Locking Gas Caps
People in this country freak out at the slightest little thing.
Entries Tagged "cars"
Page 17 of 18
DUI Cases Thrown Out Due to Closed-Source Breathalyzer
Hundreds of cases involving breath-alcohol tests have been thrown out by Seminole County judges in the past five months because the test’s manufacturer will not disclose how the machines work.
I think this is huge. (Think of the implications for voting systems, for one.) And it’s the right decision. Throughout history, the government has had to make the choice: prosecute, or keep your investigative methods secret. They couldn’t have both. If they wanted to keep their methods secret, they had to give up on prosecution.
People have the right to confront their accuser. And people have the right to a public trial. This is the correct decision, and we are all safer because of it.
RFID in British License Plates
The British government is testing a scheme to put active—the kind that are independently powered—RFID chips in automobile license plates. They can be read at least 300 feet away, and probably much, much further.
The MD5 Defense
A team of Chinese maths enthusiasts have thrown NSW’s speed cameras system into disarray by cracking the technology used to store data about errant motorists.
The NRMA has called for a full audit of the way the state’s 110 enforcement cameras are used after a motorist escaped a conviction by claiming that data was vulnerable to hackers.
A Sydney magistrate, Laurence Lawson, threw out the case because the Roads and Traffic Authority failed to find an expert to testify that its speed camera images were secure.
The motorist’s defence lawyer, Denis Mirabilis, argued successfully that an algorithm known as MD5, which is used to store the time, date, place, numberplate and speed of cars caught on camera, was a discredited piece of technology.
It’s true that MD5 is broken. On the other hand, it’s almost certainly true that the speed cameras were correct. If there’s any lesson here, it’s that theoretical security is important in legal proceedings.
I think that’s a good thing.
Eavesdropping on Bluetooth Automobiles
This is impressive:
This new toool is called The Car Whisperer and allows people equipped with a Linux Laptop and a directional antenna to inject audio to, and record audio from bypassing cars that have an unconnected Bluetooth handsfree unit running. Since many manufacturers use a standard passkey which often is the only authentication that is needed to connect.
This tool allows to interact with other drivers when traveling or maybe used in order to talk to that pushy Audi driver right behind you 😉 . It also allows to eavesdrop conversations in the inside of the car by accessing the microphone.
EDITED TO ADD: Another article.
Russia's Black-Market Data Trade
Interesting story on the market for data in Moscow:
This Gorbushka vendor offers a hard drive with cash transfer records from Russia’s central bank for $1,500 (Canadian).
And:
At the Gorbushka kiosk, sales are so brisk that the vendor excuses himself to help other customers while the foreigner considers his options: $43 for a mobile phone company’s list of subscribers? Or $100 for a database of vehicles registered in the Moscow region?
The vehicle database proves irresistible. It appears to contain names, birthdays, passport numbers, addresses, telephone numbers, descriptions of vehicles, and vehicle identification (VIN) numbers for every driver in Moscow.
I don’t know whether you can buy data about people in other countries, but it is certainly plausible.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Security Countermeasures
Amidst all the emotional rhetoric about security, it’s nice to see something well-reasoned. This New York Times op-ed by Nicholas Kristof looks at security as a trade-off, and makes a distinction between security countermeasures that reduce the threat and those that simply shift it.
The op ed starts with countermeasures against car theft.
Sold for $695, the LoJack is a radio transmitter that is hidden on a vehicle and then activated if the car is stolen. The transmitter then silently summons the police – and it is ruining the economics of auto theft….
The thief’s challenge is that it’s impossible to determine which vehicle has a LoJack (there’s no decal). So stealing any car becomes significantly more risky, and one academic study found that the introduction of LoJack in Boston reduced car theft there by 50 percent.
Two Yale professors, Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres, note that this means that the LoJack benefits everyone, not only those who install the system. Professor Ayres and another scholar, Steven Levitt, found that every $1 invested in LoJack saves other car owners $10.
