An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Broadband and TV providers will finally be required to stop charging "rental" fees for equipment that customers own themselves, thanks to a new US law that takes effect on Sunday. The bogus fees were outlawed by the Television Viewer Protection Act (TVPA), which was approved by Congress and signed by President Trump in December 2019. The law was originally scheduled to take effect on June 20, but Congress gave the Federal Communications Commission leeway to delay enforcement by six months if the FCC "finds that good cause exists for such an additional extension." The FCC in April granted the six-month delay to ISPs, claiming that providers needed more time to comply because of the coronavirus pandemic. That decision delayed implementation of the new requirements until December 20, 2020.

The law's implementation will "put an end to the unconscionable business practice of charging consumers a rental fee for cable modem routers even if consumers do not use them!" consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge said in a blog post. "This common-sense correction will permit consumers to continue to use their own equipment, and not be forced to pay for something they neither asked for nor needed." [...] The new law, passed as part of a budget bill, creates a "consumer right to accurate equipment charges" that prohibits TV and broadband providers from charging for "covered equipment provided by the consumer." Covered equipment is defined as "equipment (such as a router) employed on the premises of a person... to provide [TV service] or to provide fixed broadband Internet access service." The companies may not charge rental or lease fees in cases when "the provider has not provided the equipment to the consumer; or the consumer has returned the equipment to the provider."

The law also includes a right to transparency that requires TV providers to inform customers of the total monthly charges, including all company-imposed fees and a good-faith estimate of all government-imposed fees and taxes, before they enter into a contract. This notice must specify the amount of promotional discounts and when those discounts will expire. The law also gives customers a 24-hour period in which they can cancel new TV service without penalty. The new rule won't prevent TV providers from raising prices on existing customers, even when they're under contract. But the new transparency requirement is a step in the right direction.

The socialist regime once cracked down on bitcoin miners. Now it's mining the digital asset itself. From a report: At a military base outside Caracas, Venezuela, state video footage shows officers in green fatigues cut a blue ribbon donned with a cluster of glossy balloons. Then, the men pry open the doors of a narrow, dimly-lit bunker. But the balloons weren't inaugurating a new weapons factory or training facility. They marked the opening of a new bitcoin mining farm. Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro needs cash to sustain his grip on power after muddling through one of the worst economic implosions seen in recent modern history in the Western Hemisphere. It appears that Maduro's last ditch effort to buoy Venezuela's shriveling economy is to dig deep for this digital asset and sell it for hard cash.

"In a strategic alliance with private capital, the Bolivarian army inaugurated the first center for the production of digital assets at the Fuerte Tiuna facilities," said a spokesperson in footage published by state television in late November. Venezuelan General Domingo Antonio Hernandez Larez details the project in a cramped conference room, then he and other officers fondle a few S9 AntMiners, a type of specialized computer used to mine bitcoin, the volatile cryptocurrency whose price is scraping all-time-highs of just under $20,000 per coin. "This center of digital asset production will ensure self-financing sufficiency within the military," the Venezuelan state TV official explains. "These mining activities will be key for increasing revenues for the country."

Twitter has announced that it'll be shutting down Periscope as a service, with the company set to discontinue the Periscope applications by March 2021. The Verge reports: Twitter will, however, continue to offer live video streaming through its integrated Twitter Live feature within the main Twitter app. "The Periscope app is in an unsustainable maintenance-mode state, and has been for a while," the company explained in a blog post. "Over the past couple of years, we've seen declining usage and know that the cost to support the app will only continue to go up over time."

While Periscope won't be fully shut down until March, the company is already blocking any new account signups starting in the latest update to the apps, which is rolling out today. Users will have the chance to download an archive of both their Periscope videos and their data before the app is shuttered next year. Additionally, the Periscope website will remain active to serve as a "read-only archive of public broadcasts." Periscope will also be "relaxing our requirements" for users to apply to become "Super Broadcasters," the company's term for select users who are given the opportunity to cash out tips given to them by followers. Broadcasters will have until April 30th, 2021, to finish cashing out their tips.

Todd Haselton from CNBC reviews Apple Fitness+, with some thoughts on how it compares with Peloton's similar app. Here's an excerpt from his report: Apple's subscription fitness app, Fitness+, launches Monday. I've been using it for the past several days and I think it offers a nice variety of workouts that people will like. You need an Apple Watch to take the prerecorded exercise classes, which are available on iPhones, iPads and the Apple TV. It's a smart way for Apple to make the Apple Watch even stickier. If people get really into the fitness classes, like I have, it will be yet another way Apple keeps people locked in to its ecosystem of products. Why buy another phone, tablet or watch if you really like Fitness+? It also comes at a great time, when people aren't in gyms and are at home looking for ways to exercise.

