jinzo

On the other side, MY2015 Audi A3 8V needs online access for remote re-sync (sometimes the RF part of the key looses sync with the car). So yes, generally older cars are easy to modify, newer not (at least yet). Also the cheap gismo was cheap because it was a clone, original tools are not that cheap.

Actually, from my personal experience in the field - they only care for X. years under warranty. Then they don't care. I actually don't think they have much legal ground on their own around modifications in EU. At the end of the day you do own the car.

As I'm currently on vacation I don't have the means to study this further, but on the quick lookout I found at least one problem in how this is described. If I understand correctly it alters frames so that the device goes off bus. From their claims this is not detectable with modern tools. If I'm not missing something then I can guarantee you that the dashboard reports errors when a device is off bus. Also at least modern VW and BMW vehicles offer a lot of data (to the diagnostic tool) on the state of the can networks (dropped frames/etc). I'll have to dig deeper, but on the first glance it looks like they found a way to buss off devices, but over-prpmise on the stealthines of the vuln.

Edit: typos

Yes it is? See Chromebook for example.

As someone in the car repair industry I can assure you that Teslas hostility regarding non-authorised-repair is a big issue and will only blow up when Teslas become more common. At least here in Europe, this won't fly.

I would say that most FW bugs are found in the years that the car is under warranty (At least 2years here in EU) - which means that you have to (there are some new laws around this, but there's no change to be seen in practice as of yet) drive it to a certified mechanic/dealer that has the equipment to update the FW quickly (there's a big chance that he will have the car connected to the diagnostic equipment anyway). And the bugs/updates that are missed this way usually get solved when the driver notices them and drives them to a garage (around here the mechanics, even the non-certified ones have quite a good grasp of common faults that can be remedied with a FW upgrade). So overall this isn't as big of an issue as someone would think.

After my HTC Desire started failing me I looked at my options wide and deep. I was inclined to just get "candy bar" device like this one. Fed up with the battery and fragility - tho I almost never carried my Desire in a case (and other stuff you mention).

But then as my phone gave up on me before I found a replacement I started using a "cand bar" phone and found out that I actually like some smartphone features - like a good autocomplete keyboard, the ability to track my post packages, check bus timetable and occasionally to look up something on the internet (I'm a patient man, it doesen't need to render webpages _that_ fast).

And I came to conclusion that I would enjoy a relatively small, well build and long lasting smartphone that doesen't need to run games (and many apps at once) or have GPS/Nav, voice control,... and whatnot features that I don't use (and can't even remove usually). I think that the technology itself is advanced enough for such a device - there're even some cheap Chinese ones that look promising for what I need (for example Xiaomi Redmi 1S or Redmi 2).

Interesting. I'm running a mix of i3wm and some Gnome apps on a relatively old Intel P8700 powered laptop and the only compile pain points are browsers and libreoffice (I ended up using the -bin package).

The communities are actually quite different. Cubietruck uses Allwinner and Radxa uses Rockchip. So one community is centered around linux-sunxi.org and the other around linux-rockchip.info. I don't know the actual overlap, as I'm mostly interested in linux-sunxi stuff - but I doubt that the overlap is actually big/significant.

As someone who had to deal with legal troubles when running a user facing service I can say that it's not that easy if you don't have resources (or knowledge/time) to response correctly to the legal inquiries. For example, a relatively small (by internet standards) "local" forum has a somehow dedicated (it's not their full time job) 3 man legal team that answers all the legal inquiries.

If I add one of the latest in the series of my own experiences. Once upon a time someone wanted to scam me on a website deal. We figured out who it was (it was easy, he was the owner of the domain, paid for the hosting etc.) and published the details (we were not the first, he's quite a known scammer around here, we found numerous blogposts about him). He was even featured in a local newspaper. Fast forward 5 or so years and I get a Cease and Desist letter from him (or something looking like that) that the information in my blog post is not accurate and he will sue me. I quickly see that google doesen't bring much about him nowadays, in part to people not caring for their blogs/doing redesigns and in part of him sending out "scary" letters. Of course I could fight it, I had a lot of concrete (I was told court grade by some lawyer acquaintances) proofs. But was it worth my time? My effort? My psych? No. I redacted the blog post and let it be. I don't feel good about it, because that means he will try to scam people that could'we been warned from my post. But I wagered it and left it all behind.

EDIT: grammar n'stuff

> On the hardware front: I don't really buy the notion that Android hardware is up to par with Apple. I realize this is an inherently subjective argument: I've played with my friends' Android phones and I just don't like the way they look or feel compared to the iPhone.

It's not totally related to this discussion, and I'm not picking on you - but I had to mention this: I have a friend that bought himself a MacBook Pro (for around 2200€) and then went on to observe how this laptop is far better than any previous he owned, and how it's better than what his colleagues ad friends own. I agreed with him, and then told him that most of them paid way less than 1000€ for their laptop, and probably noone paid even close to what he paid (alas. there are not a lot of MacBooks around here), ofcourse a MacBook is way better than a 600€ HP laptop.

People forget that, most of the Android devices (analog to laptops) are actually cheaper than a iPhone.

In Slovenia (small country in Central Europe - so quite far from the HBO Nord AB countries.) they're pretty known (and available everywhere - for money of-course). And the article is wrong - we got HBO Go some months ago too.

They mainly release what they have to. They have been constantly reducing the number of OSS libraries with each new OS X release.