Security Precautions for Keyless Ignition vs Remote Entry

This is certainly the most practical post in the history of this blog, but it involves the hazards of relying on modern technology; specifically, power over reliability; one characteristic of the twenty-first century.

Some months ago I came home from vacation to find my car door open - not wide open, in fact as shut as it could be without actually being closed. Of course the battery was stone dead. I worried that this meant my electronic entry system had been hacked (otherwise, I would have to accept that I'm the kind of idiot who doesn't close my car door all the way when I'm about to leave for vacation.) Recently, another person on my street had both their cars entered without any signs of being forced, and they're quite sure the cars were both locked. Neighbors have been advising me to put my car keys in a Faraday cage when I'm out of the house.

If this is actually a problem, you can't rely on car manufacturers and dealerships telling you about it, despite it being clearly documented as a real problem that occurs in the real world. (Also, yes I do physically block cameras on my devices when I'm not using them - and yes, my wife once caught a virus which started taking photos from her camera - and yes, when James Comey was director of the FBI, he recommended covering your device cameras as well.)

For grins, I called my Honda dealership and asked the service department about this. With what sounded like a straight face, the technician told me that this has never happened. When I told him it's been documented on video, his counterargument was: no it hasn't, it's never happened. So they weren't much help. Ultimately I called a locksmith who verified what I thought must be the case about the various systems. (If you're reading this and I have anything wrong, PLEASE comment.)

The reason I'm posting this is that I had so much difficulty trying to answer the question by searching online, partly because there's no consistent terminology that I could find online. That's why I ended up having to call the (useless) dealership and quite helpful locksmith. So let's define terminology.

A remote door opener (the older original kind, which is the kind I have) requires you to press a button to send a radio signal, which unlocks the car or opens the trunk. There may be a chip in the key that is required for the car to start when you turn the ignition - but you do have to put the key in an ignition. Most of these use a rolling code that changes each time. In other words, every time you press the unlock button, the car sends back a signal saying "okay, that's the right code and I'm opening the lock - but here's the new code for next time."

To review: remote door openers only send a signal when you press the button, and you have to physically turn the ignition.

Keyless entry may require you to press a button on a key fob to open the door, or it may just automatically unlock the car when you're standing right next to it. Then, once you're in the car, there's no ignition to turn, just a button to push. The car will only start if the key fob is very close (inside the car.) In this case, the key fob is constantly sending out a signal to the car without you doing anything - certainly, in order for the car to start, and (if your locks open automatically without pushing any buttons) to open the locks as well.

To review: keyless entry constantly sends out a signal, and when you're close enough to the car, the car will allow you turn it on (and may unlock automatically.)

The "hack" is called a signal amplification relay attack (SARA), and really only is useful for keyless entry, not for remote door openers. Why? Your keyless entry key fob is designed to be very weak so your car can't detect it from more than a few feet away. But if the key is close enough to the outside wall of your house, with a special device, a criminal can detect the coded signal, amplify it, and send it to another device that's right next to the car which repeats the code. No code-breaking required; just one device for picking up the code as it's being constantly transmitted by the keyless entry key fob, sending it to a second device next to the car which repeats it. The car thinks that the key fob is right there, opens, and allows itself to be driven. (This is exactly what they did in the link above.)

You could conceivably do the same thing to a remote door opener like mine, but the bad guys would have to be sitting on your street with their devices to record the signal when you press it. The weakness of keyless entry is that it's constantly transmitting and actually lets you start the car. This is in contrast to remote door openers, which only transmit when you press the button - and even then you still need the physical key to start the car.

CONCLUSION: if you have keyless entry, then YES, you should keep your keys in a Faraday cage - especially when they're going to be sitting unused for a long period (when you're on vacation.) Most people recommend wrapping in aluminum foil or putting them in a coffee can, inside your refrigerator. (I'm only repeating what I've read and make no claim as to whether this is actually enough to defeat SARA devices.) It would be much harder to do this to one of the older remote entry keys, and I am definitely not planning to get a keyless entry key fob. The risk:benefit is obvious. The only benefit to keyless entry is literally that you don't have to press a button, and don't have to move your arm to turn a key - in exchange for exposing yourself to this security problem.

Method Proposed for Detecting Exotic Biochemistry

As written previously, we can't assume that alien life would be based on the same biochemistry as Earth, and PCR reactions might come up with nothing. A new approach, still relying on nucleic acids, suggests that short oligos interact with many kinds of molecules, and that our sequencing technology could be adapted (and in a way, reversed) to detect even exotic non-nucleic-acid-based life. (Johnson Sarah S., Anslyn Eric V., Graham Heather V., Mahaffy Paul R., and Ellington Andrew D., Astrobiology March 8 2018.)

