Author: Greg Kumparak

At the tail end of Tesla’s earnings call today, Elon Musk dropped a surprise bit of news: the company’s CFO, Deepak Ahuja, will be retiring. “There is no good time to make this change”, said Deepak, but noted that after two back-to-back profitable quarters, now might be the best time. Zach Kirkhorn, currently Tesla’s VP of Finance, will take over the role. Elon notes that Ahuja’s retirement “won’t be immediate,” but didn’t give a specific timeline. He also says that he plans for Ahuja to stay on as a senior advisor “for probably years to come.” Story...

As Tesla ramps up production and gets more cars on the road, the company is still working out a few speed bumps when it comes to service. When something goes wrong, getting it fixed tends to take longer than many owners are willing to wait. In September of last year, Elon Musk promised to make fixing service times a priority. On an earnings call today, he outlined two ways they’re working on it: more spare parts at service centers, and giving Tesla cars the ability to automatically get the process started by calling a tow truck as soon as it detects an issue. Said Elon on the call: “The next thing we want to add is if a car detects something wrong — like a flat tire or a drive unit failure — that before the car has even come to a halt, there’s a tow truck and service loaner on the way” False alarm? Don’t want a tow truck to show up? You’ll be able to cancel it through the in-dash display. If they can get it to work, it sounds great — but it’s not an easy challenge. Pulling it off in one or two major cities? Simple enough. But nationwide, or worldwide? That’s a much bigger logistical problem. Elon didn’t give a timeframe for when such a feature might roll...

Earlier this week, a bug was found in FaceTime that could let others listen in to your Apple device’s microphone (or, in specific cases, view video from the camera) without you accepting the FaceTime call. Apple disabled the Group FaceTime feature that enabled this bug server-side, thus preventing its future misuse while they worked on a proper patch. Apple says that patch should land later this week, but it sounds like that won’t be the end of it for the company. New York Attorney General Letitia James and Governor Andrew Cuomo have just announced their intent to investigate the matter — how it happened, and what they call Apple’s “slow response”. While Apple responded with its temporary fix once the bug started going viral, reports suggest that at least two users — a 14-year-old from Arizona and his mother — had been trying to no avail to warn Apple of this matter for over a week prior. While bugs happen, this is a particularly egregious and mystifying one. It’s like the perfect storm of bugs — there’s the bug that turns on the microphone early, then a second stage of the bug that for some logic-defying reason turns on the camera if the call recipient hits the power button to try to decline the call. Then it slipped through QA. Then, finally, it gets noticed by someone with good...

You might want to turn off FaceTime for a few days. A newly discovered bug in iOS allows FaceTime callers to listen in before you accept the call. Word of the bug started spreading this morning after Chicago artist Benji Mobb demonstrated it in a tweet, later being spotted by by 9to5Mac. The bug relies on what appears to be a nasty logic screwup in FaceTime’s group call system. While we’re opting to not outline the steps here, the bug seems to trick the recipient’s phone into thinking a group call is already ongoing. A few quick taps, and FaceTime immediately trips over itself and inexplicably fires up the recipient’s microphone without them actually accepting the call. Weirder yet: if the recipient presses the volume down button or the power button to try to silence or dismiss the call, their camera turns on as well. Though the recipient’s phone display continues showing the incoming call screen, their microphone/camera are streaming. TechCrunch has verified this bug on multiple iPhones running iOS 12.1.2. We reached out to Apple for insight on the issue, and a spokesperson for the company responded: “We’re aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week.”  So they know, and are working on it — but in the meantime, the quickest fix might be to...