Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station
kuow.org
kuow.org
“Between 1/24-1/31, a radio station in the Seattle area sent image files with no extension, which caused an issue on some 2014-2017 Mazda vehicles with older software,” the Mazda statement said. “Mazda North American Operations (MNAO) has distributed service alerts advising dealers of the issue.”
The statement goes on to say that “dealers are currently experiencing parts delays due to shipping constraints” and that MNAO plans to “support impacted customers with replacement parts. These customers should contact their local Mazda dealer who can submit a goodwill request to the Mazda Warranty department on their behalf, order the parts, and schedule a free repair when the parts arrive.”
The Mazda representative did not reply to GeekWire’s follow-up questions about what actually malfunctioned in these vehicles and what parts would need to be replaced.https://radiodns.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Guidelines-o...
Essentially small images sent OTA that allow stations to "Brand" themselves on automotive receivers.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/disney/images/8/8e/Gadgetm...
Advanced data services provide broadcasters with the ability to transmit information that may be unrelated to MPS, SIS or SPS. These services can carry any form and content that can be expressed as a data file or a data stream, including audio services. Examples of such services include (i) visual effects associated with MPS, SIS, or SPS services; (ii) multimedia presentations of stock, news, weather, and entertainment programming including audio, text and images; (iii) broadcast updates to in-vehicle systems; (iv) local storage of content for time shifting and later replay; (v) targeted advertising; (vi) traffic updates and information for use with navigation systems; and (vii) subscription or free-but-limited-access services using conditional access.
https://www.nrscstandards.org/standards-and-guidelines/docum...
SDR Receiver: https://github.com/theori-io/nrsc5
https://blogmedia.dealerfire.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/56...
Satellite radio had this capability very early, and HD Radio seems to want to keep up with that.
The data itself is sent on a sideband data channel that rides along with the traditional FM channel. Lots of links to read up starting here: https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/HD_Radio_(FM)
The signal specification can be read here: https://www.sigidwiki.com/images/f/f6/HD_Radio_FM.pdf
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/displaying-live-weather-and-traffic-...
I've had AM radio on for long periods and then load this app, and the traffic map is up to date. I've also driven to a different city and the map is now showing the new city.
Who are the car manufacturers (and radio standards setters for that matter) working for?
But if you pose it as seeing album art for music that you listen to (and titles!), that’s going to get a yes from a lot of people (myself included).
Of course, maybe you'd like to have that option without being exposed to logos.
At least that's the case in the USA. I seem to recall seeing the same in European vehicles as well.
So, any radio station intern will be able to take out a city's worth of Mazdas moving forward?
Nice.
If a Model 3 had an analogous bug, then everything from the windshield washers to the climate control and rear view mirrors would be borked (I'd guess phone-based unlock would be too, at a minimum.)
Many Priuses integrate parts of the power train into the radio. I suspect they'd have serious issues too.
Of course, what matters is how integrated all this stuff is in a Mazda. That, I don't know.
I’m sorry, they do what now? Why would you even do that?
I could make a VAG car hand brake turn going into a corner all from a computer remotely, just by switching on the ABS braking on the rear wheel on the opposite side to a turn. I could control the throttle remotely as well.
Why are people shocked at the way these global corporations are treating security and privacy?
Its only their lawyers that are protecting them.
Priuses can display powertrain data on the screen (such as which engines are operating, whether regen is happening, etc.) but I have never seen anything in the screen on any Prius that actually sends control data to the powertrain.
> If a Model 3 had an analogous bug, then everything from the windshield washers to the climate control and rear view mirrors would be borked (I'd guess phone-based unlock would be too, at a minimum.)
Actually it's possible to phone-unlock and drive a Model 3 with the screen completely turned off or broken. I've done it.
Well if the server exploded because someone passed a wrong get parameter I'm not blaming whoever that did it.
I guess what I've heard about eg. Tesla is a counterexample.
There's at least a little bit of a spectrum between Tesla and the total dinosaurs.
The fixes they make are controversial and many times make things worse especially wrt the infotainment system.
for example, the current system is just SO broken I don't know where to start.
