I'm all for tinkering, and tinkering with cars used to be a great hobby. But tinkering with proprietary chip sets - with consequences not only your driving experience, but on the safety of others around you - without the proper equipment strikes me as a uniquely bad idea.
You've apparently got no understanding of what the OBD II interface lets you do.
OBD II lets you read trouble codes and operational data (sensor values, fuel integrator, ignition timing, etc.), and lets you clear trouble codes.
That's it. There's no danger at all. You can't alter anything other than clearing trouble codes.
To the original poster, google for "ELM327" to find the hardware, and "ELM327 software" to find software, including many free apps that will use the ELM interface to talk to OBD II.
I use a free app on an old Palm with an ELM327 adapter I bought off of eBay for OBD II work. Works great. I paid a little more for one that works over Bluetooth; the less expensive varieties can be plugged into an RS232 port on a laptop (old, cheap laptops are powerful enough and are more likely to have an RS232 port).
You should be able to install a remote starter on an EIS-equipped Benz by just hiding a spare EIS key somewhere inside the console and tweaking the wiring approrpriately, no? That's the solution used by a lot of ignition interlock systems.
Nope. See above post. They carefully designed the SmartKey system to prevent any kind of operation of the vehicle without an authorized key in the EIS.
Here's a neat factoid - CAN bus isn't just twisted-pair anyhow, Benz is rolling out fiber for the high-speed CAN bus these days.
That's odd, there are twisted pairs in the car. In particular I noticed a twisted pair going to the C connector on the factory stereo, and according to the WIS (M-B service database), those pins are used for CAN for the steering wheel controls and radio data to the instrument cluster. Even more oddly, those features were not available on my car that year, even though it's wired for them and they're in the wiring diagrams.
I thought they were just using fiber for MOST (and formerly D2B) - they're mainly entertainment system buses. It could eliminate some of the weird problems like when CAN wires get wet though. I probably won't get a newer M-B for a couple of years. I'm saving up for an S.
I have an ELM327 adapter for OBDII, supposedly it can talk and listen on the CAN bus to any of the car's modules (if connected to the correct bus). I'll probably not get around to messing with it though.
Remote start on my E36 BMW just required a magic box (consisting literally of a relay, a coil, and a box) into which a spare key was placed. The remote starter activates the relay in this box, which switched the coil near the ignition switch out of circuit, and replaced it with the one wrapped around the spare key inside the box.
Worked like a champ. I think I only had $90 in the whole kit, including the remote start, the spare key, and the magic box. I kept the key whole and buried the magic box and extra key deep inside the dashboard for security, though I could've easily cut off the metal portion of the key so that only the RFID-ish bits was with the car.
You should open that box back up and destroy the metal key blade. If your car is ever stolen, the presence of that intact key will allow your insurance company to get out of covering the loss. It's pretty well known amongst professional installers.
Is there some reason why you couldn't have gotten a spare M-B key, and done the same thing with IR instead of RF?
To do so with the M-B EIS, you'd need to hack the EIS, ie. physically open and alter it. Extremely risky, and a replacement EIS is at least $400 and has to be programmed by M-B to operate in the specific car (in Germany! There's a facility in New Jersey that programs SmartKeys for the US market, btw.).
It would be pretty complicated even if you had access to the insides of the EIS. The EIS detects the presence of the key immediately upon insertion (the steering column unlocks as soon as you put the key in, even if you don't turn it.) So, you'd have to deal with two levels of activation.
The other problem, as toddestan notes, is that once you've tricked the EIS into talking to the hidden spare key for the remote start, the car be can stolen much easier - the steering will be unlocked and there's nothing to stop anyone shifting out of park (I'd steal this type of car by winching it onto a flatbed tow truck, which you've made possibly by unlocking the shifter even if the brake pedal interlock shuts off the remote start), and since there's a real key present, insurance won't cover the loss if the car is recovered (according to my auto insurance claims adjuster friend the insurance companies tend to investigate into how high dollar cars were stolen if they're recovered).
I installed a bypass module in the Honda (a 2004 Civic) which had an RF transponder key, although this was a code-learning bus-based bypass that tapped into the data signal from the ignition lock key reader. It only needed to authenticate they transponder code when the ignition was initially turned on to get the engine to run; there was no ongoing authentication. I have one of the cheap key-in-a-box bypass modules that I bought by mistake, but it's so primitive that I couldn't bring myself to use it, especially since it actually costs more than the bus-type bypass because there's the additional cost of an extra transponder key.
