Apple violated a court order requiring it to open up the App Store to third-party payment options and must stop charging commissions on purchases outside its software marketplace, a federal judge said in a blistering ruling that referred the company to prosecutors for a possible criminal probe. From a report: U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sided Wednesday with “Fortnite” maker Epic Games over its allegation that the iPhone maker failed to comply with an order she issued in 2021 after finding the company engaged in anticompetitive conduct in violation of California law.

Gonzalez Rogers also referred the case to federal prosecutors to investigate whether Apple committed criminal contempt of court for flouting her 2021 ruling. The U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco declined to comment. The changes the company must now make could put a sizable dent in the double-digit billions of dollars in revenue the App Store generates each year. The judge’s order [PDF]: Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.

It Is So Ordered.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista’s annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the exact reason for this. According to him, a simple programming error meant that users had to wait longer for the system to boot. After logging in, Windows 7 first set up the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for applications, and even the background image. The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component. Or, it switched from the welcome screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn’t receive any feedback.

The problem here: The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code, which means that the message never appeared if you did not have a real background image bitmap. And a single color is not such a bitmap. The result: the logon system waited in vain for the message that the background has finished loading, so Windows 7 never started until the 30 second fallback activated and sent users to the desktop. The problem could also occur if users had activated the “Hide desktop icons” group policy. This was due to the fact that such policies were only added after the main code had been written and called by an If statement. However, Windows 7 was also unable to recognize this at first and therefore took longer to load.

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NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, located nearly 150 million miles from Earth on the way to an unexplored metal asteroid, has stopped firing its engines after detecting a problem in its propulsion system.

NASA published an update Tuesday revealing that the robotic spacecraft shut off its plasma thrusters earlier this month. The news wasn’t widely shared until Wednesday, when NASA science chief Nicky Fox posted it on X.

“Engineers with NASA’s Psyche mission are working to determine what caused a recent decrease in fuel pressure in the spacecraft’s propulsion system,” the agency said. The spacecraft detected the drop in pressure April 1 inside the line that feeds xenon fuel to the spacecraft’s four plasma thrusters.

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Investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs reports: A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims. Scattered Spider is a loosely affiliated criminal hacking group whose members have broken into and stolen data from some of the world’s largest technology companies. Buchanan was arrested in Spain last year on a warrant from the FBI, which wanted him in connection with a series of SMS-based phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that led to intrusions at Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and many other tech firms. The complain against Buchanan is available here (PDF).

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New submitter LDA6502 writes: The Republican chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is proposing a new annual federal vehicle registration fee of $200 for full EVs, $100 for hybrid EVs, and $20 for combustion vehicles. The tax would be tied to inflation, would be collected by the states, and would expire in 2035. Critics of the proposal note that it could result in low mileage EVs paying a far higher tax rate than heavy ICE trucks and SUVs. Ars Technica notes that the bill “exempts commercial vehicles, which should see a rush from tax avoiders to register their vehicles under their businesses […].” Farm vehicles will also be exempt from the tax.

“The Eno Center for Transportation calculates that this new tax will contribute an extra $110 billion to the highway Trust Fund by 2035 but that cuts to other taxes and more spending mean that the fund will still be $222 billion short of its commitments — assuming that this added fee doesn’t further dampen EV adoption in the U.S., that is.”

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Epic CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said in a Zoom call with press Wednesday night that the company is “going to do everything we can to bring Fortnite back to the iOS App Store next week.” That decision comes after a federal district court found late Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction designed to allow iOS developers to steer customers to alternate payment processors for in-app purchases.

That 2021 injunction wound its way through years of appellate review until January 2024, when the Supreme Court declined to hear a final attempt by Apple to overturn it. Since then, the District Court for Northern California has been holding a series of evidentiary hearings examining the internal development of Apple’s so-called “compliance plan” for the injunction.

In a scathing Wednesday night order, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers determined that Apple had engaged in a plan to “thwart the injunction’s goals,” and then engaged in an “obvious cover-up” to prevent that plan from being revealed.