Ok, the USB audio system. You can listen to audio off of a USB flash drive. This is great because they came out with an expensive high fidelity sound system a few years back, and allowing FLAC or ALAC supported high quality uncompressed audio.
otoh the USB software is horrendously broken, and updates have frequently made things worse. reference: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/comprehensive-usb-bu... (a thread with > 2000 comments)
Which is how I wound up downloading 2 files from a person who apparently wrote the C# code for the radios and was saddened by the situation. The weirdest part was doing the upgrade: stick the files on two usb keys, turn the car on, stick the first key in the one port, remove it, open the driver side door as an indicator and then finish with the second key.
I've thought about that level of ... security every time I read about some malicious car hack.
I'm reminded of the farcical firmware reset procedure for C by GE Light Bulbs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BB6wj6RyKo
Though, in GE's defense, light bulbs do have a pretty limited interface.
It's also unfortunate that the dislike button stopped working on YouTube because I'd love to see how many people disliked that.
Though .-....-, Morse for RST, should have been enough.
This is also how you get subscription services to keep it updated.
Tesla maybe gets around this by using wifi when it's in the garage? Or perhaps the contracts on the tesla says that customers bare the cost of firmware updates that happen outside the service center setting.
Tesla uses Wi-Fi when possible, but for urgent updates they will push them over cellular at their own expense.
Also, they somewhat have users paying for this by having the monthly $9.99 "premium connectivity" feature package. Though, it isn't required for the cellular connection to function for basic maps.
I think the reason most people don't think their cars get firmware updates is because a lot of cars hide the wifi connection dialogs and update download controls behind three or four layers of menus, so if you don't know to look for it (and aren't especially interested in poking around through the menus of your head-unit), it's off by default and you don't know it's there.
Range Rover markets directly to upper-middle-class suburbanites, and show off the leather seats, fancy touchscreens and alloy wheels of shiny, clean cars.
Land Rover markets 'adventure', shows cars fording rivers and crossing deserts, and offers optional winch, expedition roof rack and ladder. But they still offer leather seats, fancy touchscreens and alloy wheels; and mostly sell to upper-middle-class suburbanites.
To me they seem like extremely similar products, predominantly targeting the same demographic, just with different marketing.
What Mazda seems to discourage is owners bringing in their cars for the update only. They also can't really diagnose issues with the Connect hardware (they didn't build it) so doing a complete unit swap was their only established procedure for a system problem. They eventually added more diagnosis when all of the people hacking their units were bricking things and then asking for a free replacement.
Had to get the unit replaced at the dealership.
Even then it was a nearly invisible problem for the podcast itself, not something that would have been significant enough to investigate and correct for if that wasn't also content for the show.
99% invisible
If so, just include a payload in the title that fixes the bug by patching the code :)
They used to autorun specifically named files on a USB stick.
Then some busybody journalists picked up on that and Mazda was forced to lock it down despite the fact that there is complete physical separation from safety systems, and that situations like this article are exactly where it helps.
[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-2.1
HackRF + open source DAB modulation stack + <carefully chosen combination of ASCII characters> = OTA... DoS? Jailbreak? Other miscellaneous interestingness?
In an age where everything's a computer, FM radio is just just another source of unsanitised input.
The original articles issue is a HD Radio (not DAB) issue to do with images, although it might still be a string parse issue of some kind as it apparently involves "image files with no extension", so presumably filenames? So the RF side can indeed be fun on consumer electronics with modern digital standards. Another example is this claimed RCE over DVB-T: https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1481963959532011520
Unlike DAB or DAB+ which are open standards with FOSS implementations out there.
The protocol itself is actually standardized: https://www.nrscstandards.org/standards-and-guidelines/docum...
It's just the audio codec that's proprietary, but it's basically just a slightly modified version of AAC so it's been decoded.
I doubt Xperi really cares, since HD Radio is a trademark so it's not like you could build, sell and market an "HD Radio" device without licensing from them anyway.
[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-2.1
I started to unsubscribe every podcast with annoying ads or hosted at megaphone.fm, but I'm in minority.
I agree, this is a problem for the makers of the broken radio. But Roman Mars is just a nice guy.
Nit: he sold it.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/26/22403852/siriusxm-roman-m...
When I first loaded my music collection, it stuck in a reboot loop, so I have a script that sanitizes the metadata for exporting to my car
TLDR: The problem is the `% In`, and specifically the `%n` - when printf sees that, it tries to store data in memory. Failing to do so, it crashes.
I read [1] which someone linked to, and it all seems to make sense. But it doeesn't!
