Join Dr. Bill as he examines the wild and wacky world of the web, computers, and all things geeky! Hot Tech Tips, Tech News, and Geek Culture are examined… with plenty of good humor as well!
9to5Mac – By: Ben Lovejoy – “Dish Network has for the first time separated out its Dish TV and Sling TV subscriber numbers. The company revealed the figures in its year-end financials for 2017…
Dish says that Sling TV accounts for 2.212M of its 13.242M Pay-TV subscribers, and told us that this represents 47% growth year-on-year. This contrasts with its legacy satellite TV service, which lost more than a million subscribers in the course of the year.
The company says that Sling TV remains the #1 live and on-demand Internet streaming service. Average revenue per user across its entire subscriber base fell slightly to $86.43.
Sling TV brought its cloud DVR feature to Apple TV back in April of last year, with support added to iOS devices a couple of months later.
Sling TV, which is available on Apple TV, starts at $20/month.”
Engadget – By: Jessica Conditt – “Angry Birds Champions is now available on iOS devices and through the developer’s website, allowing players to fling their feathered friends against precarious piles of pigs in a bid to win real money for the first time. The game is accessible through the WorldWinner iOS app or on WorldWinner.com, joining the studio’s other real-money tournament games like Wheel of Fortune, Solitaire, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit.
‘It’s really the original Angry Birds physics game — and obviously Rovio’s done a number of different derivatives using the iconography — but this is the core physics game of shooting birds and killing pigs,’ WorldWinner boss Jeremy Shea told Engadget.
Angry Birds Champions is an officially licensed title, made in conjunction with Rovio. It uses an asynchronous multiplayer format: Someone pays to enter a tournament and completes one of the two modes, best-of-three or progression, and their highest or combined score is recorded. The game finds another similarly skilled player in the tournament and that person plays the same levels. Whoever ends up with the highest score wins the cash prize, and WorldWinner takes a little off the top of each match.
WorldWinner’s matchmaking system takes a number of factors into account, including how many games you’ve played, how well you’ve performed in specific tournaments, your win-loss ratio, and average or best scores.
These competitions are generally worth a few dollars each and cost less than a dollar to join. Shea wants to be clear that this isn’t gambling — WorldWinner has been building real-money tournament games for 18 years and it knows the laws inside and out. A handful of big-name games, including Star Wars: Battlefront II and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, have come under scrutiny in recent months over their use of loot boxes and other gambling-adjacent systems. WorldWinner argues games like Angry Birds Champions are skill-based competitions, eliminating the element of chance that would turn them into gambling.
Still, 10 states have regulations that make WorldWinner’s lawyers squirm, so cash tournaments aren’t available in those areas (Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee).
‘We’re always in conversations with members of different states, and obviously there are players that want to play from certain states that we don’t allow and they’re disappointed when they find out,’ Shea said. ‘But in terms of gambling laws and regulations on a state-by-state or country-by-country basis — we spend a considerable amount of money on attorneys and we’re absolutely in line with the regulations as they are today and will be tomorrow.’
Angry Birds Champions also isn’t trying to become the next big eSport — though Shea would forgive you for thinking so. Players do win real money by playing Angry Birds Champions, but it simply isn’t built to be a spectator sport.
‘We clearly deliver competitions for money, from small two-player tournaments up to thousands of people participating,’ Shea said. ‘We deliver the entry fee and the prize model that most of your eSports competition deliver. But… we’ve never been in the viewership model. So I think that’s the one area where we evolve our lingo from saying we are eSports to we are really on the edge of eSports.’
Angry Birds comes with a built-in player base, with 4 billion downloads (and at least one movie) since the franchise’s launch in 2009. Shea expects Angry Birds Champions to have tens of thousands of players, easily.
‘That is one of reasons that we went with the partnership with Rovio, in particular at this stage of our development: In the past six months we have shifted our focus from being very committed to delivering a PC-based consumer experience where we’ve had our success for close to two decades, to trying to enter the mobile space,’ Shea said. ‘Our expectation is that this week, we hit all of our launch targets and this will quickly scale to be one of our top-performing games, which would put it in the thousands of players playing in a given day.’
And that’s just on iOS — WorldWinner is working on an Android version of the game as well, though there’s no launch window just yet.”
ZDNet – By: Liam Tung – “Customers running machines with newer Intel chips can expect to receive stable firmware updates for the Spectre CPU attack Variant 2 soon.
Intel says it has given PC makers a new set of microcode updates that mitigate the branch target injection Spectre attack on its 6th, 7th, and 8th generation Intel Core chips.
It also has new updates for its latest Core X-Series and Intel Xeon Scalable and Xeon D processors for datacenters.
‘We have now released production microcode updates to our OEM customers and partners for Kaby Lake- and Coffee Lake-based platforms, plus additional Skylake-based platforms,’ Intel vice president Navin Shenoy said on Tuesday.
The updates signal that Intel is making progress on reissuing stable microcode mitigations for the Spectre attack revealed by Google on January 3.
Intel on January 22 said it had identified the root cause of unexpected reboots on updated Broadwell and Haswell chips and advised PC makers to stop deploying its mitigations for the Variant 2 attack.
It initially said the reboots were only occurring on Broadwell and Haswell processors but later admitted its patch was also causing stability issues on Skylake and Kaby Lake chips.
Dell, HP, and Lenovo paused their respective BIOS updates while Intel worked on stable fixes. Microsoft also released an out-of-band patch to disable Intel’s fix on systems it had been installed on.
Earlier this month Intel released new microcode for several Skylake chips but didn’t disclose the status of Broadwell and Haswell chips.