Professors Nalebuff and Ayres note that other antitheft devices, such as the Club, a polelike device that locks the steering wheel, help protect that car, but only at the expense of the next vehicle.
“The Club doesn’t reduce crime,” Mr. Nalebuff says. “It just shifts it to the next person.”
This model could be applied to home burglar alarms:
Conventional home alarms are accompanied by warning signs and don’t reduce crime but simply shift the risk to the next house. What if we encouraged hidden silent alarms to change the economics of burglary?
Granted, most people don’t want hidden alarms that entice a burglar to stay until the police show up. But suppose communities adjusted the fees they charge for alarm systems – say, $2,000 a year for an audible alarm, but no charge for a hidden LoJack-style silent alarm.
Then many people would choose the silent alarms, more burglars would get caught, and many of the criminally inclined would choose a new line of work….
I wrote about this in Beyond Fear:
A burglar who sees evidence of an alarm system is more likely to go rob the house next door. As far as the local police station is concerned, this doesn’t mitigate the risk at all. But for the homeowner, it mitigates the risk just fine.
The difference is the perspective of the defender.
Problems with perspectives show up in counterterrorism defenses all the time. Also from Beyond Fear:
It’s important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Countermeasures often focus on preventing particular terrorist acts against specific targets, but the scope of the assets that need to be protected encompasses all potential targets, and they all must be considered together. A terrorist’s real target is morale, and he really doesn’t care about one physical target versus another. We want to prevent terrorist acts everywhere, so countermeasures that simply move the threat around are of limited value. If, for example, we spend a lot of money defending our shopping malls, and bombings subsequently occur in crowded sports stadiums or movie theaters, we haven’t really received any value from our countermeasures.
I like seeing thinking like this in the media, and wish there were more of it.
Speeding Ticket Avoidance
This is a very popular security-related field, and one that every driver is at least somewhat interested in.
This site is run by an ex-policeman, and feels authoritative. He places a lot of emphasis on education; installing a fancy radar detector isn’t doing to do much for you unless you know how to use it correctly.
Here’s a product that seems to counter the threat of aerial license-plate scanners.
This spray claims to make your license plate invisible to cameras. I have no idea if it works.
One final note: the ex-cop is offering a $5,000 reward for the first person who can point him to a passive laser jammer that works.
New Risks of Automatic Speedtraps
Every security system brings about new threats. Here’s an example:
The RAC Foundation yesterday called for an urgent review of the first fixed motorway speed cameras.
Far from improving drivers’ behaviour, motorists are now bunching at high speeds between junctions 14-18 on the M4 in Wiltshire, said Edmund King, the foundation’s executive director.
The cameras were introduced by the Wiltshire and Swindon Safety Camera Partnership in an attempt to reduce accidents on a stretch of the motorway. But most motorists are now travelling at just under 79mph, the speed at which they face being fined.
In response to automated speedtraps, drivers are adopting the obvious tactic of driving just below the trigger speed for the cameras, presumably on cruise control. So instead of cars on the road traveling at a spectrum of speeds with reasonable gaps between them, we are seeing “pelotons” of cars traveling closely bunched together at the same high speed, presenting unfamiliar hazards to each other and to law-abiding slower road-users.
The result is that average speeds are going up, and not down.
Universal Automobile Surveillance
Universal automobile surveillance comes to the United Arab Emirates:
IBM will begin installing a “Smart Box” system in vehicles in the United Arab Emirates next year, potentially generating millions in traffic fines for the Gulf state. The UAE signed a $125 million contract with IBM today to provide the high-tech traffic monitoring and speed-enforcing system in which a GPS-enabled “Smart Box” would be installed in cars to provide a voice warning if the driver exceeds the local speed limit for wherever he may be driving. If the voice warning is ignored, the system would use a GSM/GPRS link to beam the car’s speed, identity and location to the police so that a ticket could be issued. The system would also track and monitor any other driving violations, including “reckless behavior.”
This kind of thing is also being implemented in the UK, for insurance purposes.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.