I tried compiling this with gcc 11.2.0:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
printf("%99 Invisible", NULL);
return 0;
}
test.c: In function ‘main’:
test.c:5:14: warning: unknown conversion type character ‘ ’ in format [-
Wformat=]
5 | printf("%99 Invisible", NULL);
| ^
test.c:5:10: warning: too many arguments for format [-Wformat-extra-args]
5 | printf("%99 Invisible", NULL);
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Removing the cruft and trying plain %In gives a warning, but I guess whoever built the car's radio UI ignores warnings.
I guess it's possible that the system doesn't use a standard-compliant enough C library, so it's printf() implementation does something ... creative with this string.
Anyway, classic case of the lovely foot-gunnery that is %n in the wild! Sorry for all the car owners, of course. :/
EDIT: A commenter pointed out that the above are "just warnings", oops. :) More oops on me for not spelling the freaking title correctly, of course it's "99%" and not "%99" .. .need more coffee, clearly. Sorry.
For people less used to C, the error here more or less seems to boil down to passing an untrusted string as the special "format string" for the printf() function. That function will interpret the contents of the string, and the percent symbol is how its special formatting directives start. Characters following a percent symbol will cause it to do stuff. The proper fix is usally to change
printf(string);
printf("%s", string);
[1] https://github.com/Hamled/mazda-format-string-bug#readme
"99% Invisible" produces the expected result: https://godbolt.org/z/Mc9zPKWdq
Just are just warnings, it builds fine despite them.
<source>:6:12: warning: format string is not a string literal (potentially insecure) [-Wformat-security]Weird intersection.
So far, everything that my car replaces with a touchscreen that used to be a physical switch is a complete downgrade.
My car features a D-pad on the wheel that also works if you swipe over it, resulting in bad inputs and causing all kinds of frustration. It's my first new car and I'm feeling like I want my old car back. I seriously hate touchscreen controls and my only physical input is faulty
So I'm stuck with laggy, buggy, bad software and a stupid touchscreen full of features that I will never use.
Seriously, who needs to be able to play movies in their car's center front console?
>The automatic climate control system offers a high-tech touch-screen interface...
https://automobiles.honda.com/hr-v#interior
I'm of the opinion that the only touchscreen that belongs in a car is a barebones non-networked Apple CarPlay / Android Auto pass-through for sound and navigation. All other controls are physical.
Ever since radios stopped being a standard rectangle, and the dashboard was filled with kevlar sacks and explosives there's nowhere to put anything down.
No clue if that's still true; I think it has become less true over time for sure.
There are benefits to automakers for retaining that standard form factor. Most factory-branded infotainment systems are made by a handful of OEM manufacturers like Bose. Bose makes systems for multiple automakers. So the double-DIN form factor has persisted, it's just hidden.
Problem is, for most cars, the climate controls and shit are all bundled into that infotainment system. So you can slot a standard double-DIN stereo into most modern cars, but you need a replacement dashboard panel and fairly elaborate kit to replace the OEM climate controls and whatever else.
Metra is a company that makes those kits, I think they were pretty much the only game in town last I looked into this. https://www.crutchfield.com/S-57MGZyBW0Mm/fg_112200_FFBrand%...
One off-the-shelf touchscreen... vs. lots of little custom-molded and printed analog parts that have to be assembled by costly robots or costlier humans. Big savings, I think.
Whatever the case, it sure isn't because people like touch controls in their cars. Holy shit, what a universally reviled "feature."
There is always custom engineering to match the customer's housing and bezel, tune the analog characteristics to the electrical environment, and handle other requests like a safer/thicker cover glass, optical bonding to the LCD, and low friction or hydro/oleophobic coatings on the surface.
You didn't mention UI design, which is the worst aspect of this technology.
I test drove the upgraded trim package. It was nicer in every way but the damn touch screen, which was a non-starter. I had to wait three months for a cheaper car to come in, instead of buying the upgraded package on the spot.
At some point a manufacturer will get wise and start selling manual controls as an upgrade.
An average car lasts 12 years. How many 12 year old tablets do people want to use?
My first car was a 15 year old beater with a tape deck. It was trivial to rip it out and put in an (at the time current) CD player. I pity the poor kids who are going to be stuck with these cars down the road.
Software wise it's a complete mess. The software itself is actually pretty OK, the navigation is just very verbose and it's strange that I can't just update it myself. The startup is also quite annoying. It's an embedded computer in a car, it should be instant.
