5 ms·

In order for this to work, there must be some means of communicating with the car at distance. The nature of this (radio, etc) doesn't really matter. There will

by john_b 13y ago

In order for this to work, there must be some means of communicating with the car at distance. The nature of this (radio, etc) doesn't really matter. There will be a receiver on the car that can and will be identified and removed by criminals, rendering the stated purpose moot. Of course removing the receiver will be made illegal, as if this will accomplish anything. That leaves two classes of people who will be affected by this. One is people who commit unplanned crimes (e.g. hit a pedestrian, panic and run). The technology will probably help here, but unplanned violent crimes committed in public places almost always end with the suspect in custody, so the marginal benefit is close to zero. The second class is ordinary people who are not committing any crimes, but who the police may want to stop for other reasons. The police won't even need to be in the area, they can show up later (at their leisure) after your vehicle has been turned off. Ever parked illegally for a few minutes so you could run inside and deliver something? Your car might be off when you come back. Going a little faster than the speed limit? Enjoy your unplanned stop on the side of the road and wait for a policeman to show up with your ticket. This is yet another reason ubiquitous cameras and universal location awareness on the part of law enforcement is dangerous. Even if you accept that nothing is wrong with the police watching you 24/7, the mere fact that they are enables virtually any abuse they would want to commit.

hahainternet 13y ago
None of this makes any sense. You don't justify anything nor do you give any solid reasoning. You just state that this won't help, therefore it's bad. Please actually /support/ your claims. Why would police turn off your car instead of simply issuing a ticket electronically? Why would they stop cars speeding instead of issuing an electronic ticket? Please take the time to think about and provide plausible examples instead of this nonsense.
- ma2rten 13y ago
  From the article: The technology, scheduled for a six-year development timetable, is aimed at bringing dangerous high-speed car chases to an end and to make redundant current stopping techniques such as spiking a vehicle's tyres.
  - hahainternet 13y ago
    Right, and the parent poster claims with no support that a) The technology will be removed by all criminals who plan ahead b) Criminals that don't plan ahead are almost always caught c) This technology will be used for minor infractions that are 'ticketable offences' None of this is realistic or supported at all. I gave an example in another post, run-flat tyres defeat spike strips. Why do criminals rarely fit them?
    - jjoonathan 13y ago
      Because run-flat tires cost a lot more than removing a chip. Or buying a jammer, if they get clever about making the chip hard to remove. You don't have any support for you claim that a, b, and c were unrealistic. Pot, kettle.
    - araes 13y ago
      The marginal risk of spike strips relative to the cost of installing and maintaining run-flat tires is minimal compared to the marginal risk of a radio transmitting (likely with GPS) transceiver that can locate and disable a car relative to the cost of disabling, removing, or spoofing said transceiver. For a longer explanation, spike strips require multiple layers of failure in any criminal activity before they become a concern. You have to be in a car, have alerted police, have not been a good enough driver to elude police, and driven in a consistent direction long enough that they can predict where you'll go and drop spikes. If you're not performing a minor infraction, or you're a criminal who plans ahead, the probability of all these things happening, and you not being able to do anything about any of them is minimal. If you have a radio transmitting GPS on your car that can disable it you only have to hit the first step - be in a car. You don't even have to have police on alert. You can commit a crime, have gotten away, be driving around the next day, and as they're reviewing tape, they'll note your car, see the license (or ID the make, model, markings, and driver), find you, and then disable you wherever you are. All criminals will remove this as a matter of course. This doesn't even speak to the pattern recognition and behavioural attacks that this would allow on any criminal organization, enabling things like predictive surveillance (there's a big car pow-wow on 5th and Lake St. every Sat. night), optimal raids (same), or covertly nabbing members (Dino likes to go for a snack at 8:00 every night). Further, this is easily as bad as the NSA "meta-data" scandal, since the pattern recognition above used against all common citizens is absolutely begging for abuse by middle managers and line-workers (where's my girlfriend going?)
jdietrich 13y ago
>The nature of this (radio, etc) doesn't really matter. There will be a receiver on the car that can and will be identified and removed by criminals, rendering the stated purpose moot. Of course removing the receiver will be made illegal, as if this will accomplish anything. It has been effectively impossible to hotwire a new car for over a decade, because modern cars simply will not start without the say-so of the ECU, which is a highly secure black box. Stealing a modern car means stealing the keys, because highly sophisticated organised criminals have failed totally in developing practical attacks to circumvent immobilisers. Build the remote shutdown facility into the ECU and it will be essentially impossible to disable. Send the remote shutdown instruction over a suitably designed radio link and jamming becomes utterly impractical. I have very little doubt that the motor industry is capable of designing a very effective remote shutdown systems; Relatively crude aftermarket solutions are already being used very effectively by fleet operators. There are perfectly legitimate civil liberties objections to such a scheme, but the usual hacker trope of "technologies that I don't like can always be circumvented" is just plain wrong. Crime can be prevented or substantially curtailed through the effective use of technology, as we have seen in Europe with IMEI-based blocking of stolen mobile phones. Cash-in-transit robberies are now quite rare, due to design improvements in CiT boxes. Security technology isn't perfect, but that doesn't make it useless.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  > Send the remote shutdown instruction over a suitably designed radio link and jamming becomes utterly impractical. Unless the radio link must be always-on for the vehicle to move, I think you've underestimated what is required to construct an RF link that is impervious to interference. We still have problems with shmucks using GPS jammers to prevent employers from tracking them halting traffic at major airports: http://www.insidegnss.com/node/3676 http://www.insidegnss.com/node/3676 "It took the FAA and FCC from March 2009 until April 2011 to locate a GPS jammer operated by another trucker on the New Jersey Turnpike, according to a presentation by John Merrill, Department of Homeland Security program manager for position, timing, and navigation, at the 2012 Telcordia-NIST-ATIS Workshop on Synchronization in Telecommunication Systems."
blueskin_ 13y ago
Don't forget crackers activating other people's maliciously.

