Category: Technica Aquarius

Enlarge / The Blackberry Torch, the company’s first touchscreen phone, is held for display during its debut in New York in 2010. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

BlackBerry, the company that once dominated smart mobile devices, recently announced that it was finally discontinuing key services that support its phones. As of January 4th, the phones will no longer be provided with provisioning services, meaning that they will gradually lose the ability to join networks, including the cellular network.

It may seem difficult to imagine if you weren’t using cell phones at the time, but BlackBerry once dominated the smartphone market. Its keyboard-based hardware was widely adopted in corporate settings, in part because the services it provided typically ran through BlackBerry servers, allowing for high levels of security and control. An indication of its importance is that early internal builds of Android looked like a cheap BlackBerry knockoff, rather than the cheap iPhone knockoff that was eventually released.

Unlike the people who developed Android, BlackBerry’s leadership was blindsided by the iPhone’s popularity. It dismissed on-screen keyboards, and counted on its stranglehold on corporate services to maintain its market. It took over a year after the iPhone’s release for the company to come out with its own touch screen phone, and its software remained an awkward mix of old and new for some time after. In the mean time, corporate users fell in love with their Apple and Android phones, and compelled their IT departments to support them.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Tesla is recalling over 475,000 of its vehicles because of a pair of safety issues. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 356,309 Tesla Model 3s covering model years 2017-2020 are being recalled due to problems with the rearview cameras. The 2017-2020 Model S is the other target with 119,009 of those BEVs due to a problem with the front hood latch. 

For the Model 3, the NHTSA says that the problem comes from a cable harness for the rearview camera, which “may be damaged by the opening and closing of the trunk lid, preventing the rearview camera image from displaying.”

On the Model S, problems with the latch for the front hood may cause the “frunk” to open while the vehicle is in motion and without warning, which would obstruct the driver’s visibility, increasing the risk of a crash.”

Enlarge (credit: Jason Persoff / Getty Images)

Recently, a network of climate modeling groups showed that it will cost more to overshoot the Paris Agreement temperature goals than it will to stay on a low-temperature trajectory. On the same day, that collaboration also published work showing that additional risks of overshooting come in part via ensuing increases in extreme weather.These studies are two of four published this year; together they provide the most comprehensive projections of the requirements and implications of the path we take to reach our end-of-century temperature targets.

The article focused on the economic aspects of meeting the Paris temperature targets—specifically how much mitigation actions will cost and the impact on the global GDP—wasn’t designed to project environmental impacts. In fact, most economic models don’t include this level of complexity and, as a result, they underestimate the overall costs. But this additional analysis projects not only how much extreme weather will increase, but also how that will effect crop yields around the world.

“The decarbonization scenarios reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the last assessment reports do not account for the climate impacts’ feedback. The main reason is that [there are] many uncertainties surround the geophysical and economic impacts of climate change, making their integration difficult in the design of decarbonization pathways,” wrote first author Dr. Laurent Drouet in an email to Ars Technical. Drouet is a researcher at the RFF-CMCC European Institute of Economics and the Environment, in Milan, Italy.  “But, now, [our] research focuses on improving the representation of these impacts and producing results that are easier to integrate into mitigation models.”