Month: January 2020

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a suite of deals on Amazon's Fire TV streamers. The offers include the 1080p Fire TV Stick for $25, the brawnier Fire TV Stick 4K for $35, the smart speaker-like Fire TV Cube for $100, and the Fire TV Recast over-the-air DVR for $145. Those discounts range from $15 to $80 off.

Of these, we'd say the Fire TV Stick 4K is the best buy for most people. We've recommended it in multiple gift guides in the past, but it remains a powerful way to get 4K HDR content to your TV without putting too much of a dent in your wallet. It supports all the major streaming apps and HDR formats, consistently performs smoothly, and has more robust voice search capabilities than its closest analogue, the Roku Streaming Stick+. That Roku streamer has a far tidier, if somewhat boring, interface than the Fire TV Stick 4K, but generally speaking, the best choice between the two is whichever one is on sale at the time. Amazon will usually discount its Fire TV Sticks at various points throughout the year, but this current deal is as low as we typically see it outside of major sales events like Prime Day and Black Friday. If you aren't buying it for a 4K TV, just make sure to save some cash and get the standard Fire TV Stick instead.

If you have no interest in a new media streamer, we also have deals on Google's Pixel 3a smartphone, AMD Ryzen processors, Eero mesh Wi-Fi routers, and more. Have a look at our full deals rundown below.

Enlarge / Comcast Xfinity van in Santa Clara, California, August 17, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado)

Comcast reduced capital spending on its cable division in 2019, devoting less money to network extensions and improvements despite a series of government favors that were supposed to accelerate broadband expansions.

"For the twelve months ended December 31, 2019, Cable capital expenditures decreased 10.5 percent to $6.9 billion," down from $7.7 billion in 2018, Comcast, the nation's largest home Internet provider, said in its earnings announcement last week. "Cable capital expenditures represented 11.9 percent of Cable revenue compared to 13.8 percent in 2018."

Comcast cable revenue rose 3.7 percent, from $56 billion in 2018 to $58.1 billion in 2019. Cable-division EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization) rose 7.3 percent, from $21.7 billion to $23.3 billion in 2019.

Enlarge / If one of the Zafar communications satellites makes it into space, maybe it will look like this? (credit: Islamic Republic News Agency)

Iran is preparing for the launch of two small communications satellites, Zafar 1 and Zafar 2, from the Imam Khomeini Space Center in northern Iran.

The country's communication's minister, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, confirmed the launch after NPR editor Geoff Brumfiel first reported on the likelihood of the upcoming mission. Iran has even created a website for the satellites, called "Zafar and me," for people to upload messages for the spacecraft to transmit back to Earth.

The satellites will likely launch on the Safir-1 or Safir-2 rocket, which reportedly have capacities of 65kg and 350kg to low-Earth orbit. Combined, the vehicles have a checkered history, with four known successes and four known failures during the last 12 years.

Last month, Fallout 76 saw the emergence of a damaging new hack that let attackers literally steal the clothes off other players' backs. Now, Bethesda is making affected players whole (and clothed) again via a roundabout method that involves clones of their past selves.

The inventory theft hack, which targeted the PC version of the game, was widely popularized in a December 22 video showing a player stealing gear from dozens of fellow players, who go from fully clothed to standing in their underwear in the blink of an eye. Players quickly threw up warnings and evidence of the hack's spread on Reddit and looked for answers from the game's developer.

By December 23, Bethesda had acknowledged the hack and said it "may have resulted in a few players losing items that their characters had equipped," in a Reddit post. A patch soon followed to prevent further in-game thievery, but players that had their items stolen were still left without even the shirt on their virtual backs.