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Color E Ink in its current state requires a whole lot of compromises, as we’ve found when reviewing devices like reMarkable’s Paper Pro or Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft, including washed-out color, low refresh rates, and a grainy look that you don’t get with regular black-and-white E Ink. But that isn’t stopping device manufacturers from exploring the technology, and today, Onyx International has announced that it has a $1,900 color E Ink monitor that you can connect to your PC or Mac.

The Boox Mira Pro is a 25.3-inch monitor with a 3200×1800 resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio, and it builds on the company’s previous black-and-white Mira Pro monitors. The Verge reports that the screen uses E Ink Kaleido 3 technology, which can display up to 4,096 colors. Both image quality and refresh rate will vary based on which of the monitor’s four presets you use (the site isn’t specific about the exact refresh rate, but does note that “E Ink monitors’ refresh speed is not as high as conventional monitors’, and increased speed will result in more ghosting.”)

The monitor’s ports include one full-size HDMI port, a mini HDMI port, a USB-C port, and a DisplayPort. Its default stand is more than a little reminiscent of Apple’s Studio Display, but it also supports VESA mounting.

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After 10 consecutive quarters of rising AI-related investment, Microsoft has put on the brakes, spending over $1 billion less than the previous quarter (source paywalled; alternative source). Despite the slight slowdown, Microsoft posted stronger-than-expected results with $70 billion in revenue and $25.8 billion in profit. The New York Times reports: In the first three months of 2025, Microsoft spent $21.4 billion on capital expenses, down more than $1 billion from the previous quarter. The company is still on track to spend more than $80 billion on capital expenses in the current fiscal year, which ends in June. But the pullback, though slight, is an indication that the tech industry’s appetite for spending on A.I. is not limitless.

Overall, Microsoft’s results showed unexpected strength in its business. Sales surpassed $70 billion, up 13 percent from the same period a year earlier. Profit rose to $25.8 billion, up 18 percent. The results far surpassed Wall Street’s expectations. “Cloud and A.I. are the essential inputs for every business to expand output, reduce costs, and accelerate growth,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said in a statement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple sent notifications this week to several people who the company believes were targeted with government spyware, according to two of the alleged targets. In the past, Apple has sent similar notifications to targets and victims of spyware, and directed them to contact a nonprofit that specializes in investigating such cyberattacks. Other tech companies, like Google and WhatsApp, have in recent years also periodically sent such notifications to their users. As of Wednesday, only two people appear to have come forward to reveal they were among those who received the notifications from Apple this week.

One is Ciro Pellegrino, an Italian journalist who works for online news outlet Fanpage. Pellegrino wrote in an article that he received an email and a text message from Apple on Tuesday notifying him that he was targeted with spyware. The message, according to Pellegrino, also said he wasn’t the only person targeted. “Today’s notification is being sent to affected users in 100 countries,” the message read, according to Pellegrino’s article. “Did this really happen? Yes, it is not a joke,” Pellegrino wrote.

The second person to receive an Apple notification is Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch right-wing activist, who posted on X on Wednesday. “Apple detected a targeted mercenary spyware attack against your iPhone,” the Apple alert said, according to a screenshot shown in a video that Vlaardingerbroek posted on X. “This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it’s never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high confidence in this warning — please take it seriously.” Reacting to the notification, Vlaardingerbroek said that this was an “attempt to intimidate me, an attempt to silence me, obviously.”

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One day after Meta rolled out its standalone AI app, Mark Zuckerberg has shared more about how the company plans to eventually monetize its generative AI assistant. During the company’s first quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said Meta AI could one day show ads and product recommendations. He also hinted at plans for a subscription component for those who want a more “premium” version of the assistant.

“I think that there will be a large opportunity to show product recommendations or ads, as well as a premium service for people who want to unlock more compute for additional functionality or intelligence,” Zuckerberg said.

