Dubai Deploying Autonomous Robotic Police Cars

It’s hard to tell how much of this story is real and how much is aspirational, but it really is only a matter of time: About the size of a child’s electric toy car, the driverless vehicles will patrol different areas of the city to boost security and hunt for unusual activity, all the while scanning crowds for potential persons… Continue reading Dubai Deploying Autonomous Robotic Police Cars

April 27, 2017 – Hack Naked News #121

Windows boxes are getting pwned, vulnerabilities in SugarCRM, Ashley Madison is back in the news, and more. Jason Wood of Paladin Security joins us to deliver expert commentary on hacking cars with radio gadgets on this episode of Hack Naked News! Full… Continue reading April 27, 2017 – Hack Naked News #121

Detect Cars Running Stop Signs (and Squirrels Running Across the Roof)

There’s a stop sign outside [Devin Gaffney]’s house that, apparently, no one actually stops at. In order to avoid the traffic and delays on a major thoroughfare, cars take the road behind [Devin Gaffney]’s house, but he noticed a lot of cars didn’t bother to stop at the stop sign. He had a Raspberry Pi and a camera, so he set them up to detect the violating cars.

His setup is pretty standard – Raspberry Pi and camera pointed outside at the intersection. He’s running OpenCV and using machine learning to detect the cars and determine if they have run …read more

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Commission your own traffic and construction studies without ever leaving bed using SpaceKnow

 The number of things that can be done from the comfort of one’s own bed has increased in recent years — shopping, banking and now geospatial analytics. Ok, it doesn’t sound sexy but it might give you a leg up the next time your friend starts an arcane argument with you over whose neighborhood historically has more vehicles on the road. With SpaceKnow’s online… Read More Continue reading Commission your own traffic and construction studies without ever leaving bed using SpaceKnow

Reverse Engineering the Smart ForTwo CAN Bus

The CAN bus has become a defacto standard in modern cars. Just about everything electronic in a car these days talks over this bus, which makes it fertile ground for aspiring hackers. [Daniel Velazquez] is striking out in this area, attempting to decode the messages on the CAN bus of his Smart ForTwo.

[Daniel] has had some pitfalls – first attempts with a Beaglebone Black were somewhat successful in reading messages, but led to strange activity of the car and indicators. This is par for the course in any hack that wires into an existing system – there’s a high …read more

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How the Media Influences Our Fear of Terrorism

Good article that crunches the data and shows that the press’s coverage of terrorism is disproportional to its comparative risk. This isn’t new. I’ve written about it before, and wrote about it more generally when I wrote about the psychology of risk, fear, and security. Basically, the issue is the availability heuristic. We tend to infer the probability of something… Continue reading How the Media Influences Our Fear of Terrorism

Sporty Cars Making Fake Engine Noise

Following the monumental emissions-cheating scandal at VW, further horrible revelations demonstrate just how corrupt the modern automotive industry has become: many cars make fake engine noise. And we’re not just talking about those darn sneaky Priuses.

Ford, BMWs, Porsche, and yes, Volkswagen are all doing it, to different degrees. Some of the systems, like the one in the BMW M5, play engine sounds at low volumes through the stereo system. As you’d expect from a BMW, it’s an overly-technological solution: they have built essentially a BMW engine-sound synthesizer that responds to the tachometer and gas pedal data from the car’s …read more

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