by john_b 13y ago

hahainternet 13y ago

None of this makes any sense. You don't justify anything nor do you give any solid reasoning. You just state that this won't help, therefore it's bad. Please actually /support/ your claims. Why would police turn off your car instead of simply issuing a ticket electronically? Why would they stop cars speeding instead of issuing an electronic ticket? Please take the time to think about and provide plausible examples instead of this nonsense.

ma2rten 13y ago
From the article: The technology, scheduled for a six-year development timetable, is aimed at bringing dangerous high-speed car chases to an end and to make redundant current stopping techniques such as spiking a vehicle's tyres.
- hahainternet 13y ago
  Right, and the parent poster claims with no support that a) The technology will be removed by all criminals who plan ahead b) Criminals that don't plan ahead are almost always caught c) This technology will be used for minor infractions that are 'ticketable offences' None of this is realistic or supported at all. I gave an example in another post, run-flat tyres defeat spike strips. Why do criminals rarely fit them?
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    Because run-flat tires cost a lot more than removing a chip. Or buying a jammer, if they get clever about making the chip hard to remove. You don't have any support for you claim that a, b, and c were unrealistic. Pot, kettle.
  - araes 13y ago
    The marginal risk of spike strips relative to the cost of installing and maintaining run-flat tires is minimal compared to the marginal risk of a radio transmitting (likely with GPS) transceiver that can locate and disable a car relative to the cost of disabling, removing, or spoofing said transceiver. For a longer explanation, spike strips require multiple layers of failure in any criminal activity before they become a concern. You have to be in a car, have alerted police, have not been a good enough driver to elude police, and driven in a consistent direction long enough that they can predict where you'll go and drop spikes. If you're not performing a minor infraction, or you're a criminal who plans ahead, the probability of all these things happening, and you not being able to do anything about any of them is minimal. If you have a radio transmitting GPS on your car that can disable it you only have to hit the first step - be in a car. You don't even have to have police on alert. You can commit a crime, have gotten away, be driving around the next day, and as they're reviewing tape, they'll note your car, see the license (or ID the make, model, markings, and driver), find you, and then disable you wherever you are. All criminals will remove this as a matter of course. This doesn't even speak to the pattern recognition and behavioural attacks that this would allow on any criminal organization, enabling things like predictive surveillance (there's a big car pow-wow on 5th and Lake St. every Sat. night), optimal raids (same), or covertly nabbing members (Dino likes to go for a snack at 8:00 every night). Further, this is easily as bad as the NSA "meta-data" scandal, since the pattern recognition above used against all common citizens is absolutely begging for abuse by middle managers and line-workers (where's my girlfriend going?)

jdietrich 13y ago

>The nature of this (radio, etc) doesn't really matter. There will be a receiver on the car that can and will be identified and removed by criminals, rendering the stated purpose moot. Of course removing the receiver will be made illegal, as if this will accomplish anything. It has been effectively impossible to hotwire a new car for over a decade, because modern cars simply will not start without the say-so of the ECU, which is a highly secure black box. Stealing a modern car means stealing the keys, because highly sophisticated organised criminals have failed totally in developing practical attacks to circumvent immobilisers. Build the remote shutdown facility into the ECU and it will be essentially impossible to disable. Send the remote shutdown instruction over a suitably designed radio link and jamming becomes utterly impractical. I have very little doubt that the motor industry is capable of designing a very effective remote shutdown systems; Relatively crude aftermarket solutions are already being used very effectively by fleet operators. There are perfectly legitimate civil liberties objections to such a scheme, but the usual hacker trope of "technologies that I don't like can always be circumvented" is just plain wrong. Crime can be prevented or substantially curtailed through the effective use of technology, as we have seen in Europe with IMEI-based blocking of stolen mobile phones. Cash-in-transit robberies are now quite rare, due to design improvements in CiT boxes. Security technology isn't perfect, but that doesn't make it useless.

toomuchtodo 13y ago
> Send the remote shutdown instruction over a suitably designed radio link and jamming becomes utterly impractical. Unless the radio link must be always-on for the vehicle to move, I think you've underestimated what is required to construct an RF link that is impervious to interference. We still have problems with shmucks using GPS jammers to prevent employers from tracking them halting traffic at major airports: http://www.insidegnss.com/node/3676 http://www.insidegnss.com/node/3676 "It took the FAA and FCC from March 2009 until April 2011 to locate a GPS jammer operated by another trucker on the New Jersey Turnpike, according to a presentation by John Merrill, Department of Homeland Security program manager for position, timing, and navigation, at the 2012 Telcordia-NIST-ATIS Workshop on Synchronization in Telecommunication Systems."

blueskin_ 13y ago

Don't forget crackers activating other people's maliciously.