They might not need to open-source it: hackers have found ways of jailbreaking the installed Linux and are stepping up efforts for making it reusable. It’s a rather feeble SoC, so there won’t be a huge number of applications for it, but there will be some.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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The comment over on hackaday pointing to it being bricked possibly being down to font licensing is funny if true
Yeah, coming from someone who's tried it, the jailbreak is sorta useles at the moment. Hoping someone comes along and improves on it. Spite is an excellent motivator.
Would make for a lovely home assistant control device.
You should still get a refund, they should not get to do this.
DOOM thing
What's SOC?
System on a chip. Think like a Qualcomm or Samsung processor, or the new M line from Apple
in other words, the cpu
For most intents and purposes
SoC is from the embedded system development world - as more and more coprocessors were being put into the same chip to consolidate board space and power efficiency, it wasn’t “just” a cpu - it had the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and other coprocessors in one
x86 has moved a lot closer to this architecture over the years, but you still generally have a separate chipset controller on the motherboard the CPU interfaces with
Back in the days a CPU was a chest-height cabinet with another chest-height cabinet besides it, containing a magnetic drum or core memory or something, acting as RAM. That stuff moved into the CPU case, then it moved into the CPU package there's really no difference the central processing unit is still the central processing unit no matter how much stuff you include.
This was the first SoC: An ARM3 core, memory controller, IO controller, video accelerator. It's hard to find an x86 nowadays that doesn't have all of that on the package: A system processor to manage everything, multiple application cores, usually at least two memory controllers, decent to absurd amount of PCIe lanes, and a GPU. Chipsets nowadays do little more than manage power, feed the SoC its initial code, and split up some PCIe lanes to provide custom IO because keyboards don't tend to speak PCIe.
laptops all have pretty much an x86 soc. separation between cpu and chipset nowadays happens only on desktops for some reason.
The reason is flexibility, the board manufacturer can decide how many PCIe lanes to send where, how many USB ports there's going to be etc. Modern mainboards are a power delivery system and IO backplane.
this makes sense but can't it be done with integrated chipsets too?
Yeah but then you can't switch out the chipset without having a different CPU skew and probably also socket because changing IO without changing up pins doesn't sound like a good idea. People would barely notice the additional sockets with Intel but we don't want to take Intel as a benchmark there, do we.
I haven’t looked that closely at laptop CPUs
My guess would be partially because there are fewer possible interfaces, and they’re directly connecting the CPU to a separate Ethernet/WiFi MAC, USB hub controller, and audio DSP rather than having a separate chipset arbitrating who’s talking to the CPU and doing some of those functions?
my understanding, from the block diagrams they release, is that these io functions are simply integrated into the cpu. in a way that could probably be implemented in desktops too.
I can’t say for all of them, I just knew that e.g. the z790 chipset still ran the ethernet phy, audio dsp, SPI, their version of TrustZone, etc through the chipset
https://www.funkykit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/intel-z790-chipset-diagram.jpg
If you have the block diagrams for the laptop ones, I’d be curious
Honestly it would be cool to have it just able to clip to my vent and show me my now-playing or let me select episodes of podcasts or w/e
Are they making customers mail them back? They'll probably go for $20 plus shipping if not.
I really want a second hand one to use as a Plex controller, would be awesome for controlling my speakers in the home.
"We can't open source Car Thing because we used someone else's copyrighted code to make it and we we not allowed to do that, or we don't want to follow the license" - Blemishify, probably.
Refunds cost Spotify money. Open Sourcing is free. This is an epic level of dumb.
Maybe they don’t have 100% of the rights to the hardware in order to open source it? I don’t think they made this hardware in house. They would have had to outsource it.
Unless the code in car thing exposes vulnerabilities or potential exploits in Spotify. Even the potential exposure may not be worth the risk to them.
my money is on Spotify violating licensed open-source code in Car Thing, which would be revealed if they open-sourced their code.
People underestimate how much work open sourcing something acrually is. Not trying to defend Spotify, fuck Spotify, but open sourcing something isn't free.
Honest question, why would it cost money?
The code may contain some proprietary things they want to remove. Maybe it's not up to public standards and they don't want to be looked down upon. Maybe it could reveal vulnerabilities in other code if not cleaned up.
There could be a lot of reasons.
Didn't think about that. Thanks
Plus knowing how most companies operates, there are all kinds of secrets, API key and others in the repo that needs to be thoroughly removed before releasing to the public.
I think this is likely going to be true unfortunately, but I also feel like the title is more than a bit misleading. (The title at Ars is identical to the title of the thread here)
I didn't see anything in this article indicating that Spotify has made any direct comments on whether they were going to open source it or not. From the article, it also sounds like refunds haven't been publicly stated as the official solution from spotify, but instead just something some people have managed to get spotify support personnel to approve. In fact, it's stated that Spotify specifically 'declined to confirm' that refunds were the official solution.
For reference, I bought my Car Thing for about $50 in 2022 and was able to get 3 months of credit for my family premium plan ($17/mo x3 = $51), so in essence a complete refund.
As much as it sucks to lose the Car Thing, I’m happy with this outcome at least. Anyone recommend a good replacement for an older car?
I ripped out my old radio and put one that had apple carplay. Was annoying to install but worth the effort.
Seconded. Only downside is that you might need to replace part or all of your dash where the radio goes (because many radio designs are proprietary and aren’t a standard double-DIN bezel), and possibly get an adapter if you have any steering wheel controls like volume or skip. It can be a little involved, though generally the instructions are quite good if you buy from someplace like Crutchfield, or use YouTube videos explaining how to remove and replace the parts.
How did this connect to your car and Internet? Literally anything with blue tooth support will work with a smartphone. If you need to go cheap then a cable and mp3 player can work.
Wait was this thing really just an extra control screen for your phone? Looking at their manual it connected to the car power, pulled information from the phone, sent the information back to the phone, and the phone sent the information to the car.
If that accurately describes what was happening then please just get a car mount for your phone.
It worked just as you described it, but having actual buttons helped use it in the car easier. The Car Thing was simply a remote control of sorts for Spotify using Bluetooth to connect to the phone. The phone itself is what connected to the Internet and your car.
I’m sure a phone mount would work, but I was just curious if there was something similar that others used.
That's fair. And it's ridiculous they want to brick such a simple device.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Further, Spotify's support page for Car Thing doesn't mention refunds and only tells owners to reset and properly dispose of or recycle the gadget.
As noted by TechCrunch today, in October 2021, Spotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek said that more than 2 million people initially signed up for the Car Thing waitlist.
By July 2022, Spotify revealed that it was no longer making Car Thing, its only hardware, naming product demand and supply chain issues as factors.
Since Spotify announced that it will forcibly brick all Car Things in December, users have been pleading with the company to open source the device.
If they continue with the plan to brick Car Thing in December, the refunds won’t matter when our anger & disappointment resurfaces, and we remember why they lost our trust as users.
As Spotify currently looks unlikely to do more to appease Car Thing owners, this incident may have to serve as a note of caution for people considering buying hardware from a company that might not commit to long-term support.
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