Like other fitness apps, including Peloton's, which starts at $12.99 a month for classes that don't need the company's connected spin bike, you don't need anything to use it. But, you'll get more out of it if you have any indoor cycle, treadmill, rowing machine or free weights, since some of the classes require equipment. But you don't need anything special. I've been riding a hand-me-down exercise bike, for example. Fitness+ costs $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year. It's also part of the Premier Apple One plan, which costs $29.95 per month, and includes other Apple products like Apple Music, Apple TV+ and extra iCloud storage bundled together at a discount.

CNN reports: If it wasn't abundantly clear that content is king, especially in the Covid-19 era, Disney hammered that point home Thursday when it previewed dozens of new series and movies for its Disney+ streaming service. And investors are loving it. Shares of Disney jumped 13% Friday to a new all-time high. The stock is now up more than 20% this year, an impressive feat given that the pandemic has wreaked havoc on Disney's theme park business and forced its movie studios to delay big releases in theaters.

Investors are clearly betting that the streaming strength will offset any lingering weakness in other areas of the House of Mouse empire: Disney raised its forecast for subscriber growth and is upping prices for Disney+. Wall Street analysts rushed to upgrade Disney following Thursday's event. At least 13 analysts boosted their price targets on the stock Friday morning. While Disney initially predicted it would have 60-90 million subscribers by 2024, they're now predicting 230-260 million, CNN reported earlier this week. "The sheer scale of content announced on Thursday was a loud reminder to the rest of the streaming world that Disney+ had an amazing year, acting as a lifeboat to a company ravaged by coronavirus, and that Disney is fully committed to the future of streaming."

Besides the two new Star Wars series announced this week, Disney also announced several new series based on Marvel comic book characters:

• "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" and "WandaVision"

• Samuel L. Jackson (as Nick Fury) in "Secret Invasion"

• Don Cheadle as War Machine in "Armor Wars"

• More Marvel-based shows about Hawkeye, Moon Knight, "Ironheart" Riri Williams, She Hulk, and Ms. Marvel

• A series of shorts titled "I Am Groot" and a "Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special"

Other newly-announced Disney+ shows include:

• A live action Pinocchio starring Tom Hanks
• A reboot of "The Mighty Ducks" starring Emilio Estevez

What are some good movies and TV shows that you watched this year? You do not have to narrow down your selection to titles that came out this year, but feel free to give one a shotout.

The success of Nintendo's diminutive gadget led to a flurry of copycats, from a tiny Commodore 64 to a miniaturised Sony PlayStation. Some were good; many were flawed, with the play experience only being surface deep. Fortunately, some companies wanted to go further than fashioning yet another miniature plug-and-play TV console. From a report: One, the ZX Spectrum Next, brought into being a machine from an alternate universe in which Sinclair was never sold to Amstrad and instead built a computer to take on the might of the Amiga and Atari ST. Two other companies headed further back into gaming's past and set themselves an equally ambitious challenge: recreating the exciting, noisy, visually arresting classic cabinets you once found in arcades. "I always saw them as more than just a game, with their unique shapes, art, sounds and lights acting together to lure money from your pocket," explains Matt Precious, managing partner at Quarter Arcades creators Numskull Designs. "I was disappointed you couldn't purchase models of these machines during a time when physical items like LPs were booming in an increasingly sterile world of digital downloads."

Quarter Arcades was subsequently born as a project "trying to capture a piece of gaming history" in quarter-scale cabinets. The machines are in exact scale, including the controls, and play the original arcade ROMs. But look closer and there's an obsessive level of detail: the rough texture of the control panel art; mimicking an original cab's acoustics by careful speaker positioning; recreating the Space Invaders 'Pepper's ghost' illusion effect where graphics 'float' above an illuminated backdrop -- all realised by dismantling and reverse-engineering original cabs.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More recent Nvidia graphics cards have a proprietary feature called Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and while it's often been touted as a powerful new rendering tool, the results have sometimes been underwhelming. Some of this is down to the oddly mixed-message around how DLSS was rolled-out: it only works on more recent Nvidia cards that are still near the cutting edge of PC graphics hardware⦠but DLSS is designed to render images at lower resolutions but display them as if they were rendered natively at a higher resolution. If you had just gotten a new Nvidia card and were excited to see what kind of framerates and detail levels it could sustain, what DLSS actually did sounded counterintuitive. Even games like Control, whose support of DLSS was especially praised, left me scratching my head about why I would want to use the feature. On my 4K TV, Control looked and ran identically well with and without DLSS, so why wouldn't I just max-out my native graphics settings instead rather than use a fancy upscaler? Intellectually, I understood the DLSS could produce similarly great looking images without taxing my hardware as much, but I neither fully believed it, nor had I seen a game where the performance gain was meaningful.

