😂
Ahh just Firefox reader. Assuming there is a login / pay wall in front of the article as my Firefox on mobile refuses to load more than the first paragraph.
RIP Cybertruck. You Were Unloved, Unwanted, and Utterly Absurd
Jeremy White
5 - 7 minutes
Elon Musk, in a post on X, has officially called time on the Cybertruck, stating that “Tesla will be winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of next year to make room for increased Cybercab production.”
Produced for less than four years, the polarizing pickup is seemingly dying as it lived, with the news being greeted in a flurry of replies in praise of the EV as well as deriding it. James Star, claiming to be a Tesla employee, posted that it was “the saddest news! Cybertruck (was) the best car Tesla sold,” right next to a user called Captain Ford who simply replied to Musk with “Fuck that shitbox.”
Tesla has not responded to WIRED’s request for comment and clarification that the Cybertruck will no longer be made at all. The Cybertruck is exclusively made at Gigafactory Texas, as this is apparently the only Tesla facility equipped with the machinery required to manufacture the truck’s unique stainless steel body, which supposedly started to rust in some cases.
Despite whipping up a fevered number of reservations—allegedly more than a million according to Musk, who at the end of 2023 crowed that demand was “off the charts!”—the truck failed to sell, shifting less than 50,000 units in total by March last year.
EVWire cites Kelley Blue Book data suggesting that Tesla sold 11,586 Cybertrucks in the first three quarters of this year in the US, down 28 percent year-over-year, adding that Musk’s announcement post came about 80 minutes after Tesla raised US Cybertruck prices and paused new orders for the entry-level Dual-Motor AWD version.
The Cybertruck proved not only to be wildly unpopular, it was also beset by troubles before it even reached customers. In 2023, WIRED covered a leaked Tesla report dated January 25, 2022, that showed the Cybertruck had basic design flaws, and that the preproduction “alpha” version was struggling with problems with its suspension, body sealing, noise levels, handling, and braking.
In November 2019, when Musk stepped onto a stage in California to launch his new cyberpunk-styled electric pickup, he decided to demonstrate the strength of the “unbreakable” glass windows by hurling a steel ball at them. In what has now entered into public relations folklore, the demo truck’s windows smashed not once, but twice. Musk swore, then joked: “There’s room for improvement.”
There most certainly was. In April 2024, a recall was issued for the Cybertruck because its accelerator pedal pad could come loose and get trapped by interior trim, which had the frightening potential of pushing the car to full speed.
In March last year, Tesla had to recall nearly all the Cybertrucks it had then produced because a stainless steel trim panel could become detached from the vehicle while driving, blaming the problem on the wrong type of glue, a new adhesive “not prone to environmental embrittlement.”
Back in May this year, Cybertrucks were struck down by the wrong type of grease, which meant that their wheels could potentially fall off. In what was then the EV’s 11th recall, it was declared that the Rear Wheel Drive (RWD) Cybertruck Long Range model might have faulty brake rotors. In a notice posted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Tesla stated that “brake rotor stud holes may crack and allow the stud to separate from the wheel hub.” Such a situation might have seen some RWD Cybertruck owners merrily driving along only to then be disconcertingly overtaken by their own wheels.
Musk even tried to get President Donald Trump to buy one of his Cybertrucks, creating an impromptu Tesla showroom on the White House South Lawn, no less. But, sadly, even President Trump must have smelt something was off about the truck as instead he shunned the pickup and opted for a 200-mph Model S Plaid in ultra red, clearly impressed with the interior, remarking that “Everything’s computer!”
At the end of 2024, Karl Brauer, executive analyst at car ranking service iSeeCars, told WIRED that he’d calculated that the Cybertruck’s six recalls to date at the time made the EV “worse than 91 percent” of all other 2024 vehicles.
Yet, despite supposedly being so unreliable, the Cybertruck did find a small but loyal audience. WIRED profiled a number of owners last year, all fervently in love with their vehicles, but who were periodically forced to endure insults and taunts that they were Nazis, perhaps referring to an on-stage gesture Musk made at the start of 2025.
