News written by Matti Robinson (December, 2019)

The popular internet TV provider Sling TV has announced some updates to its subscription plans.

Sling TV is known for its à la carte-like offering of TV channels in addition to couple base plans. Now they've increased the range of channels on their plans as well as added more cloud storage, which unfortunately means also that you'll be paying more.

Both Sling Orange and Sling Blue plans go up $5 to $35/mo, although the first month is still $20. Combining the two has gone up $5 as well to $45/mo.

Other price increases include: $5 increase in Sports Extra for Sling Orange and Sling Blue combination subscribers (now $15/mo) while its still $10/mo for single plan owners, 4 Extras now costs $12/mo, and Total TV Deal remains $20 for single plan subscribers but goes up to $25 for subscribers of both Sling Orange and Sling Blue.

Now that the finances are out of the way, let's see what you'll get for the extra investment. Sling Blue includes now Fox News, MSNBC, and HLN. Sling Blue News Extra adds Fox Business Network.

Sling Blue Hollywood Extra will include soon FXM and FXX, and Sling Blue Heartland Extra is coming to Nat Geo Wild in the future.

The increased cloud storage means that you will have 10 hours of DVR service, and an additional $5 a month will buy you 50 hours more with Cloud DVR Plus.

A fairly new and reasonably popular messaging app ToTok has been found to come with spyware. Reports from the likes of The New York Times say that the app has been now been removed from app stores.

Official in the US have found that the app is loaded with hidden software that keeps tabs on its users. It is possibly the work of the government of the United Arab Emirates and mostly designed to look after its citizens.

According to the officials the app is tracking conversations, physical location of the user and even recording audio used by the device.

The app had become a household name in countries, many in the Middle East, with limited access to the leading app like WhatsApp. However, the app had, and still has, users in other regions as well, including the North America.

Now app has been removed from both Apple's App Store as well as Google's Play Store. While neither major platforms no longer distribute the app, the users will still be able to use it and will have to remove it manually if so desired – we definitely would.

One of Apple's most ambitious announcements was the new game service Apple Arcade. Perhaps only eclipsed by Hollywood-star-studded Apple TV+, the new service is aiming to attract gamers with a subscription service.

Apple is pricing both of the new subscription services very aggressively, and perhaps hoping to compensate the lack of content with a low price. For casual gamers this might be exactly the deal they are looking for.

Now the Cupertino company has made the $4.99/mo service even more affordable. If you are willing to commit and shell out year's worth of iPhone gaming funds, you'll see a nice 17% discount.

12-month subscription to Apple Arcade costs now only $49.99 and will save you a total of $10 over the year compared to the combined monthly fees.

Apple Arcade offers over a 100 titles that you can play on all (read: most) of your Apple devices, including iPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple TV and Mac computers.

Google begun shipping the latest Chrome 79 update around a week ago for both mobile and desktop users. The new update included improvements over things like notification about data breaches you might be affected by.

However, not everything went according to plan. While the update was meant to help protect users from data loss, the update itself has been losing users data.

Although the data in this case hasn't been acquired by any third parties, and there might be still a way out of this mess, Google has decided to pull the update.

The problem seems to affect Chrome's Android users and their data collected by other apps using Chrome's WebView feature.

Many apps use Chrome's simple WebView component to show content on the web for the app users. In Chrome 79 the WebView feature changed significantly.

The update was meant to transcode the old data to the new format. However, this process was buggy and the transfer hasn't been functioning as intended.

The data isn't lost entirely, though, and it is possible, maybe even likely, that Google engineers figure out the correct way to convert the lost data to the new format in a way that the user can still access it.

For now the update has been paused until the fix is in place.

The rise of Netflix, and emergence of competition from all sides, is a clear indication that no physical method of content delivery or even a traditional cable company can change what is the future.

However, it was the illegal content sharing that really got this all started. Much like Napster preceded Spotify, ThePirateBay and others preceded Netflix.

While it's probably true that P2P sharing has gone down since the popularization of Netflix, there are still massive networks that share copyrighted material.

Some of the largest were just busted by the Feds. This included streaming site iStreamItAll, which had more than 118 000 episodes of TV shows and over 11 000 movies, USA Today reports. According to the prosecutors this is more than what Netflix or its competitors like Hulu offer.

Another streaming site closed by the FBI was Jetflix, operated by the same duo: Luis Villarino and Darryl Polo.

Polo was using a script to download content from P2P networks and stream it to his customers from his servers in Canada. He admitted to have earned $1 million from the sites subscription fees, and has been involved in other piracy efforts, and pleaded guilty to both copyright money infringement and laundering charges.

One of the most talked about startups of 2018 was the controversial Magic Leap. The company's new type of augmented reality headset was hoped to be a revolutionary product in the VR/AR space.

The headset was small and some of the people that got to use an early prototype echoed superlatives everyone was hoping for in this stagnant phase in AR development.

While Oculus, PSVR and others were trying to push the boundaries of price, portability and specs, augmented reality was stuck at Microsoft's burdensome HoloLens implementations.

So where is the hyped Magic Leap headset? After all, it's been two years since the company unveiled the first generation of their futuristic goggles (pictured).

According to an ex-employee their expectations for sales were in the clouds and that did not pan out. Magic Leap hoped for more than 100 000 units sold while they only managed 6 000. An exposé by The Information, explains exactly how pear-shaped the company's past couple years have turned out.

In the previous few years mini-sized retro gaming consoles have become a thing. With tiny versions of NES and SNES as well as the original PlayStation and even Commodore 64, nearly everyone's favorite retro gaming rig was brought back to life in a tiny form factor.

Now, however, Retro Games Ltd. is bringing back Commodore 64 in its full-sized glory – with working keyboard and everything.

The new product, called TheC64, was available via Indiegogo, where it managed $100,000 in crowdfunding. Now The64 MicroComputer is shipping, just in time for some Christmas retro gaming.

It comes with a very authentic looking main frame with, as mentioned, working keyboard. There's also a joystick and a total of 64 games in either C64 or VIC-20 mode. It comes preloaded with classics like California Games, Paradroid and Boulder Dash.

You might know Nokia from the mobile revolution in the 90s and early 2000s. However, the company was producing all kinds of technology in its heyday – obviously the company is still very much alive, and even new Android sets are released under the brand.

In the 90s the Finnish technology powerhouse was producing some of the best monitors and TV sets around. Widescreen Nokia branded TVs might not have been the marvel that was the iconic, and fairly indestructible, Nokia 3310, but perhaps their new venture into TV business is going to rectify that.

See, Nokia has announced their first smart TV. The company is bringing their own 4K-enabled television with smart capabilities to the market.

The 55-inch Nokia LED-backlit TV is set to launch in India, and there's no word on whether Europe or USA will get the product at all.

In fact, Nokia has licensed their brand to an Indian electronics retailer Flipkart, which will be at this point the sole seller of these TVs.

If you are in India, and interested in buying a new smart TV, the Nokia has nice specs to go with the nostalgic brand. The 55-inch LED TV features UHD 4K resolution, Dolby Vision and HDR10 support, and is powered by a quad-core chip that runs Android TV operating system.