Technology

Owners of older Honda and Acura models started up their cars on New Year’s Day, only to find that their vehicles turned into time machines, according to a report from Jalopnik. Instead of seamlessly transitioning to the year 2022, cars’ clocks jumped 20 years back in time, and Honda says a fix could be months away. My @Honda 2007 CR-V clock now useless in 2022; resets to 2:00 MST on 1/1/2002 after every startup. 32-bit signed integer overflow of yymmddHHMM? Would unsigned int fix it? This is time-critical. 😉 Thousands of us need a software update! pic.twitter.com/BSGCaxnMmx — Sumner Hushing (@_______shushing) January 4, 2022 As spotted by Jalopnik, reports of digital clock issues have been popping up in Honda and Acura forums all over the internet, with the issue only affecting older vehic...

The James Webb Telescope (JWST) has finished unfolding its primary mirror, ending a series of major deployments that took place over the span of two weeks. All of those deployments needed to go perfectly in order for the massive space telescope, which was decades in the making, to function. The JWST has two primary mirror panels on either side that it will use to collect infrared light from the distant Universe. Each of them consists of three gold-plated hexagonal mirrors. Today, the rightmost wing was successfully unfurled, just one day after the leftmost wing was deployed. Now that both sides have been locked into place, this completes the array of 18 mirrors that makes up the 21-foot-wide JWST. The JWST launched into space on Christmas Day, and since the full-size mirror was too large t...

Two years ago, on the floor of CES 2020, there was a lot of buzz about a chip — not the latest AMD or Intel announcement, but a new alliance of major tech companies that called itself Project Connected Home over IP, or CHIP for short. Its promise was to develop an open-source smart home standard that would make every connected home device work together, simply and securely, regardless of who made them. The buzz was: “That’s never gonna happen.” Fast forward to CES 2022 (yeah, we all skipped 2021) and Matter — as CHIP is now called — was the darling of the show, with a full dance card and a line of admirers that stretched to the virtual Starbucks. Practically every smart home device announcement this week had the tagline “and we announce our support for Matter.” Plus, the infrastructure gai...

California could soon end the perks it has been giving to residents with rooftop solar on their homes, even as it pledges to move entirely to clean electricity. While the move might seem counterintuitive, environmental advocates are divided on whether the changes will help the state meet its climate goals and benefit lower-income residents or harm both efforts. They’re split on a proposal made last month by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) that would slash solar incentives for customers of investor-owned utilities, implement a new monthly fee to connect solar customers to the grid, and create a $600 million fund to help underrepresented communities gain access to solar panels and batteries. Industry and some conservation groups say the changes would end California’s solar ...

Spin, the e-scooter company owned by Ford, announced a major restructuring Friday where it will pull out of “nearly all open permit markets.” More specifically, Spin is beginning to exit “a few” US markets, Germany, and Portugal, and it is “projecting” to close down in Spain as soon as February. Moving forward, Spin says it will focus on “limited vendor markets,” where only a designated number of scooter companies are allowed to compete in a location, in the US, Canada, and the UK. Spin sees “double the revenue per vehicle” in limited vendor markets, according to Ben Bear, Spin’s CEO. “This decision to restructure impacts roughly a quarter of our staff” “This decision to restructure impacts roughly a quarter of our staff,” Bear said, which appears to mean they will be laid off. Bear said S...

Scott Rosenberg, a prominent Roku executive who helped launch the Roku Channel, is stepping down after nearly a decade at one of the largest streaming names in the business. Rosenberg is currently SVP and general manager of platform business at Roku, a title he’s held since 2017, according to a press release. In addition to his role in the development of the Roku Channel, which is now home to Roku’s original programming, Rosenberg created and scaled the streamer’s advertising business, Roku spokesperson Sarah Novatt confirmed to The Verge. According to the company, Rosenberg was a key player in Roku’s 2017 IPO. Other notable oversight roles listed on Rosenberg’s LinkedIn include partnerships, revenue, product, analytics, payments, and operations. In its third-quarter shareholders letter, R...

Google has been publicly building tiny radar chips since 2015. They can tell you how well you sleep, control a smartwatch, count sheets of paper, and let you play the world’s tiniest violin. But the company’s Soli radar hasn’t necessarily had commercial success, most prominently featuring in an ill-fated Pixel phone. Now, Google has launched an open-source API standard called Ripple that could theoretically bring the tech to additional devices outside Google — perhaps even a car, as Ford is one of the participants in the new standard. Technically, Ripple is under the auspices of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the same industry body that hosts the CES tradeshow in Las Vegas each January, but there’s little question who’s actually behind the project. “Ripple will unlock helpful i...

Rapper TakeOff, one-third of the Migos has become one of the latest celebrities to launch into the NFT space. Last December, TakeOff announced his own PFP NFT project titled, Apes in Space which became open for minting on December 6, 2021. The collection featured 9,999 space-ape themed NFTs, each selling for 0.3 ETH at the time. While the pricing is more expensive than normal avatar projects, each purchase also comes with a special collector incentive. With his Apes in Space NFTs, TakeOff is hoping to be the “biggest hip-hop festival in the Metaverse” while also making history by sending a lucky collector to outer space with TakeOff himself. Earlier this month, TakeOff further cemented himself in the NFT community with the purchase of his first CryptoPunk for 95 ETH. He took to Twitter to ...

Activision Blizzard’s legal troubles just took another potential turn. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) is appealing a judge’s decision that denies it from intervening in the $18 million settlement between the game developer and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), according to a document filed Friday. Activision Blizzard and the EEOC settled a lawsuit regarding the developer’s allegedly toxic culture in September, establishing a consent decree that included Activision Blizzard creating an $18 million settlement fund to compensate employees. This case is separate from the DFEH’s lawsuit against Activision Blizzard filed in July, which is ongoing. In October, however, the DFEH filed a motion to intervene, arguing that the consent decree could...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the company is raising the price of its “full self driving” (FSD) software to $12,000. Musk tweeted Friday that the new price, which is an increase of $2,000, will take effect January 17th for customers “only in the US.” He said the monthly subscription price of $199 for FSD would rise as the software got closer to wide release. Tesla began testing FSD in beta in October of 2020 — when it was priced at $8,000 — with a select group of customers. Tesla increased the price of FSD to $10,000 shortly after. The software does not make Tesla vehicles fully autonomous; Musk himself said during a 2019 earnings call that Teslas with FSD are “able to drive from one’s house to work, most likely without interventions. So it will still be supervised, but it will be able to drive...

Amazon has changed its PTO policy for workers forced to quarantine, as reported by CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. The policy has shrunk to one week (or 40 hours) off, down from its initial length of 14 days, which is still mentioned on an Amazon hiring page (via Engadget) but had already been shortened to ten days. Engadget’s report includes an excerpt of Amazon’s notice to employees about the change, citing the CDC’s updated recommendations that people who have tested positive for COVID should isolate for five days, as long as their symptoms are gone. Amazon isn’t alone in changing its policies along with the federal government. As Engadget points out, Walmart has also cut down the number of PTO hours employees who contract COVID get. There have also been reports of sick workers across...