Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel wants to open a formal Notice of Inquiry into the impact of internet data caps on consumers, according to an FCC document spotted by Ars Technica. The regulator will also consider "taking action" to ensure that data caps don't harm competition or impact access to broadband services, according to the letter.
"Internet access is no longer nice-to-have, but need-to-have for everyone, everywhere," Rosenworcel said in a statement. "When we need access to the internet, we aren’t thinking about how much data it takes to complete a task, we just know it needs to get done. It’s time the FCC take a fresh look at how data caps impact consumers and competition."
With the Notice of Inquiry, the FCC would "seek comment to better understand why the use of data caps continues to persist despite increased broadband needs of consumers and providers' demonstrated technical ability to offer unlimited data plans," according to the letter.
Rosenworcel would be unable to take any action on data caps at the moment, though. The FCC currently has just four members (two Democrats and two Republicans), as the Senate refused to confirm President Biden's first nominee, Gigi Sohn, and she subsequently withdrew her name for consideration. The White House has since nominated telecom attorney Anna Gomez, who appears to have the support of the telecom industry. A nomination hearing for Gomez is scheduled for this Thursday, June 22nd.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, broadband provider Comcast temporarily removed data caps, but it continues to impose a 1.2TB data cap on certain contracts in some US regions. Charter's deal with the FCC to not impose data caps on its Spectrum service (struck when it acquired Time Warner) ended this year, but the company recently said it has "no plans to [restart data caps] when the condition sunsets."
Along with the proposed Notice of Inquiry, the FCC has opened a new portal to allow consumers to share how data caps have affected them (on fixed or wireless broadband networks) at fcc.gov/datacapstories. That will help the FCC determine how data caps impact access for everyone "including those with disabilities, low-income consumers, and historically disadvantaged communities, and access to online education, telehealth and remote work," the Commission wrote.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-fcc-is-preparing-to-take-a-fresh-look-at-internet-data-caps-084245899.html?src=rss
Seemingly overnight, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, went from cryptocurrency wunderkind to wanted for questioning by the FBI. After years of unfettered success, the walls of SBF's blockchain empire came crumbling down around him as his tricky financial feats failed and his generalized lack of accounting brought increasing scrutiny by regulators. In SBF: How the FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto’s Very Bad Good Guy, veteran crypto reporter Brady Dale provides a scintillating and clarifying narrative of the entire FTX/Alameda Ventures saga. In the excerpt below, we glimpse in at the immediate aftermath of FTX's sudden insolvency.
When I wrote in Chapter 1, “I am drowning in Sam,” I was here, at this point in the story. I was then. I still am, but the tide is going out. I’m not back on land yet, but I know if I rest and I don’t fight it, the land will find me. I don’t need to find the land. Unlike SBF after CoinDesk’s Ian Allison released his post about Alameda’s balance sheet, I can see the shore from where I am.
In late November and early December SBF would not leave the public eye. He was in magazines. He was in the New York Times. He was doing interviews on YouTube. He was on Twitter Spaces.
YouTube gadfly Coffeezilla was chasing him.
NFT influencers were chasing him. TV reporters were chasing him.
A goofy token shill I will not dignify by naming chased him.
Everyone thought if they could just get one more interview from him, it would make sense.
They were all playing into Sam’s hands. Many who felt betrayed believed that his media tour was working to his benefit, that he might actually get away with losing $8 billion (or was it $10 billion?) in customer money. They saw large media companies as complicit in helping to burnish his image.
But then he was arrested, and as I write this, he’s sitting in the sick-bay of an overcrowded prison in the island nation his company had recently made his home.
Looking back on it, there is not a lot of value to say about all these many appearances. We were all just tea bags soaking in the flavors of a collective stew we had boiled up together, a swirling potion of shifting sadness, outrage, intrigue, schadenfreude, and mockery.
SBF appeared in many places, but to my mind, these were the key media appearances:
Axios interview on Nov. 29. A few pieces were published with different parts of the interview. Where he first said he was down to $100,000.
The first recording from Tiffany Fong’s phone call with SBF, released on YouTube Nov. 29.
The New York Times Dealbook Summit, Nov. 30.
Good Morning America, Dec. 1.
New York Magazine interview on its Intelligencer site, Dec. 1.
The Scoop podcast, Dec. 5.