He added that for now the company is more focused on growing Meta AI’s usage. (He announced yesterday that Meta Ai had reached “almost” 1 billion monthly users.) “I expect that we’re going to be largely focused on scaling and deepening engagement for at least the next year before we’ll really be ready to start building out the business here,” he said.

Zuckerberg’s comments — just one day after Meta introduced its standalone AI app — underscores how important the assistant is to the company. The Facebook founder has repeatedly said he wants Meta AI to be the most used AI assistant in the world, and he said on Wednesday’s call that a standalone app would be particularly important for attracting US users.

Meta’s strategy for monetizing the assistant in many ways mirrors its approach to Threads, which only just began expanding its early experiments with ads this month long after it reached hundreds of millions of users. Speaking of Threads, Zuckerberg also shared some new milestones for Threads, saying that text-based app now has 350 million monthly active users and that time spent on the platform has increased 35 percent over the last six months thanks to improvements to the company’s recommendations systems.

Later in the call, Meta’s CFO Susan Li shared that the company has also been testing its Llama model to power Threads’ recommendations and that the addition of the large language model has led to a 4 percent increase in time spent. “It remains early here, but a big focus this year will be on exploring how we can deploy this for other content types, including photos and videos,” she said.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-a-mulling-ads-and-a-premium-version-of-its-ai-assistant-mark-zuckerberg-says-225202560.html?src=rss

A newly revealed set of vulnerabilities dubbed AirBorne in Apple’s AirPlay SDK could allow attackers on the same Wi-Fi network to hijack tens of millions of third-party devices like smart TVs and speakers. While Apple has patched its own products, many third-party devices remain at risk, with the most severe (though unproven) threat being potential microphone access. 9to5Mac reports: Wired reports that a vulnerability in Apple’s software development kit (SDK) means that tens of millions of those devices could be compromised by an attacker: “On Tuesday, researchers from the cybersecurity firm Oligo revealed what they’re calling AirBorne, a collection of vulnerabilities affecting AirPlay, Apple’s proprietary radio-based protocol for local wireless communication. Bugs in Apple’s AirPlay software development kit (SDK) for third-party devices would allow hackers to hijack gadgets like speakers, receivers, set-top boxes, or smart TVs if they’re on the same Wi-Fi network as the hacker’s machine […]

Oligo’s chief technology officer and cofounder, Gal Elbaz, estimates that potentially vulnerable third-party AirPlay-enabled devices number in the tens of millions. ‘Because AirPlay is supported in such a wide variety of devices, there are a lot that will take years to patch — or they will never be patched,’ Elbaz says. ‘And it’s all because of vulnerabilities in one piece of software that affects everything.'”

For consumers, an attacker would first need to gain access to your home Wi-Fi network. The risk of this depends on the security of your router: millions of wireless routers also have serious security flaws, but access would be limited to the range of your Wi-Fi. AirPlay devices on public networks, like those used everywhere from coffee shops to airports, would allow direct access. The researchers say the worst-case scenario would be an attacker gaining access to the microphones in an AirPlay device, such as those in smart speakers. However, they have not demonstrated this capability, meaning it remains theoretical for now.

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Google has announced that it’s helping to financially support the electrical training ALLIANCe (etA), an organization formed by the National Electrical Contractors Association and the International Brotherhood of Electricians. The goal is to train “100,000 electrical workers and 30,000 new apprentices in the United States” to meet the growing power demands of AI.

Using AI will unlock unspecified, but positive economic opportunities, Google’s new white paper, “Powering a New Era of American Innovation,” claims. In order to take advantage of them, though, the US power grid needs to become more capable and efficient. That’s largely because the data centers used to run and train AI models require vast amounts of energy. The white paper claims that new data centers could demand an additional “15-90 GW” of energy by 2030, something that more efficient chips and model training can’t account for. For a sense of the scale, the US Department of Energy says 1 Gigawatt is the equivalent to 103 offshore wind turbines. 

