Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start • Hacker News Board

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#731

Post by quitit » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 10:53 AM UTC

jsrcout wrote: post #435

quitit wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscription pricing for things which aren’t subscriptions is bullshit.

I call it "property as a service". Wherein you have to pay recurrent rent on things you "own" to keep using them.

As a side note I feel rent isn’t a good comparison, as these new types of subscription have no bonafide scarcity or cost. While rental properties have real costs: taxes, maintenance, acquisition costs, advertising/agent costs and so on. Charging rent is appropriate because the owner deprives themselves of part or whole of the property (but not its costs) for the renter. This isn’t comparable with a subscription for a keyfob - especially as it’s a feature which has worked just fine without such arrangements.

The subscription approach also doesn’t fix any problems - for example, the Adobe subscription solved the common agency/design headache of receiving files for a more recent version of the software. Whereby one couldn’t drop $20-40k to upgrade their software just to get access to one set of files. A situation made worse if the source of the files is unable to back save them. This allowed big agencies to squeeze out smaller competitors which couldn’t update their versions right away. The subscription solved this problem and is generally viewed as a win/win for adobe and their customers.

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#732

Post by filoleg » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #368

gambiting wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On most(all?) Modern cars you can't unlock the door from the inside if the door got locked from the outside. I think it was made law to work like this? In order to prevent thefts where someone just runs a tiny rod through an opening and pulls a handle - that doesn't work anymore. If you get locked in the car while inside there is no way to open the door, you'd have to break a window to get out.

> On most(all?) Modern cars you can't unlock the door from the inside if the door got locked from the outside. Teslas have an (emergency?) mechanical release on their doors. At least the Model 3 does. Given that you can't 'lock from the outside' in the ordinary sense, if this law exists, there must be some leeway.

Ironically enough, Tesla Model 3 emergency mechanical release on doors is positioned so technically “well”, passengers not familiar with how the door opens in a standard way from the inside (by pressing a glowing button on the door) tend to pull on the emergency release first (which is located on the door right next to the standard release button).

Happened to my friends at least a couple of times when giving them a ride. Imo, not a bad situation, because the worst case scenario here is that they will accidentally use an emergency release instead of the standard one on their first try, which will only trigger tesla to make a warning sound that the emergency release was used. Definitely works out better in a real emergency situation too, compared to cars with difficult to find emergency release handles, given people not familiar with Tesla doors tend to reach for the emergency handles in those by default at times.

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#733

Post by brokenmachine » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 10:10 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #677

brokenmachine wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What monthly fees of this nature are required to use other Apple products? Apple conveniently disallows people from making local backups encrypted with your own key, which means in reality you need to pay a monthly fee to store them on iCloud.

That’s just an outright lie, though. There’s Time Machine: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/keep-your-time-mach... Or you can run any number of third party backup software.

Obviously I'm not an Apple customer, but from reading hackernews comments when the M1 came out, I was reading people discussing that you couldn't do that. Or maybe I misunderstood the details but they were definitely complaining about backup methods for encrypted laptops.

I would not trust Apple with all my data, which is essentially what you're doing if they have the key.

Can you do a full-disk encrypted backup of your drive using only your own keys and not sending any data back to Apple?

If you can, then I'm wrong. But "outright lie" is an uncharitable interpretation of my error.

Lol, downvoted with no answers. Apple victims are a thin-skinned bunch.

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#734

Post by brokenmachine » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

ayemiller wrote: post #568

senortumnus wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the spark plug ceramic demos. Little ceramic tip on a spark plug (isolated from the rest of the plug) make an effective car window smashing projectile. No idea if it would work from inside the car / if you could get enough speed on it sitting right next to the window! https://www.reddit.com/r/mythbusters/comments/130js6/breakin...

Technically it's not the tip of a spark plug, but a shard of the ceramic insulator when shattered- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_rocks

So they crush a spark plug to get the "rocks"? How?