More on alien evolution here: Finding Extraterrestrial Organics is Old News; Let's Look for Evidence of Life

San Diego from Space, By Balloon

High altitude balloon launches are cool, especially when you can clearly see the San Diego coastline. It always amazes me that in the distance you can drive in a half hour, you're in space. (Now where's my check from the Round Earth Conspiracy! Come on guys!)

Musicians' Royalties Are Abysmal; Meanwhile, We Should Be Able to Download Songs. ???

Recently I noticed an article making the rounds, which decries the <$1 royalty checks being sent to bands these days. I don't have numbers but it seems the people who are upset about this and forwarding the link, are the same people who get upset when labels protect their product and sue to stop illegal downloading.

Guess what!?!?!? There's a connection!!!!

So to make sure it's clear to everyone, you can have EITHER:

PRODUCT BEING GIVEN AWAY FOR FREE

****OR****

PROFITS TO LABORERS (i.e., musicians)

One or the other. Make up your mind.

And This Wouldn't Even Be the Singularity

From the Berkeley Robotics Department.
Economist Tyler Cowen asks "What is the political equilibrium when insect sized drone assassins are available?" All answers are unpleasant. This isn't even the Singularity, just a seemingly very likely possibility as mobile electronics continue to get smaller. They don't even have to be autonomous.

The smaller that automation gets, the more potential for disruption. We vastly underestimate the disruption from small autonomous flying robots. You'll move (or run) if you're walking somewhere and see bees. And bees are stupid and mostly want to ignore us, and can't even kill us.

New Call to Regulate Drones: from Google Head Eric Schmidt

This is cross-posted at my technology blog, The Late Enlightenment.

Article here. There's a clear motivation for governments and the enforcer class to have a monopoly on this technology, and Frank Fukuyama among others had predicted some time ago that governments would start creating this monopoly shortly (is this why Chris Squire put down his capital investment of a drone manufacturing facility across the border in Mexico?), but why from the private sector? I'm not sure what Schmidt is doing here. Is he just going on record stating his discomfort with drones so Google can distance itself from perceived vague connections to sure-to-come abuses of technology?

In any event, if you're uncomfortable with your neighbor having a drone, I'm ten times as nervous when the police are allowed to have drones but the rest of us are not.

If You Haven't Read Stross's Accelerando, Don't Bother Now

Just the other day I told someone I was waiting for my Manfred Macx cyber-glasses, like the ones that one of Accelerando's protagonist has in the 2030s. I was half-serious. Google is not.

The Matrix for Chickens; Or, "Darkness - Has Taken My Beak"

It's actually not really a matrix, because it doesn't produce a simulation. The purpose of this arrangement is not to replace but to prevent consciousness.

Actually, neurologically we can't really be sure what's going on here based on the description - it's an art installation after all - but it seems as if the idea of the exhibit is to decrease animal suffering by decreasing their consciousness, and that is just as important a question. Maybe we're living in a simulation, but in this simulation we experience pleasure and pain, and the animals we raise for food experience massive amounts of pain. The serious proposal has already been made to engineer livestock that are incapable of feeling pain (yes, at first blush it seems grotesque, but can you make an argument against it?)

And if we really are able to farm fully decerebrate chickens (and not just blinded ones), they cannot be conscious - cannot ever in their lives have been conscious - in any way. Therefore they cannot suffer, repugnant as this may look to us. BTW, remind you of any Metallica videos?

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Designers

If you haven't seen the footage of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing, what the hell is wrong with you.



One my fondest experiences in the Seattle area was going to see the foundations of the old bridge, which remain as concrete blocks just south of where the new bridge meets land on the western side of the Sound. Fond, because it was the Fourth of July, and the nice man who gave me directions to the ruins informed me that every Fourth a group of people traditionally gets badly baked sitting on said stone blocks and invited me to join them. Tempting though the offer was I had other plans in Seattle that night and had to decline (a mistake, in retrospect.) But standing there that day un-stoned and looking at the foundations and the white caps curling in the Sound beneath the pine-covered basalt bluffs, I suddenly wondered: who designed this doomed thing, and what happened to them?

The two responsible engineers were Washington State's Clark Eldridge, and New York's (Columbia's) Leon Moisseiff. Eldridge was apparently told by the Feds he needed a consultant to help him build the bridge more cheaply. Moisseiff's contribution was to make the bridge more elegant. The bridge opened in July 1940 and collapsed four months later. Moisseiff died just three years after that. Meanwhile, Eldridge was working for the Navy in Guam in 1941 when the war began and he was captured by the Japanese. He spent the rest of the war, almost four years, in a Japanese POW camp, but nonetheless survived the experience died in 1990 at the age of 93.