I'd also note that the E36 BMW is an older model that went out of production right around the same time that M-B went from mechanical blade keys to SmartKeys. What's BMW using now for a key? I'm guessing it's a SmartKey with a different name?
You missed another point - aftermarket installers
on
Hacking Automotive Systems
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
OBD II is all well and good for basic emissions/driveability/MIL diagnostics, but adding security to the other functions, such as the door locks, windows, etc. could basically kill the aftermarket alarm/remote start business.
On many (if not most) cars these days, many of the basic functions such as door locks are controlled via a CAN bus (a 2-wire twisted pair network) and more and more functions are migrating to network control rather than having dedicated wiring. In my car, everything other than the lights and the radio is run over CAN (even the seat adjustments and the rear window defogger).
Take, for example, installing an aftermarket stereo: Many new cars don't have a wire that supplies 12V when you turn the key on to turn on the radio, the radio is always powered and listens to the CAN bus for the command from the car's BCM (body control module) to turn itself on. On these cars, a separate aftermarket module has to be installed to turn the radio on (or the installer has to dig around in the car to find something else that only turns on with the key, like a power outlet). There are also aftermarket modules that can translate the CAN bus commands from the car's factory steering wheel controls to control an aftermarket stereo.
Adding a layer of security (presumably encryption or authentication) could cripple these abilities with aftermarket equipment.
Don't believe me, well take the example of remote start on my current car a 1999 (yes, 12 model years old now) Mercedes Benz. I have installed 3 remote start systems on various cars (a Subaru, a Honda, and a Mazda) which were what I'd call conventionally-wired cars, having accessible wires to turn the ignition and engine computer on and start the car. Easy. Cost, under $100 for all the parts including extra relays to turn on accessories and such.
On my '99 M-B, the engine computer will not allow the engine to run unless it can maintain a constant 2-way conversation over a separate CAN bus between itself and the EIS. What's the EIS? It's the Electronic Ignition Switch. Here's where things get complicated. M-B cars don't use conventional keys any more, the use a "SmartKey", which is an electronic key fob thing that inserts like a key, but has an infrared emitter-receiver in the end. The EIS supplies power to the SmartKey via an inductive coil around the key opening. The EIS and the SmartKey then engage via infrared in a continuous encrypted conversation which authorized the EIS to tell the engine computer to let the engine run. Because you need to have the SmartKey in place, it has been impossible to install a remote start system.
Recently, a remote start system became available for my car (sold new 12 model years ago, remember), which will simulate the EIS' conversation with the SmartKey and allow the factory remote's Panic alarm button to be repurposed to start the car (the SmartKey is also the remote, but don't worry about that, it's actually two devices in one package). Cost: $1000. That's over ten times the cost of a remote start system for a regular car. And it took 12 years to develop.
All because of a single encrypted function. Admittedly, a really well designed one that makes the car impossible to hotwire, but you can see what problems might face the aftermarket if things like door lock controls became encrypted.
All in all, this research exercise is just stupid. Of course you can make a complicated system do silly things if you have physical access to it. I don't see the point of adding encryption to it when the aftermarket will have to figure out how to bypass it eventually anyway.
Off topic, but in case anyone's interested, you can have up to 24 SmartKeys issued for an M-B vehicle, but I think only eight can be active at one time. The service information talks about having three ranks of eight keys. Once you need to replace the key for the 24th time, you need to replace the EIS, the engine computer and a couple of other items. SmartKeys can only be ordered at a dealer and you h
This is not true for most cars. On many cars the power steering boost is reduced at higher engine speeds but this is done for fuel economy reasons and it's actually just part of the mechanical pump design. It's much simpler (and therefore more reliable and cheaper) to do this in the pump itself than to use an electronic control system.
On most cars, the only electronic connection to the steering system is a pressure sensor that tells the engine computer how much load the power steering pump is placing on the engine. Cars with electronic stability control systems also have a steering angle sensor, but electronically modulated steering assist is only on a minority of cars as it adds to the cost over just having the power steering pump produce less pressure above a certain engine RPM.
