I don’t (and won’t) talk about my religion here. But I will say: I have a lot of respect for Ryan Bell, and would love to sit down and talk with him at some point.
Archive for the ‘Cars’ Category
Random notes: December 22, 2014.
Monday, December 22nd, 2014TMQ Watch: November 25, 2014.
Wednesday, November 26th, 2014Two of our new favorite things in the world:
- Kickended, an archive of failed Kickstarter projects. And when we say “failed”, we don’t just mean “didn’t meet their goal”; these are projects that attracted no pledges at all.
- The Clickbait Headline Generator. The real genius of this is the “View This as a Fake Website” function.
We actually want to write the “Three Types of Fun You Should Never Have With a Freelance Nurse” article, as we have some ideas for that. Unfortunately, those ideas make us cringe so badly we can’t bring ourselves to start writing.
In other news, this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
Obit watch: November 3, 2014.
Monday, November 3rd, 2014Tom Magliozzi, of “Car Talk” fame. NPR. Preliminary LAT obit. A/V Club. Car Talk.
A long time ago, I was a huge fan of “Car Talk”. My Monday nights were not complete without listening to the latest episode, and I tended to get cranky if that schedule was interrupted. (Kids, ask your parents about the time before podcasts.) I even – hold on to your hats, folks – donated money to our local NPR station at one point so I could show my support of “Car Talk”. (Oh, yeah. Like you never did anything stupid when you were young.)
Then our local station changed the schedule around so “Car Talk” was on at an inconvenient time, and I kind of dropped away from it. Then Tom and Ray started taking truly idiotic political positions (for example, advocating a federally enforced limit on horsepower to weight ratios) and I stopped being a “Car Talk” fan. As a matter of fact, I began to find the show grating. Not quite “I’d rather listen to Prairie Home Companion” grating, but grating enough. And frankly, I don’t understand why it is still on the air, since it has been nothing but re-runs since 2012. (Actually, I think I do understand why: I guess it brings in the bucks at pledge time.)
On the other hand, 77 is too damn young. Alzheimer’s sucks. I do kind of want to hear the tribute show. And he had a great beard.
TMQ Watch: October 28, 2014.
Tuesday, October 28th, 2014Musical interlude that has nothing to do with this week’s TMQ. We just needed a musical interlude right about now, and we find this particular version of the song haunting. Yes, we’re in a mood.
This week’s column after the jump.
Who holds back the electric car?
Tuesday, April 15th, 2014By way of the Y Combinator Twitter, I found this rather interesting Fast Company article about “Better Place”.
Better Place was born to be revolutionary, the epitome of the kind of world-changing ambition that routinely gets celebrated. Founder Shai Agassi, a serial entrepreneur turned rising star at German software giant SAP, conceived Better Place “on a Davos afternoon” in 2005 when he asked himself, “How would you run a whole country without oil?” Four years later, onstage at the TED conference, Agassi, a proud Israeli with a bit of a Steve Jobs complex, wore a black turtleneck and promised, with the confidence of a man who has known the future for some time but has only recently decided to share his findings, that he would sell millions of electric vehicles in his home country and around the world. He implied that converting to electric cars was the moral equivalent of the abolition of human slavery and that it would usher in a new Industrial Revolution.
Shai Agassi was on FC‘s “2009 Most Creative People in Business” list. He was on the cover of Wired. Better Place raised almost a billion dollars.
And if being on the cover of Wired wasn’t a dead giveaway for you, they collapsed.
I have been, and continue to be, somewhat critical of Tesla. But I think one thing they’re doing right is positioning their vehicles as a premium product that’s worth the asking price.
GMR 4×4 update.
Wednesday, February 26th, 2014Linoge has posted a follow-up on his dealings with GMR 4×4. In brief, he filed a complaint with the Vermont Consumer Assistance Program, GMR was given the chance to respond…and pretty much lied through their teeth.
And apparently Linoge isn’t the only person they’ve burned. Once again, I encourage you to read the original post, and Linoge’s update, and then carefully consider whether GMR 4×4 is the kind of company you’d like to do business with.
Consumer advisory: GMR 4×4
Saturday, February 8th, 2014I have two sets of fantasy vehicles. Set number one is the ones I would buy if I ever won the lottery: something like a nice high-end BMW, or an Acura NSX, or a Mercedes sedan, or maybe a nice Audi…
Set number two is the more affordable set, and what I like to call “hacking around” vehicles. Sometimes I think it’d be nice to have something like a used Pinzgauer or Unimog. I’ve also thought about a real Land Rover; not one of those soccer mom vehicles, but an older model Defender, possibly a military surplus one. All of these are surprisingly affordable.
But if I ever do go looking for that surplus Land Rover, you know who I won’t be doing business with? GMR 4×4, aka GMR Imports LLC.
Why? Linoge has the whole story of how he got screwed over by GMR over at his site. In short, his “jump in and drive away” Land Rover has cost him over $11,000 above the purchase price so far, requiring a transmission replacement (it literally could not be driven off the transport) and an engine replacement within the first 100 miles of driving. Yes, yes, buyer beware when you’re buying a used vehicle, but based on Linoge’s summary, GMR substantially misrepresented the condition of the vehicle on their website.