Cyberpunk 2077 converted me. DLSS is a miracle, and without it there's probably no way I would ever have been happy with my graphics settings or the game's performance. I have a pretty powerful video card, an RTX 2080 TI, but my CPU is an old i5 overclocked to about 3.9 GHz and it's a definite bottleneck on a lot of games. Without DLSS, Cyberpunk 2077 was very hard to get running smoothly. The busiest street scenes would look fine if I were in a static position, but a quick pan with my mouse would cause the whole world to stutter. If I was walking around Night City, I would get routine slow-downs. Likewise, sneaking around and picking off guards during encounters was all well and good but the minute the bullets started flying, with grenades exploding everywhere and positions changing rapidly, my framerate would crater to the point where the game verged on unplayable. To handle these peaks of activity, I had to lower my detail settings way below what I wanted, and what my hardware could support for about 80 percent of my time with the game. Without DLSS, I never found a balance I was totally happy with. The game neither looked particularly great, nor did it run very well. DLSS basically solved this problem for me. With it active, I could run Cyberpunk at max settings, with stable framerates in all but the busiest scenes.

At the end of a record-setting year of news consumption, Amazon Fire TV said local TV stations in 12 U.S. cities will be added to Amazon's news app, with another 90 on deck for 2021. From a report: The initial dozen stations are in New York, LA, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Tampa, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle. The roster includes CBSN Chicago, ABC7/WABC-TV New York, KIRO7 Seattle, and News 12 New York. In a year marked by Covid-19, a presidential election and racial unrest, overall news consumption has surged 48%, according to Nielsen. Amazon's news app offers free live and on-demand news from ABC News Live, CBS News, Reuters, Cheddar and other providers. The ad-supported app is built into Fire TV streaming media players and smart TVs in the U.S. Local broadcast stations have faced major challenges during the streaming boom, as the pay-TV bundle shrinks and viewership and ad revenues continue to decline. Due to a number of technological and industry-relations issues, most large station groups have not put station signals online in a coordinated fashion, though they stream select content on social media or their own websites.

The Verge writes: Maybe you're feeling nostalgic for a classic James Bond film following Sean Connery's death in late October. Or perhaps you're simply feeling a gap given that the next film, No Time to Die, got pushed back to April 2021 or beyond. Either way, you can now binge a sizable selection of the James Bond collection completely for free (with ads) from YouTube, Peacock (with its free subscription), and PlutoTV...

You can also find most of the films on Hulu and Amazon Prime this month, though you'd have to pay for those subscriptions, and Netflix has Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and three Pierce Brosnan flicks including GoldenEye — newly relevant now that the famed Arecibo Observatory, which gets destroyed in the film, has also collapsed in real life.

There's a zany twist at the end, because "This year more than ever, we felt that it was important to give people a little lift, to remind them that while we are facing a lot of challenges, there are many ways we can connect, be productive and enjoy the time we have at home," Microsoft's VP of brand, advertising, and research told Adweek.

But long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares a different opinion: While Adweek finds it "heartwarming", Windows Central's Sean Endicott writes that Microsoft's "Find Your Joy" holiday ad "just left me feeling sad."

After lock-downed family members immersed in Microsoft Halo, Teams, Minecraft, and Flight Simulator ignore the family dog, the pooch drifts off to sleep and dreams about being able to use the Microsoft products with fellow canines, including fetching a live grenade in Halo. The ad concludes with the line "This holiday, find your joy." Endicott does not approve: "I expected the ad to end with one of the people playing with the dog or at least cuddling it as it fell asleep. So much for that... Maybe this fictional family does that after the ad finishes, but Microsoft doesn't show it. And that's a real bummer."
Adweek points out that in Minecraft's Marketplace, Microsoft is also giving away a free "dogtopia" inspired by the ad (including bacon rollercoasters), while the vintage airplane will appear in Microsoft Flight Simulator, and custom backgrounds from the ad will be made available in Microsoft Teams.

Because this year more than ever it's important to give people a little lift to remind them that while we're facing a lot of challenges there's many ways we can connect, be productive and enjoy the time we have at home...

