Collaborate Disseminate
Kashmir Hill has a really good article on how GM tricked its drivers into letting it spy on them—and then sold that data to insurance companies.
Continue reading Long Article on GM Spying on Its Cars’ Drivers
The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a variety of techniques drivers are using to obscure their license plates so that automatic readers can’t identify them and charge tolls properly.
Some drivers have power-washed paint off their plates or covered them with a range of household items such as leaf-shaped magnets, Bramwell-Stewart said. The Port Authority says officers in 2023 roughly doubled the number of summonses issued for obstructed, missing or fictitious license plates compared with the prior year.
Bramwell-Stewart said one driver from New Jersey repeatedly used what’s known in the streets as a flipper, which lets you remotely swap out a car’s real plate for a bogus one ahead of a toll area. In this instance, the bogus plate corresponded to an actual one registered to a woman who was mystified to receive the tolls. “Why do you keep billing me?” Bramwell-Stewart recalled her asking…
Continue reading Cheating Automatic Toll Booths by Obscuring License Plates
Manufacturing a car involves choreographing hundreds of parts, most of which are created somewhere else, to be at the same spot at the same time for final assembly. Given the widespread adoption of “just in time” manufacturing methodology, it’s underst… Continue reading The U.S. auto industry’s dirty little secret: plummeting quality
Kasmir Hill has the story:
Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people’s driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis [who then sell it to insurance companies]…
Continue reading Automakers Are Sharing Driver Data with Insurers without Consent
There was a time when all you needed to use your car was a key. On older vehicles it was a traditional metal key, on more recent ones it had …read more Continue reading Older Nissan Leafs Lose Their App, Are They The First Of Many?
Soon we will be able to unlock and start our cars from our phones. Let’s hope people are thinking about security.
Continue reading Digital Car Keys Are Coming
Article based on a Mozilla report.
Continue reading The Privacy Disaster of Modern Smart Cars
Turns out pumps at gas stations are controlled via Bluetooth, and that the connections are insecure. No details in the article, but it seems that it’s easy to take control of the pump and have it dispense gas without requiring payment.
It’s… Continue reading Hacking Gas Pumps via Bluetooth
A new Mozilla Foundation report concludes that cars, all of them, have terrible data privacy.
All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label—making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we h… Continue reading Cars Have Terrible Data Privacy
The robot revolution began long ago, and so did the killing. One day in 1979, a robot at a Ford Motor Company casting plant malfunctioned—human workers determined that it was not going fast enough. And so twenty-five-year-old Robert Williams was asked to climb into a storage rack to help move things along. The one-ton robot continued to work silently, smashing into Williams’s head and instantly killing him. This was reportedly the first incident in which a robot killed a human; many more would follow.
At Kawasaki Heavy Industries in 1981, Kenji Urada died in similar …