131–140 of 325 posts
More surprising that the car has some call home feature that the owner doesn't seem to know about.
Many products have features the owners don't know about. Intel ME was a hidden feature of Intel processors for a while before anyone figured out it existed.
I used to fix cars for a living. Sometimes it involved “cracking” alarm & immobiliser systems. My clients all claimed they broke/lost their keys to their car - most of the time they were believable (car stuck in front of their driveway, etc). Sometimes less so, but I’d do it anyway because I needed the money and I had no proof of the contrary (innocent until proven guilty right?), although given the sad conditions of…
"Sometimes less so, but I’d do it anyway because I needed the money and I had no proof of the contrary (innocent until proven guilty right?)." Huh, is it legal to "crack" alarms/immobilizers without proof of ownership, especially if you suspect it might be stolen?
I would probably feel differently if I got called to work on a supercar but that didn’t happen.
Reading this article is honestly a bit of a domestic culture shock for me, where does this guy live in The Netherlands? Here in downtown Amsterdam we called the police because the rear window of someone's car had just been smashed outside our office, and the police's response was "Has anyone been hurt? Nope? Then we're not coming". Meanwhile, wherever this guy lives they're sending officers because some BMW call cent…
Don't you read the news? There have recently been articles in the international press that Amsterdam is a jungle right now: > Official ombudsman, Arre Zuurmond told Dutch paper Trouw that "the city centre becomes an urban jungle at night". He added: "Criminal money flourishes, there is no authority and the police can no longer handle the situation." https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/amsterdam-tourists-...
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"Sometimes less so, but I’d do it anyway because I needed the money and I had no proof of the contrary (innocent until proven guilty right?)." Huh, is it legal to "crack" alarms/immobilizers without proof of ownership, especially if you suspect it might be stolen?
anyone can call a mobile locksmith and ask them to help them get into their locked car stuck in the KFC parking lot with their keys inside. It’s usually up to the locksmith to obtain proof of ownership. otherwise they’re running the risk of committing a break-in. they usually have you sign something beforehand that tries to mitigate their liability. however I’ve used some shady locksmiths who just pulled up in the pa…
I took cash as well, because I was under 18 and couldn’t legally run a business at that time (but still needed to eat and buy drinks every weekend, and family couldn’t afford it).
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As an American, I'm glad I'm not the only one :) That said, I thought that car theft was all but gone in the US, at least for modern cars, whereas in Europe it still seems common. (Eg, if you follow international forums for newer car models, nobody in the US talks about theft anymore, but our European counterparts talk about these highly complex theft schemes). But then someone was posting about theft in Sacramento,…
There's a huge difference between the US and EU in this regard. If I steal a car in California and try to sell it in Nevada, I can expect to be arrested. If I have a car stolen in The Netherlands and it's being sold in Romania, and I find out who's selling it and where, I'll be told that I have to travel to Romania and file report with the local police there before they'll do anything. The only inter-state enforcemen…
Anyway a few year ago my car was stolen in Slovakia (the insurance paid out so my loss was minimal) and was found after a year in Hungary - the thieves were trying to sell it but it was found out they tried to change the VIN. Because apparently you can't register a car with a stolen VIN in EU. And that's nothing to do with Interpol as far as I know.
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Don't you read the news? There have recently been articles in the international press that Amsterdam is a jungle right now: > Official ombudsman, Arre Zuurmond told Dutch paper Trouw that "the city centre becomes an urban jungle at night". He added: "Criminal money flourishes, there is no authority and the police can no longer handle the situation." https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/amsterdam-tourists-...
That is a British tabloid.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/04/amsterdam-brit...
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Don't you read the news? There have recently been articles in the international press that Amsterdam is a jungle right now: > Official ombudsman, Arre Zuurmond told Dutch paper Trouw that "the city centre becomes an urban jungle at night". He added: "Criminal money flourishes, there is no authority and the police can no longer handle the situation." https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/amsterdam-tourists-...
That is a British tabloid.
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I'm not sure I'd be so paranoid. We've read of people managing to hack the key openers, etc. They're an attractive target. I mean, if you were going to leave a box containing $30,000 on your doorstep. A box not only containing 30k, but a box that was labelled that it contained 30k. How would you protect it? Put a serial number on it so you can prove it's yours? A bike lock? A motion sensor? Cement it into the ground?…
Presumably it takes a business and facilities to to realize its value, so the barrier to entry is high. Like the thief needs access to a shady used car dealer or shady used parts business, unless it's a low volume rural thing where they can strip cars in the backyard and sell parts on eBay. Assuming the 30000$ car is one ton, that's only 15$ per pound of car... Not too valuable.
(Yes, this is perpetuating a horrible stereotype. Nothing personal, Poles, you just happen to be the closest border for this particular stereotype.)
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Even more modern cars with "protection" (usually against tuning, not theft) use obvious, simple-to-reverse algorithms. For example, the Simos18 ECUs used in modern VWs use flash files encrypted with AES128. Except, they share the same key and IV across all ECUs on the platform, and the key and IV are stored in plaintext in the "upgrade" routines in the flash ROM. So once you've dumped one ECU's flash memory, you own…
Seems like an easy problem to solve - every ECU generates its own encryption/signing key at first boot and dumps it over the serial port, which then gets recorded somewhere. This is eventually passed down to the car’s owner in the documentation, and the key needs to be presented before any firmware upgrade or configuration change. This isn’t bulletproof either, but surely more than “hey I’m legit, here’s your new fir…