Netflix is the target of yet another employee-poaching lawsuit. From a report: In a suit on Friday, Activision Blizzard accused the streamer of showing "contempt" for state employment law when it poached the company's chief financial officer two years ago. Netflix has been sued twice before -- by Fox and Viacom -- for allegedly luring away employees who are in the middle of fixed-term agreements. In the latest case, Activision alleges that Netflix hired away CFO Spencer Neumann when he was less than two years into a three-year contract. "Netflix has demonstrated a pattern of caring only about attracting and employing whoever Netflix wants, regardless of whether it violates the law along the way," Activision's lawyers allege. "Netflix's unlawful conduct is not trailblazing or innovative -- it is just reflective of Netflix's contempt for the law of the State of California." The suit notes that Netflix has been making forays into the video game market since 2017, making it a direct competitor with Activision.

Joshua Topolsky, writing at Input Mag: Movies are, by their very nature, good. Movies are one of the best things to have happened to the human race, probably ranking right up there in the top 5 with eating, sex, indoor plumbing, and music. We've probably all had formative experiences in one way or another around movies, and for many of us those experiences took place in a classic multiplex, surrounded by other like-minded film fans. But over the last two decades or so, the movie-going experience has been degraded by turns, both in terms of the physical reality of packing hundreds of people into a shared experience with a world of increasing distractions, and in the quality of the "blockbuster" fare being peddled by studios. This pandemic has made us all take a long, hard look at what has really been working for humanity and what hasn't, and I think the theater experience -- at least the massive, multi-screen one we've been living with -- might be dying at just the right time.

There are myriad contributors to this realization. For me, it starts with the basic reality that a truly epic film-watching experience can now be had in your house, with all the big-screen bombast and overwhelming audio that theaters have long touted as their domain alone. A fairly cheap, big-screen 4K TV, and an accompanying surround sound setup will put you right back in the theater recliner, except you have full control over the experience. Whether that means being able to pause for bathroom and snack breaks, having the option to just switch the film if you don't like what you're seeing, or being able to return to something over a period of time, watching at home can not only be as good as watching in a theater -- it can be better.

When Warner Bros. announced that "Wonder Woman 1984" would land on the streaming service HBO Max on Christmas, the same time it debuts in theaters, many expected it to be an isolated case in response to an unprecedented pandemic. From a report: Instead, the studio will deploy a similar release strategy for the next twelve months. In a surprising break from industry standards, Warner Bros.' entire 2021 slate -- a list of films that includes "The Matrix 4," Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" remake, Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical adaptation of "In the Heights," Sopranos prequel "The Many Saints of Newark," and "The Suicide Squad" -- will debut both on HBO Max and in theaters on their respective release dates. The shocking move to simultaneously release movies day-and-date underscores the crisis facing movie theaters and the rising importance of streaming services in the wake of a global health crisis that's decimated the film exhibition community.

Discovery is the latest media company to jump into the ever more crowded streaming wars. It will launch its streaming service Discovery+ on Jan. 4, 2021. The service will include a $4.99 per month ad-supported tier and a $6.99 per month ad-free tier. From a report: The lower $4.99 tier costs the same as NBCUniversal-owned Peacock's premium tier with ads. The ad-free $6.99 tier is on par with what Disney+ costs. Both offerings are much less expensive than WarnerMedia's HBO Max, which costs $14.99 a month, and Netflix, which raised its standard plan to $13.99 a month in Oct. Discovery is also partnering with Verizon, which will give 55 million customers up to 12 months of the ad-free Discovery+ plan for free, depending on their wireless plan with the carrier.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Verizon has agreed to bring FiOS fiber-to-the-home service to another 500,000 households in New York City by July 2023, settling a lawsuit over Verizon's failure to wire up the entire city as required in a franchise agreement. "Today's settlement will ensure that 500,000 households that previously lacked Verizon broadband access because of a corporate failure to invest in the necessary infrastructure will have the option of fiber broadband and create critical cost competition in areas where today only one provider exists," NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said in an announcement last week. The settlement's full text is available here.

New York City sued Verizon in March 2017, saying the company failed to complete a citywide fiber rollout by 2014 as required in its cable-TV franchise agreement. At the time the lawsuit was filed, Verizon said it had brought its fiber network to 2.2 million of NYC's 3.1 million households. The settlement will cover many but not all of the remaining residential housing units where FiOS is currently not available. As of July 2019, Verizon had brought FiOS to 2.7 million households, a number that will rise to 3.2 million households once Verizon complies with the settlement, de Blasio's office told Ars today. The city estimates there are now 3.45 million households, so about 250,000 will be left without FiOS. With the settlement providing coverage of over 90 percent of households, "this is part of our overall strategy to increase competition in the market," a de Blasio spokesperson told Ars.