Android auto support is a trashfire. It occasionally (when i drive for more than an hour) crashes the entire infotainment system, forcing it to reboot (a 1 minute process). Thankfully it resumes from where it left off after the reboot.
I too had problems with Android Auto when using my old phone, it constantly crashed. When I switched to a Pixel 4a in 2020 I no longer had any issues. It works like a charm.
So I suspect it could be your phone, or something related (the cable, the type of USB plug, etc.).
Either way, it's branded "Android Auto". I'm going to blame Google for anything that doesn't work optimally. If they cared, they could certify their product.
Specifically running Android Auto became more unstable in March 2020, without being the head unit updated. In other words, probably the phone (Android Auto) was updated. Possibly in a way that was backwards compatible with OEM Android Auto, but not the AIO Tweaks version.
That's a long of saying, there's probably multiple potential sources of problems and failure; not clearly the hardware/software of the head unit, and not clearly the Android Auto software. But a bad combination of the two.
But it's all guesswork on my end! When I see others having the same issues with OEM Android Auto, it does make it seem more of a clear Android Auto software issue. (And we haven't really ruled out idiosyncrasies of the handsets and USB cables.)
It is a touch screen, but the "touch" part generally only operates while stopped and in navigation. I think they might also allow touch for android auto/apple car play, but I'm not sure.
No, they don't allow any touchscreen input on AA even when parked.
Well that's disappointing. As I pointed out in another comment, as of March 2020, Android Auto became wildly unstable in my 2015 Mazda. However, I put the blame on it having a version of Mazda AIO Tweaks from 2018, and possible version incompatibilities with the Android Auto on my phone. But... perhaps there are software issues at a deeper level here, if even the newer ones which officially support Android Auto are so unstable!
For me, Android Auto will crash frequently if using maps or Pandora, and will almost always crash instantly if I try to use both. It wasn't nearly as unstable before March 2020, though.
All US cars now come with a screen, because backup cameras are now legally required. So I guess most of them say if there has to be a screen anyway, of course it should be a touch screen with controls, or it's just sitting there useless when you're not using the backup camera.
I don't want a backup camera or a screen at all, but if I have to have one, at least don't make it a touch screen, please.
That was nice. Hopefully, some manufacturer will cater to the touchscreen backlash crowd,and it'll become popular.
I guess that makes sense -- I'm kind of surprised it's legal!
although I guess the windshield-mount rearview mirror isn't actually legally required anyway, for instance in trucks/vans/other situations with obstructed sightlines to back of car.
Anyway, what you describe sounds really cool and subtle in a good way, like the kind of thing we imagined we'd get in the future, when we imagined the future would be designed well, instead of the hacky poorly designed terrible UX future we've got.
You don't normally find this a problem with windshield-mounted mirrors? I wonder what the difference is, and if you'd get used to it if driving regularly.
I don't notice a focus change going from looking out the windshield to looking through the mirror. There almost certainly is one, but it's not as drastic, because you don't focus on the surface of the mirror... and, as you note, it's what I'm used to.
Now, I don't think you need to get this exactly right, but if you could make the video image appear at a focal depth close to to the length from the mirror to the back window, it would be a lot easier on the eyes than the image appearing at a focal depth of about a foot. I'm not good with optics though, so don't ask me how to do that! :D
I'd recommend giving Mazda's infotainment a chance. It's not pretty, but it gets out of your way enough that you get to enjoy the car. That was kinda the point of getting a miata in the first place.
Will they really?
Most consumers invest very little effort in researching most of their purchases, and are remarkably tolerant to specific kinds of annoyances. I wish that they invested more effort, but based on my observations of my friends and family (who will spend e.g. about 20 minutes researching their $600 phone purchase), they won't, with a few outliers.
An imperfect comparison might be the amount of effort that the average techie spends on purchasing a MicroSD card or USB drive (usually on Amazon). How many people, even programmers, will spend time looking for durability or third-party performance benchmarking numbers? How many will look for child/slave labor in the manufacturing of the device, or rare earth materials sourced from areas in conflict?
I, personally, know that I should do the above, but I don't - partially because Google is so incredibly bad at finding the information, but also because I know that because most other people don't care, a lot of the above information might not exist at all.
I try to view it instead as being paid (albeit at a lower rate) for my off time. (And if you do this for everything, you'll tend to spend less, have more in the bank, and the amount you get 'paid' will increase over time.)
