Chocolate has fantastic profit margins. No Apple chocolate. ... mhhhmm, apple chocolate, that sounds yummy.
A bit closer to home, fabbing microchips has great profit margins. Apple pays good money to TSMC.
Just because it's good money isn't enough reason, I am sorry.
I, for one, simply wouldn't believe any such claim. Too much deception has already happened for there to be any trust left.
Stallman was right, about nearly everything concerning power, companies and governments using it, and the role the citizen is viewed to have in such a limited capitalist view.
Without government mandates to open the source of every chip and firmware, none of the modern hardware we use is trustable.
If we can keep cars from the 40s running, keeping cars from the early 00s running is no big deal. Honestly older fully mechanical/analog cars with manual transmissions are often cheaper and easier to maintain than modern ones with high complexity and DRM on every part.
Sadly my desire for privacy will likely prevent me from ever buying electric unless I build my own car, which I might.
Me too. I'm not that sad about it, though. Saving an older car from being scrapped also brings environmental benefits.
So now I own a brand-new Chevy Bolt. You just yank a single fuse and that takes out OnStar and nothing else.
Absolutely. I don't buy cars that were made relatively recently.
That is ridiculously onerous! Just because geeks can share arcane knowledge about how to be safe does not mean that this isn't horribly anti-consumer.
You'd be amazed what kind of PDFs are left open in Acrobat, just because people are too lazy to close the application. I have seen contracts, bank account statements, residency permits, letters of incorporation, private messages logs, ....
All without doing any digging, I just get assigned a computer for printing, turn on the screen, and it's there.
Observation tells us it's a lost cause to teach people about privacy/security of this type and have the large majority of people observe prudent ways of preventing their data from leaking. We've known about this since before the internet when people would chuck old documents in the garbage under the assumption no one would ever bother to go through their trash digging for information. But, we've learned from police, private investigators and espionage accounts that huge amounts of data can be extracted from trash simply because people aren't careful.
We also know there's always been a small percentage of people who have been careful, they're the ones who never throw out old accounts, letters, envelopes or even notes with phone numbers on them into the trash but they're so small in numbers that those who are scrounging for information know that the majority of their pickings will be successful.
The only effective way around this is to build systems that automatically obfuscate data from anyone but their owner. As we know, this is easier said than done.
worse, because it's so few people, this is suspicious behavior (in the eye of LEO)
This is such an early 2000s idea. I'd much rather my car act as a dumb display that shows a copy of my phone screen then an intelligent agent that tries to replicate functionality already extant in my phone.
All we need is a place in the dashboard to mount our phones. Phones already have big-ass touchscreens and anything else we want... except of course now the audio outputs have been removed.
We should simply have a well in the dashboard with replaceable inserts that snap in to accommodate different-sized phone models, which would connect to the audio system and power. But no... we still have phones bouncing around in the cabin or attached to hokey third-party claws, and janky-ass Bluetooth which (how many years in now?) can't handle simple music playback reliably.
Every car in my household has an auxiliary input for audio and no support for audio over Bluetooth. One is a 2013 Mini, so it's not as if they're ancient.
And that's just fine. And if it MUST be overcomplicated, then yes... AirPlay seems to be the way.
So you rant about Bluetooth in cars ... without owning a car that gas Bluetooth?
Just checking, because we put after market radios (with BT) in our last two cars and, while not a miracle experience, music playback and handsfree telephony worked without problems.
Bluetooth implementations are trash. Rented a brand-new Toyota over the summer and its radio suffered from all the same playback defects that Bluetooth has been offering for a decade or more. Playback randomly starting when not told to... showing the wrong info on the display... showing that no songs were available but playing songs anyway (four out of five times; once it did decide to show a song list).
They really are.
> Playback randomly starting when not told to...
Yup. Toyota and Subaru are particularly egregious about this. Something about using old cable/ipod implementations which would immediately reach for the default media player and telling it to start playing (and download a list of songs or some other BS).
> showing the wrong info on the display...
Yup. Especially if you have the audacity to use Spotify or something else.
There's some really shitty bluetooth audio interfaces out there. REALLY shitty.
Keep up the "good" work, guys! Don't spend all your licensing fees at the pub... unless you're buying a round for the house!
That might be your personal prefernece, I particularly abhor the phone-centric world not to mention that a 5 inch “big-ass” touch screen becomes tiny when driving and that its UI is meant to be operated sitting down paying 100% attention to it not while operating a machine at 60mph down in the road surrounded by hundreds of people in the same situation.
If you look at CarPlay, it chunks the functionality down to a few big icons on the screen at a time. No reason that can't be done on the phone itself in a "car mode."
Anyway, this is what I ended up doing: https://imgur.com/gallery/krRXQwP
Too many regressive releases to keep track of...
I've been using Brodit/ProClip USA mounts to solve this. They sell holders designed specifically for your model of phone which attaches to a custom-fit mount for your car's make and model. It's pricy, at about $75 for a holder-mount combo, when cheap Amazon alternatives are closer to $10, but it overcomes a lot of the problems you list. I use it regularly for navigation, since my car doesn't support CarPlay or Android Auto.
And I even installed extra inputs for a guest to plug into on road trips, and the original CD player.
