During the holiday season, Apple's App Store broke records with customers spending over $1.22 billion between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. On New Year's Day alone customers spent $322 million, setting a new record for the App Store's biggest single day. CNET reports: "The App Store had a record-breaking holiday week and New Year's Day. The holiday week was our biggest week ever with more than $1.22 billion spent on apps and games, and New Year's Day set a new single-day record at more than $322 million," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. Gaming and self-care were the most popular app categories over the holidays. The Cupertino tech company calls out Fortnite, PUBG, Brawl Stars, Asphalt 9 and Monster Strike as the top downloaded games.

For the second year in a row, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will not be attending the annual Consumer Electronics Show. According to Politico Pro, Pai and Commissioner Brendan Carr are canceling their appearances at CES as a consequence of the ongoing partial government shutdown. Last year, Pai canceled due to death threats he received in the aftermath of the net neutrality rollback, which occurred just weeks prior to the conference. The Verge reports: Carr was expected to attend a roundtable session with Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter to discuss regulatory and policy issues involving 5G, privacy and accessibly, along with other topics. Both events have been removed from the CES schedule, but organizers have yet to respond to requests for comment.

As of Thursday afternoon, non-essential FCC employees were furloughed and âoemostâ operations were suspended as Congress battles it out over a funding package for the upcoming fiscal year. While the agency is shut down, consumer complaints will not be heard, consumer protection enforcement actions will be ceased, and licensing services will end until new funding is approved. CES 2018 begins on January 8th and runs through the 11th. Pai was scheduled to speak on opening day at 1:30PM PST.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: We've long suspected that Google's upcoming operating system, Fuchsia, would join the ranks of Chrome OS (and Android) in its support for Android apps. Today, that suspicion has been confirmed by a new change found in the Android Open Source Project, and we can say with confidence that Fuchsia will be capable of running Android apps using the Android Runtime. To make it simple, Fuchsia will use a specially designed version of the Android Runtime ("ART" above) to run Android applications. This version of ART will be installable on any Fuchsia device using a .far file, Fuchsia's equivalent of Android's APK.

How exactly Fuchsia will use the Android Runtime from there is still unclear. This is includes whether the Android Runtime is able to work as expected to replace Linux kernel calls with equivalents from Fuchsia's Zircon kernel or if ART will run inside of a Linux virtual machine using Machina, Fuchsia's virtual machine system. Regardless, what is clear is that Fuchsia devices are intended to run Android applications.

hmckee writes: OSNews was offline for a few days for upgrades. It is now back up with a message that indicates they encountered a data breach and considered going offline for good due to maintenance and financial difficulties. "Our best guess is that someone was able to exploit a vulnerability in old, unmaintained code in the site's content management system, and made off with at least some user data, which may be as little as a few user records or, at worst, our entire database," writes Publisher David Adams. "Your email addresses were in there, and the encryption on the passwords wasn't up to modern standards (unsalted SHA1). [...] Other than potential spam, though, we're not aware of any other nefarious use of your data, we don't store much beyond email addresses and passwords..."

David goes on to cite poor advertising revenues and a lack of time for reasons to throw in the towel and go offline permanently.

Qualcomm is enforcing a court order banning the sale of some iPhones in Germany that violate its patents on power-saving technology. As a result, Apple is likely going to pull some iPhone models from its German stores. Reuters reports: The chipmaker posted the [security] bonds of 1.34 billion euros ($1.52 billion) as part of a legal requirement by a German court, which found on Dec. 20 that Apple had infringed Qualcomm patents on power-saving technology used in smartphones. The iPhone maker had earlier said it would pull iPhone 7 and 8 models from its 15 stores in Germany when the order came into force. The order took effect when Qualcomm posted the bond. According to the court order, Apple has to stop the sale, offer for sale and importation for sale of all infringing iPhones in Germany. Apple had said it was appealing the decision. The court also ordered Apple to recall the affected iPhones from third-party resellers in Germany, according to a statement by Qualcomm.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new lawsuit filed against Comcast details an extensive list of lies the cable company allegedly told customers in order to hide the full cost of service. Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson sued Comcast in Hennepin County District Court on December 21, seeking refunds for all customers who were harmed by Comcast's alleged violations of the state's Prevention of Consumer Fraud Act and Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The complaint alleges, among other things, that Comcast reps falsely told customers that the company's "Regional Sports Network (RSN)" and "Broadcast TV" fees were mandated by the government and not controlled by Comcast itself. These two fees, which are not included in Comcast's advertised rates, have gone up steadily and now total $18.25 a month.

