Month: January 2019

Enlarge (credit: The Dragon Box)

The entertainment industry has scored a big victory over the maker of a "free TV" box that helped users watch pirated video.

Dragon Media Inc., whose "Dragon Box" device connects to TVs and lets users watch video without a cable TV or streaming service subscription, has agreed to shut down the Dragon Box services and pay $14.5 million in damages to plaintiffs from the entertainment industry.

Dragon Media was sued in January 2018 by Netflix, Amazon, Columbia Pictures, Disney, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. Dragon Media's lawyer initially predicted that the lawsuit would backfire on the entertainment industry, but the Dragon Box maker must have decided it had little chance of winning at trial.

Enlarge / Belgian players will no longer be able to buy access to screens like this in FIFA 19

Electronic Arts is halting the sale of its FIFA Points virtual currency in Belgium. The move effectively ends the ability to buy randomized, in-game FIFA Ultimate Team card packs in the country, which the Belgian Gaming Commission has ruled is a form of illegal gambling.

EA has spent the last few months defying a Belgian order to stop selling those Ultimate Team packs in the local version of the game, drawing an investigation from the country's prosecutor's office. But this week, "after further discussions with the Belgian authorities, we have decided to stop offering FIFA Points for sale in Belgium," the company wrote in a public message.

"While we are taking this action, we do not agree with Belgian authorities’ interpretation of the law, and we will continue to seek more clarity on the matter as we go forward," the statement continues.

Enlarge (credit: Samsung)

Smartphones hold most of our lives now in photos, videos, music, and more, and Samsung's latest tech will make it so they can store even more. The Korean manufacturer announced that it has created the first 1TB embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) chip for smartphones, which will allow future handsets to have internal storage capacities similar to those of laptops.

"The 1TB eUFS is expected to play a critical role in bringing a more notebook-like user experience to the next generation of mobile devices," said Cheol Choi, executive vice president of Memory Sales and Marketing at Samsung.

Samsung has already begun mass-producing the chip, which it claims has read speeds of up to 1,000Mbps—nearly twice the sequential read speed of a typical 2.5-inch SATA SSD and faster than Samsung's previous 512GB chip. A device with the 1TB chip can reportedly store 260 10-minute, 4K videos—a massive amount that dwarfs the capabilities of current smartphones with lower-capacity eUFS chips. The 1TB chips will also have the same package size as its 512GB counterpart, so smartphones won't need to get larger to accommodate the chips.

Enlarge / Ice floats on Lake Michigan at dawn in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2019. (credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

It is extremely cold in the Midwestern United States, where forecasters are warning of "life-threatening extreme cold." During the early Wednesday morning hours, much of the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois are locked down with these "feels like" temperatures in the -40s, -50s, and even -60s (Fahrenheit) as winds howl out of the west at up to 25mph.

The region's largest city, Chicago, likely will set a record Wednesday for the coldest day in the city's history. Sunrise temperatures in the city were -23°F, and high temperatures today were forecast to only reach -14°. The city's coldest day on record occurred on January 18, 1994, when the high only reached -11°. The city is even setting its railroad tracks on fire so that trains can run on them. The battle against the cold is much the same across the upper Midwest.

The culprit behind this Arctic outbreak is the much-discussed "polar vortex," which is not a storm, per se, but a feature in the atmosphere. Normally, this is a roughly circular current near the North Pole, an atmospheric river of sorts, that keeps cold air bottled over the Arctic. Every so often, something disrupts or dislodges the vortex, allowing a chunk of this colder air mass to move southward into the mid-latitudes. Presently, an especially cold and large chunk of this air mass has spilled into Canada and the United States.