Slashdot Mirror
The 5 Coolest Hacks of '07
ancientribe writes "Nothing was sacred to hackers in '07 — not cars, not truckers, and not even the stock exchange. Dark Reading reviews five hacks that went after everyday things we take for granted even more than our PC's — our car navigation system, a trucker's freight, WiFi connections, iPhone, and (gulp) the electronic financial trading systems that record our stock purchases and other online transactions."
Page 5: 'Hacking capitalism'
I've heard of that before.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Car navigation systems have canged our lives for the better.
Driving has gone from a scary oddysey where I pray I don't miss some tiny sign to an easy journey that is boring at worst.
It's amazing how a little windshield mounted device can so change your life.
probably because this is the '07 list, not the '04 list.
Now all we need is a "Top Ten 'Top Ten Lists' of 2007!"
Seek and ye shall find.
Coral Cache:
http://www.darkreading.com.nyud.net/document.asp?doc_id=142127&WT.svl=news1_2
One of the universal rules of happiness is always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual
or was it hacked???
This isn't quite a real "hack", but more of a "social hack" if you will.
In 1967 Abbie Hoffman and a group of protesters thew fake money onto the floor of the NYSE (it wasn't blocked by glass back then). Trading on the floor *actually stopped* while traders scrambled around trying to collect the money. Kinda ironic that they'd stop to do that, considering how much more they were actually making doing their real trading. Wikipedia has a little bit on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbie_Hoffman. I don't really know much about Hoffman, but I found the story very amusing myself.
Somebody hacked a trucker? Holy hell...I hope never to see that one documented Hackaday.
when i drove an 18 wheeler i hauled a some very expensive loads, once i picked up a load of Macintosh computers from Apple's Sacramento's warehouse and hauled them to Omaha Nebraska, another time i picked up wine (the kind you can drink) in several locations in northern California and hauled them to Little Rock Arkansas, thats just two examples, the Macs were the most expensive, (i bet there were close to half a million dollars worth of freight in Macs) when Apple was loading those Macs they told me to only stop at well lighted truck stops & stay away from roadside rest areas and given me a designated route along with the bill of lading...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Uhm, bullshit. The worst this attack can do is to either
In neither case does Kelly's mother need to be concerned with "how a hacker could redirect her brand-new car navigation system to a deserted dead end street far from her intended destination." For that one needs to be able to pretend to be a group of satellites. This possibility the article does not cover — either due to the (mentioned) lack of imagination (on behalf of the author itself), or because it is not really possible (because Pentagon's designers of the system thought about it first, maybe).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Print version on coral cache. theres no pictures anyway. everything on one page. no ads
http://www.darkreading.com.nyud.net/document.asp?doc_id=142127&print=true
one up.
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
Dude, your keyboard is being sniffed! I just saw everything you typed posted on the internet!!
No.1 hack for 2008 will be the new electronic passports as discussed in the previous Slashdot discussion.
No.2 will be the the voting machines, but that only gets a second place because it's a dupe from 4 years ago.
No.3 will be the poor truckers again. We should really revert back from robotic drivers.
and No.4 will be slashdot's grammar and spelling checking engine, although this will be done in a fairly low-tech manner. The ten submission monkeys will be poisoned and their typewriters tinkered with...
I personally have to smirk at the Apple brigade who on one hand spent the year touting everything Apple as more secure, and on the other hand rushed to jailbreak their iPhones by simply viewing a web page embedding a malformed image.
"... built tools for hacking satellite-based navigation systems that use Radio Data System-Traffic Message Channel (RDS-TMC) to receive traffic broadcasts and emergency messages ... The researchers tested their hardware and software tools with a one- to five-kilometer radius of the targeted vehicles, but they say an attacker could target a specific vehicle by adding a directional antenna, for instance ..."
I think I'm going to invest some effort in this, and build a system that allows me to send messages to the NAV display of other vehicles to say things like:
"Pull the fuck out of the fast lane jackass."
or
"Turn your goddamned high beams off you stupid sack of shit."
Actually I've seen a few of those already. What we really need is a Top Ten 'Top Ten' "Top Ten lists".
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Spotted in Sydney and posted to youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECoA8pi9Rmk
A road-side advisory sign.
I don't know if the EPCs would be encrypted, but I seriously doubt it. Anyone know? Because if they're not, I'd hardly consider that a hack. They were broadcasting their information unencrypted. Reading it is no more of a hack, in that situation, than turning on your radio. DIY, homebrew, sure. But not a hack. If the EPCs were encrypted, that's different, but it probably wouldn't make any sense to do so. Making your electronic barcodes secret strikes me as kind of silly.
On a side note, I have compiled a list of the most uncool hacks since 2003. Here is my list:
1. Nickelback.
I used to be a gay hacker. Then they changed the meanings of all the words, now I'm a happey equipment modifier. No, I'm heterosexual but they changed the meaning of "gay" from "happy and carefree" to "homosexual" and changed the meaning of "hacker" from "someone who writes quick-and-dirty but functional code, or modifies equipment" to "an electronic burglar".
I was incredibly disappointed with the article (RTFA? I must be new here), so much so that I made it no farther than page one of the short five page adfest. I thought it was going to be about hacking a wi-fi connection so that it doubled as a firewall or something. We nerds still use "hacker" in the old fashioned sense, just as we geezers still sing "deck the halls" without thinking about sodomy.
Ok, I know language evolves, but unlike the evolution of organisms the evolution of language is usually stupid. Like "gay", which now means "homosexual", half of whom attempt suicide. I never could understand what was so gay about suicide. Now the kids are twisting the word "gay" to mean clumsy, stupid, or dorky.
As to hacking, fine, now a hacker is a burglar. What do we nerds who write quick single-use code, or those of us who take a soldering iron to a transistor radio to turn it into something besides a radio, call ourselves now?
And could someone please point to an real NERD article somwhere that actually has the ten best hacks of 2007, instead of the ten best cracks of 2007?
I'm glad I can afford to be modded down because this really annoys me and I want to know what the rest of the slashdot audience thinks. I wish I'd seen this when it was fresh, nobody will likely seee this comment to mod it down anyway.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I just got my first car with OBD2 (yes, it's been a while) and it says right in the manual that it records about 60 seconds of driving information that can be used against me in the case of an accident whether I give permission or not. I want a hack that automatically erases that information in the event of a button push or airbag deployment. That's complete crap if you ask me...