Same IP, same port, different traffic pattern. The folks who build these system aren't stupid. Now if rather than a VPN you're running an https proxy, that's a little harder to detect, but even then, if all the traffic from one host is going to another host, and not touching anything else, it's not hard to develop a high degree of confidence that you're looking at a VPN or proxy service.
This is already "handled" by international obligation. If you look at the coverage maps for Iridium, Inmarsat, etc... there is a nice big hole over China. Same thing with the internet service offered by the likes of Lufthansa and so forth on airliners. Once over Chinese territory, the services cease to function. One of the basics of international law is that sovereign nations have the right to control what RF spectrum is used within their territories, and China simply refuses to issue licenses, thus the operators prohibit the use within the territorial claims of China.
You don't know how VPNs work? Unless China bans all encrypted connections to the outside world, this will do exactly fuckall.
Assuming you have DPI capabilities, which I presume the Chinese government has, it's pretty trivial to block the normal VPN mechanisms without affecting other encrypted traffic. VPN (and SSL VPN) connections behave very differently from your typical connection to an https website. You basically just do traffic analysis and look for, say, SSL connections that have been open for more than 15 minutes, those where there has been more client sourced traffic than your typical http get, or whatever other thing that makes it behave differently than your standard web connection.
You don't need to know the content, you just do traffic analysis. A "Normal" https connection has a certain traffic distribution/fingerprint. An SSL connection is setup between the client and server, the http request is made, the content/object delivered, and the connection torn down.
SSL VPNs, even if operating over proper https and port 443, behave very differently. The connection is held open for long periods of time, and there is much more back and forth between the client and the server, as all further browsing connections are multiplexed through the tunnel. You don't need to decode the traffic or protocol to figure this out.
Anyhow, the point is that if you have DPI capabilities, it's pretty trivial to detect most standard SSL VPNs. Is it possible to develop a VPN protocol that would defeat this? Sure, and that's part of the game.
I've worked with a (much) smaller system that was the same concept. At one of the off-grid First Nations reserves in BC, the power used to be supplied by a large diesel generator. Modern diesels realistically need to run at pretty much full power in order to run most efficiently, and keep their emissions tech working right. So, what the power utility did was couple the diesel with what amounts to a utility-scale UPS. The diesel runs for a few hours twice a day, typically morning and at around inner time, and supplies the village. At the same time, any excess output is stored in batteries. The rest of the day, the village runs off of the batteries through a megawatt class inverter. Yeah, it's not ultra-efficient, or green, or any of that crap, but it dramatically reduces the runtime hours on the engine, and allows it to run as efficiently as possible.
Hydrocarbons and oil are still an extremely valuable resource, even if we aren't burning it for its BTUs. It's an integral part of the feed stocks for many chemical processes, and we'd be hard pressed to change those out. As someone once said "Crude oil is really too valuable to be burning."
That's only true on Iridium. All the other providers (Thurya, Inmarsat, and Globalstar) use bent-pipe satellites and do all the processing on the ground.
And, well, you had better believe that Iridium has "lawful" intercept capabilities. Iridium has two downlink stations, one in Tempe Arizona for all their civilian/commercial traffic, and the other in Hawai'i, owned and operated by DISA for the DoD phones.
They were most likely working in the "Dark Ages" because that's pretty much how the whole industry works. When I left the industry in 2013, companies were just discovering that IPv4 was still a thing, but even then they were generally handling it by pumping it through HDLC over satellite. I'd wager that 90+% of non-television satcom is completely unencrypted, with the exception of whatever crypto people run over it (https, VPN, whatever). One of the big challenges with dealing with Cryptography, even 3DES (never mind AES, or whatever else), is that if it's in the hardware or even in the firmware, you start dealing with ITAR and all that bullshit.
For the satellite network I still operate, which were finally discontinued last year, the only cryptographic option would be to run 3DES, with static keys, and if and only if you bought the cryptographic version, which required you to sign an end user statement, and then you need to have special firmware that you have to request personally etc... The regulatory environment is a right total pain in the butt, but that's the way it is.
They're using that because the technology was developed 15 to 20 years ago. In the world of satellite communications technology moves a lot slower than it does for the rest of the industry. It's also very difficult to change the technology once its deployed.
The stream cipher used was most likely chosen because it provided sufficient security for their needs (basically privacy rather than real security), and was easy to implement in the hardware that was available when the service was being developed.
