Month: March 2022

Enlarge / A VW employee assembles an ID.3 electric vehicle at the VW factory in Dresden in 2021. (credit: Volkswagen)

Any hopes that the auto industry's supply chain shortages were easing up appear to be comprehensively dashed this week. In Europe, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has caused BMW and Volkswagen to halt production at a number of their factories. And an outbreak of COVID-19 in China has shuttered plants belonging to Toyota, VW, and now Tesla.

VW was one of the first to be affected. In late February, it announced that it was stopping production for four days at its factory in Zwickau, Germany, where the electric ID.4 crossover is built, as well as a three-day halt at another factory in Dresden.

By early March, a leaked internal memo from Porsche revealed that it, too, was affected and that production of all Porsche models would be delayed as a consequence.

Enlarge / The 2022 iPad Air. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple's latest iPad refresh is minor on the surface, but there's a big step forward inside.

The new iPad Air refresh is mainly about two things: the M1 chip and 5G. Apart from those changes, the new tablet is very similar to its 2020 predecessor.

Those two things are probably not enough to make upgrading from the 2020 model worth it, but thanks to the M1, the 2022 iPad Air is a slam dunk if you have an older iPad or another tablet and you're ready for a step up.

Enlarge / A Tesla with Full Self-Driving enabled, a moment before hitting a bollard in San Jose. (credit: AI Addict)

Ex-Tesla employee John Bernal says he was fired for posting YouTube videos about Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta. He had been creating the videos for about a year. Bernal says that Tesla also cut off his access to the FSD beta in the 2021 Tesla Model 3 that he owns.

The firing and beta cutoff occurred shortly after Bernal posted a video on February 4 of a minor accident in which his Tesla car hit a bollard that appears to separate a car lane from a bike lane in San Jose. In a subsequent video on February 7 providing frame-by-frame analysis of the collision, Bernal said that "no matter how minor this accident was, it's the first FSD beta collision caught on camera that is irrefutable."

"I was fired from Tesla in February with my YouTube being cited as the reason why—even though my uploads are for my personal vehicle, off company time or property, with software I paid for," Bernal said in the latest video, which was posted yesterday on his AI Addict channel. Bernal showed a notice he received that said his Full Self-Driving beta access was disabled "based on your recent driving data." But that explanation didn't seem to make sense because "the morning of being fired, I had zero improper use strikes on my vehicle," he said.

Enlarge / With better alignment, the test star has been joined by a whole host of background stars and galaxies. (credit: NASA/STScI)

Today, NASA announced that it has successfully completed two further steps to align the mirrors of the Webb telescope. The resulting performance indicates that Webb will meet or exceed its design goals. "So far, we're finding that the performance is as good [as] or better than our most optimistic projections," said Lee Feinberg, the Webb optical telescope element manager.

The announcement was accompanied by a spectacular image that showed a sharp focus on the target star and included many in-focus galaxies in the backdrop.

Get in line

The Webb telescope's primary mirror is made up of an array of 18 individual segments that, once properly aligned, will act as a single large mirror. The initial steps of mirror alignment involved identifying the images from each segment and bringing those images together at a single point. That work was completed back in February. At this point, the light was all gathered in one place, but it wasn't necessarily taking an equal path from each segment, meaning the segments weren't acting as a single mirror.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Windows 11 testers are regularly finding new Windows 11 features that Microsoft wasn't ready to show anyone yet. Sometimes that means digging up a new Task Manager or tabs for the File Explorer. And sometimes it means finding advertisements for other Microsoft products as you browse your own locally stored files.

Microsoft MVP Florian Beaubois found an example of the latter when he saw an ad promoting Microsoft Editor while viewing his Documents folder in a Windows 11 build. In a statement to The Verge, Microsoft Senior Program Manager Brandon LeBlanc acknowledged that the banner ad was genuine, but he said that it had been "experimental" and that it "was not intended to be published externally and was turned off."

The banner ad discovered in a Windows 11 build. (credit: Florian Beaubois)

As The Verge notes, "we didn't mean for anyone to see that" is not a promise to never run ads in Windows Explorer, and Microsoft's behavior around its Edge browser, Microsoft account requirements, and prompts to try OneDrive and Microsoft 365 all indicate that the company has no problem with this kind of aggressive internal promotion of its own products and services. It's an unfortunate reality that comes with using a big company's products—you'll get promo notifications for Apple TV+ on your iPhone, suggestions that you switch to Chrome when you're using Gmail, or prominent ads for Alexa-based products every time you try to buy a $6 cable on Amazon.

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Google Domains is officially out of beta after a whopping seven years. Some Google products start up (and shut down) at a breathtaking pace, but Domains got an old-school, multi-year-long beta, just like in the early days of Gmail. Domains launched to everyone in the US in 2015 and has since expanded to support 26 countries.

Google Domains is a simple service that lets you buy a domain, with over 300 different domain endings. It's not the cheapest registrar available, but the interface is great, and the fees for common TLDs are just $12 per year, every year, without any of the extra fees or renewal increases that some sites charge. Registrant privacy is free, as is access to Google's DNS.

Of course, you can protect all your domain settings behind the two-factor authentication security settings you have on a regular Google account. You can forward emails to your consumer Gmail inbox or use the domain to start a Google Workspace organization. If you're using a Google Cloud or Ads product, Domains supports easy domain verification with one of those services, too. Google does so much stuff on the Internet that having a service like this to direct customers to just makes sense.