Google’s paper calls for investments in alternative energy sources like nuclear power, but also notes that expanding the electrical workforce is necessary. “McKinsey estimates that 130,000 additional electricians will be needed by 2030 to build out data centers and manufacturing facilities,” the company writes. Currently, though, retiring electricians outnumber newly trained ones. “Nearly 10,000 American electricians either retire or change careers each year, while only about 7,000 new entrants join the field.”

Investing in electrical training is Google’s attempt to help change that. It would be nice if it was paired with a clearer explanation around what that AI will be doing with all that extra power — Google notes that there’s a “causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth” — but skilled job training isn’t a bad thing.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-is-funding-electrician-training-to-help-meet-the-power-demands-of-ai-221320678.html?src=rss

Google is investing in training over 100,000 new U.S. electricians through a $10 million grant, aiming to address a critical labor shortage driven by AI-fueled data center growth and rising electricity demands. Reuters reports: A lack of access to power supplies has become the biggest problem for giant technology companies racing to develop artificial intelligence in energy-intensive data centers, which are driving up U.S. electricity demand after nearly 20 years of stagnation. The situation has led President Donald Trump to declare a national energy emergency aimed at speeding up permitting for generation and transmission projects.

Google’s funding, which includes a $10 million grant for electrical worker nonprofits, is the latest in a series of recent moves by giant technology companies to alleviate power project backlogs and electricity shortfalls across the United States. […] The Google grant will be used for electrician apprenticeship programs and the training of existing workforce through organizations, including the Electrical Training Alliance, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association. It could increase the pipeline of electrical workers by 70% by the end of the decade, the company said. “This initiative with Google and our partners at NECA and the Electrical Training Alliance will bring more than 100,000 sorely needed electricians into the trade to meet the demands of an AI-driven surge in data centers and power generation,” said Kenneth Cooper, international president of the IBEW labor union.

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Mark Zuckerberg says he believes most of the Meta’s code will be written by AI agents sometime within the next year-and-a-half. Zuckerberg made the prediction during an hour-long interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. 

“I would guess sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, we’ll reach the point where most of the code that’s going towards these efforts is written by AI,” said Zuckerberg, referring to the company’s efforts to build internal AI agents. “And I don’t mean like autocomplete… I’m talking more like you give it a goal, it can run tests, it can improve things, it can find issues, it writes higher quality code than the average very good person on the team already.” 

This is not the first time Zuckerberg has made this type of prediction. During his awkward appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this year, he said, “Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.” 

Notice how the goal posts have moved. Less than five months ago, Zuckerberg said coding agents that could effectively replace most human programmers were within reach. Now, those same systems will not arrive by mid-2026 at the earliest.

The changing timelines underscore exactly why we should be critical of the AI industry and its many promises. AI agents may very well one day replace mid-level programmers, but right now predictions like the one made by Zuckerberg and many others are, at best, advertisements for technologies that don’t yet exist and may never perform at the level their advocates say they will. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/mark-zuckerberg-predicts-ai-will-write-most-of-metas-code-within-12-to-18-months-213851646.html?src=rss

A thousand years ago, the people living in Chaco Canyon were building massive structures of intricate masonry and locations as far away as Mexico. Within a century, however, the area would be largely abandoned, with little indication that the same culture was re-established elsewhere. If the people of Chaco Canyon migrated elsewhere, it’s unclear where they ended up.

Around the same time that construction expanded in Chaco Canyon, far smaller pueblos began appearing in the northern Rio Grande Valley hundreds of kilometers away. These have remained occupied to the present day in New Mexico; although their populations shrank dramatically after European contact, their relationship to the Chaco culture has remained ambiguous. Until now, that is. People from one of these communities, Picuris Pueblo, worked with ancient DNA specialists to show that they are the closest relatives of the Chaco people yet discovered, confirming aspects of the pueblo’s oral traditions.

A pueblo-driven study

The list of authors of the new paper describing this genetic connection includes members of the Pueblo government, including its present governor. That’s because the study was initiated by the members of the Pueblo, who worked with archeologists to get in contact with DNA specialists at the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. In a press conference, members of the Pueblo said they’d been aware of the power of DNA studies via their use in criminal cases and ancestry services. The leaders of Picuris Pueblo felt that it could help them understand their origin and the nature of some of their oral history, which linked them to the wider Pueblo-building peoples.