There were others. People really like the grilling scam vigilante Coffeezilla gave him, too. Eventually, though, listening to these things was like watching one of those YouTube videos of skateboarding accidents: it was a lot of the same thing over and over.
He was sorry, there was an accounting artifact, he should have had better risk management, he shouldn’t have given up his company, etc., etc., etc.
Were anyone to go through the above accounts and more from that month in a two-day marathon session like I did, I think they would eventually discern a strategy. What appeared to be a series of open conversations had become, to my ears, talking points.
I wrote the same for Axios at the time, but I don’t actually think the talking points are all that interesting anymore now that he’s been arrested. At the end of December 2022, he would be back in his family home, under house arrest, his passport taken, and wearing an ankle monitor. Once those handcuffs went on, the public relations campaign became irrelevant because it was something designed to prepare himself if his lawyers succeeded in keeping him out of jail.
As I wrote in the beginning, as new facts and circumstances arise, the set of possible explanations and futures shrink. Before the handcuffs, it seemed almost likely he might get away with the company’s failure. Once he went to jail, it’s hard to imagine how we ever even saw that possibility.
Because they failed to keep him out of jail, the talking points matter very little.
Except one point, which I think is worth highlighting.The fact that Alameda was drawing customer funds from FTX to cover losses on investments hasn’t been verified by a court yet, but it has been alleged in multiple accounts by different government organizations who seem to have had a look at the books.
That cash (in cryptocurrency form) had moved from FTX to Alameda to meet margin calls, make loans, make investments, and even to make political donations. This is, in my estimation, considerably more nefarious than the way SBF described the hole’s origins in his media tour.
In all of his appearances, he described Alameda as having an excessive margin position. For example, in New York Mag, he said:
A client on FTX put on a very large margin position. FTX fucked up in allowing that position to be put on and in underestimating, in fact, the size of the position itself.That margin position blew out during the extreme events over the last few weeks. I feel really bad about that. And it was a large fuckup of risk analysis and risk attention and, you know, it was with an account that was given too much trust, and not enough skepticism.
In other words, FTX let Alameda’s bets on FTX get too big.We were to imagine Alameda was, I don’t know, 12X long $500 million on bitcoin and 20X long $200 million in ether or something.
All secured by the ftt token. And ftt went bad, and now they were out a bunch of money.
When FTX first fell apart, I went into Slack and explained my understanding of the whole debacle to one of my coworkers this way:
Step 1.
Launch a trading desk. Make piles.
Step 2.
Decide you want to make more piles, so open an exchange that prints money off retail trades and use that money to lend to trading desk.
Step 3.
Lend retail money to trading desk in hopes of quadrupling all gains.
Step 4.
Trading desk loses borrowed money.
Step 5.
[Surprised face emoji]
But SBF was trying to spin it as if it had all stayed inside the house. It was just big bets, but funds hadn’t left FTX.This is still bad, but more negligent, less outright theft.
Jason Choi had been with Spartan Capital when FTX was raising money, and he’d declined to invest because he didn’t like the Alameda/ FTX relationship. He explained all this on Twitter after the exchange collapsed.We spoke before complaints had been made against SBF, and I asked him whether he thought it mattered if Alameda had an outsized margin position or had taken customer funds out of the exchange.
“I think functionally they are the same,” he said. “It implies that Alameda is able to run things into seriously negative positions.”
In other words, in terms of what people have lost, each outcome arrives at the same place.
But it does matter in terms of how to understand the decisions made. If funds were taken out and handed to Alameda to use elsewhere, people had to green-light those moves, knowing that they were against the terms of service and against the many assurances that the company had made to the public and their users.
It’s not negligent. It’s willful. Legality aside, it just feels different ethically.
However, for what it’s worth, when SBF and I last spoke he stuck by this explanation: the hole in FTX’s balance sheet was from a margin position Alameda took out. It had failed to adequately hedge, and it had gotten much too long on the wrong collateral.
Before he was arrested, that’s how he described the problem. That’s still how he describes it. He agreed, when we spoke, that it would be different if FTX had been sending actual customer assets to Alameda to use in other ways, but he says that wasn’t happening.
The government is claiming that it did happen, and to do so it’s drawing attention to loans made to SBF and other cofounders, loans they used to make venture investments, to buy stock in Robinhood, political donations, and to purchase real estate.
