Allowing me to use the car's interface to control my phone is a nice tool. It probably adds to the safety of my driving, since I can skip audio tracks using physical controls on my steering wheel instead of a touch screen.
But hardly any new cars have that ….
> Allowing me to use the car's interface to control my phone is a nice tool. It probably adds to the safety of my driving, since I can skip audio tracks using physical controls on my steering wheel instead of a touch screen.
It seemed that paulsutter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20686844) was suggesting a setting that prevents this automatically for people who never want it, not removing the capability for people like you who do want it.
I'm in a 2019 Subaru Outback, and I have two. One for the front seat, one for the back.
WRT a setting - CarPlay must be explicitly enabled, and has a per-vehicle pairing. I imagine Android has a similar requirement.
Even a Tesla Model 3 still has a 12 Volt cigarette adapter port. New cars still include them because of all the accessories out there like inverters and tire inflaters people want to use.
As an added bonus, my iphone wouldn't automatically crank up itunes on my mac every single friggin time I plug it into the dock.
I've had better luck using a USB battery to "filter" USB connections in random rental cars.
Going back to PS/2 could be an option? Guess that wouldn't be too different from allowing all devices only on a single USB port.
Any desktop computer would have to be redesigned to add a "allow new device" button since they have no other input.
Even on many laptops, the internal keyboard and mouse are USB devices, when you install a new OS, do you have to accept trust to those as well? Or how will you stop an external device from spoofing them with the same vendor/device ID?
This sounds like something that creates a chicken-and-egg problem of there not already being any such DTLS-speaking USB devices... but how about if vendors just create a little USB dongle that wraps whatever's plugged into it in "authentication" using DTLS? Ship the dongle with the laptop; tell people that if they want to install a new OS, they have to plug a USB keyboard in through the dongle.
hell, simply through acquisition and acquiescence, the market already accepted locked-down platforms. at this point, we ought to have more benefits from this instead of just making these platforms hard to install Linux on.
Or only allow completely unauthenticated devices as a fallback when there is no other available authenticated device.
A computer not having any keyboard is a rare case. Most of the time you have what is built-in (and should be authenticated) or what came with the computer (and should be authenticated).
Allowing unauthenticated keyboards only on detection of no authenticated ones probably covers 99.9% of all use cases and increases security dramatically.
Not sure if I just mis-configured my windows, but it is certainly lacking on that front. The Settings -> Devices -> USB having just a single checkbox for error popups is probably not a good sign.
Usability could be optimized depending on how uniquely identifiable keyboards are (to reduce when trust prompts are shown).
For every phone owner who thinks this way, there are probably a dozen others who hate it when they plug in their phone and the car doesn't mirror the phone's UI. I'd be in the latter group.
"A new (unneeded if devices sufficiently uniquely identifiable?) keyboard has been plugged in, please type <random char sequence> to confirm"
This is changing in the upcoming iOS 13, so the car display and the phone will be much more independent[1]. As someone who's often a passenger with their phone plugged in, I'm happy for this.
[1]: https://www.macstories.net/stories/carplay-in-ios-13-a-big-l...
But, then, I am shifting trust to my data blocker...