License Plate Scanners Hidden in Fake Cactus
The city of Paradise Valley, AZ, is hiding license plate scanners in fake cactus plants.
Entries Tagged "cars"
Page 8 of 17
Ford Proud that "Mustang" Is a Common Password
This is what happens when a PR person gets hold of information he really doesn’t understand.
“Mustang” is the 16th most common password on the Internet according to a recent study by SplashData, besting both “superman” in 21st place and “batman” in 24th
Mustang is the only car to appear in the top 25 most common Internet passwords
That’s not bad. If you’re a PR person, that’s good.
Here are a few suggestions for strengthening your “mustang” password:
- Add numbers to your password (favorite Mustang model year, year you bought your Mustang or year you sold the car)
- Incorporate Mustang option codes, paint codes, engine codes or digits from your VIN
- Create acronyms for modifications made to your Mustang (FRSC, for Ford Racing SuperCharger, for example)
- Include your favorite driving road or road trip destination
Keep in mind that using the same password on all websites is not recommended; a password manager can help keep multiple Mustang-related passwords organized and easy-to-access.
At least they didn’t sue users for copyright infringement.
Common Risks in America: Cars and Guns
I have long said that driving a car is the most dangerous thing regularly do in our lives. Turns out deaths due to automobiles are declining, while deaths due to firearms are on the rise:
Guns and cars have long been among the leading causes of non-medical deaths in the U.S. By 2015, firearm fatalities will probably exceed traffic fatalities for the first time, based on data compiled by Bloomberg.
While motor-vehicle deaths dropped 22 percent from 2005 to 2010, gun fatalities are rising again after a low point in 2000, according to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Shooting deaths in 2015 will probably rise to almost 33,000, and those related to autos will decline to about 32,000, based on the 10-year average trend.
There’s also this story.
Corporations Misusing Our Data
In the Internet age, we have no choice but to entrust our data with private companies: e-mail providers, service providers, retailers, and so on.
We realize that this data is at risk from hackers. But there’s another risk as well: the employees of the companies who are holding our data for us.
In the early years of Facebook, employees had a master password that enabled them to view anything they wanted in any account. NSA employees occasionally snoop on their friends and partners. The agency even has a name for it: LOVEINT. And well before the Internet, people with access to police or medical records occasionally used that power to look up either famous people or people they knew.
The latest company accused of allowing this sort of thing is Uber, the Internet car-ride service. The company is under investigation for spying on riders without their permission. Called the “god view,” some Uber employees are able to see who is using the service and where they’re going—and used this at least once in 2011 as a party trick to show off the service. A senior executive also suggested the company should hire people to dig up dirt on their critics, making their database of people’s rides even more “useful.”
None of us wants to be stalked—whether it’s from looking at our location data, our medical data, our emails and texts, or anything else—by friends or strangers who have access due to their jobs. Unfortunately, there are few rules protecting us.
Government employees are prohibited from looking at our data, although none of the NSA LOVEINT creeps were ever prosecuted. The HIPAA law protects the privacy of our medical records, but we have nothing to protect most of our other information.
Your Facebook and Uber data are only protected by company culture. There’s nothing in their license agreements that you clicked “agree” to but didn’t read that prevents those companies from violating your privacy.
This needs to change. Corporate databases containing our data should be secured from everyone who doesn’t need access for their work. Voyeurs who peek at our data without a legitimate reason should be punished.
There are audit technologies that can detect this sort of thing, and they should be required. As long as we have to give our data to companies and government agencies, we need assurances that our privacy will be protected.
This essay previously appeared on CNN.com.
Deanonymizing Taxi Passenger and Fare Data
Interesting essay on the sorts of things you can learn from anonymized taxi passenger and fare data.
Security for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has released a report titled “Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications: Readiness of V2V Technology for Application.” It’s very long, and mostly not interesting to me, but there are security concerns sprinkled throughout: both authentication to ensure that all the communications are accurate and can’t be spoofed, and privacy to ensure that the communications can’t be used to track cars. It’s nice to see this sort of thing thought about in the beginning, when the system is first being designed, and not tacked on at the end.
Excess Automobile Deaths as a Result of 9/11
People commented about a point I made in a recent essay:
In the months after 9/11, so many people chose to drive instead of fly that the resulting deaths dwarfed the deaths from the terrorist attack itself, because cars are much more dangerous than airplanes.
Yes, that’s wrong. Where I said “months,” I should have said “years.”