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Thanks to some smart (and aggressive) marketing, Duolingo has cemented itself as one of the most popular language learning apps in the world. That said, it isn’t without competition: There are plenty of alternatives to consider, and if you’re peeved about Duolingo’s plans to phase out its contract workers in favor of using AI, you might be looking into them.

There’s now a new competitor for Duo’s crown, but it certainly isn’t a replacement for the AI-averse. It’s also far from an underdog, considering the service comes from none other than Google. Yesterday, the company announced a new AI-powered language learning experience it calls Little Language Lessons. It isn’t an app, rather an experiment in Google Labs that offers small doses of lessons and immersion for a handful of different languages.

Here’s how Google’s Little Language Lessons currently work.

Using Google’s Duolingo alternative

To start, head to Google Labs’ Little Language Lessons site, and sign in with your Google Account. You’ll need to agree to a pop-up that warns you that the feature is an early experiment that uses generative AI, and might not always be accurate—a hallmark flaw of AI tools in general.

Google is offering 22 language options (including regional dialects for specific languages). Those include:

• Arabic

• Chinese (China)

• Chinese (Hong Kong)

• Chinese (Taiwan)

• English (AU)

• English (UK)

• English (US)

• French (Canada)

• French (France)

• German

• Greek

• Hebrew

• Hindi

• Italian

• Japanese

• Korean

• Portuguese (Brazil)

• Portuguese (Portugal)

• Russian

• Spanish (Latin America)

• Spanish (Spain)

• Turkish

Once you’re in, there are three different types of lessons to try—or “experiments,” as Google calls them. “Experiment no. 001” is “Tiny Lesson,” which assists you with words, phrases, and grammar for any situation you can dream up. You choose the language, then type a “purpose or theme” into the provided text field. If you can’t think of anything, you can use one of the auto-generated themes Google provides, like “taking a taxi,” “scuba diving” or “going on a first date.” (Or taking a taxi to scuba dive on your first date.)

I went with Portuguese (Portugal) and “taking a taxi.” I hit Generate, and Tiny Lesson offered me three categories to work from: Vocabulary, which lists different words I might use (“o táxi” for “the taxi” or “o taxista” for “the taxi driver”); Phrases, such as “Pode chamar um táxi, por favor?” for “Can you call a taxi, please?”; and Tips, like explaining how to use “ter que” to express that I need to go somewhere. Any Portuguese words and phrases have a speaker option to click to hear the proper pronunciation.

“Experiment no. 002” is “Slang Hang,” which aims to teach you slang and expressions from the regions that speak the language you’re learning. For fun, I asked it to run with U.S. English for this one. Slang Hang generates a story between two people, and, following a short premise, generates a conversation between them to demonstrate how they might naturally speak to one another. Expressions and slang are underlined, and, again, you can click the speaker icon to hear them spoken out loud.

One side of the conversation is generated at a time, and you press the space bar to move on to the next person’s sentence. If you want a new story altogether, you can hit the refresh icon, or click the X to exit entirely. (Slang Hang is currently missing support for Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Portugal), and Turkish.)

Credit: Lifehacker

Finally, there’s “Experiment no. 003,” or “Word Cam.” This feature lets you take and share a photo with the web app to learn how to talk about your surroundings. This works best on a smartphone or tablet, since otherwise you’ll only have your computer’s front-facing camera to work with.

Once you grant access to your camera, snap a photo of your surroundings. Word Cam then analyzes the image, highlights specific elements, and labels them with words in the target language. For example, I took a photo of the street corner, and Word Cam labeled the car as “o carro,” the grass as “a relva,” and the bush as “arbusto.” You can tap each word to pull up a full page about the word in question, as well as examples of how you might use it in different sentences and scenarios.

