Month: November 2022

Enlarge / Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of FTX, testifies during a House Financial Services Committee hearing on December 8, 2021. (credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty)

The digital assets industry has been shaken by the near-collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges, which clinched a rescue deal with arch-rival Binance after a surge in customer withdrawals sparked a liquidity crisis.

Binance chief executive Changpeng “CZ” Zhao wrote on Twitter that FTX had “asked for our help,” adding: “There is a significant liquidity crunch.” Binance has signed a letter of intent to buy FTX but said it had “the discretion to pull out from the deal at any time.”

The bailout of one of the biggest and most prominent companies in the global cryptocurrency industry by its chief competitor reverberated across the market. Bitcoin, the most actively traded token, fell as much as 17 percent while smaller coins faced steeper falls. US-listed crypto exchange Coinbase dropped about 14 percent.

Enlarge / The original Slingbox, on display at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show. Key indicators this was a long time ago include the Toshiba Satellite laptop used for the demonstration (and the giant glossy UI buttons). (credit: Getty Images)

Slingbox, the device and service that was into streaming digital television long before the world was ready for it, will die a cloud-based server death Wednesday, November 9. The service was nearly 17 years old.

Sling Media announced two years ago that the Slingbox would be discontinued, noting that "all Slingbox devices and services will become inoperable." The reason given was decreased demand. Being able to watch the video that would normally be on your television on a non-television screen was a novel—and legally contentious—thing back when Sling started in 2005. Today, there is more content than you can possibly watch in a lifetime, available on devices that can connect from almost anywhere, willingly offered by every major media company and sports league.

Sling was born out of two rich fields: General Magic, the Apple spin-off company where founder Blake Krikorian worked in the early 1990s, and San Francisco Giants baseball in 2002. Krikorian and his brother, Jason, traveled frequently back then while building their own consulting firm. The Giants were headed to the World Series that year, and the Krikorian brothers wanted to watch, or at least listen. They found that they were either blacked out by local broadcast agreements or asked to pay additional fees to stream the games on top of the cable and Internet they already paid for at home.

Enlarge / The original Slingbox, on display at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show. Key indicators this was a long time ago include the Toshiba Satellite laptop used for the demonstration (and the giant glossy UI buttons). (credit: Getty Images)

Slingbox, the device and service that was into streaming digital television long before the world was ready for it, will die a cloud-based server death Wednesday, November 9. The service was nearly 17 years old.

Sling Media announced two years ago that the Slingbox would be discontinued, noting that "all Slingbox devices and services will become inoperable." The reason given was decreased demand. Being able to watch the video that would normally be on your television on a non-television screen was a novel—and legally contentious—thing back when Sling started in 2005. Today, there is more content than you can possibly watch in a lifetime, available on devices that can connect from almost anywhere, willingly offered by every major media company and sports league.

Sling was born out of two rich fields: General Magic, the Apple spin-off company where founder Blake Krikorian worked in the early 1990s, and San Francisco Giants baseball in 2002. Krikorian and his brother, Jason, traveled frequently back then while building their own consulting firm. The Giants were headed to the World Series that year, and the Krikorian brothers wanted to watch, or at least listen. They found that they were either blacked out by local broadcast agreements or asked to pay additional fees to stream the games on top of the cable and Internet they already paid for at home.

Enlarge / LG's UltraFine 27EQ850-B OLED monitor. (credit: LG)

LG has released an OLED computer monitor with a more accessible size and price than most. The LG UltraFine 27EQ850-B represents one of the few 27-inch OLED panels available and has a competitive MSRP (for an OLED monitor) at $2,000.

LG recently listed the 27EQ850-B, as spotted by sites like DisplaySpecifications and KitGuru. It's a 4K, 60 Hz screen with a claimed 200 nits of brightness and 99 percent DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB color coverage.

The 10-bit color monitor's stand supports portrait mode, tilting, pivoting, and height adjustments. (credit: LG)

USB-C connectivity with 90 W power delivery puts the monitor on par with other USB-C monitors, like the Dell UltraSharp U2723QE; although there are monitors, like the Apple Studio Display, with greater power delivery (96 W).

Enlarge / LG's UltraFine 27EQ850-B OLED monitor. (credit: LG)

LG has released an OLED computer monitor with a more accessible size and price than most. The LG UltraFine 27EQ850-B represents one of the few 27-inch OLED panels available and has a competitive MSRP (for an OLED monitor) at $2,000.

LG recently listed the 27EQ850-B, as spotted by sites like DisplaySpecifications and KitGuru. It's a 4K, 60 Hz screen with a claimed 200 nits of brightness and 99 percent DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB color coverage.

The 10-bit color monitor's stand supports portrait mode, tilting, pivoting, and height adjustments. (credit: LG)

USB-C connectivity with 90 W power delivery puts the monitor on par with other USB-C monitors, like the Dell UltraSharp U2723QE; although there are monitors, like the Apple Studio Display, with greater power delivery (96 W).

Enlarge / The new version of Dishy McFlatface. (credit: Starlink)

Starlink is imposing new data-usage limits on its Internet customers, slowing speeds after a customer uses 1TB in any given month unless they pay extra. While the new data limits are in some ways more forgiving than Comcast's data cap, the change may be concerning to Starlink users who have already seen slower speeds in recent months.

"To ensure our customer base is not negatively impacted by a small number of users consuming unusually high amounts of data, the Starlink team is implementing a Fair Use policy for Residential customers in the US and Canada and all Business/Maritime customers beginning December 2022," a FAQ says.

Under Starlink's fair use policy, residential customers will get 1TB of "priority access data" each month. After using 1TB, customers can keep accessing the Internet at slower speeds or pay $0.25 per gigabyte for "additional priority access." Starlink sent emails to customers notifying them of the new policy late last week. The residential service's base price is $110 per month.