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 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.

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.

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."

Samsung is starting the year off with a push to expand the reach of its chips. The company today announced Exynos Auto V9, its first auto-branded processor under the Exynos umbrella, as it looks to gain traction in the in-car infotainment space. From a report: The company says the Exynos Auto V9 chip is designed to power in-vehicle infotainment systems, with support for multiple displays. The South Korean tech company said it has partnered with Audi to power the car maker's next generation in-vehicle system, which is expected to hit the road by 2021. As for the specs, the Exynos Auto V9 is based on 8-nm process technology and features the first generation variant of the recently unveiled Cortex-A76 CPU cores (which clocks up to 2.1 GHz), and ARM Mali G76 GPU.

The announcement highlights Samsung's growing ambition to diversify its chips business as revenue from its mobile division drops. In Q3 of last year, revenue from Samsung's mobile division was down by 10 percent. At the same time, the company's decades-old chip business is growing rapidly.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Speaking with Bloomberg last week, Sony's sensor division boss Satoshi Yoshihara said Sony plans to ramp up production of chips to power front and rear 3D cameras in late summer, responding to demand from multiple smartphone manufacturers. Though Yoshihara is geeked about the potential for augmented reality applications, the most intriguing aspect of this new tech would appear to be a better form of face identification than we currently have. The Face ID approach that Apple first brought into use on the iPhone X -- and others like Xiaomi, Huawei, and Vivo have since emulated -- works by projecting out a grid of invisible dots and detecting the user's face by the deformations of that grid in 3D space. Sony's 3D sensor, on the hand, is said to deploy laser pulses, which, much like a bat's echolocation, creates a depth map of its surroundings by measuring how long a pulse takes to bounce back. Sony's sensor chief argues this produces more detailed models of users' faces, plus it apparently works from as far away as five meters (16 feet).

MikeChino writes: Is Apple branching out into clever clothing? On January 1, 2019, the tech giant was awarded an original design patent for "Fabric." First filed for in September 2016, the "Fabric" patent shows a swatch of a ridged material in gray, dark gray, and white to represent contrasting appearances. Apple has filed for several patents in the last few years related to combining technology with fabric, but this is the first glimpse we've had at what that fabric might look like. The "smart" fabric could sense environmental changes, warn the wearer of various events, and/or respond to pressure and touch.

As Dwell notes, "Apple's other fabric-related patents have involved a jacket that sends tactile or audible signals to visually and hearing impaired users -- so they can walk around without a cane or guide dog -- and a force-sensing fabric with interwoven circuits that could be used in a glove to track a wearer's vital signs and control devices wirelessly."