Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

Except that the touch screen could be activated by rain. In Seattle.

There was a small cowl over the apparatus to keep regular rain off, but if there was any wind at all, it was very easy for drops to be blown onto the screen and it would start phoning apartments in the middle of the night.

Amazingly, this was among the building's least troublesome faults.

Many years ago I had an optical mouse that would act erratically in the afternoons (just wouldn't register movement). It seemed to be ok if I squeezed it while I was using it so I figured it was a connection somewhere. Eventually I realised that it was the afternoon sun streaming in through the plastic seam and somehow stopping the sensor.

Report: "If my secretary logs with our account, it works. If I do, the website logs in but then later shows me errors message when I try to submit a report".[0] Entirely repeatable. Screenshots sent showing it exactly. All of us scratching our heads. How could our web server know who was sitting in front of the keyboard?

Root cause: the username was a number with a leading zero. The login didn't care if you used zeros or not, but the internal logic did care. She logged in with them, he logged in without them (or was it the other way around?). Once logged in, the username was taken from a cookie or something that had been set at login time and fed into the internal logic, which barfed.

Lessons learned: either don't have forgiving logins, or have forgiving functionality when users use inconsistent logins.

[0]They were indeed sharing an account with the same username and password. It was 2005 and government website, so this made sense.

This was back during the DOS days, and i suspect it was only discovered when she complained that it would no longer start in the morning.

It may well be that said joker had the best of intentions by sorting the keys in the numerical order...

I love reading about interesting problems and creative ways to solve them. I used to wish for the same. But then I was given a super annoying one.

In my apartment I heard this beep about once every 90 seconds or so. I tried ignoring it for a while hoping it'd go away. And just so at the right frequency and infrequent enough Impossible to determine direction. But also just loud enough to be annoying after hours and hours. I spent several hours trying to pinpoint it. Including putting my head up agaisnt numerous neighbors doors to see if it was coming thru the walls.

I ended up downloading a dozen different audio apps for phone. And found only one that gave out an accurate enough histogram of dB volume level. Most weren't good enough. I needed to differentiate between 2 and most were sensitive enough of reading. I was able to triangulate the direction thru several patient iterations.

Turns out it was coming thru the wall.

Be careful what you wish for. Because you might end up with something arbitrarily dumb and annoying!

I was a noobie computer programmer in my first job. After being there for a few months my mouse started to have issues. It stuttered and refused to move correctly.

So I'd take the little grey ball out and clean it and it'd be OK again. But the next day it'd do it again.

So I ended up with the cleanest fucking mouse on planet earth. Yet every so often it'd stop working... on parts of the screen. Other parts it'd work. I ended up using the keyboard a lot.

The mouse would work fine all day some days. Some days it would work fine until about 2PM then it may or may not work.

Eventually I figured out that when the sun shone through the window it created a beam across my mouse mat. When the mouse was moved into the beam it would stop working. So I took it to bits and discovered that the ball would roll a little disc, that disc had little holes in it, there was also an LED and a photodetector. So the mouse was counting the blips in light to determine the movement in the mouse. I guess the cheap plastic was allowing the bright sunlight to bleed through the case causing the photodetctor to go bonkers.

A secondary thing about that cheap as shit PC was you could hear the video card render the screen. It'd buzz when the screen was mostly blue, when it was white it would be silent.

Talking to my father in the morning, he indicated that his neighbor had taken up Ham radio and he was having to put filters on various devices to reduce interference. To this day, I wonder if his spotty wifi in the house is related to his neighbor turning his system...

For your list, and I’d do a) and not bother with b) and c) as a) eliminates them well enough (point the emitters away from the alarm sensors). For d), I’d put a light cloth in the tailpipe, enough that it will change the exhaust note across RPM range, but the car will still run. Your suggestion leaves the slight possibility of a false positive if we accidentally hit the resonant rpm range. For experimentation only, don’t drive to work a banana in your tailpipe.

One last one: throw it in reverse near the house, but not in your driveway. Could be some weird parabolic blah blah acoustic thing focus thumpy exhaust waves at the house sensors.

I suppose there’s the possibility that a 2.4Ghz radio transmitter of some sort could be responsible, but this way out there and would be way down in my list. SDR and a dongle would be handy here.

> What does your neighbor think of this lmao

> > I don't have time to stay around because I tend to lag for work and have to leave as soon as I do get to my car.

How ... convenient.

I bought an electricity usage monitor plug and started to measure every electricity consuming stuff, but couldn't account for more than 3 or 4 daily kWH. Then I went in vacation for one week, turning off almost everything in the house, and the electricity consumption, that I can check every day, had barely moved. Something was consuming at least 20kWH every day in my home and I didn't know what it was.

At the same time in prevision of the winter, I bought a thermal IR camera to spot isolation problems. I started to play around with it, and discovered a fairly large hot spot in the bathroom, on the bottom of the bathtub. Touching it with the hand, it sure felt warmer than you would expect from a baththub. Maybe it was some hot water? But the water heater was on gas and my gas bill was fairly normal. The hotspot would also not go away after hours. Then I remember a visiting friend remarking weeks ago that my bathroom was warmer than the rest of the appartment.

To test my suspicions, I tried to play with the electricity meter of the appartment. After some experiments, I found out a switch that would turn off the mysterious heat source. The baththub started to cool down and the power usage displayed went down to 0. My theory was validated! Something under my bathroom was drawing around 800W constantly every hour of the day and every day of the week and that was making my appartment so hot in summer and my bill so large.

