It’s a great system until you return to your car – or, I should say, where your car should have been, but isn’t, because hackers have hacked your code and stolen your car.
It doesn’t happen often, but often enough to be of concern
No system is perfect, but I prefer “smart” physical keys that require both a traditional key and an embedded sensor. With the right key but without the sensor, the ignition will turn and the car will start, but will quickly become immobilized.
Risks everywhere. That particular relay attack is about 10 years old now. I don’t know how current the risk is. Fobs may have gotten smarter about broadcasting an identity before they’ve “heard” your car.
Critically, that attack depends on being able to associate a particular car with a particular fob location. Given the short ranges involved between fob and thief #1 and also between car and thief #2, it becomes a guessing game.
e.g. #1 is wandering around inside a restaurant while #2 is wandering around the parking lot. Maybe they get lucky and both are near a matched pair of fob and car simultaneously. Maybe not.
It’d be lots more productive for them to try to snag cars from in front of homes where the location of the fob (inside that same house) is not a guessing game.
Can it happen? Sure. Does it happen often enough for any one of us to alter our behavior? Not that I can see.
Would an insurer love to scare every single one of their customers into taking massive, inconvenient, and expensive precautions if there’s even a chance it will stop a single theft claim? Of course they would. It’s the economic equivalent of spam. That article could have been scaring customers for probably 10+ years at near-zero cost to the insurer.
Agreed, of course they would.
But how about when law enforcement takes the same position?
Even more pedantic Chevrolet owner : MILs GM keys had the ISUZO logo on them
It also depends how far back you go. IIRC early mid 1960s the keys were different for each GM division. Mid 1970s? All the same.
Rant warning (tech over-complications).
My new-ish truck has a rotary shift knob on the dash instead of the traditional lever. Since there is no physical connection to the trans, and no tactile feedback, software governs a lot of the decisions.
Due to the lack of visual cues, it’s easy for a driver to exit without realizing the truck is not in “Park”. So it attempts to discern whether a driver is actually present, and if not, overrides the knob’s position and commands “AutoPark”.
As you’d expect, this isn’t perfect. Last week while going through the car wash, it got alarmed and decided to fling itself into Park while moving down the line. This caused the conveyor to stop while shoving the truck forward, and then shut down the whole wash line, complete with alarms. Thankfully I completed the sequence to reset it to Neutral before the workers restarted the line.
It seems to have occurred while I was shifting around on the seat, trying to put my wallet in my back pocket. I’m guessing it sensed “Seat belt released”->“No weight on seat”->“In Neutral”->“Vehicle rolling forward”, and assumed I’d abandoned ship and it needed to trigger an emergency stop.
Thankfully we finally got away from those obvious and easy to use levers… you know, the one’s on the column with detents and an obvious pointer to the gear? We are so fortunate now to have spiffy and decorative knobs that are the exact same tactile feel and shape as the radio and A/C knobs. Because it’s much more important to look neato and cool than to have safe and familiar functionality. And if Stellantis sacrifices a lot of people and even a beloved Star Trek actor to their fashion-driven gear selectors, it’s just the price we have to pay for shiny things, right? /s
Quotes from the link above (bolding mine):
Unlike traditional gear selectors which shift forwards and backwards, the units in the 2015 Jeep that killed Yelchin operate electronically, sending a signal to the vehicle’s transmission and returning to a center rest position. This can make it confusing for drivers used to traditional gear selectors to tell right away whether the vehicle is in park, neutral, or reverse.
…hundreds of crashes and dozens of injuries are also associated with the vehicle. Injuries from the defective Jeep Grand Cherokees include crushed pelvises, broken ribs, ruptured bladder, bone fractures, and internal organ damage.
I don’t know how much of this is law-firm histrionics, or how many of the injuries are due to the “shiny new shifters”, but I’d sure like to spend some quality time (with a cat ‘o’ nine-tails) explaining my position to the moronic dipshits who came up with this abomination.
I will point out that a great many other vehicles with what vaguely resemble shift knobs or levers aren’t really anything but oversized switches connected to the computer too.
