Slashdot Mirror
How To Take Control of a Car's Electronics, Cheap
mspohr writes with this excerpt from The Register: "Spanish hackers have been showing off their latest car-hacking creation; a circuit board using untraceable, off-the-shelf parts worth $20 that can give wireless access to the car's controls while it's on the road. The device, which will be shown off at next month's Black Hat Asia hacking conference, uses the Controller Area Network (CAN) ports car manufacturers build into their engines for computer-system checks. Once assembled, the smartphone-sized device can be plugged in under some vehicles, or inside the bonnet of other models, and give the hackers remote access to control systems. 'A car is a mini network,' security researcher Alberto Garcia Illera told Forbes. 'And right now there's no security implemented.'"
The hacker has to physically install a dongle in the port, or plug the hard ware somewhere under the hood of the car. Once that is done, it would be possible to control the cars electronics remotely.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And how does this differ from the Bluetooth ODB-II connector I use to stream car data to my cell phone? That is wireless and also requires being plugged into the diagnostic port on the car.
I can pull all sorts of data from that. If I spend a little more, I can get a full CAN-bus connection and actually *send* information and control things.
This isn't hacking. It is a product demo for VW.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This issue surrounds physical access to the vehicle, at which point no amount of security is going to be able to protect it (it will only make it more difficult to do). Adding security would make it significantly more difficult for mechanics and enthusiasts to work with their vehicles. My vote is towards adding a notification light on the dash board for when a device is connected to the vehicle's computer (that cannot be turned off by the computer [e.g. controlled by an auxiliary system]), which would notify the user that something is not right (if they did not connect something).
Taken from the wise wjwln
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4761849&cid=46192975
You're obviously not paying attention then. Plenty of people have posted *exactly* what's wrong with the comment system in beta. Maybe you haven't seen them because you're actually using beta?
Look, you have to understand something: Slashdot discussions generate interesting content by allowing tons of garbage to be posted, mixed around, and evolved. Part of the evolution comes from the interactive nature of community discussion, and part of it comes from the moderation process. For this evolution process to work properly, you have to be able to see a lot of posts at once, all in one shot. You need to be able to see some contextual information about the people posting comments. When you post your own comments, you need to be able to quote or link to other posts easily. When you want to moderate, you need to be able to do it in place, at the comment you intend to moderate.
Beta breaks all of these vital features; without them, the nature of Slashdot discussion changes completely. People will read fewer comments because the new layout hinders rapid seeking, scanning, and comprehension of potentially valuable posts... all while making it much more difficult to skim past the stuff that doesn't interest you. When people read fewer comments, they post fewer comments. When the total number of comments starts to drop, the exploration of the discussion space becomes much less thorough. Potentially valuable or interesting discussion paths will be missed. Those rare, but highly sought after gems of insight and wisdom borne from the cesspool of chaos will become much more scarce.
You want to know why people hate the beta so much? It's because it kills the evolutionary discussion dynamic that makes this community what it is. There's nothing else like it, and many of us do not want to lose it.