512 people, double the previous limit.  

The features will be rolling out over the next week across iOS, Android, macOS and Windows, so you many not see them tout de suite. That should be just the beginning as well, because WhatsApp has previously said that it plans to support reactions with all emoji and skin tones down the road.

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In a win for net neturality, ISPs agreed to end their legal challenge to a 2018 Californa law that bars providers from throttling service. Telecom groups and California Attorney General Rob Bonta today jointly agreed to dismiss the case, reportedReuters. 

It’s fair that say that luck hasn’t exactly been on the telecom industry’s side. Earlier this year, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reconsider its ruling that California’s law be upheld. And last year, the US DOJ dropped its own lawsuit over the net neutrality law, which the agency had filed during the Trump administration.

“Following multiple defeats in court, internet service providers have finally abandoned an effort to block enforcement of CA's net neutrality law. This is a win for California and for a free and fair internet,” wrote Bonta in a tweet.

After Trump-appointed FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai overturned the agency's net neutrality rules in 2017, California’s legislature decided to enact its own law. The state’s net neutrality law, which went into effect in August 2018, expanded on previous federal rules by banning the use of “zero-rating” by ISPs in an anti-competitive manner. Zero-rating occurs when an ISP exempts any of its affiliated services from eating away at a customer’s data caps. For example, AT&T Wireless once exempted HBO Max from the data caps of its internet customers. The company dropped this practice last year, and blamed the impact of California’s law. Digital rights groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation have argued that zero-rating is hostile to consumers, especially those from low-income households.

Federal net neutrality rules that were blocked under the Trump administration have yet to be restored by the FCC under President Joe Biden. That’s because the five-member panel is currently short one member, which they’ll need in order to vote on net neutrality. The agency is awaiting the Senate confirmation of Gigi Sohn. But thanks to intense lobbying from telecom groups and a number of Republicans (and moderate Democrats) in Congress, Sohn’s confirmation is stalled at present.

Whisteblowers are accusing Facebook of purposely blocking government, healthcare and emergency services pages in Australia in order to thwart a potential law that would require platforms to pay for news, according to WSJ. The accusers say the platform last year created an algorithm to identify pages that would affect the most publishers. But Facebook reportedly didn’t just take down pages for media outlets — it also removed pages for hospitals, governments and charities.

According to the documents, Facebook put together a team of roughly a dozen employees who were tasked with removing news content from Australia. The team sidestepped an existing Facebook database of existing news publishers. Instead, the Facebook employees quickly created a new algorithm with a definition of news broad enough to grab a large number of non-news pages. “If 60 percent of [sic] more of a domain’s content shared on Facebook is classified as news, then the entire domain will be considered a news domain,” stated one internal document.

The end-result was that — for several days — Australians weren’t able to access or share any news or information from governments and healthcare services pages on Facebook. The timing was particularly bad, since the nation was just about to embark on a mass vaccination campaign for Covid-19. A number of Australian health officials decried the move. "It is truly ironic that Facebook has allowed health misinformation to be spread via its platform throughout this pandemic, yet today much of this misinformation remains on Facebook while official information sources are blocked … [The decision is] corporate bullying at its worst,” Australian Medical Association President Dr. Omar Khorshid told NBC last year.

Facebook’s troubles in Australia began when the nation’s Parliament began devising ways to force companies to pay publishers for news content distributed via search products and social media platforms. Back in February 2021, the Australian House of Representatives passed a version of this legislation opposed by Facebook. The company then blocked Australians from sharing or viewing news on the platform altogether. Following days of public outcry, the Australian Parliament eventually negotiated with Facebook and passed a new, more lenient bill that had the support of the social media giant. Facebook then reversed the ban.

Facebook has maintained that blocking the government and healthcare pages was accidental. “The documents in question clearly show that we intended to exempt Australian government Pages from restrictions in an effort to minimize the impact of this misguided and harmful legislation,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told WSJ. “When we were unable to do so as intended due to a technical error, we apologized and worked to correct it. Any suggestion to the contrary is categorically and obviously false.”

The documents that the whistleblowers submitted were filed with the US Department of Justice and the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, WSJ reported. A number of members of the US Congress were also given copies of the Facebook documents.

And. And. And. And. And. 

For whatever reason that specific string of words seems to be enough to permanently brick a Google Docs page. Noted Google's support pages mere hours ago, the poster who seemingly discovered this unusual bug is quick to point out that the series of five conjunctions, separated by periods, is case-sensitive (at least if the goal is to cause the document in question to become unusable.) 

Engadget was able to confirm the issue on a 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro running Monteray 12.3.1 and Google Chrome 100.0.4896.127... and we were summarily greeted by the "Something went wrong" popover as well as its loathsome cousin "Unable to load file." Reloading the page as prompted results in the same popovers. In effect, a death loop. 

Attempts to replicate the issue on Firefox 99.0.1 on a (significantly older, worse) MacBook Pro running Big Sur 11.1 were not successful but a respondent on the Google Support forums claims to have experienced the same problem on the same version of FireFox. 

What exactly is happening here remains a mystery, though we've reached out for clarity on what is likely a small if amusing technical oversight. How this bug was even discovered is itself an enigma, given that there's rarely cause to pile a slew of Ands on top of each other like this. Project Gutenberg turned up no instances in its database, while a (cursory) search through Google Books produced at least one example — seemingly meant to reproduce the effect of stammering — though it did quite meet the punctuation or capitalization criteria. We'll update should we hear back.