Capabilities used in or justified by extreme circumstances often become commonplace and are used for much more mundane things in the future. And so the remote investigative actions taken by Elon Musk in Wednesday’s Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas are a warning and a reminder that Tesla owners do not actually own their Teslas, and that cars, broadly speaking, are increasingly spying on their owners and the people around them.

After the Cybertruck explosion outside of the Trump International Hotel in Vegas on Wednesday, Elon Musk remotely unlocked the Cybertruck for law enforcement and provided video from charging stations that the truck had visited to track the vehicle’s location, according to information released by law enforcement. 

“We have to thank Elon Musk specifically, he gave us quite a bit of additional information in regards to—the vehicle was locked due to the nature of the force from the explosion, as well as being able to capture all of the video from Tesla charging stations across the country, he sent that directly to us, so I appreciate his help on that,” Clark County Police sheriff Kevin McKahill said in a press conference.  

The fact that the CEO of a car company or someone working on his behalf can—and did—remotely unlock a specific vehicle and has the means of tracking its location as well as what Musk described as the vehicle’s “telemetry” is not surprising given everything we have learned about newer vehicles and Teslas in particular. But it is a stark reminder that while you may be able to drive your car, you increasingly do not own it, that the company that manufactured it can inject themselves into the experience whenever it wants, and that information from your private vehicle can be provided to law enforcement. Though Musk is being thanked directly by law enforcement, it is not clear whether Musk himself is performing these actions or whether he’s directing Tesla employees to  do so, but Tesla having and using these powers is concerning regardless of who is doing it.

Reverse engineer Scotty Allen made his own iPhone. Well, more accurately, he made his own iPhone enclosure out of a block of aluminum, put the internal components of an iPhone into it, and managed to make it all work. Then, he used the same schematics he made to 3D print a working iPhone enclosure out of nylon carbon fiber.

Like lots of repair and DIY projects on the iPhone, Allen did tons of painstaking work over the course of a year to more or less recreate something that already exists and that most people do not need. But his work opens the door to a more modifiable iPhone and a DIY culture around smartphones that still doesn’t really exist. Essentially, he took a block of aluminum, used a CNC mill to carve it down, and was able to put all of the components in the custom enclosure, the way someone might when they’re building a PC. Along the way, he made CAD files of the inside of an iPhone, which will allow people to recreate his work. It is now possible to download his design files and 3D print your own iPhone shell.

“There's been an open question for me from the beginning, which is like, we have this culture around modding PCs, right? And custom PCs. Why do we not have that for phones?,” Allen told me in a video chat. “It’s very celebrated in the culture. But then when you talk about building your own phone, everyone is like, ‘No, that’s crazy.’ Apple is going to sue you.”

As you might expect, the iPhone’s enclosure is not just an empty block of metal. There are various tiny holes for screws and engraved areas for cables and antennas to go. Allen studied all of this and, through a roughly year-long process of trial-and-error, was able to recreate this enclosure and create blueprints for other people to replicate it. 

“This was really difficult because I had to reverse engineer it and there was a lot of time spent figuring out, ‘OK, now I’ve got it drawn, but how do I know everything about the interior walls? There’s all these little threaded inserts that are glued in. And I think I actually went about this machining it in a different way than Apple does,” he said.

Over the years, Allen has done lots of cool things with the iPhone, which started with adding a working headphone jack back into the iPhone 7 after Apple removed it. He is part of the right to repair movement, but takes things a step further and says he’s advocating for the right to modify, and the normalization of opening and tweaking things like the iPhone to prove that they’re not just unknowable black boxes.

“I look at this as an infrastructure project, which is, let’s make a 1-to-1 copy,” he said. “It’s not totally 1-to-1, but in terms of overall geometry, it’s a fairly faithful representation and reproduction with the goal that, if you want to do interesting things, you need to start with the boring things first. And now with all the design files that I’ve created, you can really easily begin to modify it to look how you want on the outside, to add space for things on the inside. So this is a base for doing all sorts of more creative things.” 

Allen said that at the moment one challenge is that there are limitations on the types of touchscreens that will work with the iPhone, but that with more work it would be possible to work with additional modifications. 

“My notion is that a phone is a device that you can open up and tinker with, or at least repair,” he said. “I think I’ve had a hand in saying, ‘Look, this isn’t a black box that only Apple is allowed to open.’ … I think consistently what I’ve done is poke at the edges and say, ‘What other things can we do with this?’” 

Yesterday, US Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Joshua Hawley (R-MO) sent letters to the heads of Ford, General Motors, and Tesla, as well as the US heads of Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen, excoriating them over their opposition to the right-to-repair movement.

"We need to hit the brakes on automakers stealing your data and undermining your right-to-repair," said Senator Merkley in a statement to Ars. "Time and again, these billionaire corporations have a double standard when it comes to your privacy and security: claiming that sharing vehicle data with repair shops poses cybersecurity risks while selling consumer data themselves. Oregon has one of the strongest right-to-repair laws in the nation, and that’s why I’m working across the aisle to advance efforts nationwide that protect consumer rights."

Most repairs aren’t at dealerships

The Senators point out that 70 percent of car parts and services currently come from independent outlets, which are seen as trustworthy and providing good value for money, "while nearly all dealerships receive the worst possible rating for price."

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