fidzu : geeks

2021: "Automotive Startup Canoo Debuts a Snub-Nosed Electric Pickup" 2025: Canoo "Goes Belly-Up After Moving to Texas" "Its production volumes paled in comparison to Canoo's rate of cash burn, which was substantial, with net losses in 2023 totaling just over $300 million..." reports AutoWeek. "It was able to deliver small batches of vans to a few customers, but apparently remained distant from anything approaching volume production." "Back in 2020, electric vehicle maker Canoo snagged a $2.4 billion valuation before it had shipped a single car," remembers SFGate. "Now, just months after yanking its headquarters from Los Angeles County to Texas, the company has gone belly-up." In its four-year span as a public company, Canoo battled investor lawsuits, Securities and Exchange Commission charges, executive departures and a mixed reception of its cars. Auto tech blogger Steven Symes recently likened Canoo's cargo-style van to an "eraser on wheels." "Canoo is the latest EV startup to go bankrupt after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as a shortcut to going public," notes TechCrunch. "Electric Last Mile Solutions was the first in June 2022. But since then, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Lion Electric, and Arrival all filed for different levels of bankruptcy protection in their various home countries." In the years since it went public, [Canoo] made a small number of its bubbly electric vans and handed them over to partners - some paying - willing to trial the vehicles. The U.S. Postal Service, Department of Defense, and NASA all have or had Canoo vehicles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 Jan 2025 6:34pm GMT

TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So "Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online." The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews "listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550." Another example from The New York Times: An information technology engineer, Mr. Gustab listed his iPhone 15 Pro with TikTok downloaded onto it for $3,000 on Facebook Marketplace. That's about three times the cost of a brand-new iPhone 16 Pro. On Thursday night, he had an offer for $1,200, still more than almost every brand-new iPhone and nearly twice as much as a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro without TikTok. Business Insider reports the search term iPhone TikTok "yielded more than 45,000 results" on eBay...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 Jan 2025 5:34pm GMT

Slashdot reader jenningsthecat writes: 3D printer manufacturer Bambu Labs has faced a storm of controversy and protest after releasing a security update which many users claim is the first step in moving towards an HP-style subscription model. Bambu Labs responded that there's misinformation circulating online, adding "we acknowledge that our communication might have contributed to the confusion." Bambu Labs spokesperson Nadia Yaakoubi did "damage control", answering questions from the Verge: Q: Will Bambu publicly commit to never requiring a subscription in order to control its printers and print from them over a home network? A: For our current product line, yes. We will never require a subscription to control or print from our printers over a home network... Q: Will Bambu publicly commit to never putting any existing printer functionality behind a subscription? Yes... Bambu's site adds that the security update "is beta testing, not a forced update. The choice is yours. You can participate in the beta program to help us refine these features, or continue using your current firmware." Hackaday notes another wrinkle: This follows the original announcement which had the 3D printer community up in arms, and quickly saw the new tool that's supposed to provide safe and secure communications with Bambu Lab printers ripped apart to extract the security certificate and private key... As the flaming wreck that's Bambu Lab's PR efforts keeps hurtling down the highway of public opinion, we'd be remiss to not point out that with the security certificate and private key being easily obtainable from the Bambu Connect Electron app, there is absolutely no point to any of what Bambu Lab is doing. The Verge asked Bambu Labs about that too: Q: Does the private key leaking change any of your plans? No, this doesn't change our plans, and we've taken immediate action. Bambu Labs had said their security update would "ensure only authorized access and operations are permitted," remembers Ars Technica. "This would, Bambu suggested, mitigate risks of 'remote hacks or printer exposure issues' and lower the risk of 'abnormal traffic or attacks.'" This was necessary, Bambu wrote, because of increases in requests made to its cloud services "through unofficial channels," targeted DDOS attacks, and "peaks of up to 30 million unauthorized requests per day" (link added by Bambu). But Ars Technica also found some skepticism online: Repair advocate Louis Rossmann, noting Bambu's altered original blog post, uploaded a video soon after, "Bambu's Gaslighting Masterclass: Denying their own documented restrictions"... suggesting that the company was asking buyers to trust that Bambu wouldn't enact restrictive policies it otherwise wrote into its user agreements. And Ars Technica also cites another skeptical response from a video posted by open source hardware hacker and YouTube creator Jeff Geerling: "Every IoT device has these problems, and there are better ways to secure things than by locking out access, or making it harder to access, or requiring their cloud to be integrated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 Jan 2025 4:34pm GMT