That said, it's regulation which has driven the present problem....
Why is this? You'd think these massive corporations could afford the best SWE's in the world. And yet, the average infotainment system in a new car today is literally worse than an iPad from 2010.
Also, infotainment is not a make-or-break feature of the car. It might nudge people a little, but it’s not the thing, so it’s not as high a priority.
I will say for my former employer that I could get a better salary at almost any software company than there. The work was interesting though.
A lot of automakers leave too much to their suppliers, and take too much on faith. The testing and validation is often happy-path only, show that it is capable of functioning properly, not that's incapable of functioning improperly. Pathetic but thrifty, as long as there are no standards for these things.
Mazda's gaffe here is that the boot-loop prevents the rear-view camera from working, which is a NHTSA requirement. So their 'courtesy replacement' is an attempt to avoid the shame of a true recall, as I understand it.
SWEs working at these companies are probably hamstrung in what they can do.
From cheap economobiles to six figure luxury cars, I've yet to see an infotainment system that works better than CarPlay.
The last bastion for factory infotainment systems is that CarPlay/Android Auto doesn't integrate with factory HUD or instrument panel displays (whether the instrument panel is a big LCD itself, or a small one nestled between the gauges). But I hear even this is changing in some recent models. Once that revolution is finished, then I don't see why I'd ever use the factory infotainment software ever again instead of just CarPlay.
There is a touchscreen. IMO, you want that for Apple CarPlay / Android Auto. Mostly for nav.
But for everything else, there are big grippy analog controls. There are also analog volume and prev/next controls for the touchscreen. I believe the interior was designed with the concept of, "everything should be operable, even if the driver is wearing gloves."
More importantly, federal law requires that new cars must have back-up cameras. Car manufacturers are doing the obvious analysis of, if we need to have a screen in there anyway, may as well make it a touchscreen. And if we're going to make it a touchscreen, may as well save some money by eliminating a bunch of physical controls.
I don't like it—I plan to drive my 2002 Tacoma into the ground specifically to avoid getting a car with a huge touchscreen UI—but I kind of understand it.
That's all I need, my phone apps and interface update just fine and are pretty good at doing the things I want.
Some day, I hope a lawyer will team up with a UI researcher, and then sue car manufactures for "safety theater" features like this that endanger people.
One of my favorites? The click through legal disclaimer that blocks my view of the backup camera screen every single time I pull out of a spot in a parking lot.
A runner up is "we can't let the passenger type a destination into the navigation system because the vehicle is moving"
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a32254313/1960s-porsche-91...
And a car 10 years ago at the same price point seems so much more dated.
It's amazing. Maintenance is cheap, stuff works. I have a Bluetooth FM radio dongle, and the audio quality is less than ideal, but my speakers are crap too, so who cares. I threw on a dash mount for my phone to do navigation and music, and it's wayyyy better than even decks with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto (particularly since most of that stuff, until very recently, required you to plug in a cable).
I'm going to drive the thing into the ground. Really not looking forward to the idea of buying a car full of computers to replace it.
That being said, fuel economy isn't _great_. If the odometer is to be trusted I get around 25 mpg, but I don't drive all that much, and I just don't think a hybrid or electric vehicle is worth the price, both upfront (particularly in this market) and maintenance (for the hybrids only, electrics seem to be maintenance-free).
If they shit on them too much then they risk getting banned.
The UI is developed by a U.S. company and I think is JavaScript based.
Ah, here you go:
(I retrofitted CarPlay support to mine via an upgrade Mazda offered a couple years after I got the car and I think that closed off access to tweaking, but I forget. I’m generally happy with the UI but I wish it booted faster. It’s a good 1-2 minutes after starting the car before it’s responsive.)
Edit: By the way. Thanks for reminding me. I looked at the site and they now have support for wireless Android Auto. So I might just be able to ditch the somewhat unreliable connection with the cable.
The IVI from that era is an iMX6 hardware platform developed by Johnson Controls and was written in JavaScript running on the Opera browser.
JCI sold that business to Visteon in 2014.
I drive a 2016 CX-5 with the stock in-dash software. If I'm bored enough at some point I might test the hypothesis on that.
Notably, the UI was sluggish and unstable before (and after) I installed Android Auto.
