Bytes: What’s new in tech

Hyundai’s newest hybrid features a roof with built-in solar panels, said Haje Jan Kamps in TechCrunch.

“In good sunlight,” the company says, the panels in the 2022 Sonata Hybrid “will produce 200Wh of electricity”—enough energy for about 3 to 4 miles of driving—that gets stored in the car’s drive and starter batteries. It’s not a huge figure, and that’s partly because solar panels collect the sun’s rays better when placed at a 30-degree angle, which isn’t possible on a car roof. With Hyundai’s configuration, you’ll need roughly six hours of solid sun per day to add 800 miles to the total annual driving distance, which, for the average driver, adds up to “a fuel-efficiency bump of around 8 percent.”

An AI order to kill?

Sightings of Russian “loitering munitions” in Ukraine have raised fears about AI-powered killing machines on the battlefield, said Will Knight in Wired. Photographs on Telegram and Twitter showed “what appears to be the KUB-BLA, a type of lethal drone sold by ZALA Aero, a subsidiary of the Russian arms company Kalashnikov.” The sleek white machine is nicknamed a suicide drone because it is programmed to “deliberately crash into a target, detonating a 3-kilo explosive.” ZALA Aero has claimed in promotional material that the KUB-BLA features “intelligent detection and recognition” of targets, although some AI experts doubt such drones are truly autonomous weapons—yet. Meanwhile the U.S. has supplied Ukraine with a loitering munition—a drone that hovers waiting for a target—called the Switchblade, which has “some autonomous capabilities but relies on a person” to make lethal decisions.

Subscribing to an iPhone

Apple is planning to launch another subscription service, said Samuel Axon in Ars Technica, and this one is for the iPhone itself. Similar to an auto-leasing program, instead of paying a large upfront cost for a new device, users would pay a monthly fee. Microsoft has done a similar hardware subscription for the Xbox, in which “users pay in installments with a flat monthly fee that also includes online and software subscription services like Xbox Game Pass.” Apple already took a step in this direction in 2015 with an iPhone Upgrade Program, which lets customers pay for an iPhone in installments over 24 months and upgrade to a new device every 12 months.

High-profile teen hackers

Cybersecurity researchers investigating recent hacks against high-profile targets traced the attacks to a 16-year-old living at his mom’s house near Oxford, England, said William Turton and Jordan Robertson in Bloomberg. Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, and others have blamed data breaches on a hacking group called Lapsus$, whose members have “publicly taunted their victims” and even “joined Zoom calls of companies they’ve breached.” Four researchers investigating the breaches “said they believe the teenager is the mastermind,” using forensic evidence from the hacks to tie him to the group, which includes at least six other members. The teen “is so skilled at hacking—and so fast— that researchers initially thought the activity they were observing was automated.”