I got the sound bite from John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart’s book, Terror, Security, and Money. This is footnote 19 from Chapter 1:
The inconvenience of extra passenger screening and added costs at airports after 9/11 cause many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination instead, and, since airline travel is far safer than car travel, this has led to an increase of 500 U.S. traffic fatalities per year. Using DHS-mandated value of statistical life at $6.5 million, this equates to a loss of $3.2 billion per year, or $32 billion over the period 2002 to 2011 (Blalock et al. 2007).
The authors make the same point in this earlier (and shorter) essay:
Increased delays and added costs at U.S. airports due to new security procedures provide incentive for many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination rather than flying, and, since driving is far riskier than air travel, the extra automobile traffic generated has been estimated in one study to result in 500 or more extra road fatalities per year.
The references are:
- Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel H. Simon. 2007. “The Impact of Post-9/11 Airport Security Measures on the Demand for Air Travel.” Journal of Law and Economics 50(4) November: 731–755.
- Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel H. Simon. 2009. “Driving Fatalities after 9/11: A Hidden Cost of Terrorism.” Applied Economics 41(14): 1717–1729.
Business Week makes the same point here.
There’s also this reference:
- Michael Sivak and Michael J. Flannagan. 2004. “Consequences for road traffic fatalities of the reduction in flying following September 11, 2001.” Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behavior 7 (4).
Abstract: Gigerenzer (Gigerenzer, G. (2004). Dread risk, September 11, and fatal traffic accidents. Psychological Science, 15 , 286287) argued that the increased fear of flying in the U.S. after September 11 resulted in a partial shift from flying to driving on rural interstate highways, with a consequent increase of 353 road traffic fatalities for October through December 2001. We reevaluated the consequences of September 11 by utilizing the trends in road traffic fatalities from 2000 to 2001 for January through August. We also examined which road types and traffic participants contributed most to the increased road fatalities. We conclude that (1) the partial modal shift after September 11 resulted in 1018 additional road fatalities for the three months in question, which is substantially more than estimated by Gigerenzer, (2) the major part of the increased toll occurred on local roads, arguing against a simple modal shift from flying to driving to the same destinations, (3) driver fatalities did not increase more than in proportion to passenger fatalities, and (4) pedestrians and bicyclists bore a disproportionate share of the increased fatalities.
This is another analysis.
Scientists Banned from Revealing Details of Car-Security Hack
The UK has banned researchers from revealing details of security vulnerabilities in car locks. In 2008, Phillips brought a similar suit against researchers who broke the Mifare chip. That time, they lost. This time, Volkswagen sued and won.
This is bad news for security researchers. (Remember back in 2001 when security researcher Ed Felten sued the RIAA in the US to be able to publish his research results?) We’re not going to improve security unless we’re allowed to publish our results. And we can’t start suppressing scientific results, just because a big corporation doesn’t like what it does to their reputation.
EDITED TO ADD (8/14): Here’s the ruling.
Automobile Data Surveillance and the Future of Black Boxes
Tesla Motors gave one of its electric cars to John Broder, a very outspoken electric-car skeptic from the New York Times, for a test drive. After a negative review, Tesla revealed that it logged a dizzying amount of data from that test drive. The company then matched the reporter’s claims against its logs and published a rebuttal. Broder rebutted the rebuttal, and others have tried to figure out who is lying and who is not.
What’s interesting to me is the sheer amount of data Tesla Motors automatically collected about the test drive. From the rebuttal:
After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear, a popular automotive show, where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives.
Read the article to see what they logged: power consumption, speed, ambient temperature, control settings, location, and so on.
The stakes are high here. Broder and the New York Times are concerned about their journalistic integrity, which affects their brand. And Tesla Motors wants to sell cars.
The implication is that Tesla Motors only does this for media test drives, but it gives you an idea of the sort of things that will be collected once automobile black boxes become the norm. We’re used to airplane black boxes, which only collected a small amount of data from the minutes just before an incident. But that was back when data was expensive. Now that it’s cheap, expect black boxes to collect everything all the time. And once it’s collected, it’ll be used. By auto manufacturers, by insurance companies, by car rental companies, by marketers. The list will be long.
But as we’re learning from this particular back-and-forth between Broder and Tesla Motors, even intense electronic surveillance of the actions of a person in an enclosed space did not succeed in providing an unambiguous record of what happened. To know that, the car company would have had to have someone in the car with the journalist.
This will increasingly be a problem as we are judged by our data. And in most cases, neither side will spend this sort of effort trying to figure out what really happened.
EDITED TO ADD (2/21): CNN weighs in.
Shaming as Punishment for Repeated Drunk Driving
Janesville, Wisconsin, has published information about repeated drunk driving offenders since 2010. The idea is that the public shame will reduce future incidents.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.