With Android Auto installed, I got a good two and a half years out of moderately reliable use, but just as the pandemic started in March 2020, Android Auto got remarkably unstable. It might run OK for a few songs if I only did one thing, i.e. Pandora OR Google Maps, but doing both almost always caused a freeze within seconds, required the three button salute to reboot the system.
I thought it might be due to the phone (Pixel 3), but I tried a different phone since with the same result (OnePlus 7 Pro). I suspect something changed on the Android side, but Android 9 was six months earlier and Android 10 was six months later. The updated Android Auto design had been out for several months (summer 2019) before I started having issues. Since I haven't driven much since the pandemic started, I still haven't tried to fix it. (I suspect maybe an updated install from Mazda AIO Tweaks might help.)
Ford is using an HTML-based interface in the Mach-E (and vehicles which get infotainment systems derived from that new generation of infotainment system). I've seen rumors that Ford is using React to power that interface, but I wasn't able to pin down any real sources.
This explains to some degree how Tesla is able to have such a buttery smooth UI on such terrible Intel Atom hardware (until recently.. they're switching to much better hardware now). At the same time, the Mach-E interface is not very smooth at all, but it is functionally pretty good. I think Ford should have a leg up on rapidly improving their infotainment interface, given that I would expect React to make some things easier than Qt... but Ford has so far failed to demonstrate that they can effectively distribute OTA updates, regardless of early promises. Hopefully they get that figured out soon.
If they equipped the Mach-E with a reasonably powerful SoC for the infotainment system, then I would agree 100% that a React-based UI could be implemented in such a way that it operates smoothly.
Sometimes though, firmware can't be flashed by dealers (due to not booting), and then they'll swap the unit, and the old unit will be flashed and given to someone else.
Might be worth hiding an airtag taped to the circuit board!
Cars where it can't are inferior.
If that's not a sign that people are making the simplest things Way More Complicated Than Necessary(tm) I don't know what is.
And ID3.
I don't find it distracting. I treat it like everything else on the dashboard and I don't look at it unless I'm at a stoplight or whatever.
There's an NRSC-5 encoder floating around on Github, if you want to try your hand at it. Notably, it was implemented by an infosec firm, presumably because more garbage code like this is lurking everywhere, and it never gets proper testing because HD Radio is proprietary and its creators never intended an open-source encoder to exist. (To the point of hiding all sorts of details about the codec, but some educated guesses and comparison to similar codecs seem to have paid off.)
So, in this case it just crashes the radios so they boot-loop, but how long until someone figures out a payload that can do more damage?
But, I'm honestly more surprised that it's a Mazda specific issue. I would have expected for the same bug to hit multiple infotainment systems.
I sure would be pissed if I had a car with a backup camera and something like this bricked the big center screen in my car, however.
My hatchback has about the best you could get (and they don't sell it here anymore) and I still added a backup camera, it's very useful.
My little GTI with a backup camera made me an invincible parking machine.
It also enables auto-parking and other enhancements while not inhibiting anyone that wants to perform those functions manually.
A bigger rear window wouldn't have let me see the toddler who'd wandered a short distance off from his parents in a car park and was standing right behind my car.
You can't see the pavement under the bumper, but you can see a kid on a tricycle right behind the car.
Personally I find rear view cameras to be quite disorienting. The view is quite distorted by the wide-angle lens and it's not clear where it can see and where it can't. Do I still have blind spots if I look at only the screen? Where are they? With a mirror I get an intuitive sense of what it can and can't see. Also, I expect the view to move when I move my head like in a mirror, which is part of what makes it so easy to get a sense of where the mirror can see. I suppose someday I'll get used to cameras, but today is not that day.
Your perspective is biased. If the backup camera had been invented before you were born and the automobile after you had been born than you would consider it only logical and familiar to see backup cameras on the wagons and horse drawn carts that you were used to but you would consider automobiles to be 'the expensive gadget-based way of doing things [that] seems horribly shortsighted.'
And to make it more fun, our car has an overlay on the left edge with a top down view of the sensors around the car. That one blocks the view completely in that edge. And has a black background window that slowly fades away.
This doesn’t mean that I am not also checking the surroundings but the backup camera is such a big improvement that I would not buy any car without one.
I've caught myself just backing up without thinking about it in the car with the backup camera. never done that in the old-school mirrors car.
I don't know if there are any studies that back up backup cameras.