At this point, the only thing I could do was contacting my landlord and detailing my findings. It turned out he had installed a dehumidifer in the basement the year before to dry out the air and fight a moisture problem, but he had configured it to a very low setting, like 30% humidity and that was making it work constantly. The dehumidifer was installed just below my bathtub and its operation was heating it at the same time. Since it was an old home he had bought out a few years before, he didn't know where the basement was drawing its electricity from. Well now he does.

He reimbursed me the electricity and changed the settings of the machine and then my electricity consumption went to almost nothing... until november came and the cold of the last weeks of fall started to hit Montreal, but that's another story.

That way they can see debug output of what happens when he hits reverse.

[as someone else already said]

From what I heard this is not uncommon.

Because me being a sysadmin for the past 14 years would go directly to the logs and see my client timing out.

You could actually just press that "off" button at any time, and the dog would look around and do that funny "Dog shrug" thing they do, and go upstairs and lie down, even if it was the middle of the day. We had, essentially, a remote controlled dog.

An elderly lady with several pets called the operator to say that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called; and that when it did ring, her dog usually barked first. The engineer went to investigate.

He climbed a telephone pole next to the house, connected his test set, and rang the line to subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring, but the dog barked loudly. He tried again, now the phone rang.

Climbing down from the pole, the engineer found:

- This was in a country where the ringing was done from one of the wires against ground (not across the pair) (I think it was England).

- A dog was tied to the telephone system's ground post via an iron chain and collar.

- The ground post was in dry, poorly conducting ground.

- The dog was receiving >50 V of ringing voltage when the phone rang.

- With this torturous treatment, the dog would start barking and urinating on the ground.

- The wet ground now completed the circuit and the phone would ring.

OK, this story has a definite "urban legend" ring to it. Mythbusters wouldn't have tested it with a real dog, I guess.

I thought it was pretty cool that she could sit on her chair and change the channel & volume without getting up.

I suspect that if a dog had been involved that cable would have quickly become a tangled mess! (I'm not sure how common "wired remotes" were, that was certainly the only one I ever saw, in the early eighties.)

What does this mean?

This was before validating license keys over the internet was really possible so a lot of people just used our application with a key from a public cracking site. Of course, we also knew about this list of cracked keys and our application would pretend to accept them. But if you actually tried to use the application, it would appear to be doing something for several minutes but fail with a mysterious error inviting the user to submit a log file to support.

Of course, the log file was secretly marked to indicate that it had come from a pirated copy and the customer would get a polite call from the sales team.

It worked out pretty well, a lot of customers didn't know they were using pirated software (or so they claimed; somewhat plausible given the nature of the utility) and were happy to pay and the sales team got a lot of solid leads. Evil vanquished, good prevailed, and I got paid.

We had a problem with piracy for awhile. We spent nearly a million dollars on some of the best licensing software out there and over 2 years of tweaking it to try and eliminate all attack vectors and we still had piracy. We learned even the best anti-piracy methods will be broken eventually. In the end, the proper solution was pretty simple... we just rewrote our application as a web app and now only people who pay can login.

I mean come on people, if you're using professional software and expect to be paid for your work, pay the other professionals for their work too.

If I may be permitted a brief comment, I recall several years ago a situation where we received complaints that our rather computationally-intensive software was running on some people's laptops without them having installed it, rapidly draining their batteries and heating the machines up, and what did we think we were playing at hijacking their systems?

It turned out that the culprit was a modified version of our software for a distributed computing project that would apply the credit generated to one particular account, presumably belonging to the user who had distributed the cracked version. IIRC (though I may be mistaken) they were distributing it bundled with some other cracked Windows software.

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/4xxx-hacker.html

As for the S2000, I guess water coincidentally changes the frequency of the leaked radio waves to match the car alarm?

Eventually I tracked it down to microwave usage. Whenever the microwave was in use, I lost WiFi.

It was too cheaply made to have an interference suppression capacitor across the supply leads, is how. Bet he got it from Harbor Freight...

I would guess this is what's happening with your GFI. Even though you're receiving the call, your phone is probably transmitting too (sending back the equivalent of an ACK or something). The current induced causes a difference between hot and neutral and the GFI trips. It's surprising that it can induce a strong enough current! I'm not sure what wattage cell phone radios operate at.

Edit: Ah missed the detail about outgoing calls not causing it. That is very strange! Perhaps a cell phone engineer can shed some light on that!

GFCI works by detecting the difference in the current flowing between the hot wire and the neutral wire. It needs to work very fast (to avoid the human touching the wire getting electrocuted) so any slight difference in current would trip it off. The current induce by your phone's speaker probably causes enough difference in the current to trip it off.

You can run an experiment by turning off your phone's speaker for incoming call. See if the speaker is the culprit.

In that case too, sending calls didn't trigger the interference, and neither did picking up the received call.

Source: I wrote firmware for microwave/PIR motion detectors for a few years.

https://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/icecream.asp

Skip to 18:50 and listen on for couple minutes.

Love the caller complaining about his brother in law.

https://play.podtrac.com/npr-510208/npr.mc.tritondigital.com...

Made for some fun times at LAN parties etc.

Even read about a pair of keyboard that managed to reach several kilometers, even though the locations had line of sight blocked by a hillside.

Seem to recall reading about similar issues related to WIFI and USB3.

As for the remote app stuff, i guess it's time to break out the packet sniffer.

That's a hypothesis, a very good hypothesis, but the Reddit thread and Hacker News offer many other reasonable-sounding hypotheses. I can't tell you the number of times I've tracked down a bug or other type of malfunction where I was 100% sure of the cause since my hypothesis made so much sense, but it turned out to be wrong. It was something else.