Is Hacking Cars a Thing of the Past? 748
"Ever since electronic ignitions, and especially ones controlled by computers, it seems the "hackability" and user-maintainability of cars has been declining. Your neighborhood grease monkey can't do much to a modern car without a bunch of electronic gear interfacing to the car's computer. It's almost a little anti-competitive.
Carbeurators, and the other mechanical systems which were fairly standard and visible and self-evident, really seem to be the equivalent of "open source", while the new computer-based systems seem to be more closed and proprietary. I know in the early days of cars with computers, there were third party ROM upgrades for performance tweaking; I'm guessing that's falling by the wayside more and more, as these systems get more and more complex.
It almost seems like a Microsoft-like statement, to tell you they're doing all of this to reduce theft, while really they're doing it to ensure you are forced into coming back to their dealerships..."
"Loss of freedom and control" (Score:4, Insightful)
Jesus, this is on the level of whining that you can't use the windshield wipers from your old car (which were brand new!) on a new car you just bought.
Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
All of this comes at a price. You now nearly need to be a rocket scientist (or at least an automotive engineer) to work on them, but IMO, the price is worthwhile. Meanwhile, my 5.0L V8 '66 Mustang used to get about 16 MPG and had about 220HP, yet you can buy a 4-cylinder Subaru WRX with 225HP (Turbo) which gets ~27MPG, and will let you walk away in a crash.
Yes, cars have gotten harder to work on, but they've also gotten safer, lighter, less polluting, and more luxurious. If you want to tinker with your vehicle, buy a 2-door Civic and mod it up, or buy a classic to restore like I did. Or get a kit, and build it from scratch.
Car thieves have it all wrong.... (Score:5, Insightful)
No antitheft system in the world will help against a dedicated theif. The most effective system would probably be to just remove the distributor cap, or a kludge to disconnect the battery easily. No car thief is gonna spend time under the hood finding out why the car won't start. Of course, you get bit on convienence issues. But you'll never have to concern yourself with car theft.
-Restil
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh good lord! (Score:1, Insightful)
What? Couldn't you find something about computers to bitch about today?
Seriously, how is this reducing your freedom? You still have the freedom to buy an older car, or even modify your newer car to use the older engines and transmissions. The bottom line is that a lot of the modern computerized gimmicks in cars are there to increase performance, and mileage. Some minor things are done to increase security. But I really don't see how requiring the proper code to be administered (in this case with the key in the automatic starter) is restricting your freedom. And how is the little addon that requires a key in it "that much more work"? You make it sound as if that one extra little thing is a world ending situation, while the entire project would have been a yawn without that.
Yes, cars are becoming less hackable. But, in case you haven't noticed, so is damn near everything else around us nowadays. Things get more and more complex, with more and more specialized parts, and eventually it becomes less "hackable" by the common man. When the internal combustion engine was invented it was a fairly simple device. But progress has lead to changes that are vast improvements over the original. One of those improvements is a computer that controls all sorts of aspects of the engines performance. Is that really a bad thing?
Seriously, not everything is out to get you. Just calm down and take a rational look at it. That, or go back to bitching about Microsoft. (Oh, never mind. I see you managed to fit that into an article on cars anyway. Hey, wait a minute! Since when was Slashdot a site for car jockeys?)
taking this a little too far (Score:2, Insightful)
And I wouldn't go around comparing cars from the past to open-source and modern cars to microsoft - that's essentially saying open-source software, though infinitely hackable, is inefficient, outdated, and insecure. Drawing a parellel between Microsoft (closed-source) and modern cars would in effect say MS software is clean, efficient, secure, and performs well out of the box.
If modern cars are less "hackable" than older cars, why are there thousands of custom shops dotting the country, hooking up modern cars? Why are there still car shows for people to show off their mods (some of which leaving the original car nearly unrecognizable)?
Cars aren't getting less hackable, you just have to do it differently than before.