However, despite evidence seemingly to the contrary, Musk claims he is killing the Cybertruck, not because of its unreliability and staggering unpopularity, but because he wishes to focus instead on Cybercab, an autonomous EV that is central to Tesla’s robotaxi ambitions but itself has had a rocky start.
Currently operating in Austin only, with a fleet supposedly numbered only in the hundreds, Musk apparently wants to ramp up production dramatically since he confirmed on an earnings call the first cab came off the line in February.
Musk sees Cybercab as very much the vision of Tesla’s future. The CEO has even said that Tesla should no longer be regarded as an automaker but as a robotics and autonomous vehicle company. “Cybertruck was an incredible technology development platform and lives on through Cybercab,” Cybertruck lead engineer Wes Morrill said on X.
Ah shoot, that would do it.
Guessing that swipe typing is OK? I remember way back when it was first introduced as a 3rd party keyboard on Android I started using it, but quickly gave up.
Futo if your on android ticks (most) boxes for me.
Asterina NixOS.
Man gonna have to test that on my spare laptop. Quite interested to see how development progresses.
For those who cannot read due to paywall / geofencing.
A retired Penn professor has been blocking Uber Eats robots for months. This week, she got arrested for it
Kristin Hunt
3 minutes
On Wednesday afternoon, Carolyn Marvin was leaving her flu shot appointment when she spotted an Uber Eats robot rolling down the Center City sidewalk. So she did what she has done for months whenever she's had the time: stand in front of it.
MORE: Penn Wood High School suspends sports programs as it reviews student safety
Marvin, 78, said she's not sure how many times she's blocked the path of these robots, which hit the streets of Philadelphia in March. The University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus has made a practice of it to protest "corporations that displace human delivery workers in order to enrich their own bottom line." Her past encounters have circulated online. The Wednesday incident was the first time, however, that the police got involved.
Officers approached Marvin after she'd been there "quite a long time," she said. They asked her to step aside and let the robot complete its delivery. When she repeatedly refused, they arrested her for disorderly conduct.
Police confirmed they had responded to a report of "criminal mischief involving a robot" on the 1200 block of Filbert Street around 1:16 p.m. on Wednesday. A woman on the scene ignored "multiple commands" to move, they said, resulting in a criminal violation notice for disorderly conduct.
Uber declined to comment.
Marvin, who plans to contest the charge on the grounds of her First Amendment right to protest, has been undeterred by the arrest. She plans to continue blocking Uber Eats robots and chatting with curious passersby who ask what she's doing.
"It allows me to talk to people about what's going on," she said. "It's always very interesting conversations that we have, and I think it's good to have those kinds of conversations in public space."
Marvin characterizes public opinion as "divided." Some people are very supportive, she said, while others view her protest as unfair to the customers who paid for delivery. Marvin usually tells them if they're "concerned about money," the robots' impact on delivery workers should worry them, too. She is careful never to block the sidewalk to human pedestrians, she added.
Before Marvin retired, she taught a course on freedom of expression at Penn. She doesn't see her actions as an extension of her academic work, however, as much as civic engagement.
"I would say it's my citizenship," she said. "I'm exercising the rights of my citizenship, so I think of it in those terms."
Follow Kristin & PhillyVoice on Twitter: @kristin_hunt | @thePhillyVoice
Like us on Facebook: PhillyVoice
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I had to work with keepass and the Firefox fork I'm using to have them speak together correctly. From memory it had to do with an incorrect directory / socket being used.
Our current electricity provider, energy prices can and do dip into the negatives which is great for running AC or heating (don't believe I've seen negatives during winter).
I don't however own an electric car at this stage, would be nice but the 20k budget models are in my eyes horrible, nor do we have enough spare cash to justify the purchase of anything reasonable.
Man prices are good currently.
Nice, thanks for the info.
I'll give it another go hopefully on my one day off over this long weekend 😅
Having less reliance on major tech providers is something I'm slowly moving towards, probably like lots of us here.
Headscale any easier to config nowadays?
I'd tried running it ages ago, but I was very new to Linux, and nixos as a whole. Eventually gave up and just ran tailscale for ease of use.
Cops Can Bypass iPhone’s Automatic Reboot to Get Into Locked Phones, Leaked Video Claims
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
6 - 7 minutes
A company that makes phone hacking devices claims to have developed a solution that freezes iPhones in a state that lets cops more easily access sensitive data inside them, according to a video obtained by 404 Media.