It helps to be a member of the SAE and read their published papers on this stuff.
the steering gets locked only when you REMOVE the key.
Only on a few cars, like Mercedes Benz which uses an electronic key and motorized steering lock. On most cars with a conventional ignition key, the steering is locked when the key is turned back to the Off position.
The devices in question are already approved by the Federal government for use in residential settings.
That more than likely trumps any claims by this nutcase*.
It will be up to the nutcase* himself to insulate or shield the interior of his home.
Think about it - if instead of electromagnetic sensitivity he thought he had car sensitivity - cars driving by his house made him sick. He'd want to stop people from driving on the street, but that's another government sanctioned activity that no court would let him impose restrictions on.
*nutcase - someone with a psychological disorder that they think is caused by something external, instead of the truth which is that he's got too much time on his hands. He should really buy an old mine and live underground if he wants to avoid RF.
Heat Sunks wont be very effective in a desert nvironment where the ambient air temp is hitting 50 C. Even an atom would need a fan in the desert
Sorry, I've spent time in the Sahara desert, and it doesn't usually get that hot there - if it did the people retreat to someplace cooler. At 50 C (122 F) all the people will be dead, so there won't be anyone to worry about heatsinks or fans.
There are heat pump devices, such as Peltier effect devices which with a large heatsink can keep things pretty cool even in the (fictional) temperature you mentioned. I have a project at work that's using Pelter devices to keep an electronic device similar in size and power dissipation to an external hard drive down around 80 F in a 130 F environment.
That's all well and good, but the mic inputs on a sound card or laptop won't accept line level input without the signal being attenuated to mic levels. They're designed for a normal moving coil or condenser mic input and that's all.
I'm not sure what a high-output pro audio mic has to do with this discussion. Just because one particular mic can produce high amplitude signals does not mean that a normal sound card mic input will accept them. Pro audio equipment that can accept a +8dBV input has little relevance to a sound card or laptop mic input which is designed for a cheap consumer grade microphone that works at a much lower level like -68dBV.
The simple fact of the matter is that the engineers who design the inexpensive audio hardware used in PCs expect the microphone input to be used to connect a microphone and not much else. If you want to connect something else, then you have to convert the signal level to the acceptable range for the input.
It's POSSIBLE that with that disabled the mic port acts just like a line-in.
It doesn't. Trust me. I was handed 12 hours of video with overdriven audio that can't be corrected (there's no good correction for clipped audio), all recorded that way because someone set up the recorder with line level audio going into the mic jack and never checked the recorded levels.
Why do you need two inputs? I highly doubt there's much difference between the line-in jack on your sound card and the stereo microphone jack.
A microphone input is expecting microphone-level signals - not line level. There's a big difference, and without something similar to a DI box to correct the level, all you'll get if you put line level audio into a microphone jack is distorted overdriven noise.
In a strange coincidence, Google today unveiled the awesome power of the revamped Google Weather service, which delivers carefully targeted weather to their enemies^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, I mean users.
uh... you know the Altos doesn't have a screen, right?
Like most older Unix-y systems, you plug a terminal (or a bank of modems, or a protocol converter or whatever) into one of the serial ports, just like how you might configure a router these days. The system might have been sold with a terminal, but video output was not part of the computer itself.
Wait a minute, computers have serial ports nowadays too! Seems like you could just use those, with a null modem cable.
I'm waiting for someone to suggest plugging in a speech synthesizer and a DTMF dialer, then using a Google Voice account to transcribe the speech back into text which would then be emailed to you.
They don't supply any services except telling everyone else to not let their yard look like ass.
And, the problem is that if you buy in a nice enough area, everyone keeps their yards and houses looking nice anyway.
When I was shopping for a house after four years of living in a townhouse with an HOA, I told my realtor that any houses that were in a Homeowners' Association were unacceptable.
I bought a nice house in a nicer part of town - and because I'm not paying those fees I could afford a better house than if I had bought in an HOA development. The townhouse HOA fees were aproaching $200 a month, for what basically amounted to (albeit very professional) grass cutting. They didn't even do any of the much overdue building maintenance until the management company was bought out by someone who knew what they were doing, in the last year I was there.