I encourage you to go over to Walls of the City, read Linoge’s story, and then carefully consider whether you wish to do business with GMR 4×4.
TMQ Watch: December 17, 2013.
Thursday, December 19th, 2013You know that comment we made yesterday, about “Start writing or stop talking about it” being pretty good writing advice?
Obit watch: December 1, 2013.
Sunday, December 1st, 2013For the historical record: Paul Walker.
Random notes: September 10, 2013.
Tuesday, September 10th, 2013You could hear the music on the AM radio…
(If you have to put this much effort into “saving” commercial radio, is it really worth saving?)
I’m not a huge NASCAR fan: if I’m home and a race is televised, I’ll put it on as background noise, and I’d happily go to a race if someone invited me. But my life doesn’t revolve around it. With that said, this is interesting:
Ryan Newman replaced Martin Truex Jr. in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship on Monday night when NASCAR penalized Michael Waltrip Racing for manipulating the outcome of last weekend’s race.
Michael Waltrip Racing was fined $300,000, and general manager Ty Norris received an indefinite suspension. Truex, Bowyer and Vickers were docked 50 points apiece — but Bowyer’s deduction does not affect his position in the Chase, which begins Sunday at Chicago.
Isn’t “manipulating the outcome” of a race pretty much what every racing team tries to do? Is this example just particularly egregious? (And I find it surprising that there’s been no FARK thread on this yet.)
(Edited to add: Thanks to Ben for his thoughtful and enlightening comments, which you should really go read now. Also, FARK did put up a thread after I posted this.)
Random notes: August 14, 2013.
Wednesday, August 14th, 2013Ford stopped making the police variant of the Crown Victoria in 2011. We’re now in 2013, and police departments are starting to retire the last of the Crown Vics.
I have flirted from time to time with the idea of purchasing a former cop car as a backup vehicle. (“It’s got a cop motor, a 440 cubic inch plant, it’s got cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks.”) Problem is, the state surplus store wants nearly $6K for used DPS cars; at that price, I could go get a used Miata or Outback instead.
The 1933 double eagle is on display at the New York Historical Society. I’ve written previously about the strange history of the 1933 double eagle, and the linked NYT article contains a good summary, too.
DEFCON 21 update: August 5, 2013.
Monday, August 5th, 2013Yeah, I know, I’ve been quiet. Much of Friday’s blogging time was eaten by Bluehost instability, and Saturday and Sunday were busy.
But I do have some updates and links.
- Slides for Benjamin Caudill’s “Offensive Forensics – CSI for Bad Guys” are here. See also his post on the Rhino Security Labs blog.
- Amber Baldet has a post up with links to the slides from her “Suicide Risk Assessment & Intervention Tactics” talk, and some additional resources. I’m not on Twitter, so I can’t add to the support she’s been getting there. But I will say, again: thank you, Amber, for doing this.
- Amir Etemadieh and the other Google TV hackers have a page up at the GTVHacker site with slides and resources from their DEFCON 21 presentation, “Google TV or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Exploit Secure Boot”. There is also a blog entry that (I think) gives a little more context to the slides.
- Dan Crowley, David Bryan, and Jennifer Savage have slides, a white paper, and sample code from their presentation at Black Hat, “Home Invasion 2.0 – Attacking Network-Controlled Consumer Devices” up at the Black Hat site. From the descriptions, I assume tha the DEFCON 21 version is very similar to the Black Hat one.
- Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller have a blog entry up at IOActive with links to the content and their white paper on “Adventures in Automotive Networks and Control Units”.
- The LMG Security blog has a post up with links to the white paper and source code from the Sherri Davidoff/Randi Price/David Harrison/Scott Frethem talk, “Do-It-Yourself Cellular IDS”.
- Ryan W. Smith has a post up at the Lookout blog about the talk he did with Tim Strazzere, “DragonLady: An Investigation of SMS Fraud Operations in Russia”. That post, in turn, links to the white paper summarizing their presentation.
- I haven’t found the DEFCON slides for Joseph Paul Cohen’s “Blucat: Netcat For Bluetooth” presentation yet. But here’s the Blucat SourceForge page, which includes slides from a couple of other conferences, and the source code, and Mac OS X binaries for 10.6 and 10.8. Wow. I got more than what I asked for. (Edited to add 8/6: Mr. Cohen has added the DEFCON 21 slides. Praise be unto him, and may flights of angels sing him to sleep.)
- The slides for Aaron Bayles’ “Oil and Gas Infosec 101” talk are here.
I’m going to cut things off here for right now. I’m still trying to find links to some of the other presentations I mentioned (in particular, I’d love a link of some sort to Anch’s “Pentesters Toolkit” if anyone has one) and will post updates as they come in. Depending on what I dig up, there may be a second post tomorrow. In the meantime, this should keep you busy.