Comcast has responded to some lawsuits -- including this one -- by saying that the company had already stopped the practices that triggered the court actions. But Minnesota says that Comcast's lies about the sports and broadcast fees continued into 2017, which is after Comcast knew about identical allegations raised in a separate class action complaint filed in 2016. (That case was settled out of court.) When contacted by Ars, a Comcast spokesperson yesterday said that "our policy is to be very clear to our customers about the broadcast TV and RSN fees and [tell them] that these are not government-mandated fees." But employees make mistakes, the Comcast spokesperson said. "Employees may go off script and incorrectly characterize things, but that is not in line with our policy because [the broadcast TV and sports charges] are not government-mandated fees," Comcast said. According to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, Comcast agreed in November to pay $700,000 in refunds "and cancel debts for more than 20,000 Massachusetts customers" to settle allegations that it used deceptive advertising to promote long-term cable contracts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Still using your ex-roommates cable credentials to watch "Game of Thrones?" That may soon be getting a lot harder, thanks to new efforts to crack down on password sharing for pay TV and online video services. One of these efforts, launched by London-based Synamedia ahead of next week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), even uses artificial intelligence to uncover notorious password sharers. Credentials Sharing Insight, as the new service is being called, targets both casual password sharing as well as criminal enterprises looking to resell pay TV login information. However, the focus clearly is on friends and family taking their generosity a bit too far, explained Symanedia chief product officer Jean-Marc Racine in an interview with Variety this week.

[...] Most services have tried to curtail password sharing by limiting the number of simultaneous streams, with little else to go by to identify abuse. "Today, you are in the dark," he said. Synamedia's solution on the other hand digs through lots of data to cluster users based on their streaming behavior. This can include user's physical location (someone streaming from both coasts at the same time) as well as general usage patterns (someone streaming 24/7). The company can even take a look at the specific content streamed by a user to identify unusual patterns. Based on these clues, Synamedia trains models to score users on a scale of 1 to 10, indicating whether they are likely sharing their passwords or not.

Rather than serving up platitudes about innovation, the man charged with saving former unicorn Evernote says his priority this year is addressing the long list of user complaints. From a report: Despite some progress, Evernote continued to struggle last year, cutting 15 percent of its staff and losing many top executives.So what doesn't work? Lots of stuff, much of it very basic, new CEO Ian Small says: "Frankly, it's a bit disingenuous for me to try to get our most dedicated users all fired up about inventing the future of Evernote when exactly those same people are the ones who know best that sync doesn't always work right. Or that Evernote on Windows is a bit tired, and is missing features that are found on the Mac version. Or that each version of Evernote seems to work slightly differently, and exhibits its own unique collection of bugs and undesirable behaviors. Or that Evernote on mobile devices sometimes feels like a pared-down version of a powerful desktop app, instead of a mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment." Small says these problems have lingered for years and were well-known, but he didn't want to get into why they weren't fixed sooner. Instead, he promises the main focus of 2019 will be dealing with these and numerous other issues.

Microsoft is working on a project codenamed "Bali," which is designed to give users control of data collected about them. The project is a Microsoft Research incubation effort and seems to be in private testing at this stage. From a report: I learned of the existence of Bali in a tweet from "Longhorn," which I saw via another Twitter user, "Walking Cat." Longhorn described Bali as "a project that can delete all your connection and account information (inverseprivacyproject)." I found a link to the Bali project page. That page allows those with a code to sign into the site and says those without a code can request one.

The "About" page for Bali describes it as a "new personal data bank which puts users in control of all data collected about them.... The bank will enable users to store all data (raw and inferred) generated by them. It will allow the user to visualize, manage, control, share and monetize the data."

schwit1 shares a report: Google moved 19.9 billion euros ($22.7 billion) through a Dutch shell company to Bermuda in 2017, as part of an arrangement that allows it to reduce its foreign tax bill, according to documents filed at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. The amount channeled through Google Netherlands Holdings BV was around 4 billion euros more than in 2016, the documents, filed on Dec. 21, showed. For more than a decade the arrangement has allowed Google owner Alphabet to enjoy an effective tax rate in the single digits on its non-U.S. profits, around a quarter the average tax rate in its overseas markets. The subsidiary in the Netherlands is used to shift revenue from royalties earned outside the United States to Google Ireland Holdings, an affiliate based in Bermuda, where companies pay no income tax.

Throughout 2018, researchers inside and outside Intel continued to find exploitable weaknesses related to Meltdown and Spectre class of "speculative execution" vulnerabilities. Fixing many of them takes not just software patches, but conceptually rethinking how processors are made. From a report: At the center of these efforts for Intel is STORM, the company's strategic offensive research and mitigation group, a team of hackers from around the world tasked with heading off next-generation security threats. Reacting to speculative execution vulnerabilities in particular has taken extensive collaboration among product development teams, legacy architecture groups, outreach and communications departments to coordinate response, and security-focused research groups at Intel. STORM has been at the heart of the technical side. "With Meltdown and Spectre we were very aggressive with how we approached this problem," says Dhinesh Manoharan, who heads Intel's offensive security research division, which includes STORM. "The amount of products that we needed to deal with and address and the pace in which we did this -- we set a really high bar."