Just because you move the knob to position X doesn’t mean the transmission will follow. Just because you see the knob in position X doesn’t mean the transmission is actually in state X.
In the interest of preventing runaway cars that roll over drivers some new regulations demand cars become aggressively “smart” about ensuring the vehicle can’t be easily left in neutral and can’t engage forward or reverse with a door open or nobody in the seat. All of which practically demands the human shift control is just a suggestion to a computer guarding the inputs to prevent the dangerous situation.
We may not like it, and we may rant about it, but it’s here to stay.
My gripe against modern automotive controls: it’s really hard to press a button on a touch screen while the vehicle is bumping and bouncing about.
I have to spend more time than necessary to aim my finger at whatever button I want.
Thankfully my truck is older, so it has a relatively small touch screen and there is a bezel that I can use to anchor my thumb as I reach for some control button. I can’t imagine driving a vehicle that has a big featureless expanse of touch screen.
And they probably make them just as unresponsive and laggy as those kiosk touchscreens at fast food joints (which I surely must have ranted about earlier)
good call on that, but the problem is an american invention and older than I am…
;–)
(ok, one could argue the case that it did not catch on 70 years ago … )
I used to belong to a gym, long ago enough that cars didn’t yet have GPS. When you walked in was the check-in desk on the left side, followed by treadmills. On the right side was a peg board with hooks to hang your keys. If one was on one of the first treadmills you had direct line of sight to the key board. If you saw someone walk in & hang their keys you could walk over, knowing you probably had at least ½ hour, grab their keys, walk outside, press the button, listen for the chirp & get in & drive off. I’m sure when the owner went back & didn’t see their keys their first thought wouldn’t be to go outside & see their car missing but to assume that they put their keys there last time & go check out the machines that they used assuming that they left them somewhere in the gym, buying the car thief even more time to get away.
I went to the hardware store & bought a chipless key that would only un/lock the doors & put the ignition in ‘Accessory’ position so one could use the windows & radio but not start it. I figured no one is going to attempt to steal if they have to put the key in every car door to see if it’ll unlock (hardware store key so it didn’t even have the manufacturer’s logo on it.
Yup. I believe they are a significant cause of distracted driving if you need to look down to change the radio, or turn on/off certain functions rather than just do it by feel if you had buttons. Manufacturers like them because they’re cheaper & easier to build. Adding a button on a UI is easy compared to a physical layout. It’s one of the main reasons I will never get a Tesla, too.
Try explaining to your kids on Christmas morning that the reason the LEGOs aren’t working is because “BrickNet” is down.
I’ve not read anything about these to know the real details, all I’ve heard is commentary from people who are extremely jaded on tech promises. They said that the use case for the smart brick appears to be making screams if there is a mini-figure in a lego plane and it flies upside down. It will also scream if you run over a mini-fig with a lego car.
So one of the out of box demonstrated use cases appears to be enhancing torture play.
I use my Pixel 3 watch mainly for reminders and alarms. One very helpful function was setting an alarm for a specific reason, then when the alarm went off it would read, “get your laundry” or whatever. Excellent.
This function now appears to be disabled, and gives only a generic alarm, so I’m left wondering what the hell I set the alarm for.
This isn’t really a minor thing for me because I have executive function issues and these stupid alarms are a significant component of how I manage my day to day life.
I have a similar usage case - but for my celular …
I create lots of small calendar entries for mundane tasks most often ad-hoc ( → call Cris to return hecksaw) … so, even if you create them in google-calendar, does it not show the reason why of the alarm on the watch (maybe a setting in the alarm-function of the watch)?
Any way you can work around that, as it seems odd?
I just happen to check this thread while sitting here contemplating two of my problems which, I think, are great examples.
