Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

blog.koenvh.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 525 posts

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#151

Post by Aeolun »

madaxe_again wrote: post #92
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given them a reasonable amount of time (maybe a couple months) to collect their property Why waste your own time with this? If it's your house, you own everything inside. I would put all the cameras in the trash and forget about it.

Not so. My mother bought a house in France in 1988. The previous owners had a mountain of stuff in the barn that they would come collect “soon”. 25 years passed. My mother started variously selling and disposing of their slowly rotting crap that they evidently were never going to collect, as she wanted to fix the structural issues with the barn, and their stuff was in the way, as it literally filled the entire ground…

That doesn’t make any sense. What would the value of that stuff be if she’d just moved it out of the barn and left it to rot there?

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#152

Post by dlcarrier »

IshKebab wrote: post #83
sellmesoap wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's find a list of electric cars without some form of network connection!

Found it:

Coda EV

Rav 4 EV

Nissan Leaf

Fiat 500e

Smart Fortwo electric drive

...

There's probably a dozen or so first-generation (well for this century) electric vehicles that are just regular cars that happen to have an electric power plant.

The upside is that you can buy them used, for a couple grand. The downside is that they were manufactured with a 100 mile range, and your lucky if you can find one that still retains half that.

If aftermarket batteries become common, they'd be perfect around-town vehicles.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#153

Post by focusedone »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #10

> “can I get free data from the SIM card embedded in the device that I now technically own?” That seems like the next-most-interesting question now that you've determined what the device is. Possibly followed closely by "can I use that free-to-me data in a fun way that might teach the people who installed the SIM to deactivate their devices when they sell them?" i.e. Could you send and receive enough on the connectio…

I work at a place with LTE GPS trackers on fleet vehicles. Tracking boxes get moved from old -> new vehicles when possible. Otherwise the cell and tracking services are deactivated ASAP to avoid paying a monthly fee on an unused tracker.

I'd personally be equal parts creeped out and curious about the hardware if that showed up on a car I bought. If it's a former fleet vehicle, its probably deactivated.

The particular sound described makes me think of older pre-lte stuff, which in my part of the world was abandoned and became useless a couple years ago.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#154

Post by actionfromafar »

akira2501 wrote: post #140
Gee101 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there will be kits to swap the ice engine to eletricfor most popular cars eventually. Then you will have more control about what features is added.

I've seen people do this but I think it's unlikely. The weight on an ICE car is slung much differently from an EV and placing a battery bank where your engine used to be is not a great idea.

I may be daft but it seems like a great idea. Same weight and everything. In France you get a decent subsidy if you convert your ICE to EV.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#155

Post by Etheryte »

quailfarmer wrote: post #144
Etheryte wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electric cars are essentially black boxes. When you take it apart, you have largely no idea what any of the chips do, even if you chase down what they're connected to. Is this the infotainment system or is it the infotainment system and a data gathering system that sends all my data off seas? There's no way to know. Old cars don't have that problem. Here's an engine, here's a gearbox, add a radio if you'd like, but b…

They’re not black boxes, you’re just not an electrical engineer. They’re actually way simpler than ICE in a bunch of ways that really improve reliability. We just need to develop a collective understanding of how electric drivetrains work, the kind of understanding that we had developed in previous generations for ICE cars

This is a funny comment because that's almost exactly what I have a degree in. The point here isn't the engine though, even though those are also a separate beast, but rather that all of these vehicles are packed to the brim with a bunch of chips with internet access and you have no idea what's really running on them. With electric cars we're seeing even more of this than with ICEs.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#156

Post by tengwar2 »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #10

> “can I get free data from the SIM card embedded in the device that I now technically own?” That seems like the next-most-interesting question now that you've determined what the device is. Possibly followed closely by "can I use that free-to-me data in a fun way that might teach the people who installed the SIM to deactivate their devices when they sell them?" i.e. Could you send and receive enough on the connectio…

If the people who made it know much about telecoms, then no, the will not work. When your mobile device connects to the Internet, the connection tunnels through the mobile network to a gateway specified by the "APN" (access point name). This is usually set up automatically these days, but you can dig the setting out of your phone. That's for an Internet connection - however a company can pay for a "private APN". This is still a gateway, but they control what it connects to. This is often done for machine to machine connections, e.g. for utility smart meters - so a SIM for a gas meter will not be provisioned for the normal Internet APN, and if you were able to get that SIM out (difficult as they are not usually in card format) you would not be able to connect to the Internet. Typically the equipment company will negotiate a cheaper data price than for Internet access, since the data usage will be low and predictable.

Now it could be that the people who built this tracking device are too small scale to negotiate a deal, or just don't know this, but my guess is that (a) the SIM is not in a physical format which can be removed and fitted in a different device; and (b) it is connected to a private APN which is not connected to the Internet.

BTW, if you look up the Wikipedia article, bear in mind that it is a bit inaccurate - for instance it refers to an APN as being a gateway to the Internet, which is not always true. I'll correct it some time.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#157

Post by javawizard »

akira2501 wrote: post #141
jagged-chisel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … used to be able to remove the key and keep the engine running, while preventing the car from being shifted out of park … I’m pretty sure (not 100%) that new cars with contactless keys have this feature by default. You can get out (with the key) and leave it running, but the shifter won’t work until you return with the key.

Contactless keys and fleet vehicles do not go well together.

I'll bite. Why not?

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#159

Post by eastern »

afh1 wrote: post #25

The scary part is not the GPS installed by the fleet company that previously owned the car, which in all likelihood was just forgotten there, but the GPS and eSIM that comes with most (all?) new cars and that in most (all?) new cars cannot be disabled. Apart from privacy concerns of your data being used or sold by the car vendor, government outreach is also a concern. There was a bill announced in the US for all new…

Media people obviously thought that kill switch meant something that can kill the driver and rushed to reassure the public that no that was not the case.

They're good people at heart. Don't misunderstand them.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#160

Post by N19PEDL2 »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #53
bean-weevil wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They own the cameras. You can still take them down and give them back if requested.

The thing is, first of all I’m hardly a handyman, I wouldn’t have known where to start. Second, I was dealing with moving to a new place, which can be very stressful (to add to that, my girlfriend was 6 months pregnant and my dad had passed away unexpectedly less than 2 months earlier). And third, I wanted the alarm, just with me in the contract and with the access to the cameras, not the previous owner. I simply cov…

Maybe you could just cut the wires. Surely the former tenant's contract does not oblige you to provide electricity and connectivity to those devices.
Post reply on HN