Archive for the ‘Cars’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Here in my car…

Thursday, July 5th, 2018

I bought a new to me car last Saturday. It’s a 2006 Honda Accord EX-L that had 82,000 miles on it (not bad, in my opinion, for a 12 year old car) and has quite few features I like: leather interior, sun roof, cabin air filter, power seats, and even seat heaters for that one month a year when those are actually useful in Texas. (Also ABS. I’m not clear on whether it has traction control or not. I checked the Honda-Tech VIN decoder and while it is useful, it doesn’t talk about traction control.)

Now that I have the car, I splurged on a couple of things. I got a dashcam for it: the Papago GoSafe 535, which is what the Wirecutter currently recommends. That one has gone up by about $13 in the couple of days since I ordered it, and it really wasn’t my first choice. I wanted the Spy Tec G1W-C, which was a previous Wirecutter choice that I bought for my mother’s car and have been happy with. But by the time I was ready to order, Amazon had sold out of the Spy Tec.

My other splurge item was a LELink Bluetooth Low Energy BLE OBD-II car diagnostic tool. Why? Several reasons:

(more…)

Posted in Android, Apple, Bluetooth, Bookmarks, Cars, Geek, Radio | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 18, 2018.

Thursday, January 18th, 2018

Dan Gurney, one of the all-time great racing drivers.

In all, according to All American Racers, Gurney drove in 312 races in 20 countries in 51 makes of cars. He won 51 races, including seven in Indy cars and five in Nascar Winston Cup stock cars (all five in 500-mile races in Riverside, Calif.). He twice finished second in the Indianapolis 500.

…

…alternating with his fellow American driver A. J. Foyt, he won the 24 Hours of LeMans in France in a Ford prototype. It was the first time in that race’s 45-year history that it had been won by an American driver in an American car.
A week after that, Gurney won the Grand Prix of Belgium in a 416-horsepower American Eagle, a car he had designed and built himself. He was the first American in 46 years to win a world championship race in an American car.

Posted in Cars, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Like Steve McQueen…

Monday, January 15th, 2018

Hand to God, when I mentioned Steve McQueen cosplay yesterday, I had no idea this was a thing.

Posted in Cars | Comments Closed

DEFCON 25/Black Hat updates: July 28, 2017.

Friday, July 28th, 2017

Round 2:

  • The white paper for “Free-Fall: Hacking Tesla from Wireless to CAN Bus” (Ling Liu, Sen Nie, Yuefeng Du) is here. Slides here.
  • Slides for “Exploiting Network Printers” (Jens Müller, Vladislav Mladenov, Juraj Somorovsky, Jörg Schwenk) are here.
  • Found slides for “Breaking Electronic Door Locks Like You’re on CSI: Cyber” here. (I called this one wrong: no Bluetooth. Not a complaint, just an observation.)
  • This is one that I saw, overlooked, and now am intrigued by: “All Your SMS & Contacts Belong to ADUPS & Others“. “Our research has identified several models of Android mobile devices that contained firmware that collected sensitive personal data about their users and transmitted this sensitive data to third-party servers in China – without disclosure or the users’ consent.” Slides. White paper.
  • Slides for Vlad Gostomelsky’s “Hunting GPS Jammers”. I think this is one that really needs video, too.
  • “Intercepting iCloud Keychain” (Alex Radocea) slides.
  • And “The Future of ApplePwn – How to Save Your Money” (Timur Yunusov) slides.
  • And (hattip to Mr. Yunusov) “Jailbreaking Apple Watch” (Max Bazaliy). I haven’t compared these slides to the onea on the presentations server, just FYI.

Okay, lunch time is almost over, and I feel like I’ve done enough damage to the security community today. I’ll try to have more updates later today or tonight.

Posted in Android, Apple, Cars, DEFCON, DEFCON 25, Geek, GPS, Locks | Comments Closed

Here’s your hat.

Wednesday, July 26th, 2017

Black Hat 2017 is just getting started.

There’s some overlap with DEFCON 25. For example, hacking wind farm control networks and the SHA-1 hash talk are on both schedules. But there are also a few things unique to the Black Hat 2017 schedule:

The same rules for the DEFCON post apply here: if you’re a presenter who wants some love, or if you want me to follow a specific talk, leave a comment.