First, I have multiple devices, including my smart TV and cell, that are regularly showing me pop-ups inviting me to set up some AI feature. On my TV, I literally get a pop-up with a QR code asking me to activate some stupid Samsung AI feature every few days. It’s big and it can’t be cleared using the remote. I have to either use it or do nothing until it disappears after 30 seconds or so. Very, very irritating. So far, I cannot find a way to stop this from happening, even after searching the TV settings vigorously. Same sort of thing happens with Amazon. Rufus keeps popping up, even after I turn the feature off. I want these features/notifications GONE. There should be a way to turn them off. Don’t make me spend valuable time figuring out how to keep Samsung from covering up 1/8 of my screen while we’re watching a movie.
Second, my wife and I received one of those digital picture frames for Christmas from her daughter. We don’t want or need anything like that, but this gets even worse. It’s one of those where the gift giver can download new photos to the device through her phone app so she can “instantly share” her hundreds of pics of her new baby with us. That’s terrifying. I don’t care for social media as photo gallery anyway and I’m not fond of other people’s baby pics to start with. I sure don’t want my baby-obsessed brand-new-mother step-daughter controlling what’s in the picture frame on my desk over there all hours of the day and night. I already have my “eight photos of my brand new baby” Christmas card from her sitting nearby. I’ve politely explained to my better half that I’m OK with the device being activated ONLY if it lives in the spare bedroom. Otherwise, it may accidentally fall behind the sectional couch, to be lost forever.
Perfect examples of technology that pisses me off and makes my life not-so-subtly worse.
I think the picture frame is not so much an example of technology that complicates things , but just an example of your step-daughter not knowing your tastes. Because your step-daughter probably has at least one of these frames for herself . Now that you’ve mentioned it , I’m thinking about getting one of the ones with a slide show feature myself.It will save me from having to change out the photos every so often.
That’s true, to some extent. But it seems a bit over the top for someone to think, “Hey! I should put a digital picture frame in my parents’ living room and remotely control what they see and hear.” (I believe it also does small videos.) Might be a step beyond our choosing to watch TV or follow on Facebook, which, of course, I don’t do…and she knows it.
I understand that having a child must be a wonderful experience. But my sister put it best when she had her first child: “I know that every parent believes their baby is absolutely the cutest in the world and should be in commercials. But it’s TRUE of mine.”
Someone at our church donated one of those digital picture frames to show announcements in our foyer, and there was enough of an “impedance mismatch” between the expected usage (share images only, mostly baby pictures, with grandma) and the actual usage (show announcement slides, either PDF or PowerPoint, changing every 10 seconds) that the care and feeding was way too much and it stayed dark for a couple of years.
A month or two ago our church secretary started asking me why it wasn’t in use and I said “because it’s too much effort to put stuff on it 52 weeks a year”
…then I got to thinking: she makes a PowerPoint slide deck every week with announcements slides…why couldn’t I make a simple slideshow gadget that allowed me to drop the slide deck in a folder and have it magically appear?
A couple of weeks later I had the perfect simple Raspberry Pi announcements app designed to use any random TV, and it’s currently in the church foyer doing its thing. And I designed it with a scheduler so it will turn off the TV at night and when our rental church group is in so they don’t have to see our slides.
Sometimes annoyance spurs on creativity!
And we have to watch out for impedance mismatch between a product and our usage.
What watch do you have? I have a Garmin watch that shows me the first __ characters of any meeting (reminder) in my calendar. I’m guessing there’s a setting for show alert details that you have toggled the wrong way.
I used to do a monthly calendar of the kids. I tried to line up the pics so they were from that month a year ago; it’s amazing how a one year old photo for a little one is sooo outdated. Depending upon when the kid was born & when those Christmas card pics were taken they could be significantly out of date already.
They got her dad one of those frames & will she’ll send him a pic or two of our adventures & he loves it. Sounds like she needs to turn down the frequency of her updates to your frame.
I did a similar thing once.
My wife wanted a way to show my photos on our 4K TV, but only changing them every 3 hours, and with no transition effects. The built-in slideshow app couldn’t do this. So, I made a Raspberry Pi Python app which turned the TV on and off at preset times, cycled through a folder of images, changing them every 3 hours, and even allowed skipping to the next image by remote control.