Month: May 2024

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The Federal Trade Commission's Office of Technology has issued a warning to automakers that sell connected cars. Companies that offer such products "do not have the free license to monetize people’s information beyond purposes needed to provide their requested product or service," it wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. Just because executives and investors want recurring revenue streams, that does not "outweigh the need for meaningful privacy safeguards," the FTC wrote.

Based on your feedback, connected cars might be one of the least-popular modern inventions among the Ars readership. And who can blame them? Last January, a security researcher revealed that a vehicle identification number was sufficient to access remote services for multiple different makes, and yet more had APIs that were easily hackable.

Later, in 2023, the Mozilla Foundation published an extensive report examining the various automakers' policies regarding the use of data from connected cars; the report concluded that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy."

Enlarge / John Milton citing Spenser on the recent history of Ireland in his 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles. Note Milton's italic e, hooks and curls on letters and distinctive s's. (credit: Phoenix Public Library)

John Milton is widely considered to be one of the greatest English poets who ever lived—just ask such luminaries as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Jonson, and Voltaire, who once declared, "Milton remains the glory and the wonder of England." But while Milton's own books continue to be widely read and studied, there are only a handful of books in collections today known to have been part of his personal library.

Add one more title to that small list, as scholars recently discovered a copy of Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the Phoenix Public Library, containing handwritten notes in Milton's distinctive hand. This makes the volume extra-special, since only two other books once owned by Milton also contain handwritten notes. The scholars detailed their findings in a new article published in the Times Literary Supplement.

Holinshed's Chronicles is a hugely influential and comprehensive three-volume history of Great Britain, first published in 1577; it was followed by a second edition in 1587. A London printer named Reginald Wolfe started the project and hired Raphael Holinshed and William Harrison to help him create a "universal cosmography of the whole world." Wolfe died before the book could be completed, and the project was eventually scaled down to a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland, complete with maps and illustrations.

Enlarge (credit: VMware)

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware last year has led to widespread upheaval at the company, including layoffs, big changes to how it approaches software licensing, and general angst from customers and partners. Broadcom also discontinued the free-to-use version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, earlier this year, forcing home users to find alternatives.

But today there's a bit of good news—for home users, at least. Broadcom is making VMware Fusion Pro 13 and VMWare Workstation Pro free for personal use.

Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro certainly aren't the only free-to-use virtualization products—VirtualBox has existed for years, and there are many indie projects that make use of Apple's virtualization frameworks for macOS. But VMware's products are a bit more polished and easier to learn than some of those alternatives, and VMware's file formats are also commonly used when redistributing virtual machines for retrocomputing purposes.

Enlarge / GM used a Silverado EV to power a 10,000-square-foot house as a demo of its Home Energy system. (credit: General Motors)

LOS ANGELES—Let's face it: The American power grid is a hot mess. The system is outdated and overstressed by amp-sucking appliances, air conditioning units, and extreme weather. Depending on where you live, it's likely only a matter of time before your home will experience a blackout. GM Energy, a subsidiary of General Motors, is here to help.

At a demonstration in a swanky 10,000-square-foot mansion in Beverly Hills, California, where I counted 51 recessed lights in the great room, the new home products from GM Energy easily kept the electrons flowing, eschewing the grid and drawing power from the 200 kWh battery in a 2024 Chevrolet Silverado RST.

It all starts with the GM Energy PowerShift charger. On an 80 A circuit, the charger can charge your EV at a whopping 19.2 kW, and its bi-directional technology can push electrons from the truck's battery into an inverter to convert it to the AC power your home requires. The happy little AC current then goes into the Home Hub that distributes the power to the appropriate circuits, and voilà—the lights are on.