Keep your car fob in the freezer?
Apr. 15th, 2015 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitouthttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/style/keeping-your-car-safe-from-electronic-thieves.html
Power amplifiers may allow would-be thieves to break into your car by allowing your dongle to talk to your car from much further away than usual. Apparently they are cheap and readily available. If you make sure your dongle is electronically isolated (tin foil? Faraday Cage? A freezer?), this probably can't happen.
Or, for the 25% of Americans who have a garage which is too full to actually park a car in it, you could think about emptying the contents of the garage and parking the car in it, I guess?
FirstWorldProblems, presumably.
ETA: h/t BI, and I should add, this is a Style section piece so grain of salt until we get more information.
ETAYA: Snopes has not updated their piece on this to reflect the new information yet -- the older rumors all involved very implausible code grabber devices and were not true.
ETA still more: I have ordered one of those cell phone blocking pouches (someone out there in Big Data collection land has combined this with my earlier post on AshleyMadison and come to some wildly incorrect conclusion). I don't _think_ I need to get an amplifier to figure out if the pouch will block, because I can test it right next to the door where the fob would usually work. If it blocks there, it should block in general.
Car break-ins that aren't, er, break-ins have been increasing the last couple years. The assertion is that these cars are _not_ locked at the time the thieves get to the car. It is difficult to pin down the basis for this assertion, other than that glass isn't broken. A lot of the articles over the last year or so point out that these breakins are happening in nice neighborhoods, and the cars are parked in driveways or on the street right in front of the house. This would seem to be compatible with the story in the NYT.
ETA Because whyever the hell not: Remember, Nick Bilton is the same guy that posted foolishness about the health risks of wearable tech not too long ago. Also, he posted some silly things about automated payments and tipping that had some problems. I sort of expect this to maybe not turn out to be what it seems to be. Altho you never know.
Here is what some bloggers at The Lede at NYT said a while back when Snowden made some journalists put their cell phones in a fridge. The fridge isn't a good Faraday cage ... but a martini shaker is!
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/why-snowdens-visitors-put-their-phones-in-the-fridge/
I was trying to remember where I had read that and I finally found it. I love search engines!
Power amplifiers may allow would-be thieves to break into your car by allowing your dongle to talk to your car from much further away than usual. Apparently they are cheap and readily available. If you make sure your dongle is electronically isolated (tin foil? Faraday Cage? A freezer?), this probably can't happen.
Or, for the 25% of Americans who have a garage which is too full to actually park a car in it, you could think about emptying the contents of the garage and parking the car in it, I guess?
FirstWorldProblems, presumably.
ETA: h/t BI, and I should add, this is a Style section piece so grain of salt until we get more information.
ETAYA: Snopes has not updated their piece on this to reflect the new information yet -- the older rumors all involved very implausible code grabber devices and were not true.
ETA still more: I have ordered one of those cell phone blocking pouches (someone out there in Big Data collection land has combined this with my earlier post on AshleyMadison and come to some wildly incorrect conclusion). I don't _think_ I need to get an amplifier to figure out if the pouch will block, because I can test it right next to the door where the fob would usually work. If it blocks there, it should block in general.
Car break-ins that aren't, er, break-ins have been increasing the last couple years. The assertion is that these cars are _not_ locked at the time the thieves get to the car. It is difficult to pin down the basis for this assertion, other than that glass isn't broken. A lot of the articles over the last year or so point out that these breakins are happening in nice neighborhoods, and the cars are parked in driveways or on the street right in front of the house. This would seem to be compatible with the story in the NYT.
ETA Because whyever the hell not: Remember, Nick Bilton is the same guy that posted foolishness about the health risks of wearable tech not too long ago. Also, he posted some silly things about automated payments and tipping that had some problems. I sort of expect this to maybe not turn out to be what it seems to be. Altho you never know.
Here is what some bloggers at The Lede at NYT said a while back when Snowden made some journalists put their cell phones in a fridge. The fridge isn't a good Faraday cage ... but a martini shaker is!
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/why-snowdens-visitors-put-their-phones-in-the-fridge/
I was trying to remember where I had read that and I finally found it. I love search engines!