I doubt that they really want strong encryption and will just stick another back-doored system in place of hte current back-doored system
The reality is that national actors probably don't care about the cryptography involved. They just pick up the call when it hits the PSTN. It's much easier, unencrypted, and you don't have to do any hard work to try and unite both sides of the conversation.
I seriously doubt doing updates to the phones is a problem at all, I'll bet they push updates all the time. Satellites are routinely updated and I'm guessing is not a serious problem.
For the Inmarsat service, it's likely to be very difficult, if not impossible. Inmarsat is generally considered a life-critical system for communications with ships at sea. The ground terminals used on the ships are based on designs that are on average probably at least a decade old, which means that the cipher and associated bits are most likely baked into the silicon, making it impossible to update. Forcing a global fleet-wide replacement is about as easy as calling an Internet flag-day and switching everyone to IPv6. It ain't going to happen.
Inmarsat-B finally shut down in December 2016, at least a decade after the last terminal supporting it was sold.
For the most part, satellites in geosynchronous orbit (such as those used by Inmarsat) are generally bent-pipe designs, rather than carrying the equipment for onboard signal processing.
Demodulating, decrypting, processing, and remodulating the signal on board requires the relevant electronics to do so. This means that you're putting sensitive, power hungry electronics in a high radiation environment, where it's difficult to dissipate heat, your power supply is limited, and it's impossible to service if something goes wrong. It also generally means you're beholden to a specific technology for 15+ years.
Instead, the most common design is to follow the KISS principle for the satellite; it dumbly repeats whatever radio signal it receives, and put all the intelligence on the ground. In the literature I can find on the Inmarsat Satellites, they appear to be of the bent-pipe variety.
Now, even though the head end of the satellite phone is on the ground (and the satellite is a passive relay) that doesn't mean that it's necessarily easy to swap out ciphers for the phone portion of the system. It's quite likely that the system is baked into the silicon on the ground stations, and pushing out a firmware update for old systems is going to be quite difficult, especially because inmarsat is often considered to be a life-critical service. The amount of paperwork involved would be extreme, never mind the testing and so forth if it was even possible.
On the flip side, given the audience for this system, I'd wager that the vast majority of what you would hear would be mariners on the phone to their loved ones in the Philippines, yakking away in Tagalog.
In a couple of counties that I work in, the PUDs have delivered GPON to nearly every residential address in the county, and will do other gigabit fiber connections for businesses. The residents pay the PUD something like $10/mo for access to the infrastructure, then have their choice of 6 to 8 different ISPs and 4 or 5 internet/phone providers, if they decide to do that rather than stick with Frontier and their copper infrastructure.
For larger installations, both Cogent and Zayo offer peering through the county fiber network.
Sorry, but you pretty clearly have little knowledge of how the various fuels and internal combustion engines work. Kerosene is a completely different fuel than gasoline, and with certain rare exceptions (old turbine engines, among others), the two are not interchangeable. Kerosene is pretty much the same stuff as Diesel fuel (as well as Jet fuel, heating oil, and RP1 rocket propellant). It's a comparatively heavy hydrocarbon, with a high vapor pressure. It is also quite difficult to ignite.
If you put Kero, Diesel, or whatever in an engine designed for gasoline/petrol, it simply will not work. It's not volatile enough to work in a typical carburator, nor is it flammable enough to be ignited in a spark ignition system. You'll just wind up gumming up the works and effectively ruin the engine. The same goes the other way, putting gasoline into a diesel engine is a good way to destroy it, as the gasoline does not provide sufficient lubrication for the fuel system to work.
In the case of India, many of the auto-rickshaws on the road are now operating on compressed Natural Gas. Much cleaner, and significantly lower pollution per passenger mile.
Anyhow, the point is that you can't interchange gasoline and kerosene/diesel, they have radically different properties.
Unlike the US, Norway has heavy royalties that are paid to the state sovereign wealth fund, which benefits all norwegian citizens. It's not just going in to the corporation's pockets.
How can a building heated by "special stoves that burn wood chips" possibly have lower emissions than one using heating oil ?
Large/mid-scale hog fuel/chip boilers can be extremely efficient and clean. They work by burning the wood chips at high temperatures in an oxygen deprived atmosphere. This produces significant quantities of Carbon Monoxide, Hydrogen, and other flammable gasses. These gasses move to the other part of the boiler, where they are combusted with forced air, heating the water. A portion of the exhaust gasses are then cycled back into the primary combustion chamber, where they serve to reduce the oxygen content and keep the chip bed hot.