Can Little Language Lessons compete with Duolingo?

Little Language Lessons is a neat idea, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with it further. Will this take a bite out of Duolingo? I doubt it. But it does offer a more casual and personal approach to language learning, as opposed to Duolingo’s more structured lessons. I like that I can choose what I want to learn more about, especially as, in my view, language acquisition is most effective when you’re learning words and phrases you actively use on a daily basis.

The main concern is learning the wrong words, which could be an issue if the AI decides to hallucinate an incorrect translation. That’s where human intervention would come in handy: If lessons were generated by people and fact-checkers, you’d feel a bit more at ease with accepting the information at face value. With these lessons, however, I feel I have to double-check everything it tells me.

YouTube is testing a new feature that will blur the thumbnails of videos that appear in search results that “frequently include sexual themes,” the platform announced in the Community section of the YouTube Help Center. The experimental feature is currently being tested on a small percentage of users, Youtube says.

The hope is that by blurring thumbnails, YouTube can provide search results that include videos that technically abide by its Community Guidelines, but protect users from seeing content that’s possibly “sensitive in nature.” YouTube’s post doesn’t get into specifics of what will trigger a blurred thumbnail, but does note that “the video title, channel name, and description will remain visible” even if a thumbnail is obscured. Users who have the feature will also be able to disable thumbnail blurring if they want.

YouTube offers a Restricted Mode for screening out mature content, but a more apt comparison for this experimental feature might be the SafeSearch settings in Google Search. SafeSearch lets you completely filter out “explicit images, text, and links,” show all relevant results or blur explicit images, while allowing explicit text and links through. Considering YouTube’s position 20 years in as both a backbone of the internet and a de facto television replacement, this seems like a common sense feature to have.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/youtube-will-blur-the-thumbnails-of-mature-videos-as-part-of-a-new-test-202546425.html?src=rss

Getting the hang of through-hole soldering is tricky for those of us tinkering at home with our irons, spools, flux, and, sometimes, braids. It’s almost reassuring, then, to learn that through-hole soldering was also a pain for a firm that has made more than 60 million products with it.

Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely.

The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can’t be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. “In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement,” writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step.

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Home renovation projects always start out in a rush of excitement—you’re finally going to solve all those annoying problems, update those dated aspects of the house, and live the life you deserve! And sometimes it actually works out that way—but there are a lot of ways a renovation can go wrong. That’s why nearly three-quarters of homeowners come to regret their renovations to some extent.

Most of the reasons behind renovation regrets are pretty straightforward: Cost overruns, dissatisfaction with the final result, or shoddy work (either by contractors or DIY efforts) are the problems most people worry about when embarking on a renovation. But there are other, less obvious ways your renovation plans can backfire on you—problems that will only seem obvious in retrospect.

Utility red tags

I once innocently called my local utility company to come out and service my water heater, and ended the day with a dreaded “red tag” on my mechanical room—a paper notice that I had to bring something up to code. The worst part? The problem had nothing to do with my water heater, furnace, or anything else—it was the door to my mechanical room. When we renovated our house we had a new door hung, and it didn’t have any ventilation built in. We passed city inspections after the reno, but now the utility company insisted I cut a louver into the door.

In another instance, a utility worker came by and noticed that our electrical panel was just in the wall. They informed me that there was a new requirement that panels be enclosed, so we had to build a fairly ridiculous box around the panel.

Those are mild cases—it can be a lot worse. A nearby neighbor is renovating his house, and the utility company discovered that he shares a gas supply with his next-door neighbor, and that now has to be separated and re-routed despite the fact that neither of them have ever had a problem. The project is adding weeks to the renovation schedule and aggravating everyone involved. Often our homes have non-ideal setups or infrastructure that was code-compliant decades ago—and when the utility company comes by you’re suddenly the proud owner of a shiny red tag, and your renovation has just backfired on you.