There is a.kml file that you can plug into Google Earth that shows all kinds of interesting things inside North Korea (including a rather small but very quiet water park, presumably just for Kim's kids to use).
If you look for the power lines, you'll notice that they only lead to areas where the elites live - areas with special compounds, like Kim's estate that has it's own rail spur and station.
One of the funniest stories is that there's a high speed road built only for the Dear Leader to use to escape to China. Apparently they ran a test to make sure it was drivable and found that there were a bunch of turns that were to tight to make at speed, and things like trees and livestock in the road. Needless to say, I'm sure heads rolled (although that probably happened later at a prison camp as a warning to others).
Anyway, it's logical to assume that if only the elites have reliable electrical service, and only those and a few showplaces have access to the Internet, that any firewall (Dear Firewall?) would be to keep the elites in line.
Does it count as fulfilling the obligations required by the GPL if you make your source code freely available and downloadable but your entire country is behind a firewall and no one can access it?:)
Most of North Korea doesn't even have electricity. I'm not sure they need a firewall.
USB sticks are fragile and tiny. Even during a raid there is plenty of time to get rid of them or destroy them physically. Even if you're arrested on the street, your chances are higher to destroy what you have on you by throwing it on the street. Chances are, before they can retrieve it a few trucks passed over it, or it shattered from the impact altogether.
They may be tiny, but they are not fragile. The worst that is likely to happen if one is run over is that the connector gets crushed. That won't render the data irretrievably lost.
Seriously, try to break one of these things sometime. Without resorting to pliers or some kind of heavy duty shredder, it's pretty tough.
I wonder if it would be possible to make the printed circuit board out of a starch that would dissolve in water?
If the flash chips were erasable by exposure to light (like the old UV-erasable EPROMS), then just having the plastic enclosure dissolve away would be enough to destroy the data.
Shifting to neutral and switching the engine off would likely cause damage if you were travelling at high speed.
No, it doesn't. Ask any automatic transmission repair guy. Unless you're going to coast for more than about 10 miles (probably impossible unless you're driving down a mountain slope) then nothing bad is going to happen.
Where are people coming up with this nonsense?
The worst that happens from turning the engine off is that you lose power steering assist, and after a couple of applications of the brakes you lose the power brake boost.
If you have a car that has an automatic transmission, putting it into neutral while driving is a bad idea and it wouldn't surprise me if ALL automatics stopped the driver from doing so. The reason is that auto gearboxes have an oil pump that's driven by the engine. When you stop driving the gear box from the engine and start driving it from the wheels, the gear box quickly heats up and I suppose could even seize with potentially nasty consequences.
Try Googling "why can't i tow an automatic car" or something like that
Nonsense. No such rapid heating occurs.
The pump on an automatic transmission is driven directly by the torque converter shell, which is driven directly by the engine crankshaft.
So, the only way to stop the pump is to stop the engine. Shifting to neutral does not do that.
Even if the engine were stopped, the transmission doesn't suddenly lose all of it's lubricant - there is still fluid in the bearings and bushings and you're safe to coast for many many miles. The rules about not towing an automatic without the engine running specify a limited distance, not that you can't do it at all.
Sometimes folks step on both pedals to start up steep inclines. You can use the emergency brake as an alternative though.
Also sometimes folks step on both pedals to dry out brakes after driving through puddles. Granted this was more of an issue with shoe brakes than disk brakes, but folks get in the habit and the results could be unfortunate if the behavior is changed......
I would suggest to those people that they learn how to drive properly.
Hill starts are done with the parking brake, not the service brakes.
Drying out the brakes is a drum brake issue completely and is 100% unnecessary with disc brakes. Seriously, if you are having water-related problems with disc brakes then there's something wrong with them, or you're just imagining it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for tinkering, and tinkering with cars used to be a great hobby. But tinkering with proprietary chip sets - with consequences not only your driving experience, but on the safety of others around you - without the proper equipment strikes me as a uniquely bad idea.
You've apparently got no understanding of what the OBD II interface lets you do.
OBD II lets you read trouble codes and operational data (sensor values, fuel integrator, ignition timing, etc.), and lets you clear trouble codes.
That's it. There's no danger at all. You can't alter anything other than clearing trouble codes.