Because the majority of the energy comes from combustion in the gas phase, they are extremely clean and low emissions. What ash is produced can be filtered out relatively easily.
Heat pump is a pretty broad term. All heatpumps work by moving the thermal energy up a gradient. The higher that gradient, the less efficient they are. Air to Air heat pumps do not work worth crap in low temperatures, such as what you have in the midwest. Ground source heat pumps, which I presume this article is talking about, are a very different beast. They offer about a 3:1 energy gain; 1 watt of electrical power in means 3 watts of heat out. Since their heat source coils are buried below the frost-line, there's little variation in performance between summer and winter.
While it doesn't get that cold here in Vancouver, BC, one of the new towers downtown did something pretty cool. When building the foundations for the tower, the bored hundreds of deep wells under the structure and filled them with heat exchanger pipes. During the summer, the building's air conditioning systems sink their waste heat into the block of earth under the tower. In the winter, they heat pump off of that. The AC effectively salts the heat pump source for the winter months.
And is shocking to me that people in Norway heat their homes with camping equipment. At least get a wood stove.
Kerosene, in this sense, is basically the same thing as heating oil as used in the US northeast. Kerosene, Diesel, Heating oil, RP-1 rocket propellant, and Jet fuel are all closely related. The main difference is the specific fraction and how much control is put on some of the components.
It's a function of the satellite uplink on the barge. The video is digitized, then transmitted via Ku-Band satellite through one or two stabilized antennas onboard. (If you look at pictures of the barges they have two white R2D2 type domes on either side). These antennas are finely balanced machines, allowing their motors to react quite quickly to the motion under them. However, they are also required to prohibit transmission, unless the system believes the satellite is within 0.5 degrees of the antenna's boresight.
Anyhow, the long and short of this is the booster coming in for landing is a high energy event, that causes lots of vibrations and shaking. When that happens, the antenna looses its ability to track gravity (the shaking overwhelms the accelerometers and IMUs) so it does what it must, and mutes the transmission. There's no real way around this, for better or worse, at least until SpaceX gets their own constellation of the ground, which will get to play by different rules.
As jobs are automated, their cost of production drops, meaning money is freed up to spend or invest elsewhere in the economy.
Nice theory, but it only holds a certain amount of water. The price of a product and the cost of manufacturing it are only loosely coupled. A vendor will sel the product for whatever the market will bear. With the advent of easy (not necessarily cheap) credit, people will keep paying old prices even when they can't really afford it.
Charity I work with maintains a campus with buildings that were built in 1937. Much of the lumber was milled on site, and is actually dimensional (ie the 2x8s are actualy 2" x 8"). To rebuild/modify these buildings, and work on them, we wind up having to mill our own lumber to match. In situations where we have to use graded lumber (aka something structural), it takes a lot of care to rebuild with standard lumber vs what was originally used.
Also, BBC 4 used to be part of the UK Nuclear deterrence system. If a submarine commander thought that the UK had been attacked, one of the tests was to check whether BBC Radio 4 was still broadcasting.
BBC Radio actually does have a backup system (or used to) that involved DAT players, and a system that would run them should it detect more than 2 minutes of silence. This became an issue when they wanted to broadcast a performance of John Cage's 4'33". The subtle sounds of the orchestra turning the pages and the crowd noise was not sufficient to reset the watchdog, so it had to be temporarily disabled for the duration of the broadcast.
I once took the train across Canada in winter. We were delayed several times in Manitoba and northern Ontario because they had to wait for crews to come out and weld in new sections of rail because a flat spot on a wheel of the freight in front of us had shattered the rail.
They actually run a (small) electric current through the rails, and can detect breaks pretty quickly and narrow it down in time to stop the following train.
The car sense cars in neighboring lanes (BLIS - Blind Sport Information System) by using its ultra-sound sonars. Basically a type of souped up parking assistance with a little bit more range.
Last time I drove one of those, it was more annoying than it was worth... The damned little light kept coming on as I was driving a winding mountain road, telling me there was something in my blind spot. No shit; it's called a mountain. During the day it was no big deal, but at night, that light blinking on and off in the peripheral vision was quite distracting.