This points to a part of the story that I didn’t really understand until the complaints started coming out.
When it’s said that someone is a “billionaire,” that doesn’t mean that they have billions of dollars in cash. It doesn’t mean, necessarily, that they can even spend that much money.That doesn’t even mean that they can access billions of dollars in cash, or even many millions.
If someone’s billionaire status is tied up in a stake in a private company, it can be very difficult to turn that value into spendable money. If their status is tied up largely in thinly traded, extremely new crypto tokens, it might be even harder.
In the complaints by the SEC and the CFTC and the DoJ, they allege loans from the Samglomerate, using customer funds, to enable investments, property purchases, political donations, and more. All of these things take actual cash. SBF and his cadre had very high net worth, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn’t really have access to that much cash until those complaints came out.
Of course SBF, Wang, Singh, and others could borrow money somewhere, and maybe more sophisticated readers than me presumed it was borrowed from banks. Or maybe it was borrowed from some of the new crypto lenders (many of which fell into dire straits). But these various agencies allege something else: the funds were borrowed from FTX customers. And the customers didn’t know. Further, they had no upside. Only downside.
And the downside is here now.
“I thought at the time and still do think that, the size of those loans was substantially less than the profit, than like the liquid trading profit that Alameda had made,” he told me in December. In other words, he denies that the loans were made using FTX user funds.
The whole story of what happened is confusing and dripping in finance jargon and involves a level of mathematics few of us have contemplated recently. It may be that SBF’s story here has been a bet that he was smart enough to cast a spell and convince us all that all the mistakes were only made inside the casino.
And if he had done that well enough, the sting of the error might fade, and if he evaded an arrest and conviction, he might be able to rehabilitate himself in the public eye and apply his considerable gifts, once again.
He might still have won, but then he was arrested.
So in that case, these appearances might really have just been about enjoying that last moment in the spotlight. For some, it’s better to be hated than ignored. But it’s also worth noting that he hasn’t given up on this story.
As I wrote in the prologue: he doesn’t believe the evidence of crimes is there. He seems as eager to reopen the books at FTX and Alameda. He wants everyone to get from 20 percent of the story to 80 or 90 percent. And maybe we will. And maybe the fact that he seems to want that as much as anyone will prove to be a sign that he was right.
But trust me, if you haven’t seen the many media appearances of November and December 2022, you don’t need to. This chapter gives more than you need to know about what he had to say before they put him in a Bahamas jail.
Sources Referenced
“Exclusive: Sam Bankman-Fried says he’s down to $100,000,” Shen, Lucinda, Axios, Nov. 29, 2022.
“Sam Bankman-Fried Interviewed Live About the Collapse of FTX,” New York Times Events,YouTube, Nov. 30, 2022.
“FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried denies ‘improper use’ of customer funds,” Stephanopoulos, George, Good Morning America, Dec. 1, 2022.
“Sam Bankman-Fried’s First Interview After FTX Collapse,” Fong, Tiffany,
YouTube, posted Nov. 29, 2022
“What Does Sam Bankman-Fried Have to Say for Himself? An interview with the disgraced CEO,”Wieczner, Jen, New York Magazine, Dec. 1, 2022.
“2-hour sit-down with Sam Bankman-Fried on the FTX scandal,” Quinton, Davis, and Frank, Chaparro, The Scoop podcast,The Block, Dec. 5, 2022.
Jason Choi, interview, mobile, Dec. 11, 2022.
“The SBF media blitz’s key messages,” Dale, Brady, Axios, Dec. 8, 2022.
Interview, Sam Bankman-Fried, phone call with spokesperson, Dec. 30, 2022.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-sbf-brady-dale-wiley-ftx-143033761.html?src=rss
Ever since taking the pandemic-soaked world by storm in 2020, the unique battle royale platformer Fall Guyshas added new gameplay elements and released on new platforms. Now, the developers are throwing a full-blown level editor into the mix.
Fall Guys Creativelaunches on May 10th and is part of Season 4 of the viral multiplayer title. The level editor lets you create legitimate multiplayer courses (called Rounds) using a wide variety of iconic items, enemies and obstacles. Developer Mediatonic encourages players to use the tools to “finally design the Round of your dreams”.