Financially Incompatible (Score:2, Insightful)
As far as leaving an entire key in place I guess that depends on the car and the kit your using. My Acura has one of the mentioned keys and when I looked into a remote start for it, I was told I needed to buy a spare key which would be disassembled to get just the coded portion out. I decided it wasn't for me.
But the point about cars being less hackable is valid. For years manufacturers have been making it harder to replace stock radios, and if you want to retain steering wheel controls your going to need lots of electrical tape and redbull.
I think Mercedes Benz has taken this to an entirely new level. New MB vehicles are incredibly difficult to steal thanks to their code hopping IR keys, so much so that the theft portion of insurance rates on them are down right cheap (which is good). But forget putting a remote starter in your brand new benz. Last time I tried counting there are 97 buttons within reach of the driver in the S class (I counted knobs as one switch even if they had more than one selectable position). All of this runs through a central computer in the car so basically if you want a different stereo system you better know german and feel like dumpster diving at MB headquarters.
Mercedes has a integrated cell phone system that comes with voice recognition. It uses a standard motorola timeport phone, identical in every sense except the firmware. Yet if I plug in my old timeport the car refuses to recognize it. Mercedes apparently thinks that the $87K you spend on the car with the phone isn't enough, they want the extra $450 for every phone you want to use in the car.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to get a copy of the firmware off the timeport that comes with the benz system so that I can put it on my original timeport.
This is quite sad, among manufacturers there is zero incentive or requirement to play nicely. I understand that they want to protect profit margins but its damn near predatory. There was an article on wired about some company offering a in car voice recognition system that works with bluetooth enabled cell phones. Great idea, too bad bluetooth is a technological unicorn and car manufacturers are bound to shut these guys out of the business.
Luddites unite! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd MUCH RATHER have a GOOD factory security system than a botched aftermarket one. (I've had 4 cars that had aftermarket systems installed by previous owners. ALL of them have caused more headaches than the 'security' they provided.)
Having any kind of security system will not likely prevent the really serious fella trying to seal your car. While you CAN buy LOJACK et al, they pretty much ensure you get back the bits and pieces you DON'T care about. By the time somebody recovers the professionally stolen car, all the nifty doodads have been stripped or broken.
I own Corvettes. (That my, ahem, other hobby) One's an 89 and the other's a 98 (OBD I and III) yeah they're more difficult to work on than the 76 Pontiac I _just_ got rid of, but no more so than working on computers. Often, that 'technological B$' folks complain about actually HELPS in diagnosing the problem.
If you aren't willing to spend time learning how to work on something, you probably oughtn'ta go at it uneducated.
As far as installing the remote starter, it didn't sound like you wanted it bad enough. IMHO, the one thing it MIGHT give you (remote starting) isn't worth the things you MIGHT get (wiring issues, intermittent gremlins, connections that don't AGE well.)
Honestly, a Nerd complaining about complexity on Slashdot...who'da thunk?
Re:other ignition technologies (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no problem with installing a breathalizer in the car of someone who has been convicted of DUI/DWI, but it's totally unacceptable to require it of someone who has not even been accused, let alone convicted, of a crime.
Computer Controls are our Friends (Score:4, Insightful)
To use my own car as an example, there is a program that would allow me to modify the fuel tables, ignition tables and other operational parameters on the on-board computer using a standard PC (program: LS1Edit). This acheives the same thing as playing with the distributor dwell and carb mixture on an older engine, and then some.
Or, for the less adventurous, Hypertech [hypertech-inc.com] makes a device [hypertech-inc.com] that allows you to apply "macros" to the onboard computer, doing the same thing as LS1Edit, but to a lesser degree.
Further, modern cars (with the appropriate computer hacks) still respond quite nicely to the old-school tricks: headers, camshafts, intakes, strokers, blowers, etc. It's like having the best of both worlds - the reliability and economy of computer control, and the performance and "hackability" of old-school tricks.
It all comes down to learning new rules to play the same old game.