To the original poster, google for "ELM327" to find the hardware, and "ELM327 software" to find software, including many free apps that will use the ELM interface to talk to OBD II.
I use a free app on an old Palm with an ELM327 adapter I bought off of eBay for OBD II work. Works great. I paid a little more for one that works over Bluetooth; the less expensive varieties can be plugged into an RS232 port on a laptop (old, cheap laptops are powerful enough and are more likely to have an RS232 port).
The ELM 327 is fully documented and you can write your own software to talk to it. The datasheet is here: http://www.elmelectronics.com/DSheets/ELM327DS.pdf, ELM's OBD product page is here: http://www.elmelectronics.com/obdic.html.
You should be able to install a remote starter on an EIS-equipped Benz by just hiding a spare EIS key somewhere inside the console and tweaking the wiring approrpriately, no? That's the solution used by a lot of ignition interlock systems.
Nope. See above post. They carefully designed the SmartKey system to prevent any kind of operation of the vehicle without an authorized key in the EIS.
Here's a neat factoid - CAN bus isn't just twisted-pair anyhow, Benz is rolling out fiber for the high-speed CAN bus these days.
That's odd, there are twisted pairs in the car. In particular I noticed a twisted pair going to the C connector on the factory stereo, and according to the WIS (M-B service database), those pins are used for CAN for the steering wheel controls and radio data to the instrument cluster. Even more oddly, those features were not available on my car that year, even though it's wired for them and they're in the wiring diagrams.
I thought they were just using fiber for MOST (and formerly D2B) - they're mainly entertainment system buses. It could eliminate some of the weird problems like when CAN wires get wet though. I probably won't get a newer M-B for a couple of years. I'm saving up for an S.
I have an ELM327 adapter for OBDII, supposedly it can talk and listen on the CAN bus to any of the car's modules (if connected to the correct bus). I'll probably not get around to messing with it though.
Hmm.
Remote start on my E36 BMW just required a magic box (consisting literally of a relay, a coil, and a box) into which a spare key was placed. The remote starter activates the relay in this box, which switched the coil near the ignition switch out of circuit, and replaced it with the one wrapped around the spare key inside the box.
Worked like a champ. I think I only had $90 in the whole kit, including the remote start, the spare key, and the magic box. I kept the key whole and buried the magic box and extra key deep inside the dashboard for security, though I could've easily cut off the metal portion of the key so that only the RFID-ish bits was with the car.
You should open that box back up and destroy the metal key blade. If your car is ever stolen, the presence of that intact key will allow your insurance company to get out of covering the loss. It's pretty well known amongst professional installers.
Is there some reason why you couldn't have gotten a spare M-B key, and done the same thing with IR instead of RF?
To do so with the M-B EIS, you'd need to hack the EIS, ie. physically open and alter it. Extremely risky, and a replacement EIS is at least $400 and has to be programmed by M-B to operate in the specific car (in Germany! There's a facility in New Jersey that programs SmartKeys for the US market, btw.).
It would be pretty complicated even if you had access to the insides of the EIS. The EIS detects the presence of the key immediately upon insertion (the steering column unlocks as soon as you put the key in, even if you don't turn it.) So, you'd have to deal with two levels of activation.
The other problem, as toddestan notes, is that once you've tricked the EIS into talking to the hidden spare key for the remote start, the car be can stolen much easier - the steering will be unlocked and there's nothing to stop anyone shifting out of park (I'd steal this type of car by winching it onto a flatbed tow truck, which you've made possibly by unlocking the shifter even if the brake pedal interlock shuts off the remote start), and since there's a real key present, insurance won't cover the loss if the car is recovered (according to my auto insurance claims adjuster friend the insurance companies tend to investigate into how high dollar cars were stolen if they're recovered).
I installed a bypass module in the Honda (a 2004 Civic) which had an RF transponder key, although this was a code-learning bus-based bypass that tapped into the data signal from the ignition lock key reader. It only needed to authenticate they transponder code when the ignition was initially turned on to get the engine to run; there was no ongoing authentication. I have one of the cheap key-in-a-box bypass modules that I bought by mistake, but it's so primitive that I couldn't bring myself to use it, especially since it actually costs more than the bus-type bypass because there's the additional cost of an extra transponder key.
