Mercedes starts charging a subscription for hardware that’s already in the car.
Written by Rayan Nadeem
Recently, Mercedes has started charging users for hardware that is already there on the basis of a monthly subscription. The subscription costs $1200 a year, and has left many in shock. However, this is only the beginning of an - arguably worrying - trend in the automotive industry.
The subscription called “Acceleration Increase” allows the motors in electric Mercedes’ to output 20-24% more and also increasing torque and reducing the time it takes for 0-60 mph acceleration. The subscription does not include any new hardware that gets shipped to you. Rather it just unlocks the capabilities of the car that were already there. As global trends in the industry have shown a decline in the number of new cars that are being bought, automotive manufacturers have started releasing subscriptions that have new software or hardware upgrades to bring in more revenue. From one perspective, it could be argued that this is not something that car producers should be doing, as the hardware is already there. However, from another point of view, this may be important as it allows the company to add hardware to every car, lower the costs, and then asking consumers to pay if they want to use it. This way, you won’t be paying for features you aren’t going to be using.
This makes sense in the long run. The average person in a city does not need extremely fast acceleration. Especially with all the traffic in most cities these days. The same goes for the other side. A person buying a car for racing does not generally need heated seats (BMW has started charging customers for some features, which include heated seats, in some of their car lineups. Read more here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62142208) , so why should they pay for it?
Whether you agree or disagree, this is the direction that the automotive industry has chosen, and there are great transformations coming: this is only the beginning.
Is jailbreaking dead?
Written by Muhammad Shah
When Apple released the first iPhone all the way back in 2008, it had no App Store meaning you could not download any of today’s most essential apps, such as Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp. Now enter a man named Jay Freeman. In early 2008, he released one of the most revolutionary apps in jailbreaking history: Cydia. Cydia is a package manager which allows users to install, well, packages. These allow the user to install .deb files which modify iOS to their liking. A by-product of this was being able to install apps as well, which in effect, made Cydia the first ever App Store and possibly what also prompted Apple to create an App Store. In fact, several jailbreak “tweaks” over the years have been copied by Apple and added into the main iOS experience. Examples of this include the basics such as Pull to Refresh, the redesigned notifications system from iOS 15, lock screen widgets and even iPad widgets in general.
Fast forward to November 2022, a public jailbreak has not been released for over two years and counting. Partially thanks to Apple’s new mitigations which have patched one of the main memory kernel exploits, which jailbreak developers had relied on previously, jailbreak development in general has slowed significantly. But in addition to this, with jailbreaking primarily being done to gain access to additional features and greater customisation, but with the latest jailbreak now being two whole iOS versions behind (only supporting up to iOS 14.8), users are actually starting to lose features which are available in the latest iOS 16 update. This has prompted many to update and therefore also lose the ability to jailbreak, and unfortunately it is currently predicted that less people than ever before are jailbreaking their devices. Not only this, the developers who work to release these jailbreaks are leaving the scene due to either being bought out by Apple or due to the lack of money in the job. In fact, one of the main jailbreak developers, CoolStar has recently announced their movement away from the jailbreak community, another big loss.
That brings me to the actual title of this article. Is jailbreaking actually dead now? Well, no matter how much the scene may have seemed to slow, new developers (most of whom are actually still in school), have joined the scene, including Nebula, who released the experimental Palera1n jailbreak for checkm8 compatible devices (iPhone 6s - iPhone X) between iOS 15.0 and 15.7.1. In addition to this, all devices between 15.0 and 15.1.1 are also able to use the sideloading tool TrollStore, which is an untethered app that allows the user to install any app via an .ipa file without revokes. These new tools have been incredibly important in driving the community forward. Unfortunately, it is not all good news. Due to mitigations made by Apple, developers are no longer directly able to access the Root File system on iPhones without a long workaround which has not yet been developed. As a result, all the jailbreaks so far are Rootless and this means developers will need to rewrite many tweaks in order to add compatibility.
Programming News
Written by Joel Swedensky
Firstly, programming language updates:
Rust 1.65.0 has been
released, bringing much-awaited features such as Generic Associated Types to
stabilisation, allowing previously impossible traits such as `LendingIterator` - an
`Iterator` that can give out references - to be available.
Python 3.11 is also here, giving big performance
boosts - the standard benchmark suite runs 25% faster (than 3.10). It also has better error
messages, including "notes" that can be added to `Exception`s. Finally, it now has support
for the `Self` type (inspired by other languages such as rust), to allow you to add type
annotations class methods which return...themselves.
C# 11 has come out,
with raw/utf8 string literals - and list patterns (in `switch` statements) -
In other news, Github Copilot - the AI tool, powered by OpenAI's GPT-3 released by Github in October last year - is being sued. Since is launch, the self-described "AI pair programmer" has been controversial, as Github trained it on public code across its platform - without, in many repositories, license to do so. > We contend that the defendants have violated the legal rights of a vast number of creators who posted code or other work under certain open-source licenses on GitHub
Many licenses frequently used in open source projects on Github - such as MIT, GPL, and Apache - require that the author is credited, which of course Copilot never does: it infamously copied the exact source code of Quake III's fast inverse square root function, including comments with swearing. The team has filed a class-action complaint in San Fransissco.
In happier news, Windows Subsystem
for Linux has reached version 1.0.0. WSL is a
tool from Microsoft that allows you to run Linux on Windows without needing a Virtual
Machine. Despite Windows being such a popular operating system, Linux is generally preferred
among developers, as it gives more control. WSL lets many developers have the best of both
worlds - allowing Linux to be run inside of Windows.
With the release of v1.0.0, WSL is now officially stable and even more accessible,
especially on Windows 11 where it is available in Microsoft Store.
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