It now has updated its guidance with the current status of microcode updates for various generations of chips, which now indicates that fixes for Broadwell, Haswell, Sandy Bridge and some Ivy Bridge chips have reached beta. It also has production updates available for Apollo Lake and Cherry View and Bay Trail chips.
The chip giant last week revealed it is facing 32 class action lawsuits over the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, and additional lawsuits over alleged insider trading.
Intel last week published a new whitepaper explaining how Google’s software-based fix for Variant 2 called Retpoline works. The search company found Retpoline doesn’t cause the performance overhead that Intel’s earlier mitigations did.
‘There are a number of possible mitigation techniques for the branch target injection Spectre variant 2 exploit. The Retpoline mitigation technique presented in this document is resistant to exploitation and has attractive performance properties compared to other mitigations,’ Intel notes in the paper.”
The Verge – By: James Vincent – “Samsung has unveiled the world’s largest solid state drive — an unassuming-looking bit of kit that boasts a whopping 30.72 terabytes of storage. It’s the most storage ever crammed into the 2.5-inch form factor, and is designed for enterprise customers looking to move away from the mechanical parts of your standard disk-based hard drive.
The PM1643 is built from 32 sticks of 1TB NAND flash packages, each of which contains 16 layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. That’s enough space to hold 5,700 HD movies or roughly 500 days of non-stop video, and offers twice the capacity of the former largest SSD — a 16 terabyte drive also released by Samsung back in March 2016. (Seagate has made a bigger 60 terabyte SSD, but that was in the more spacious 3.5-inch form factor, and was ‘demonstration technology’ that doesn’t seem to have ever gone on sale.)
The new Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive offers impressive sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700 MB/s. That’s about three times as fast as the average SATA SSD you’d find in a consumer desktop or laptop, like Samsung’s own SSD 850 EVO. And the drive is robust too, with Samsung offering a five-year warranty that’s good for one full drive write per day.
When exactly the PM1643 will go on sale and for how much isn’t known, but Samsung says now it’s got this form factor settled it’ll expand its range of SAS SSDs later this year, with 16.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB, and 800GB versions to come. As Samsung executive VP of memory sales Jaesoo Han said in a press statement, the company will ‘continue to move aggressively in meeting the shifting demand toward SSDs over 10TB.’
Don’t expect to see 30TB SSDs turning up in laptops or desktop PCs anytime soon of course. But new biggest-ever storage components like this are always trailblazers, and create downward pressure on prices in the consumer market. Now if only we could get a terabyte’s worth of storage in our phones.”
YouTubeTV, multiple Amazon Dots, Combining multiple OTA antennas, GSotW: TeaTV, Philo, NoCable.org, Microsoft Edge can be pwned! SlingTV and, be sure to tune in at approximately 29 minutes in for the ‘Marvel Movie after the credits’ scene on Leonflix!’
YouTubeTV, multiple Amazon Dots, Combining multiple OTA antennas, GSotW: TeaTV, Philo, NoCable.org, Microsoft Edge can be pwned! SlingTV and, be sure to tune in at approximately 29 minutes in for the ‘Marvel Movie after the credits’ scene on Leonflix!’
Cord Cutters News – Luke Bouma – “Been thinking about giving HBO a try? Today may be your lucky day because all Sling TV subscribers have free access to HBO and all of the HBO On-Demand content! This deal is running through Monday, February 19th 2018…
Not a Sling TV subscriber? Sling TV is still offering a 7-day free trial that will give you access to the FREE HBO deal. You can head over to their site and sign up for any of their plans starting at just $20 a month.”
ZDNet – By: Liam Tung – “Google’s Project Zero team has published details of an unfixed bypass for an important exploit-mitigation technique in Edge.
The mitigation, Arbitrary Code Guard (ACG), arrived in the Windows 10 Creators Update to help thwart web attacks that attempt to load malicious code into memory. The defense ensures that only properly signed code can be mapped into memory.
However, as Microsoft explains, Just-in-Time (JIT) compilers used in modern web browsers create a problem for ACG. JIT compilers transform JavaScript into native code, some of which is unsigned and runs in a content process.
To ensure JIT compilers work with ACG enabled, Microsoft put Edge’s JIT compiling in a separate process that runs in its own isolated sandbox. Microsoft said this move was ‘a non-trivial engineering task’.
‘The JIT process is responsible for compiling JavaScript to native code and mapping it into the requesting content process. In this way, the content process itself is never allowed to directly map or modify its own JIT code pages,’ Microsoft says.
Google’s Project Zero found an issue is created by the way the JIT process writes executable data into the content process.
Its ‘ACG bypass using UnmapViewofFile’ allows a compromised content process to predict which address a JIT process is going to call VirtualAllocEx() next, and for the content process to ‘allocate a writable memory region on the same address JIT server is going to write and write an soon-to-be-executable payload there’.
Google reported the medium-severity issue to Microsoft in mid-November and published details of the bypass yesterday as it had passed its 90-day deadline.
Microsoft confirmed the ACG bypass in a response to Google at some point to February’s Patch Tuesday. It appeared to have been aiming to fix the issue by then but found it to be ‘more complex’ than initially thought. It’s now targeting Patch Tuesday in March for a fix.
‘The fix is more complex than initially anticipated, and it is very likely that we will not be able to meet the February release deadline due to these memory management issues,’ Microsoft said.
‘The team IS positive that this will be ready to ship on March 13, however this is beyond the 90-day SLA and 14-day grace period to align with Update Tuesdays.'”
Lot’s of new Cable Cutters out there!
At least they are addressing it! Kudos to them!
Wow! 30 TB on an SSD in your computer! That is like having a whole datacenter at your fingertips!
Another reason I am sticking with Chrome!
TV without Cable – Over 90% of households can get free over-the-air TV. Can you?