The Linux kernel has become such an integral, core part of pretty much all aspects of the technology world, and corporate contributions to the kernel make up such a huge chunk of the kernel's ongoing development, it's easy to forget that some parts of the kernel are still maintained by some lone person in Jacksonville, Nebraska, or whatever. Sadly, we were reminded of this today when the sole maintainer of a few DRM (no, not the bad kind) announced he can no longer maintain the gud, mi0283qt, panel-mipi-dbi, and repaper drivers. Remove myself as maintainer for gud, mi0283qt, panel-mipi-dbi and repaper. My fatigue illness has finally closed the door on doing development of even moderate complexity so it's sad to let this go. ↫ Noralf Trønnes There must be quite a few obscure parts of the Linux kernel that are of no interest to the corporate world, and thus remain maintained by individuals in their free time, out of some personal need or perhaps a sense of duty. If one such person gives up their role as maintainer, for whatever reason, you better hope it's not something your workflow relies, because if no new maintainer is found, you will eventually run into trouble. I hope Trønnes gets better soon, and if not, that someone else can take over from him to maintain these drivers. The gud driver seems like a really neat tool for homebrew projects, and it'd be sad to see it languish as the years go by.

25 Jan 2025 11:29am GMT

Basically, this seems to mean applications will no longer be allowed to limit themselves to phone size when running on devices with larger screens, like tablets. Other tidbits in this first beta include predictive back support for 3-button navigation, support for the Advanced Professional Video codec from Samsung, among other things. It's still quite early in the release process, so more is sure to come, and some things might not make it to the final release at all.

25 Jan 2025 11:03am GMT

3D-printed gun parts are worth real money on the black market.

24 Jan 2025 11:05pm GMT

The US is currently the WHO's biggest funder, contributing about 18% of its budget.

24 Jan 2025 10:27pm GMT

Nvidia last dropped Game Ready driver support for older GPUs in 2021.

24 Jan 2025 10:13pm GMT

Snowdrop OS was born of my childhood curiosity around what happens when a PC is turned on, the mysteries of bootable disks, and the hidden aspects of operating systems. It is a 16-bit real mode operating system for the IBM PC architecture. I designed and developed this homebrew OS from scratch, using only x86 assembly language. I have created and included a number of utilities, including a file manager, text editor, graphical applications, BASIC interpreter, x86 assembler and debugger. I also ported one of my DOS games to it. After all, what kind of an operating system doesn't have games? ↫ Snowdrop OS' website It seems like every talented programmer will, at some point, think to themselves: I should write my own operating system. Most of these efforts strand pretty quickly - and that's fine! - but Sebastian Mihai's effort did not, and it has grown into a very capable operating system, especially given the constraints stemming from the chosen architecture - 16bit realmode x86 - and programming language - x86 assembly. Snowdrop OS is an incredibly impressive labour of love, and comes with a unique extra I haven't seen before: a daily development log covering over 600 days of development. No, this won't take over the world, but I love that is exists. More of this, please.

23 Jan 2025 12:41am GMT

We'd like to raise awareness about the rsync security release version 3.4.0-1 as described in our advisory ASA-202501-1. An attacker only requires anonymous read access to a vulnerable rsync server, such as a public mirror, to execute arbitrary code on the machine the server is running on. Additionally, attackers can take control of an affected server and read/write arbitrary files of any connected client. Sensitive data can be extracted, such as OpenPGP and SSH keys, and malicious code can be executed by overwriting files such as ~/.bashrc or ~/.popt. We highly advise anyone who runs an rsync daemon or client prior to version 3.4.0-1 to upgrade and reboot their systems immediately. As Arch Linux mirrors are mostly synchronized using rsync, we highly advise any mirror administrator to act immediately, even though the hosted package files themselves are cryptographically signed. All infrastructure servers and mirrors maintained by Arch Linux have already been updated.

16 Jan 2025 12:00am GMT

Dear blog. This post is inspired by an old friend of mine who has been writing these for the past few years. I meant to do this for a while now, but ended up not preparing anything, so this post is me writing it from memory. There's likely stuff I forgot, me being gentle with myself I'll probably just permit myself to complete this list the next couple of days. I hate bragging, I try to not depend on external validation as much as possible, and being the anti-capitalist that I am, I try to be content with knowing I'm …

31 Dec 2024 12:00am GMT

A eulogy for the greatest dog of all, and a friend I will never forget.

24 Dec 2024 12:00am GMT