Anyhow, I know how to set my mirrors properly to minimize blind spots, and I always shouldercheck. It would be nice if things like that could be turned off when not needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Same IP, same port, different traffic pattern. The folks who build these system aren't stupid. Now if rather than a VPN you're running an https proxy, that's a little harder to detect, but even then, if all the traffic from one host is going to another host, and not touching anything else, it's not hard to develop a high degree of confidence that you're looking at a VPN or proxy service.
This is already "handled" by international obligation. If you look at the coverage maps for Iridium, Inmarsat, etc... there is a nice big hole over China. Same thing with the internet service offered by the likes of Lufthansa and so forth on airliners. Once over Chinese territory, the services cease to function. One of the basics of international law is that sovereign nations have the right to control what RF spectrum is used within their territories, and China simply refuses to issue licenses, thus the operators prohibit the use within the territorial claims of China.
You don't know how VPNs work? Unless China bans all encrypted connections to the outside world, this will do exactly fuckall.
Assuming you have DPI capabilities, which I presume the Chinese government has, it's pretty trivial to block the normal VPN mechanisms without affecting other encrypted traffic. VPN (and SSL VPN) connections behave very differently from your typical connection to an https website. You basically just do traffic analysis and look for, say, SSL connections that have been open for more than 15 minutes, those where there has been more client sourced traffic than your typical http get, or whatever other thing that makes it behave differently than your standard web connection.
You don't need to know the content, you just do traffic analysis. A "Normal" https connection has a certain traffic distribution/fingerprint. An SSL connection is setup between the client and server, the http request is made, the content/object delivered, and the connection torn down.
SSL VPNs, even if operating over proper https and port 443, behave very differently. The connection is held open for long periods of time, and there is much more back and forth between the client and the server, as all further browsing connections are multiplexed through the tunnel. You don't need to decode the traffic or protocol to figure this out.
Anyhow, the point is that if you have DPI capabilities, it's pretty trivial to detect most standard SSL VPNs. Is it possible to develop a VPN protocol that would defeat this? Sure, and that's part of the game.
I've worked with a (much) smaller system that was the same concept. At one of the off-grid First Nations reserves in BC, the power used to be supplied by a large diesel generator. Modern diesels realistically need to run at pretty much full power in order to run most efficiently, and keep their emissions tech working right. So, what the power utility did was couple the diesel with what amounts to a utility-scale UPS. The diesel runs for a few hours twice a day, typically morning and at around inner time, and supplies the village. At the same time, any excess output is stored in batteries. The rest of the day, the village runs off of the batteries through a megawatt class inverter. Yeah, it's not ultra-efficient, or green, or any of that crap, but it dramatically reduces the runtime hours on the engine, and allows it to run as efficiently as possible.
Hydrocarbons and oil are still an extremely valuable resource, even if we aren't burning it for its BTUs. It's an integral part of the feed stocks for many chemical processes, and we'd be hard pressed to change those out. As someone once said "Crude oil is really too valuable to be burning."
That's only true on Iridium. All the other providers (Thurya, Inmarsat, and Globalstar) use bent-pipe satellites and do all the processing on the ground.
And, well, you had better believe that Iridium has "lawful" intercept capabilities. Iridium has two downlink stations, one in Tempe Arizona for all their civilian/commercial traffic, and the other in Hawai'i, owned and operated by DISA for the DoD phones.
They were most likely working in the "Dark Ages" because that's pretty much how the whole industry works. When I left the industry in 2013, companies were just discovering that IPv4 was still a thing, but even then they were generally handling it by pumping it through HDLC over satellite. I'd wager that 90+% of non-television satcom is completely unencrypted, with the exception of whatever crypto people run over it (https, VPN, whatever). One of the big challenges with dealing with Cryptography, even 3DES (never mind AES, or whatever else), is that if it's in the hardware or even in the firmware, you start dealing with ITAR and all that bullshit.
For the satellite network I still operate, which were finally discontinued last year, the only cryptographic option would be to run 3DES, with static keys, and if and only if you bought the cryptographic version, which required you to sign an end user statement, and then you need to have special firmware that you have to request personally etc... The regulatory environment is a right total pain in the butt, but that's the way it is.
They're using that because the technology was developed 15 to 20 years ago. In the world of satellite communications technology moves a lot slower than it does for the rest of the industry. It's also very difficult to change the technology once its deployed.
The stream cipher used was most likely chosen because it provided sufficient security for their needs (basically privacy rather than real security), and was easy to implement in the hardware that was available when the service was being developed.