I'd also note that the E36 BMW is an older model that went out of production right around the same time that M-B went from mechanical blade keys to SmartKeys. What's BMW using now for a key? I'm guessing it's a SmartKey with a different name?
OBD II is all well and good for basic emissions/driveability/MIL diagnostics, but adding security to the other functions, such as the door locks, windows, etc. could basically kill the aftermarket alarm/remote start business.
On many (if not most) cars these days, many of the basic functions such as door locks are controlled via a CAN bus (a 2-wire twisted pair network) and more and more functions are migrating to network control rather than having dedicated wiring. In my car, everything other than the lights and the radio is run over CAN (even the seat adjustments and the rear window defogger).
Take, for example, installing an aftermarket stereo: Many new cars don't have a wire that supplies 12V when you turn the key on to turn on the radio, the radio is always powered and listens to the CAN bus for the command from the car's BCM (body control module) to turn itself on. On these cars, a separate aftermarket module has to be installed to turn the radio on (or the installer has to dig around in the car to find something else that only turns on with the key, like a power outlet). There are also aftermarket modules that can translate the CAN bus commands from the car's factory steering wheel controls to control an aftermarket stereo.
Adding a layer of security (presumably encryption or authentication) could cripple these abilities with aftermarket equipment.
Don't believe me, well take the example of remote start on my current car a 1999 (yes, 12 model years old now) Mercedes Benz. I have installed 3 remote start systems on various cars (a Subaru, a Honda, and a Mazda) which were what I'd call conventionally-wired cars, having accessible wires to turn the ignition and engine computer on and start the car. Easy. Cost, under $100 for all the parts including extra relays to turn on accessories and such.
On my '99 M-B, the engine computer will not allow the engine to run unless it can maintain a constant 2-way conversation over a separate CAN bus between itself and the EIS. What's the EIS? It's the Electronic Ignition Switch. Here's where things get complicated. M-B cars don't use conventional keys any more, the use a "SmartKey", which is an electronic key fob thing that inserts like a key, but has an infrared emitter-receiver in the end. The EIS supplies power to the SmartKey via an inductive coil around the key opening. The EIS and the SmartKey then engage via infrared in a continuous encrypted conversation which authorized the EIS to tell the engine computer to let the engine run. Because you need to have the SmartKey in place, it has been impossible to install a remote start system.
Recently, a remote start system became available for my car (sold new 12 model years ago, remember), which will simulate the EIS' conversation with the SmartKey and allow the factory remote's Panic alarm button to be repurposed to start the car (the SmartKey is also the remote, but don't worry about that, it's actually two devices in one package). Cost: $1000. That's over ten times the cost of a remote start system for a regular car. And it took 12 years to develop.
All because of a single encrypted function. Admittedly, a really well designed one that makes the car impossible to hotwire, but you can see what problems might face the aftermarket if things like door lock controls became encrypted.
All in all, this research exercise is just stupid. Of course you can make a complicated system do silly things if you have physical access to it. I don't see the point of adding encryption to it when the aftermarket will have to figure out how to bypass it eventually anyway.
Off topic, but in case anyone's interested, you can have up to 24 SmartKeys issued for an M-B vehicle, but I think only eight can be active at one time. The service information talks about having three ranks of eight keys. Once you need to replace the key for the 24th time, you need to replace the EIS, the engine computer and a couple of other items. SmartKeys can only be ordered at a dealer and you h
Unless you've known a sheep farmer, you might be overestimating the intelligence of sheep.
A friend of mine's parents raised sheep, and I remember his mother complaining that she was always having to untangle the sheep from the fence.
They said sheep are surprised every day when the sun comes up.
They might just crap themselves and stay exactly where they are. Now, send in a couple of sheepdogs and you'd find the fakes pretty quickly.
This is not true for most cars. On many cars the power steering boost is reduced at higher engine speeds but this is done for fuel economy reasons and it's actually just part of the mechanical pump design. It's much simpler (and therefore more reliable and cheaper) to do this in the pump itself than to use an electronic control system.
On most cars, the only electronic connection to the steering system is a pressure sensor that tells the engine computer how much load the power steering pump is placing on the engine. Cars with electronic stability control systems also have a steering angle sensor, but electronically modulated steering assist is only on a minority of cars as it adds to the cost over just having the power steering pump produce less pressure above a certain engine RPM.