Once you make a level and test it out, you can share it with friends via a private lobby or share it on a larger scale with the entire community. The developer says they will also curate lists of its favorite player-designed levels to boost their popularity, housing them in a Playlists tab within the Show Selector.
To show off what’s possible with these creation tools, Mediatonic is dropping over 50 new Rounds designed by professional creators but using the toolkit available to regular players. This seems similar to how Super Mario Maker 2 handled things with all of its many tutorial levels. You’ll get 20 levels on May 10th, with the remainder releasing at various points throughout the season.
Season 4 is not just about the level editor, though that’s the primary new feature. Players will also find plenty of new costumes, like a neat-looking low polygon outfit, and new items at the store. Mediatonic is also teasing future collaborations, but has not offered any details. This likely refers to new branded costumes. The title has already featured costumes inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog, Doom, Ghost of Tsushima and other iconic titles.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/fall-guys-level-creation-tools-arrive-on-may-10th-192027104.html?src=rss
When looking back at past console generations, the conversation often turns to graphical fidelity. And for good reason. Who could, for example, forget the first time they left the confines of Kokiri Forest for the wide expanse of Hyrule Field in The Ocarina of Time? It was a moment where you felt like you were experiencing the future of gaming.
But as video games have become more complex, so too have the peripherals we use to play them. Over on Engadget’s YouTube channel, Senior Producer Brandon Quintana recently took a look back at the evolution of console controllers, tracking their development all the way from the 1970s to the modern day. It’s an overview that includes everything from the Coleco Telstar to the PlayStation 5 and its Dual Sense controller.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-evolution-of-video-game-controllers-from-telstar-to-the-ps5s-dualsense-170415428.html?src=rss
Microsoft has expanded the Xbox Game Pass family plan to six more countries. Folks in Chile, Hungary, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden can now sign up for a membership that allows up to five friends and family members in the same country to access Game Pass Ultimate features via a single subscription. This is the first expansion of the Xbox Game Pass Friends & Family plan, which Microsoft debuted in Colombia and Ireland last summer.
There are a few things worth keeping in mind if you're in one of those countries and you're interested in the plan, which offers access to a library of hundreds of PC, console and cloud games and has other benefits. The primary account holder will be able to convert their existing plan based on the monetary value of the time they have left. A full month of an Ultimate subscription equates to 18 days of Xbox Game Pass Friends & Family access, for instance. People who are invited to join a group can't convert their remaining Game Pass time, however. Those with an Xbox All Access payment plan can't join a friends and family group.
Pricing varies by country. A good rule of thumb is that, based on the conversion rates, a regular Game Pass Ultimate subscription costs about three-fifths as much as the family plan. Given the US Game Pass Ultimate pricing, the family plan costs the equivalent of $25 per month. Split that cost between five people, and that's just $5 per month per person for Game Pass Ultimate access — around the same price as a single full game purchase each per year.
There's no sign of Xbox Game Pass Friends & Family plan coming to North America, the UK or elsewhere more broadly just yet. However, it's clear that Microsoft is interested in getting as many people as possible to sign up for Game Pass in one way or another, so it's likely the plan will expand to more territories down the line.
Microsoft's set to make an AI-related announcement today at 1pm ET, but it will not be streaming the keynote to the public. Not to worry, though, we're here at the event in Redmond and will be liveblogging all the news the company is sharing today. After Google unveiled its ChatGPT rival Bard yesterday, Microsoft revealed it had been planning today's event all along, without disclosing many details beyond telling us to expect information about "exciting projects." Thanks to a tweet from OpenAI's Sam Altman, though, we can at least guess that generative AI is on the agenda, if not the star of the show. We'll be starting this liveblog around 12:30pm ET, with myself (Cherlynn Low) on text and our head of video Brian Oh taking pictures. See you soon!
It's now much simpler to participate in a Microsoft Teams meeting if you have hearing issues. Microsoft has introduced a sign language view that lets people who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as their interpreters, prioritize each other during meetings. Those video feeds will remain in consistent locations, at sizes large enough for sign language to be visible. You'll see as many as two other signers throughout a meeting, and video will remain large even when slides or screen shares are visible.