I have an old car without any sort of fancy infotainment system, and I always end up with my phone overheating during long drives into the sun.
The phones are too tall to fit there now (even the original SE), so there's going to have to be some rework anyway!
Where I live, even touching your phone while driving is illegal. Doesn't stop most people, but I'd still not mess about.
I do remember reading news of someone getting cited in california when the model 3 was new, for "mounting a screen visible to the driver" which was the stock touchscreen.
I was told that the infotainment systems were where a large chunk of their profit came from and differentiating their experience was important to the car company.
Of course, they wanted to use decade old CPUs and touchscreens to save money, so the experience was horrible. I left shortly after CarPlay was announced and our response was "That will never catch on."
Money talks. I know it's hard when you want that nice car, but considering the above, the only way is just not buying the car with software lock-in. Only this stimulus can have some effect.
I wonder how that could be true. Most car companies have pretty terrible infotainment systems, and I've never met anyone who genuinely loved the infotainment system in their car. (Most people I know tend feel that it ranges from "somewhat annoying" to "good enough".)
These days, even when I see the rate infotainment system that is pretty good, people still want CarPlay/Android Auto because that's what they're used to, and it already integrates with settings and data that have already been configured on the user's phone.
If I rent a car, I won't pair my phone at all, even going so far as to use a car charger instead of the provided USB ports.
i didn't even like having my phone data sunk to a my own personal car. it just made no logical sense on why that would be useful, so being me, i just assumed it was for nefarious purposes. people no longer get the benefit of the doubt of being lazy/incompetent. i immediately jump to the situation essentially being an attack vector.
TBH, in this day and age where it's difficult to replace batteries when they wear out, I strongly prefer slow-charging over fast-charging. Fast-charging wears out the batteries more quickly.
You can create one by severing the data lines in a normal usb cable
Driving in the country was fine with just audio navigation, but I had to connect my phone to get the display once I was driving in a big city. "Take the freeway exit" "Use the right lane" "Use the left lane" was coming too quick if I relied only on the audio.
By extension, that means it is 100% legal for anyone, including any branch of any government to get a copy of your call and text history.
Always has been
> Here's the fix that 95%+ of the users impacted will never use
Hopefully you only had HN users in mind while writing your comment, otherwise you've intentionally downplayed one of dozens of security & privacy risks "our moms" are dealing with daily.
* There's an obvious, legitimate want for the vehicle's head unit to ingest this data, in order to display a UI (or provide a voice UI) which allows the user to call a contact by name or read a recently received text message. Is this a poor implementation concept which has mostly been supplanted by better implementations (Android Auto / CarPlay), sure, absolutely but it's not some thing that was added for the express purpose of "stealing" information. It's a long-standing set of features which use obvious, standardized Bluetooth technologies to fill an obvious, straightforward user need. Nothing weird there.
* There's no sign whatsoever that there was any collusion with law enforcement in the construction of these systems. They're just badly implemented, vulnerable software which is exploited by a forensics vendor (just like literally every other piece of hardware and software under the sun).
It is the lack of planning to prevent it that is years later branded as a feature to sell when company leadership looking to boost numbers or build political capitol start talking to law enforcement. Often after an acquisition or two.
I personally know a release engineer that was required to quietly send all new code changes to an NSA ftp server, presumably to make sure none of the bugs they rely on were fixed.
If something is in popular use and -can- collect data covertly, it will be co-opted to do so by someone for power or money without fail.
Destroying the means of surveillance, capturing targets, and reverse blackhatting is what will work.
... what would they have your acquaintance do if a bug they relied on were fixed? Push back on the change?
Could be they just decide to go take maximum risky advantage of the flaw before it is patched.
"Oh it wasn't our fault the software was wrote poorly. Not like we wrote laws around it or paid companies to share data with us."
What else do you believe that comes from the govt's mouth? Would you simply never believe they'd take advantage of us unless caught in some precise way, in some precise situation?
Government can start showing us it's loyal to us, or face attack of its own networks.
* Automotive head units are just embedded computers. Most run Linux, QNX, or Windows CE, with some proprietary UI system on top.
* These machines usually store data in an onboard database in flash (sometimes just SQLite).
* Sometimes, phone data is captured using standard Bluetooth mechanisms (Message Access Protocol MAP and Phone Book Access Protocol PBAP) which require authorization on the phone side. Some vendors implement an additional "are you sure you want to share your information" check on the head unit side, and others don't.
* This data is cached on the head unit so that finding a contact to call or reading a text message doesn't require 10 minutes worth of Bluetooth nonsense.
* Some vendors inadequately purge this cached data when a Bluetooth pairing is removed from the head unit.
* Berla sell data extraction exploits to law enforcement, just like other forensics vendors do for mobile phones. Sometimes this can extract latent data and sometimes active data.
My advice:
* Never authorize a head unit to download your contacts or SMS.
* If you use a rental car, Factory Reset the head unit when you leave.
That's decent protection for most people. I didn't find any evidence pointing to a central server upload, a conspiracy to build an LE database, etc. It's just typical crappy hardware manufacturer-made software leaving data around that shouldn't be left around, creating an opening for forensic vendor exploits to slurp the data.