Month: April 2024

Enlarge / Photos of iGBA that appeared on the App Store before the app was taken down. (credit: https://web.archive.org/web/20240413221558/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/igba-gba-gbc-retro-emulator/id6482993626)

Over the weekend, developer Mattia La Spina launched iGBA as one of the first retro game emulators legitimately available on the iOS App Store following Apple's rules change regarding such emulators earlier this month. As of Monday morning, though, iGBA has been pulled from the App Store following controversy over the unauthorized reuse of source code from a different emulator project.

Shortly after iGBA's launch, some people on social media began noticing that the project appeared to be based on the code for GBA4iOS, a nearly decade-old emulator that developer Riley Testut and a partner developed as high-schoolers (and distributed via a temporary security hole in the iOS App Store). Testut took to social media Sunday morning to call iGBA a "knock-off" of GBA4iOS. "I did not give anyone permission to do this, yet it’s now sitting at the top of the charts (despite being filled with ads + tracking)," he wrote.

GBA4iOS is an open source program released under the GNU GPLv2 license, with licensing terms that let anyone "use, modify, and distribute my original code for this project without fear of legal consequences." But those expansive licensing terms only apply "unless you plan to submit your app to Apple’s App Store, in which case written permission from me is explicitly required."

Enlarge / Tesla's Shanghai factory in 2023. (credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Times are starting to get tough for Tesla. The electric vehicle automaker had been riding high, with quarter after quarter of successive growth and plenty of profits in the process. But lately, that success has mostly been due to a series of price cuts meant to tempt customers to buy into an aging lineup. This March, the company reported its first quarterly decline since 2020.

Now, it plans to lay off more than 10 percent of its workforce, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

"As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity," Tesla CEO Elon Musk told employees in the memo.

Enlarge / The Cybertruck remains a divisive vehicle. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Tesla's troubled Cybertruck appears to have hit yet another speed bump. Over the weekend, dozens of waiting customers reported that their impending deliveries had been canceled due to "an unexpected delay regarding the preparation of your vehicle."

Tesla has not announced an official stop sale or recall, and as of now, the reason for the suspended deliveries is unknown. But it's possible the electric pickup truck has a problem with its accelerator.

Tesla has been accused of making cars that have sudden unintended acceleration problems. In 2017, the company was the subject of a class-action lawsuit based on at least 23 accounts of Tesla Models S and X suffering from this problem. Tesla vehemently denied any such problem, and in 2020, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declined to investigate.