I doubt that they really want strong encryption and will just stick another back-doored system in place of hte current back-doored system
The reality is that national actors probably don't care about the cryptography involved. They just pick up the call when it hits the PSTN. It's much easier, unencrypted, and you don't have to do any hard work to try and unite both sides of the conversation.
I seriously doubt doing updates to the phones is a problem at all, I'll bet they push updates all the time. Satellites are routinely updated and I'm guessing is not a serious problem.
For the Inmarsat service, it's likely to be very difficult, if not impossible. Inmarsat is generally considered a life-critical system for communications with ships at sea. The ground terminals used on the ships are based on designs that are on average probably at least a decade old, which means that the cipher and associated bits are most likely baked into the silicon, making it impossible to update. Forcing a global fleet-wide replacement is about as easy as calling an Internet flag-day and switching everyone to IPv6. It ain't going to happen.
Inmarsat-B finally shut down in December 2016, at least a decade after the last terminal supporting it was sold.
For the most part, satellites in geosynchronous orbit (such as those used by Inmarsat) are generally bent-pipe designs, rather than carrying the equipment for onboard signal processing.
Demodulating, decrypting, processing, and remodulating the signal on board requires the relevant electronics to do so. This means that you're putting sensitive, power hungry electronics in a high radiation environment, where it's difficult to dissipate heat, your power supply is limited, and it's impossible to service if something goes wrong. It also generally means you're beholden to a specific technology for 15+ years.
Instead, the most common design is to follow the KISS principle for the satellite; it dumbly repeats whatever radio signal it receives, and put all the intelligence on the ground. In the literature I can find on the Inmarsat Satellites, they appear to be of the bent-pipe variety.
Now, even though the head end of the satellite phone is on the ground (and the satellite is a passive relay) that doesn't mean that it's necessarily easy to swap out ciphers for the phone portion of the system. It's quite likely that the system is baked into the silicon on the ground stations, and pushing out a firmware update for old systems is going to be quite difficult, especially because inmarsat is often considered to be a life-critical service. The amount of paperwork involved would be extreme, never mind the testing and so forth if it was even possible.
On the flip side, given the audience for this system, I'd wager that the vast majority of what you would hear would be mariners on the phone to their loved ones in the Philippines, yakking away in Tagalog.
In a couple of counties that I work in, the PUDs have delivered GPON to nearly every residential address in the county, and will do other gigabit fiber connections for businesses. The residents pay the PUD something like $10/mo for access to the infrastructure, then have their choice of 6 to 8 different ISPs and 4 or 5 internet/phone providers, if they decide to do that rather than stick with Frontier and their copper infrastructure.
For larger installations, both Cogent and Zayo offer peering through the county fiber network.
It works really quite well.
Sorry, but you pretty clearly have little knowledge of how the various fuels and internal combustion engines work. Kerosene is a completely different fuel than gasoline, and with certain rare exceptions (old turbine engines, among others), the two are not interchangeable. Kerosene is pretty much the same stuff as Diesel fuel (as well as Jet fuel, heating oil, and RP1 rocket propellant). It's a comparatively heavy hydrocarbon, with a high vapor pressure. It is also quite difficult to ignite.
If you put Kero, Diesel, or whatever in an engine designed for gasoline/petrol, it simply will not work. It's not volatile enough to work in a typical carburator, nor is it flammable enough to be ignited in a spark ignition system. You'll just wind up gumming up the works and effectively ruin the engine. The same goes the other way, putting gasoline into a diesel engine is a good way to destroy it, as the gasoline does not provide sufficient lubrication for the fuel system to work.
In the case of India, many of the auto-rickshaws on the road are now operating on compressed Natural Gas. Much cleaner, and significantly lower pollution per passenger mile.
Anyhow, the point is that you can't interchange gasoline and kerosene/diesel, they have radically different properties.
Unlike the US, Norway has heavy royalties that are paid to the state sovereign wealth fund, which benefits all norwegian citizens. It's not just going in to the corporation's pockets.
How can a building heated by "special stoves that burn wood chips" possibly have lower emissions than one using heating oil ?
Large/mid-scale hog fuel/chip boilers can be extremely efficient and clean. They work by burning the wood chips at high temperatures in an oxygen deprived atmosphere. This produces significant quantities of Carbon Monoxide, Hydrogen, and other flammable gasses. These gasses move to the other part of the boiler, where they are combusted with forced air, heating the water. A portion of the exhaust gasses are then cycled back into the primary combustion chamber, where they serve to reduce the oxygen content and keep the chip bed hot.