Posted in Apple, Bluetooth, Cars, DEFCON, DEFCON 25, GPS, Locks, Radio, WiFi | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#37 in a series)

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2017

The district attorney of Philadelphia, Seth Williams, was indicted yesterday.

A 50-page, 23-count indictment accused Mr. Williams of accepting lavish gifts — including trips to a Dominican resort, Burberry accessories, checks for thousands of dollars and a custom sofa worth $3,212 — from businessmen for whom he was willing to do favors. The indictment also accused Mr. Williams of diverting money from a relative’s pension and Social Security for his personal use.

Philly.com reports that relative was his mother.

He also gave Williams his old 1997 Jaguar XK8 convertible worth $4,160, the indictment says.

No wonder Williams was “cash-strapped”. What do you think the repair bills are on a 20-year-old Jaguar?

He has complained of his inability to pay alimony stemming from a 2011 divorce and private-school tuition for his daughters, despite his salary of $175,572 a year.
In January, the Philadelphia Board of Ethics assessed the largest fine in its 10-year history for Williams’ failure to report for years more than $175,000 in gifts he had accepted including a new roof, luxury vacations, Eagles sidelines passes, and use of a defense attorney’s home in Florida.

I don’t see any evidence of hookers or blow yet. However, Philly.com does mention that hr was known to hang out in cigar bars; that seems to have replaced call girls and Bolivian marching powder in the affections of many corrupt politicians these days. I really ought to start keeping a tally.

Posted in Cars, Law | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 5, 2016.

Monday, September 5th, 2016

Officer Amir Abdul-Khaliq of the Austin Police Department passed away yesterday.

He was critically injured in an accident on Thursday. According to reports, he was escorting a funeral procession, and was at the Burnet/Ohlen intersection when a woman pulled in front of him (trying to make it into a gap in the procession) resulting in the officer striking her vehicle.

Cmdr. Art Fortune with the Police Department’s Highway Enforcement Command said the department has handled at least a dozen motorcycle crashes involving officers in the past two years, but none had been as serious as Thursday’s incident.

Officer Abdul-Khaliq had been on the force for 17 years and has five children.

Be careful out there, people.

Semi-related: “A Fighter Pilot’s Guide to Surviving on the Roads..”

Posted in Austin, Bookmarks, Cars, Cops, Law, Safety | Comments Closed

Good news, everyone!

Monday, May 2nd, 2016

Liberace is back!

Well, more specifically, his cars are back. The Liberace Garage at the Hollywood Cars Museum is displaying a group of them.

You may remember that at least some of these cars were on display at the now tragically closed Liberace Museum.

Posted in Cars, Museums, Music, Travel | Comments Closed

DEFCON 23 notes: August 11, 2015.

Tuesday, August 11th, 2015

The Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek paper, “Remote Exploitation of an Unaltered Passenger Vehicle” is here. Sorry I don’t have much to say beyond that; I’ve been frantically busy all day and haven’t had a chance to review their paper (or much of anything else) yet. But I did want to get this up, because I’ve been waiting for it.

(Also, one of my cow-orkers owns a vulnerable vehicle, and I’ve been giving him a little bit of grief about that. Only a little bit, though, because he has problems with the vehicle that go beyond Miller and Valasek’s work.)

Posted in Cars, DEFCON 23, Geek | Comments Closed

DEFCON 23 notes: August 10, 2015.

Monday, August 10th, 2015

More when I have it; possibly tonight or tomorrow.

Posted in Cars, DEFCON 23, Geek, Guns | Comments Closed

DEFCON 23: -2 day notes

Tuesday, August 4th, 2015

DEFCON 23 starts Thursday. Black Hat USA 2015 starts tomorrow.

Once again, it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it out to Vegas. Once again, I’m going to try to cover things from 1,500 miles away. It isn’t completely clear to me that anyone other than me is getting any benefit from this, but I’ve been doing this for long enough that I have a hard time stopping now.

Here’s the schedule. There are several presentations that are already getting media attention:

So what would I go see if I was there? What sounds interesting to me?

(more…)

Posted in Android, Apple, Cars, DEFCON 23, Geek, Guns | 1 Comment »

TMQ Watch: January 13, 2015.

Thursday, January 15th, 2015

We lost the better part of the day yesterday to jury duty, so we’re late getting this up. We apologize for the convenience.

After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

(more…)

Posted in Cars, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »