paywall

7 Articles

A black and white line drawing of a vehicle interior showing the dashboard and. steering wheel. On the infotainment screen, the words "Selected Ad" are emblazoned in large letters.

Will You Need Ad Block For Your Car?

September 24, 2024 by 113 Comments

The modern web has become difficult to navigate without ad blocking software. Ford now has a patent application that would bring the ads we hate to your vehicle’s infotainment system. [via PCMag]

Ford has already replied to criticism with the usual corporate spiel of patents not necessarily being the direction the company will go with future products, but it’s hard to imagine that other automakers aren’t planning similar systems since they’re already charging extra for heated seats, EV range, and performance. Bringing ads to the captive audience of your personal vehicle and targeting them based on listening to the occupants’ conversations would be a new low. Maybe you’ll be able to pay an extra $100/month for the “ad-free experience.”

Instead of taking advantage of the EV transition to make better, simpler cars, automakers are using their highly-computerized nature to extract more from you and provide less when you drive off the lot. Enshittification has come for the automobile. Perhaps auto executives should read A Few Reasonable Rules for the Responsible Use of New Technology?

The first step of blocking these ads will likely be jailbraking the infotainment system. If that wasn’t enough, locking features behind a paywall has come for wheelchairs too.

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Hackaday Links: August 11, 2024

August 11, 2024 by 8 Comments

“Please say it wasn’t a regex, please say it wasn’t a regex; aww, crap, it was a regex!” That seems to be the conclusion now that Crowdstrike has released a full root-cause analysis of its now-infamous Windows outage that took down 8 million machines with knock-on effects that reverberated through everything from healthcare to airlines. We’ve got to be honest and say that the twelve-page RCA was a little hard to get through, stuffed as it was with enough obfuscatory jargon to turn off even jargon lovers such as us. The gist, though, is that there was a “lack of a specific test for non-wildcard matching criteria,” which pretty much means someone screwed up a regular expression. Outside observers in the developer community have latched onto something more dire, though, as it appears the change that brought down so many machines was never tested on a single machine. That’s a little — OK, a lot — hard to believe, but it seems to be what Crowdstrike is saying. So go ahead and blame the regex, but it sure seems like there were deeper, darker forces at work here.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: August 11, 2024” →

A black PCB with a cellular modem board piggy backed on top. It has a micro-USB and DB-type connector on the end facing the camera.

Open Vehicle Monitoring System Is The Window To Your EV’s Soul

January 25, 2024 by 14 Comments

Electric cars have more widgets than ever, but manufacturers would rather you don’t have direct access to them. The Open Vehicle Monitoring System intends to change that for the user. [via Transport Evolved]

As car manufacturers hoover up user data and require subscriptions for basic features, it can be a frustrating time to make such a big purchase. Begun in 2011, OVMS now interfaces with over a dozen different EVs and gives you access to (or helps you reverse engineer) all the data you could want from your vehicle. Depending on the vehicle, any number of functions can be accessed including remote climate start or cell-level battery statistics.

The hardware connects to your car’s OBDII port and uses an ESP32 microcontroller connected to a  SIMCOM SIM7600G modem (including GPS) to provide support for 3 CAN buses as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections. This can be particularly useful for remote access to data for vehicles that can no longer phone home via their originally included cellular modems as older networks shut down.

Do you wish EVs weren’t so complicated? Read our Minimal Motoring Manifesto.

Jailbreaking Tesla Infotainment Systems

August 5, 2023 by 22 Comments

With newer cars being computers on wheels, some manufacturers are using software to put features behind a paywall or thwarting DIY repairs. Industrious hackers security researchers have taken it upon themselves to set these features free by hacking a Tesla infotainment system. (via Electrek)

The researchers from TU Berlin found that by using a voltage fault injection attack against the AMD Secure Processor (ASP) at the heart of current Tesla models, they could run arbitrary code on the infotainment system. The hack opens up the double-edged sword of an attacker gaining access to encrypted PII or a shadetree mechanic “extracting a TPM-protected attestation key Tesla uses to authenticate the car. This enables migrating a car’s identity to another car computer without Tesla’s help whatsoever, easing certain repairing efforts.” We can see this being handy for certain other unsanctioned hacks as well.