It helps to be a member of the SAE and read their published papers on this stuff.
the steering gets locked only when you REMOVE the key.
Only on a few cars, like Mercedes Benz which uses an electronic key and motorized steering lock. On most cars with a conventional ignition key, the steering is locked when the key is turned back to the Off position.
The devices in question are already approved by the Federal government for use in residential settings.
That more than likely trumps any claims by this nutcase*.
It will be up to the nutcase* himself to insulate or shield the interior of his home.
Think about it - if instead of electromagnetic sensitivity he thought he had car sensitivity - cars driving by his house made him sick. He'd want to stop people from driving on the street, but that's another government sanctioned activity that no court would let him impose restrictions on.
*nutcase - someone with a psychological disorder that they think is caused by something external, instead of the truth which is that he's got too much time on his hands. He should really buy an old mine and live underground if he wants to avoid RF.
Heat Sunks wont be very effective in a desert nvironment where the ambient air temp is hitting 50 C. Even an atom would need a fan in the desert
Sorry, I've spent time in the Sahara desert, and it doesn't usually get that hot there - if it did the people retreat to someplace cooler. At 50 C (122 F) all the people will be dead, so there won't be anyone to worry about heatsinks or fans.
There are heat pump devices, such as Peltier effect devices which with a large heatsink can keep things pretty cool even in the (fictional) temperature you mentioned. I have a project at work that's using Pelter devices to keep an electronic device similar in size and power dissipation to an external hard drive down around 80 F in a 130 F environment.
That's all well and good, but the mic inputs on a sound card or laptop won't accept line level input without the signal being attenuated to mic levels. They're designed for a normal moving coil or condenser mic input and that's all.
I'm not sure what a high-output pro audio mic has to do with this discussion. Just because one particular mic can produce high amplitude signals does not mean that a normal sound card mic input will accept them. Pro audio equipment that can accept a +8dBV input has little relevance to a sound card or laptop mic input which is designed for a cheap consumer grade microphone that works at a much lower level like -68dBV.
The simple fact of the matter is that the engineers who design the inexpensive audio hardware used in PCs expect the microphone input to be used to connect a microphone and not much else. If you want to connect something else, then you have to convert the signal level to the acceptable range for the input.
Forgot to mention that they were using the Mic input with the boost turned off.
It's POSSIBLE that with that disabled the mic port acts just like a line-in.
It doesn't. Trust me. I was handed 12 hours of video with overdriven audio that can't be corrected (there's no good correction for clipped audio), all recorded that way because someone set up the recorder with line level audio going into the mic jack and never checked the recorded levels.
Why do you need two inputs? I highly doubt there's much difference between the line-in jack on your sound card and the stereo microphone jack.
A microphone input is expecting microphone-level signals - not line level. There's a big difference, and without something similar to a DI box to correct the level, all you'll get if you put line level audio into a microphone jack is distorted overdriven noise.
In a strange coincidence, Google today unveiled the awesome power of the revamped Google Weather service, which delivers carefully targeted weather to their enemies^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, I mean users.
uh... you know the Altos doesn't have a screen, right?
Like most older Unix-y systems, you plug a terminal (or a bank of modems, or a protocol converter or whatever) into one of the serial ports, just like how you might configure a router these days. The system might have been sold with a terminal, but video output was not part of the computer itself.
Wait a minute, computers have serial ports nowadays too! Seems like you could just use those, with a null modem cable.
I'm waiting for someone to suggest plugging in a speech synthesizer and a DTMF dialer, then using a Google Voice account to transcribe the speech back into text which would then be emailed to you.
We couldn't use that SSID at my house. The neighbors would know exactly whose it was.
They don't supply any services except telling everyone else to not let their yard look like ass.
And, the problem is that if you buy in a nice enough area, everyone keeps their yards and houses looking nice anyway.
When I was shopping for a house after four years of living in a townhouse with an HOA, I told my realtor that any houses that were in a Homeowners' Association were unacceptable.
I bought a nice house in a nicer part of town - and because I'm not paying those fees I could afford a better house than if I had bought in an HOA development. The townhouse HOA fees were aproaching $200 a month, for what basically amounted to (albeit very professional) grass cutting. They didn't even do any of the much overdue building maintenance until the management company was bought out by someone who knew what they were doing, in the last year I was there.