This is the latest salvo in the never-ending battle between Apple and companies that help cops — sometimes those in authoritarian countries — break into iPhones.
In November 2024, 404 Media revealed Apple quietly introduced a new feature in iOS that automatically reboots an iPhone that has not been unlocked for 72 hours. The idea behind this so-called “inactivity reboot” is to revert the phone to a state that makes it harder for police to break into the device, and thus extract sensitive data from it with forensics technology.
At the time of Apple’s change, law enforcement agents expressed concern about this new feature, given that oftentimes they can’t immediately try to break into iPhones that have been seized. That could be because police are still waiting for a court authorization to do so, or there is simply a backlog of devices to unlock, for example.
The new technology to get around inactivity reboot was developed by Magnet Forensics, the company behind GrayKey, a popular tool sold to law enforcement agencies that allows them to unlock and access data stored in iPhones and Android smartphones. Magnet has developed a new device called GrayKey Preserve and a feature for its regular GrayKey devices called Evidence Preservation Mode, according to the video.
“This is an absolute game changer for iOS forensics and a function that I wish we had years ago,” a Magnet employee says in the leaked video, specifically mentioning that the solution is targeted at the iPhone’s inactivity reboot feature and the data it makes unavailable. GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode are also designed to combat another iPhone feature that automatically deletes certain data — such as cached locations, and recently deleted photos and iMessages — after a certain number of days. “We're gonna be able to preserve that data for an infinite amount of time.”
The educational and tutorial video, which was made exclusively for law enforcement agents and appears to be dated early 2025, does not explain the technical details behind this new product and feature, but gives some strong hints as to how it works. 404 Media granted the person who provided it anonymity because they were not authorized to share it with third parties.
“Now, one of the many things that the GrayKey Preserve is going to do, as part of all of this, inside of our initial access, is it's going to enable Airplane Mode, or more specifically, it's gonna disable our radio transmissions like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular. In doing this, that's not only going to allow you to preserve the data in the field, but also isolate the data in the field,” the employee explains. “Even if that device doesn't have the ability to turn on Airplane Mode or to turn off the transmitters through the Control Center of iOS. Once initial access is gained and the device is in a preserved state, we also disable all of those radios to make sure that that data cannot reach that device.”
The idea behind GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode is to keep the iPhone in a state known as After First Unlock, or AFU. Having an iPhone in that state essentially allows cops to access data that would otherwise be much harder to obtain if the phone was in a Before First Unlock, or BFU state. If the iPhone is in BFU, certain sensitive data is encrypted, and it can be significantly harder — sometimes even virtually impossible — to brute-force the device’s passcode and unlock it. 404 Media previously obtained lists of iPhones that GrayKey and competitor Cellebrite could access, with variations between phones in an AFU and BFU state.
“That AFU state is captured,” by GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode, the employee says. “Even if that device does reboot for any number of reasons, memory maintenance or the power is lost or whatever, the AFU state is not lost. This is the true magic behind the GrayKey Preserve and the Evidence Preservation Mode function.”
When using this new solution, law enforcement agents only see the iPhone’s software version and device model, rather than any data within, according to the employee and a screenshot of GrayKey’s customer interface included in the video. That allows the cops to preserve the data they care about without actually seeing it before they are authorized to do so.
Apple and Magnet did not respond to a request for comment.
404 Media shared a transcript of the video with Jiska Classen, a researcher at the Hasso Plattner Institute who studies iPhone security. While Classen said that it’s impossible to know for sure how Magnet’s new feature works based on the video, she posited some theories and agreed that it is “quite a game changer” or “at least puts things back to where they were before inactivity reboot.”
She thinks Magnet has found a way to manipulate the iPhone’s clock, effectively “slowing down time” or even “stopping the clock from ticking, even after a reboot.” Most likely, according to her, the GrayKey may disable the iPhone tasks that set data to expire.
What is certain is that the ball is now in Apple’s court to figure out how Magnet got around inactivity reboot, and find a way to prevent the company and its technology from freezing iPhones — and the sensitive data stored in them — in time.
Had hoped someone posted this.
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