Settable Parameters (Score:2, Insightful)
I personally hate the lighting systems that act like your mom. I don't want my lights on during the day. I also want the dome light to go off immediately when I shut off the car, unless I intervene. I also don't want the @$%# locks to lock every time the car goes off->on and vice versa.
Add to that the ability to turn on/off the chipped key requirement and whatever else isn't absolutely required for the car to run.
Would it be so hard to allow the owner to chose?
Re:Their goal... (Score:4, Insightful)
On the whole "their making it more complex to make more money for dealers issue", its not even close to that. They make it more complex by adding computer controls to get finer control of the car. Mechanical switches and valves are not as good (emissions, gas mpg, etc..) as computer controlled (electronic) ones. I have a feeling a lot of geeks don't even change their own oil let a lone do something like change an engine. Please go to a local net forum about cars and read a little.
Complicated? Yes; Impossible? No (Score:3, Insightful)
To be fair about it, Honda had a big problem with theft. It's no secret that the engine computer is the final frontier of anti-theft technology. How can anyone critize Honda for addressing the problem?
Car hacking is not dead, but it requires more ingenuity than it used to. I remember the old days when I upgraded my home computer by soldering additional memory chips on top of the onboard memory. Just because I can't do that with a modern motherboard, does that make it "unhackable"?
Re:spare key (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't just remove the key and then take the car. You have to remove the key, remove the remote starter, then reconnect the ignition to the car's starter. This job, in an ideal environment would take about an hour to do.
It then occurred to me that the least secure place to leave the car is in my own garage, since that place would provide the thieves with the most cover to work under overnight.
Why Write A Ticket? (Score:4, Insightful)
They were talking about that on CNN while I was travelling through Europe. It's quite feasible to implement it. It's also quite feasible to implement automatic ticketing that tickets all speeders all the time. Neither system would stand a chance of hell of ever getting implemented. In the case of the car just refusing to speed, that'd eliminate speeding ticket revenue and a lot of places depend on that revenue. In the case of the automatic ticketing thing, people would force the speed limits to be removed or raised to the actual speeds people drive at (Which again would have the effect of eliminating those lovely ticket revenues.)
What this adds up to is that there is a system that is arbitrairly enforced against a population which more or less completely ignores the posted limits.
Yup. (Score:3, Insightful)
Cars are not meant to be toys anymore. If you really insist on playing with your car, buy an old mustang that you don't need to worry about.
Re:Expensive Car Parts Needed (Score:2, Insightful)
(Former locksmith)
Except that there are something like 16 possible resistance values (that was a few years ago, there may be more now) used in, for example, the Corvette. If you try to start the car with the wrong value, the fuel pump is disabled for a period of time (I think it started at three minutes). Second wrong one, the pump is disable for six minutes. Then 12, then 24, etc.
We had a tool called a Sidewinder that slipped over a cut key and slipped copper prongs alongside it in place of the normal contacts. You cut the key to satisfy the tumblers, then slip on the Sidewinder and start trying resistance values (it has a dial on it to change values). It didn't get us around the pauses, however, and sometimes generating a key for a VATS enabled vehicle was an multiple-day event (unless you got the key code from GM, which is not always available...hence the need for the Sidewinder).
All of this is more time than the average car thief has. Now, flatbed trucks with winches, those are another story.
Re:other ignition technologies (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:other ignition technologies (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I'm not a big fan of automobiles. I have structured my life in such a way so that I do not require any vehicle beside my feet, and my bicycle.
I think that most people would be much happier without the pollution, financial burden, endless concrete slabs, and accidents caused by cars, but, I still don't consider cars to be a mere privilege.
domc
Blame the Environmentalists for "tamper proof" (Score:2, Insightful)
But the engine control module and software, etc. is all part of the "emission control system". Modify them and you aren't "street legal". The anti-theft portion comes from the insurance companies. Many people won't buy models if the insurance gets too expensive.