The view also makes preferences "sticky" thanks to a new accessibility settings pane, Microsoft says. You won't have to worry about pinning interpreters or enabling captions every time a Teams call begins. You can jump directly into a meeting instead of tweaking options.
The sign language view and accessibility pane are currently available only through a Public Preview available on a user-by-user basis. They'll roll out to all commercial and government customers in the "coming weeks," Microsoft says. It could take a while before everyone can use the functionality. Still, this promises to greatly simplify meetings for anyone with limited hearing — and might make Teams more viable if alternatives like Zoom (which only recently added support for interpreters) aren't up to the task.
Disney CEO Bob Chapek has told division leads in a letter that the company is implementing cost cutting measures in part to help it "achieve the important goal of reaching profitability for Disney+ in fiscal 2024." Based on the internal memo obtained by CNBC, Disney is planning to limit additions to its workforce through a targeted hiring freeze. It will still welcome new people for the "most critical, business-driving positions," but all other roles are on hold for now. Chapek has also admitted in his letter that Disney "anticipate[s] some staff reductions" as it looks at all aspects of its business to find places where it can save money.
Chapek's letter comes after Disney reported less-than-stellar earnings for the previous quarter. While Disney+ welcomed 12.1 million new subscribers for the company's fourth fiscal quarter ending on October 1st, the company's operating loss for streaming jumped from $0.8 billion to $1.5 billion. The company expects its losses to taper off going forward, thanks to its streaming services' price hikes and the launch of an ad-supported tier on Disney+. In his memo, Chapek also reiterated he is "confident in [the company's] ability to reach the targets [it has] set," but Disney clearly intends to tighten its belt until it hits its goals.
Disney is but one of the many companies imposing a hiring freeze due to the economic downturn. When Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Facebook parent company is laying off 11,000 employees, he also said that it's extending its hiring freeze through the first quarter of 2023. Amazon froze hiring at its corporate offices earlier this month, as well.
Twenty years ago this month, Konami released Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, an expanded reissue of MGS2: Sons of Liberty. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to revisit one of the most important games of the 21st century, now is the perfect time. Over the weekend, modder oct0xor released The Substance of Subsistence, a mod that adds a third-person camera to Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece.
If it’s been a while since you played MGS2, you may have forgotten the game employed an overhead camera that was a holdover from Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear Solid. It wasn’t until 2006’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, the expanded rerelease of Snake Eater,that Hideo Kojima and Konami implemented a proper third-person camera. That bit of history is also where the mod's name comes from, with The Substance of Subsistence referring to the expanded editions of each game.
Adding a new perspective to MGS2 was no easy task. "The code to have a normal third-person camera was never present in the game, and in order to implement it, I had to reverse engineer and rewrite many things in the game engine," oct0xor told PC Gamer. You can learn more about the work that was involved in a developer diary oct0xor shared a few months back.
You can find instructions on how to install the Substance of Subsistence on Github. The tricky part is finding a copy of the game for PC. Konami delisted Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3from GOG and other digital storefronts over a “temporary” licensing issue in 2021. In July, the company said it was still working on resolving the dispute but did not provide a timeline for when the games would be available to purchase again.
Following a leak last week, Microsoft has unveiled the Game Pass Friends & Family in Ireland, offering the same benefits of Game Pass Ultimate for you and four others at €22 ($22) per month. That's less than double the Game Pass Ultimate price for one person (€13), and works out to just €4.40 ($4.40) a month each. Better still, it's not limited to family and the only restriction is that all four members have to be in the same country.
So far, it's come to just two countries, but that might change soon. "Currently we are piloting this plan in Colombia and the Republic of Ireland. Future countries / regions might be added in the next months," Microsoft wrote in a FAQ.
Users in those countries with an existing Game Pass Ultimate plan will see their remaining days pro-rated, basically according to the price difference. That means for 30 days of Game Pass Ultimate you'll get 18 days of Game Pass Friends & family, while 30 days of Xbox Game Pass or Live Gold gets you 12 days. 30 days of EA Play nets 6 days of Game Pass Friends & Family.
In the US, Xbox Game Pass or PC Game Pass costs $10 per month, while Game Pass Ultimate is $15 with multiplayer capabilities. The Game Pass Friends & Family is likely to cost around $25 stateside, according to The Verge, or $5 per month per person. On top of multiplayer, Ultimate users can also access Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Live and more.