Since neither the summary nor either article tell you what the guy wins, (almost like it's a secret), here's a wikipedia entry that does.
It's a million dollars.
There is a .kml file that you can plug into Google Earth that shows all kinds of interesting things inside North Korea (including a rather small but very quiet water park, presumably just for Kim's kids to use).
If you look for the power lines, you'll notice that they only lead to areas where the elites live - areas with special compounds, like Kim's estate that has it's own rail spur and station.
One of the funniest stories is that there's a high speed road built only for the Dear Leader to use to escape to China. Apparently they ran a test to make sure it was drivable and found that there were a bunch of turns that were to tight to make at speed, and things like trees and livestock in the road. Needless to say, I'm sure heads rolled (although that probably happened later at a prison camp as a warning to others).
Anyway, it's logical to assume that if only the elites have reliable electrical service, and only those and a few showplaces have access to the Internet, that any firewall (Dear Firewall?) would be to keep the elites in line.
Does it count as fulfilling the obligations required by the GPL if you make your source code freely available and downloadable but your entire country is behind a firewall and no one can access it? :)
Most of North Korea doesn't even have electricity. I'm not sure they need a firewall.
USB sticks are fragile and tiny. Even during a raid there is plenty of time to get rid of them or destroy them physically. Even if you're arrested on the street, your chances are higher to destroy what you have on you by throwing it on the street. Chances are, before they can retrieve it a few trucks passed over it, or it shattered from the impact altogether.
They may be tiny, but they are not fragile. The worst that is likely to happen if one is run over is that the connector gets crushed. That won't render the data irretrievably lost.
Seriously, try to break one of these things sometime. Without resorting to pliers or some kind of heavy duty shredder, it's pretty tough.
I wonder if it would be possible to make the printed circuit board out of a starch that would dissolve in water?
If the flash chips were erasable by exposure to light (like the old UV-erasable EPROMS), then just having the plastic enclosure dissolve away would be enough to destroy the data.
That's not true. My landrover has an electrical lockout that prevents changing into nuteral whilst driving. I have tried it
That makes your landrover illegal to operate on public roads in many countries.
What is the benefit of preventing the driver from shifting to neutral? (Hint: There is no benefit to that.)
Shifting to neutral and switching the engine off would likely cause damage if you were travelling at high speed.
No, it doesn't. Ask any automatic transmission repair guy. Unless you're going to coast for more than about 10 miles (probably impossible unless you're driving down a mountain slope) then nothing bad is going to happen.
Where are people coming up with this nonsense?
The worst that happens from turning the engine off is that you lose power steering assist, and after a couple of applications of the brakes you lose the power brake boost.
If you have a car that has an automatic transmission, putting it into neutral while driving is a bad idea and it wouldn't surprise me if ALL automatics stopped the driver from doing so. The reason is that auto gearboxes have an oil pump that's driven by the engine. When you stop driving the gear box from the engine and start driving it from the wheels, the gear box quickly heats up and I suppose could even seize with potentially nasty consequences.
Try Googling "why can't i tow an automatic car" or something like that
Nonsense. No such rapid heating occurs.
The pump on an automatic transmission is driven directly by the torque converter shell, which is driven directly by the engine crankshaft.
So, the only way to stop the pump is to stop the engine. Shifting to neutral does not do that.
Even if the engine were stopped, the transmission doesn't suddenly lose all of it's lubricant - there is still fluid in the bearings and bushings and you're safe to coast for many many miles. The rules about not towing an automatic without the engine running specify a limited distance, not that you can't do it at all.
Sometimes folks step on both pedals to start up steep inclines. You can use the emergency brake as an alternative though.
Also sometimes folks step on both pedals to dry out brakes after driving through puddles. Granted this was more of an issue with shoe brakes than disk brakes, but folks get in the habit and the results could be unfortunate if the behavior is changed......
I would suggest to those people that they learn how to drive properly.
Hill starts are done with the parking brake, not the service brakes.
Drying out the brakes is a drum brake issue completely and is 100% unnecessary with disc brakes. Seriously, if you are having water-related problems with disc brakes then there's something wrong with them, or you're just imagining it.