Month: September 2024

Enlarge / Spotify released the Car Thing to the general public in February 2022. It's bricking them in December. (credit: Spotify)

For some of us, few things are more infuriating than when a gadget stops working due to a software change. As we've frequently covered here at Ars, startups and big tech companies are guilty of rendering hardware obsolete and/or stripping it of core functions. A pile of activists are urging the Federal Trade Commission to get involved.

In a letter sent today to Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, and Serena Viswanathan, associate director of the FTC's Division of Advertising Practices, representatives from 17 groups, including Consumer Reports, the US PIRG, and iFixit, urged the FTC for "clear guidance" around software tethering. Software tethering, per the letter, is "making functions of a device reliant on embedded software that ties the device back to a manufacturer’s servers.” As it stands, the practice is hurting customers with "unfair and deceptive practices," such as suddenly locking features behind a subscription—like the Snoo smart bassinet recently did—or bricking already-purchased devices, which Spotify did with its Car Thing.

The letter to the FTC argues that such practices hinder owners' ability to own their hardware.

Enlarge / The final Vega rocket on its launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana. (credit: European Space Agency)

The final flight of Europe's Vega rocket is scheduled for liftoff Wednesday night from French Guiana, carrying an important environmental monitoring satellite for the European Union's flagship Copernicus program.

The launch is set for 9:50 pm EDT Wednesday (01:50 UTC Thursday) from the European-run spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The 98-foot-tall (30-meter) Vega rocket will head north from the launch pad on the coast of South America, aiming for a polar orbit about 480 miles (775 kilometers) above the Earth.

The sole payload is Sentinel-2C, a remote sensing platform set to join Europe's fleet of Copernicus environmental satellites. The multibillion-dollar Copernicus system is the world's most comprehensive space-based Earth observation network, with satellites fitted with different kinds of instruments monitoring land surfaces, oceans, and the atmosphere.

Enlarge / The Artemis II Orion spacecraft being prepared for tests at NASA’S Kennedy Space Center in Florida in June 2024. (credit: NASA / Rad Sinyak)

Now that NASA has resolved the question of the Starliner spacecraft and its two crew members on the International Space Station, the agency faces another high-stakes human spaceflight decision.

The choice concerns the Orion spacecraft's heat shield and whether NASA will make any changes before the Artemis II mission that will make a lunar flyby. Although Starliner has garnered a lot of media attention, this will be an even higher-profile decision for NASA, with higher consequences—four astronauts will be on board, and hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, will be watching humanity's first deep space mission in more than five decades.

The issue is the safety of the heat shield, located at the base of the capsule, which protects Orion's crew during its return to Earth. During the Artemis I mission that sent Orion beyond the Moon in late 2022, without astronauts on board, chunks of charred material cracked and chipped away from Orion's heat shield during reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Once the spacecraft landed, engineers found more than 100 locations where the stresses of reentry damaged the heat shield.

Enlarge (credit: Jorg Greuel via Getty Images)

Over the weekend, the nonprofit National Novel Writing Month organization (NaNoWriMo) published an FAQ outlining its position on AI, calling categorical rejection of AI writing technology "classist" and "ableist." The statement caused a backlash online, prompted four members of the organization's board to step down, and prompted a sponsor to withdraw its support.

"We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology," wrote NaNoWriMo, "and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

NaNoWriMo, known for its annual challenge where participants write a 50,000-word manuscript in November, argued in its post that condemning AI would ignore issues of class and ability, suggesting the technology could benefit those who might otherwise need to hire human writing assistants or have differing cognitive abilities.