Hidden problems

Your utility company doesn’t have to be involved for a renovation to ruin your day. Just opening walls and floors can expose all manner of scenarios where stuff that is working just fine will suddenly need to be replaced, at great expense and frustration:

• Wiring. You have exactly zero problems with your electricity—no flickering, so shorts, no non-functional outlets. But when you open up your walls, you discover your wiring is old (most modern electrical wiring will last about 50 years, but your panel typically has a shorter lifespan) and suddenly you have to replace it. While this might be a good idea from a safety standpoint, it’s hard not to think you could have lived a happy life without ever knowing about it.

• Plumbing. Like your power, you’ve never had a problem with your plumbing. Everything drains, nothing leaks, and your water pressure is fine. Then your contractor digs into your walls and floors and suddenly the drain slopes are wrong, the pipe connections are outdated and no longer meet code, and your supply lines are insufficient for modern appliances.

• Permits. More accurately, a lack of permits. Pulling permits for new renovation work can reveal that the previous owners did a lot of DIY work without getting a permit, and now you’re faced with getting old work you had nothing to do with retroactively permitted and possibly brought up to code before you can even begin your intended project.

• Craptastic DIY work. Do-it-yourselfers can perform miracles: Their work can look pretty good in a casual inspection and be revealed as a shoddy, lazy mess the moment you take a closer look. Whether it’s a living room floor being held up by wishes and dreams because the previous owner enthusiastically cut every joist in the basement or uncovering a host of buried electrical boxes they couldn’t be bothered to remove properly, the ghosts of incompetent DIYers will haunt you the moment you start your own project.

Lowering home value

It’s true: Sometimes a renovation project can actually lower the value of your house. Sometimes it’s personal taste that will require effort to change, like wallpaper. Sometimes they’re features that come with hefty maintenance bills, like swimming pools. Sometimes it’s a practical decision to delete something from the home—removing one bedroom to expand another, or taking out a garage to add a bedroom, for example.

You shouldn’t assume your renovation is going to pay for itself by raising the value of your home. If you want to change something because you like it a certain way—hey, it’s your house. But don’t be surprised if your decision to carpet the entire house results in a drop in its value.

Paying for nothing

Hiring contractors can be stressful. You’re dealing with people who have specialized knowledge and connections that you lack, so it’s easy to feel intimidated. We rely on recommendations from friends and neighbors, internet reviews, and the general vibe when they come out to give you a quote—but things can still go wrong. Some of those worst-case scenarios have obvious solutions—if a contractor ghosts you in the middle of a project, you hire someone else. But a bad contractor experience can be surprisingly difficult to resolve, especially if you rely on a simple contract provided by the contractor themselves when you hire them.

There are surprisingly few legal protections against what’s known as a mechanic’s lien—a claim against your property designed to force payment for work performed there. If you refuse to pay a contractor for poor work, or seek to fire them in the middle of a job for some reason, they can—and often do—slap a lien on your home, and you’ll have to head to court to fight it. And there’s no guarantee that it will go your way, especially if the contract you signed is vague about deadlines or other requirements.

For example, a woman refused to pay her contractors over a renovation job that ballooned to $500,000 and ended with an unfinished house filled with defects. But the courts dismissed most of her complaints, and she wound up paying her crappy contractor an additional $32,000—in addition to a hefty legal bill. And she still had to hire someone else to fix and finish her house.

Relationship stress

If you want to test the strength of your relationship with a partner, renovate a house with them. Renovations are so stressful they can damage even the strongest relationship: A 2018 survey found that 7% of people who’d worked on house projects together seriously considered separation or divorce as a result. Even if you don’t get to that point, there’s no doubt that living in a construction zone (or a cramped rental) for months, watching your savings melt away, and disagreeing about design choices and scope on a daily basis can have a negative effect on your partnership.

A renovation can also negatively affect your relationship with your neighbors. Months of dust, noise, and contractors trooping around will stress anyone out, and if your work damages your neighbor’s home in some way things can get heated. You might wind up with a beautifully renovated house but lose the friendly vibe you used to enjoy around the block, so it pays to tend to those relationships while the work is going on.