Because the majority of the energy comes from combustion in the gas phase, they are extremely clean and low emissions. What ash is produced can be filtered out relatively easily.
Heat pump is a pretty broad term. All heatpumps work by moving the thermal energy up a gradient. The higher that gradient, the less efficient they are. Air to Air heat pumps do not work worth crap in low temperatures, such as what you have in the midwest. Ground source heat pumps, which I presume this article is talking about, are a very different beast. They offer about a 3:1 energy gain; 1 watt of electrical power in means 3 watts of heat out. Since their heat source coils are buried below the frost-line, there's little variation in performance between summer and winter.
While it doesn't get that cold here in Vancouver, BC, one of the new towers downtown did something pretty cool. When building the foundations for the tower, the bored hundreds of deep wells under the structure and filled them with heat exchanger pipes. During the summer, the building's air conditioning systems sink their waste heat into the block of earth under the tower. In the winter, they heat pump off of that. The AC effectively salts the heat pump source for the winter months.
And is shocking to me that people in Norway heat their homes with camping equipment. At least get a wood stove.
Kerosene, in this sense, is basically the same thing as heating oil as used in the US northeast. Kerosene, Diesel, Heating oil, RP-1 rocket propellant, and Jet fuel are all closely related. The main difference is the specific fraction and how much control is put on some of the components.
It's a function of the satellite uplink on the barge. The video is digitized, then transmitted via Ku-Band satellite through one or two stabilized antennas onboard. (If you look at pictures of the barges they have two white R2D2 type domes on either side). These antennas are finely balanced machines, allowing their motors to react quite quickly to the motion under them. However, they are also required to prohibit transmission, unless the system believes the satellite is within 0.5 degrees of the antenna's boresight.
Anyhow, the long and short of this is the booster coming in for landing is a high energy event, that causes lots of vibrations and shaking. When that happens, the antenna looses its ability to track gravity (the shaking overwhelms the accelerometers and IMUs) so it does what it must, and mutes the transmission. There's no real way around this, for better or worse, at least until SpaceX gets their own constellation of the ground, which will get to play by different rules.
As jobs are automated, their cost of production drops, meaning money is freed up to spend or invest elsewhere in the economy.
Nice theory, but it only holds a certain amount of water. The price of a product and the cost of manufacturing it are only loosely coupled. A vendor will sel the product for whatever the market will bear. With the advent of easy (not necessarily cheap) credit, people will keep paying old prices even when they can't really afford it.
TL;DR: people are stupid.
Charity I work with maintains a campus with buildings that were built in 1937. Much of the lumber was milled on site, and is actually dimensional (ie the 2x8s are actualy 2" x 8"). To rebuild/modify these buildings, and work on them, we wind up having to mill our own lumber to match. In situations where we have to use graded lumber (aka something structural), it takes a lot of care to rebuild with standard lumber vs what was originally used.
Also, BBC 4 used to be part of the UK Nuclear deterrence system. If a submarine commander thought that the UK had been attacked, one of the tests was to check whether BBC Radio 4 was still broadcasting.
BBC Radio actually does have a backup system (or used to) that involved DAT players, and a system that would run them should it detect more than 2 minutes of silence. This became an issue when they wanted to broadcast a performance of John Cage's 4'33". The subtle sounds of the orchestra turning the pages and the crowd noise was not sufficient to reset the watchdog, so it had to be temporarily disabled for the duration of the broadcast.
I once took the train across Canada in winter. We were delayed several times in Manitoba and northern Ontario because they had to wait for crews to come out and weld in new sections of rail because a flat spot on a wheel of the freight in front of us had shattered the rail.
They actually run a (small) electric current through the rails, and can detect breaks pretty quickly and narrow it down in time to stop the following train.
The car sense cars in neighboring lanes (BLIS - Blind Sport Information System) by using its ultra-sound sonars. Basically a type of souped up parking assistance with a little bit more range.
Last time I drove one of those, it was more annoying than it was worth... The damned little light kept coming on as I was driving a winding mountain road, telling me there was something in my blind spot. No shit; it's called a mountain. During the day it was no big deal, but at night, that light blinking on and off in the peripheral vision was quite distracting.
Anyhow, I know how to set my mirrors properly to minimize blind spots, and I always shouldercheck. It would be nice if things like that could be turned off when not needed.