Disney has digitally removed a lone crew member who accidentally appeared in the background of a recent Mandalorian episode. The Verge reports: The crew member, who the internet lovingly dubbed "Jeans Guy," appeared at the 18:54 mark in season 2, episode 4. Back flat against the wall, the crew member was not in the shot for very long, but they made an impact on Star Wars fans everywhere. People even made mock designs for action figures based on the crew member! You can't buy that kind of love. The Verge has reached out to Disney about the digital erasure. Upon revisiting the scene, however, the crew member is nowhere to be found, something I was worried would happen. The beauty of digital editing technology is that shows and movies can be worked on in homes around the world at a time when it's impossible to be in a shared office space. The downside is that accidental gaffes we've come to love are erased, lost forever in the digital wavelengths of time.

Reuters reports: David Prowse, the English actor who played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars films, has died aged 85, his management company said on Sunday...

The champion weightlifter-turned-actor starred as the body, but not the voice, of one of cinema's best-known villains. Director George Lucas opted to dub another voice onto Prowse's portrayal of the towering, masked antagonist Darth Vader in "Star Wars", "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi".
More from the Los Angeles Times: Born in Bristol, southwest England, in 1935, Prowse represented England in weightlifting at the Commonwealth Games in the 1950s before breaking into movies with roles that emphasized his commanding size, including Frankenstein's monster in a pair of horror films [and also in the 1967 comedy Casino Royale].

Director George Lucas saw Prowse in a small part in "A Clockwork Orange" and asked the 6-foot-6-inch actor to audition for the villainous Vader or the Wookiee Chewbacca in "Star Wars." Prowse later told the BBC he chose Darth Vader because "you always remember the bad guys."

Physically, Prowse was perfect for the part. His lilting English West Country accent was considered less ideal, and his lines were dubbed by actor James Earl Jones. Prowse was also known to a generation of British children as the Green Cross Code Man, a superhero in a series of road safety advertisements.
An anonymous reader writes: In 2011 he authored an autobiography titled Straight from the Force's Mouth (with a foreword by bodybuilder/Incredible Hulk actor Lou Ferrigno), and his differences with Lucasfilm are chronicled in a 2015 documentary about his career titled I Am Your Father. (You can watch its trailer on its page on Amazon Prime, though the full documentary is currently listed as "unavailable.")
Wikipedia lists some of Prose's other roles, including:

• A Minotaur in the Doctor Who serial The Time Monster
• The Black Knight in the Terry Gilliam film Jabberwocky
• A small role as Hotblack Desiato's bodyguard in the 1981 BBC TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Microsoft is in the early phases of rolling out its xCloud streaming service on mobile devices, but TVs are the next logical step. From a report:In an interview with The Verge, Xbox chief Phil Spencer has revealed we'll likely see an Xbox app appear on smart TVs over the next year. "I think you're going to see that in the next 12 months," said Spencer, when asked about turning the Xbox into a TV app. "I don't think anything is going to stop us from doing that." Spencer previously hinted at TV streaming sticks for Microsoft's xCloud service last month, and this latest hint suggests we might see similar hardware or an Xbox app for TVs during 2021. Microsoft is currently working on bringing xCloud to the web to enable it on iOS devices, and this work would naturally allow xCloud to expand to TVs, browsers, and elsewhere. Microsoft was previously working on a lightweight Xbox streaming device back in 2016, but it canceled the hardware. Microsoft has been testing the idea of streaming and TV sticks ever since the company originally demonstrated Halo 4 streaming from the cloud to Windows and Windows Phones all the way back in 2013.

thomst writes: Variety is reporting that uber-champion Ken Jennings will be the first of a series of guest hosts to substitute for the late, great Alex Trebek on trivia-maven game show Jeopardy! Executive Producer Mike Richards revealed that, when production resumes on November 30, Jennings will be the first of a series of guest hosts of the program, as the show begins its search for a permanent replacement for the much-beloved Trebek.

Odds are good that the "beauty pageant"-style guest host format will, in effect, be a series of auditions for the permanent position. Jennings, who is legendary for the number of games he won as a regular contestant, as well as for triumphing over fellow Tournament of Champions contestants, IBM's Deep Blue expert system, and two other "winning-est" players to be crowned Greatest of All Time, has hosted trivia game shows in the past, and has made no secret of his desire to take the Trebek's job full-time.

As the saying goes, "Stay tuned for more on this story!"