That said, I'd much rather have a backup display in my rear-view mirror than a giant touch screen
You are correct that in general the automotive OEM's farm out the various components of the vehicle to suppliers. In that case, they probably also have some sort of support contract in place that ensures the supplier will address issues like this in a timely manner for the duration of the warranty period for the vehicles it is included in.
The moment I switch into reverse the camera forcibly takes over the infotainment screen. You can occasionally see the signal flicker when the switch happens.
But also… a backup camera is hardly critical equipment. It’s there for situational awareness (and a good idea), but doesn’t replace the mirror. And since nobody drives in reverse at high speed, stopping is always an option if it malfunctions.
Brakes are critical, steering is critical. Reverse and everything that entails is not.
The statistic is that every year, in the U.S. alone, over 2000 kids are run over by vehicles reversing. I had to read what you wrote a half-dozen times, but in hindsight the dissonance makes perfect sense.
That’s nothing. 10k a year die from speeding.
I think that take precedence over your idiosyncratic definition of what is critical.
Edit: I really don’t understand why I’m getting downvotes on this. Is it because people are so glad the federal government is in their bathroom making these “critical” decisions for you?
My point is that the federal government makes all kinds of decisions that are obviously not “critical,” and that includes in the auto industry.
The camera is "critical" to manufacturers by definition because it's the subject of regulatory compliance - it's a must have for the manufacturer to clear a gate.
We also know that people have been driving in all sorts of conditions and in all sizes of cars without backup cameras for decades upon decades and cameras are obviously not critical to the act of driving the vehicle. They undeniably help: the field of view is often wider than your mirrors, you can drive backwards at high speed while ducking to avoid bullets, You can see directly behind the bumper of your car to wedge yourself into tighter parking spots and avoid backing over tiny people, etc. I don't believe a functional backup camera is required to resell the vehicle.
If you never learned to drive without a backup camera, it may be more "critical" to you individually.
Emissions systems are a completely different story. Critical to manufacturer and required for resale of the vehicle (technically critical to owner), though who's going to check for that $400 bypass kit? ;)
Manufacturer mandates for general safety have only a small overlap with what is critical.
That's my cue ;)
The Netherlands used to have national championships reverse driving for many years on the official race track at Zandvoort (part of the Formula 1 circuit).
https://www.fleetowner.com/safety/article/21687582/nhtsa-to-...
And decided it was worth it. (If my experience told me anything: Probably under some pressure of marketing or C-level)
Unless we are calling serving unwanted ads as an attack.
But in a broader sense, I am absolutely unsurprised that there is terrible security on automotive hardware and software. Things like this are one of my major personal concerns about self driving cars.
>Station Logos use file-naming conventions with version numbers (this is accomplished in the image client). This is useful for storing and cataloging station logo images in the receiver.
https://hdradio.com/broadcasters/engineering-support/station...
If this is what could happen when you omit a dot, good luck if there's a malicious payload. Infotainment systems generally won't get the safety critical audits/oversight that other car systems would get.
> It is critical that the station call sign be transmitted correctly. Station Logos follow a file-naming convention that includes the station call sign. This way the receiver can quickly read the call sign and determine if the Station Logo is already archived for immediate display. The filename for a Station Logo includes the station call sign, the program number, and the version number.
Sounds like they didn't sanitize their inputs. This is going to be a huge hassle for everyone involved.
Hacking digital equipment is a very creative job as many will know and the one's who have the most experience are the military, been doing to other country's before consumer electronics made it possible to hack their own population.
I cant even say follow the money because alot of countries can and do print what they like.
2016 was apparently a good year for Mazda infotainment systems.
The worst part is that the car owner was told that a firmware update would “likely” fix it but they would have to pay for it.
[0]: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-....
Just make sure to adjust your schedule so you're on the road at the appropriate half hour time slots for your tastes and I'd say "bug closed"!
NPR listener demographics disagree. http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wnmu/files/MasterMedi...
What I get from the bar graph is that not listeners skew male, educated, old, affluent, etc relative to the population. But I'm not sure how this even relates to the original question of whether there's something for everyone... even if there were no skew, what matters is what percent of the population listens. If it's less than 100%, there must not be something for everyone. Or if you look at it from another perspective, no demo is completely missing from the listener base therefore there's something for every demographic.
What a cool program if you think about it. I wish more highschool was tangible skills like that.