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#735

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

rswail wrote: post #661

brokenmachine wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have NO IDEA how anyone managed the jump from this story about Toyota to a totally imaginary anti-Apple rant Because Apple are the nickel-and-dime masters . From removing headphone sockets in order to sell stupidly expensive wireless headphones, to stupidly overpriced soldered memory and storage upgrades, to the 30% appstore fee scam, to disallowing local backups to promote their iCloud storage racket, to unrepair…

LOL, as someone that adopted/adapted to the Apple world when I moved from a Linux laptop to an Apple Mac Mini (for development), this is nonsense. The removal of the headphone socket, from their perspective, was to move people to wireless headphones. Yes, it was a move everyone hated, but it didn't drive people across to Google/Samsung. The 30% app store fee is a problem for the developers, not the consumers. I can m…

[deleted]

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#736

Post by brokenmachine » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:26 AM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #709

brokenmachine wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget disallowing local backups for no reason other than moneygrubbing. $3/month for 200Gb is reasonable in your opinion, but people who don't buy Apple can buy a 2T drive for $50.

Local backups still work fine, you just do it in Finder now instead of iTunes. Not sure what the situation is for Windows users. As far as comparing prices, yes, a bare hard drive is cheaper but I'm paying for that storage with services and backups attached to it. A hard drive won't automatically sync photos between my phone and my computer, and I'm more likely to have that hard drive fail than I am to lose iCloud. R…

>Replacing iCloud storage with a big hard drive is a bit like replacing a car with a motorcycle.

What you lose in convenience, you gain in privacy, since iCloud backups are not e2e encrypted.

https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/blog/post/iphone-backup-icloud...

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#737

Post by drewzero1 » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:48 AM UTC

frosted-flakes wrote: post #454

drewzero1 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what GP might mean is that whether you are on the driver's or passenger's side, when you pull the handle that door opens even if it is locked. I've noticed that on both our 1995 and 2014 Fords, when you pull the door handle it mechanically unlocks that door and opens it. (On the 2014 the other doors may additionally be triggered to unlock. However, in a no-power situation pulling the handle will still mechani…

Chevy Express vans and trucks didn't unlock the door when you pulled the handle. You had to manually slide the unlock toggle or hit the electronic unlock button before opening the door.

I've only noticed this feature on Fords. My SAAB requires the occupant to pull up on the lock knob on the windowsill, and my Saturn requires one to turn the lock knob on the inside door handle to the unlocked position. While both require additional action besides just pulling the handle, neither relies on the car's electrical system to open or unlock the doors (and indeed, neither car has any electrical locking component in any of the doors).

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#738

Post by frosted-flakes » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:54 AM UTC

drewzero1 wrote: post #737

frosted-flakes wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chevy Express vans and trucks didn't unlock the door when you pulled the handle. You had to manually slide the unlock toggle or hit the electronic unlock button before opening the door.

I've only noticed this feature on Fords. My SAAB requires the occupant to pull up on the lock knob on the windowsill, and my Saturn requires one to turn the lock knob on the inside door handle to the unlocked position. While both require additional action besides just pulling the handle, neither relies on the car's electrical system to open or unlock the doors (and indeed, neither car has any electrical locking compo…

To be clear, the vehicles I was referring to all had manual lock controls. The button unlocked all of the doors

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#739

Post by rpaddock » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 3:28 PM UTC

joegreen wrote: post #721

rpaddock wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...impossible to act on information from the future..." Might want to read: Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect Daryl J. Bem Cornell University https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/psp-a0021524.pdf This work has been replicated many times by others because no one believed it. Also look up Decision Augmentation Theory.

That paper was an interesting read :) I googled a bit about it and found possible explanation https://replicationindex.com/2018/01/05/bem-retraction/

There is also:

"Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4706048/

The book 'Real Magic' is related:

https://www.deanradin.com

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#740

Post by plattenbau » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

boppo1 wrote: post #616

mywittyname wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards have a lot to say on the strength, composition, and properties of glass in passenger vehicles. In addition to being very difficult to break, it must also be resistant to shattering and remain in place while experiencing some pretty extreme forces. Automotive glass is not even glass really, it's more of a composite made up of layers of various transparent materials all design…

are these specs public somewhere? Sounds cool.

Sadly, no. Unlike some better fields, the auto industry is incredibly tight-lipped about safety and crash structures. If these in-formal standards were to get out... and if the public were to know how well the industry has cornered the regulators, creating pseudo-standards that technically conform to the safety protocols but functionally make zero difference to consumer/passenger safety... there'd be riots.