The attack is purported as being “unpatchable” and giving root access that survives reboots and updates of the system. Since AMD is a vendor to multiple vehicle companies, the question arises as to how widely applicable this hack is to other vehicles suffering from AaaS (Automotive as a Service).

Longing for a modern drivetrain with the simplicity of yesteryear? Read our Minimal Motoring Manifesto.

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Hackaday Links: March 12, 2023

March 12, 2023 by 38 Comments

With a long history of nearly universal hate for their products, you’d think printer manufacturers would by now have found ways to back off from the policies that only seem to keep aggravating customers. But rather than make it a financially wiser decision to throw out a printer and buy a new one than to buy new ink cartridges or toners, manufacturers keep coming up with new and devious ways to piss customers off. Case in point: Hewlett-Packard now seems to be bricking printers with third-party ink cartridges. Reports from users say that a new error message has popped up on screens of printers with non-HP cartridges installed warning that further use of the printer has been blocked. Previously, printers just warned about potential quality issues from non-HP consumables, but now they’re essentially bricked until you cough up the money for legit HP cartridges. Users who have contacted HP support say that they were told the change occurred because of a recent firmware update sent to the printer, so that’s comforting.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 12, 2023” →

Malamud’s General Index: Research Gist, No Slap On The Wrist

November 2, 2021 by 10 Comments

Tired of that unsettling feeling you get from looking for paywalled papers on that one site that shall not be named? Yeah, us too. But now there’s an alternative that should feel a little less illegal: this new index of the world’s research papers over on the Internet Archive.

It’s an index of words and short phrases (up to five words) culled from approximately 107 million research papers. The point is to make it easier for scientists to gain insights from papers that they might not otherwise have access to. The Index will also make it easier for computerized analysis of the world’s research. Call it a gist machine.

Technologist Carl Malamud created this index, which doesn’t contain the full text of any paper. Some of the researchers with early access to the Index said that it is quite helpful for text mining. The only real barrier to entry is that there is no web search portal for it — you have to download 5TB of compressed files and roll your own program. In addition to sentence fragments, the files contain 20 billion keywords and tables with the papers’ titles, authors, and DOI numbers which will help users locate the full paper if necessary.

Nature’s write-up makes a salient point: how could Malamud have made this index without access to all of those papers, paywalled and otherwise? Malamud admits that he had to get copies of all 107 million articles in order to build the thing, and that they are safe inside an undisclosed location somewhere in the US. And he released the files under Public Resource, a non-profit he founded in Sebastopol, CA. But we have to wonder how different this really is from say, the Google Books N-Gram Viewer, or Google Scholar. Is the difference that Google is big enough to say they’re big enough get away with it?

If this whole thing reminds you of another defender of free information, remember that you can (and should) remove the DRM from his e-book of collected writings.

Via r/technology

Sci-Hub: Breaking Down The Paywalls

November 27, 2018 by 125 Comments

There’s a battle going on in academia between the scientific journal publishing companies that have long served as the main platform for peer review and spreading information, and scientists themselves who just want to share and have access to the work of their fellows. arxiv.org launched the first salvo, allowing researchers in physics to self-publish their own papers, and has gained some traction in mathematics and computer science. The Public Library of Science journals focus on biology and medicine and offer peer review services. There are many others, and even the big firms have been forced to recognize the importance of open science publication.

But for many, that’s still not enough. The high prestige journals, and most past works, are stuck behind paywalls. Since 2011, Sci-Hub has taken science publishing open by force, illegally obtaining papers and publishing them in violation of copyright, but at the same time facilitating scientific research and providing researchers in poorer countries with access that their rich-world colleagues take for granted. The big publishing firms naturally fought back in court and won, and with roughly $20 million of damages, drove Sci-Hub’s founder underground.

Continue reading “Sci-Hub: Breaking Down The Paywalls” →