You have misunderstood the term "locked down" in the context I used it.

During the engineering design process of a new vehicle, which can be as long as 10 years, every element at some point becomes fixed and immutable, hence "locked down", so that designs can be submitted to the fabricators - often sub-contractors. For example, while Ford might stamp the body panels in-house, production of the injection-moulded rear light clusters will be out-sourced to specialists.

No vehicle maker fabricates their own infotainment systems, but instead provides the design specs to 3rd-parties sufficiently in advance to bid on, then tool-up to manufacture in quantity. This is usually several years before the vehicle goes on sale.

As such, the infotainment hardware in a brand new new-model vehicle will not only already be several years out-of-date, but will by no means be the best possible hardware available when the fabrication contract was signed.

In my own three-year-old vehicle, switching from BlueTooth to DAB radio can mean up to three seconds of silence before the process completes, all because the hardware that underpins it was the cheapest available 10 years ago... and this is the issue that standardised, plug-in replacement hardware would ameliorate.

It doesn't help that the hardware it runs on needs to be both as cheap as possible and locked down quite early in the vehicle development cycle, which means that it's going to be old and slow on day one of sales.

It would make sense for the infotainment/vehicle UI box to be treated as a "wear part" like brakes and tyres, with a standardised, plug-in interface so it can be replaced and upgraded over the life of the vehicle.

Of course, because it would make sense - and cost a fraction more per unit to produce - it's unlikely to happen.

They've created the first tasp! Wireheads rejoice!

It ultimately won't cost the companies anything.

Their customers, however...

Or coffee ice-cream.

For a factory making instant coffee granules, huge.

Not only will they save the energy from not having to boil water, they'll also save it when freeze-drying the room-temp output.

Of course, that won't make it any cheaper to actually buy...

Actually, SlashDot will give you 15 mod-points at a time, as long as you've got good karma.

I'm not surprised you didn't know...

It's interesting to see the general tone of the comments here, mostly "Well, it's a beta, so...", "Why would you want Linux when you've got MacOS" and "Asahi isn't that good on Apple silicon anyway".

I'm sure the comments would be equally forgiving if a Windows beta prevented dual-booting of a Linux distro.

On the other hand, I'm old enough to remember when a beta of a sits-on-top-of-DOS Windows version threw a "not supported on DR-DOS" message, and the torches-and-pitchforks crowd got the federal government to invoke anti-trust regulations.

This time I'm not expecting to need the popcorn...

I'd be surprised if all the major players didn't have this capability in some form or another. In fact, I'd expect that most LEO GPS (or equivalent) birds would be able to broadcast jamming signals for "opposition" services.

I hope this succeeds in compelling game-makers to adopt "life after end-of-life" measures for their products as, once this precedent is set, we can do the same for hardware makers.

Yes.

So that there's no way for this decision to be overturned.

The annual operating costs for this network are so tiny in the overall scheme of the national budget that this must be driven by other, somewhat less noble, reasons.

It reminds me of a friend's toddler who would smash a toy they no longer wanted rather than give it to someone else.

And a good thing too, otherwise we'd have nothing to do or watch as Walmart, Home Depot and all the movie theatres are closed.

Oh, wait...

It had better be disabled by default.

It depends if they're able to convince him that he will own the equity stake, at least for long enough for him to forget about it altogether and focus on the next invasion/grift/scandal.

...we laugh when a Government says "We must have backdoor access to everyone's cryptography, it will be perfectly safe with us."