Intel's offensive security research team comprises about 60 people who focus on proactive security testing and in-depth investigations. STORM is a subset, about a dozen people who specifically work on prototyping exploits to show their practical impact. They help shed light on how far a vulnerability really extends, while also pointing to potential mitigations. The strategy helped them catch as many variants as possible of the speculative execution vulnerabilities that emerged in a slow trickle throughout 2018. "Every time a new state of the art capability or attack is discovered we need to keep tracking it, doing work on it, and making sure that our technologies are still resilient," says Rodrigo Branco, who heads STORM. "It was no different for Spectre and Meltdown. The only difference in that case is the size, because it also affected other companies and the industry as a whole."

On Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook issued a dire warning to his investors. Apple, the world's first trillion dollar company, lowered its revenue forecast for the first time since 2002, thanks primarily to China, he said. But there was at least one more issue at play.

Motherboard: The lengthy letter cites, specifically, that people are buying fewer iPhones because they are repairing their old ones. Apple has long fought efforts that would make iPhones easier to repair: It has lobbied against right to repair efforts in several states, doesn't sell iPhone replacement parts, sued an independent repair professional in Norway, worked with Amazon to get iPhone and MacBook refurbishers kicked off Amazon Marketplace, and has deals with electronics recyclers that require them to shred iPhones and MacBooks (as opposed to allowing them to be refurbished.) The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, has seized iPhone replacement parts from prominent right to repair activists in the United States.

[...] Apple has never clearly articulated why it doesn't want people to fix their own iPhones or to have independent experts repair them. It has previously said that iPhones are "too complex" for users to repair them, even though replacing a battery is pretty easy and is done by average users all the time. But the fact that repair hurts Apple's bottom line came out in Cook's official communication with shareholders, who he is legally obligated to tell the truth to.

Longtime BitTorrent executive and recent CEO Rogelio Choy left the company just 6 months after its acquisition by blockchain entrepreneur Justin Sun. Coincidentally, Choy's departure comes just as BitTorrent is doubling down on blockchain tech: The company announced Thursday that it is adding a crypto-currency to its popular uTorrent client.

From a report: Choy had been BitTorrent's chief operating officer from 2012 to 2015. After a 2-year stint at an on on-demand startup, he rejoined the company in 2017 as its CEO. His departure was confirmed by a company spokesperson Thursday, who said that he "decided to pursue other opportunities." One possible point of contention is BitTorrent's increased focus on crypto-currencies: The company announced Thursday that it was adding a crypto token to its popular uTorrent Windows client. The token will initially allow uTorrent users to achieve faster download speeds. The exact reasons for his departure are unknown at this time, but a source close to the company suggested that there had been disagreements about the direction of the company.

dryriver writes: A relative of mine has been left with extremely low speech volume -- about 25% of a normal speaker -- and lack of high pitch capability after a major throat surgery. He cannot speak on the phone at all now -- you cannot hear him properly on the other end of the line, even though you can understand his speech OK when you are standing in the room next to him. Is there an assistive Android app that can:
1. Significantly boost the output volume (e.g. X 4) of the Android phone microphone he speaks into.
2. Add voice box, equalizer, autotune or audio filtering/bass boosting type audio effects in realtime to the microphone input to fix the speaker's pitch.
3. Can filter out background noise to some extent (so it doesn't get boosted as well).
4. Allows these effects to be used easily during phonecalls?
All the Android microphone/equalizer/megaphone type apps I've tried so far have huge problems -- some are novelty voice-changer apps for teens, some demand ridiculously broad permissions to everything on the phone including realtime location data of the user, some demand that an external mic is attached to the phone, some are too simple technically to do anything useful and some are advertising-fests that are plain unusable. Is there a good Android -- or iOS -- app for the speech impaired that would give this person a chance to make audio phonecalls on a smartphone again? Thanks for any advice!

The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the entertainment market in UK, according to new figures. From a report: The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) said the gaming market's value rose to $4.85bn, more than double what it was worth in 2007. It now makes gaming a larger market than video and music combined for the first time. The figures show three games -- Fifa 19, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 -- each sold more than one million physical units in the UK across games consoles during 2018. ERA chief executive Kim Bayley said: "The games industry has been incredibly effective in taking advantage of the potential of digital technology to offer new and compelling forms of entertainment. Despite being the youngest of our three sectors, it is now by far the biggest."