Interestingly, Moisseiff also designed the Manhattan Bridge across the Hudson, and the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philly across the Delaware, both of which are still "alive and well" today. If you have occasion to drive across either in the future, try jumping up and down on your seat to see if the bridge survives it. Hey, don't be too smug left coasters. Eldridge designed the Lake Washington Floating Bridge (i.e., I-90 in Seattle).

Some more interesting and oddly neglected West Coast engineering history here.

Kill All Hipsters: The Obscurometer

Okay, maybe don't kill them, but use an objective measure to scrutinize their claims to liking obscure bands. Put in any band to the obscurometer and get a % obscurity back. If you're registered as a user it can tell you how obscure your tastes are - this is where you send the hipsters to see whose is bigger. If they're cool enough they'll be into Lobster Toilet Death, which is the fifth most obscure. Coldplay, Radiohead and Red Hot Chili Peppers are the least obscure.

Of the Big 4 thrash bands, the obscurity in increasing order was Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer (almost same as Megadeth) and Anthrax. If you want to know the basis for the measurement go to the damn site.

A Crowd-sourced Reverse Image Search

[Added later: the best guess seems to be that it's a Japanese door-curtain, i.e., the Japanese answer to a bead-curtain. If you think you can verify this or can definitely identify it as something else don't hesitate to comment.]

Here. H/T Dan. Google is trying to automate it but it didn't work well for this image (below). Would've been nice when I was trying to figure out what the flowers outside my front door were. Answer: Callistemon. I found it only because a nice gentleman in Georgia posted pictures happened to use the same descriptor I do, "toilet-brush flowers".

Here's what I'm trying to figure out what it is dammit. My own guess is it's a blanket or something for an office floor. It's hanging partly on a door here, it's flat fabric and about the thickness of a thin blanket, and it's the right size to drape over your legs. It has a tag on it that says "Oswal".

So what is this?

A Use for Quadrotor UAV's

Finally. Matternet is developing models for delivery of critical high-value supplies (like medicine) in parts of the world that lack roads and security infrastructure. Not surprisingly, the company's in-box is currently at Singularity University in Silicon Valley.

Below is a test flight of a quadrotor (not Matternet's model) at Stanford.

Intellectual Property on the Planet of the Apes

Franco's discussion with Jimmy Kimmel about a "non-visible art" museum - or rather, one which only contains plans and concepts for works of art - seems silly at first glance. But it becomes a lot more interesting in an age of 3D printing, where the templates are what really matter. Either way Franco is an interesting guy.

A Jumbo Jet in the Middle of Seoul

It's really odd. You should read about it and look at the rest of the pictures.

I Like When Reality Beats Science Fiction

Alvin Toffler always said the future always gets here too fast and in the wrong order. So get ready for some trope-and-quote mixin': "The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy."



I wouldn't spot this easy. If you don't know there are terminators around and you're not generally fearful of all humanoids, then assuming they can get it to walk, it could get close to you for a few seconds before it failed the Turing test or you noticed something was wrong. By then, too late. Even if they can't get it to walk convincingly, they can get it to at least crawl like an injured soldier, which would also excuse it from having to talk intelligibly for any length of time. By "they" I mean "government with resources to build this weapon" or (much worse) as always, "Skynet". Not ready for prime time right now, which is unfortunately. It would be kind of funny if in the first war between humans and terminators, the real John Connor was one of Gaddafi's men.

There are those who explain away obviated science fiction as alternative history, but that's weak. Steampunk, as much as I hate it, is alternate history, because you know it didn't happen that way when you're writing it. Hugo Gernsback or H.G. Wells is not alternate history, it's just wrong predictions. To his credit, in the Ender's Game universe (most of which was written when geopolitics changed around the end of the Cold War) Orson Scott Card put in something about the "New Soviet Union". Still, interesting to live in a world where a science fiction writer's futuristic-sounding ideas are sometimes behind the curve of technology that's actually being developed in commercial labs. (Building proteins out of D-amino acids? OLD NEWS BUDDY!)

Testing Amazon Links

I'm buying an iPhone car charger and this gives me a chance to make sure it works. If you need an iPhone car charger, please feel free to order it through that link as well.

Sell 10^9 Shares in Skynet

Given my obsession with linking the Singularity and Skynet, I found this Economist post about the stock market plunge last week funny.