Also KBRD 680, when I can. A radio station playing public domain music picked by a parrot? sign me up
Infotainment systems are developed as a partnership (usually) between a vendor and the auto company. The hardware is often developed by a different company, I like to think of them as old-school stereo manufacturers: Bosch, Pioneer, etc. The development cycle is somewhere between 12-36 months, and that's still quite a bit before the vehicle actually rolls off the assembly line.
Many customers like CarPlay or Android Auto. Both represent a cost to the manufacturer, and require ceding the design space to another company which is very visible to the customer. Brand is a big deal for car makers, and giving that space up is hard.
Depending on the manufacturer this is true for most of the car nowadays, right? I watched an engineering teardown of the new all-electric Mustang Mach E recently and they even used different vendors (which produced parts of vastly different calibers of quality) for the rear and front motors[0].
Point taken about ceding the branding power to the vendor, especially when that vendor is big and scary like Apple or Google.
I believe so. I was thinking specifically of the OS work and how it would be contracted out to a provider, and the hardware for the Infotainment would go out to another.
> I watched an engineering teardown of the new all-electric Mustang Mach E recently and they even used different vendors (which produced parts of vastly different calibers of quality) for the rear and front motors[0].
One of the interesting things about EVs is that a lot of traditional OEMs don't have the expertise in-house, so things like motors (which would normally be something in-house) end up being designed and manufactured by someone else.
If you really need a touchscreen that badly, just buy an ipad and tape it to the dash, would probably offer way more feature and flexibility.
My truck had dials and audio jacks, what else do you really need? The car navigation systems I've seen are universally worse than google map.
The car's Bluetooth is satisfactory for taking calls.
Part of the problem is the car's unit, as it's Android and it crashes a lot when it's running CarPlay.
My reasoning in rejecting the option was:
- That's a lot of money, and a lot of maps.
- External hardware (a smartphone, laptop, or tablet) is far more likely to provide both that functionality and be independently upgradable.
Instead I opted for a standard mains electrical outlet, which has proved its worth in recharging (or powering) any electrical device, even before USB charging became prevalent.
I feel much the same way with entertainment systems.
A tuner by itself is compatible with an external device having a small FM transmitter dongle. With 3.5mm or 6.35mm audio connector, any line-in device can feed the audio system, with controls on that device used. Bluetooth pairing is somewhat more complex though mostly works. It's about the extreme level of intelligence I'd want, and I'd avoid it if at all possible.
The present level of complexity is a major regression.
I think people have even managed to side load electron apps on it.
Mazda’s CMU may be the closest thing to DD-WRT in a car that you can get, but confess I’m not too familiar with what else might compete for that title.
I have done some basic fiddling with SDR but am not at all competent.
After reading this I started to wonder if it might be something similar/related.
I even thought of removing the antenna as I never use radio anyway. Have you done anything about your issue that you can recommend?
* You enable "LOCAL" mode, this should ignore those AFs broadcasted by stations which would switch to another station broadcasting a different program (it's actually more complicated, for brevity simplified). Not all head units HU offer this setting.
* You disable the AF-feature of your HU.
* KQRS should stop broadcasting this AF
Not saying they are all bad but most of them
Seen it happen in the UK with RDS and head units tuning to the higher powered (mis-configured) station.
My God, the horror.
Many Seattleites would also be happy if it were stuck on KEXP.
Not just that, it's required by federal law to announce the callsign once an hour, in both radio and OTA television. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_identification#United_... (If you watch sports broadcasts on OTA TV you might notice a subtle overlay pop over the content at the top of the hour)
Made more sense in the analog era, when tuning was done by twiddling a potentiometer and you never quite knew exactly what frequency you were on.
Many years back Clear Channel would simulcast hurricane coverage across most of their stations in Florida, resulting in them all identifying as "Newsradio 610 WIOD Maimi". (Though a YouTube search suggests iHeartMedia now pitch- and speed-bends to say all the legal identifiers very quickly.)
Because of course it is. Facepalm moment right there.
I guess they could have just used them the other way around, to simplify things a bit (West Coast - W, East Coast - K).
The thing is, I realized now why people care about this stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_signs_in_the_United_State...
> Other stations downplay their call letters, in favor of an easily remembered slogan. This is also the standard practice in most other countries.
I have NO idea what the radio call letters are for any radio in Romania. Nobody I know does. We just know them as RockFM, MagicFM, EuropaFM, RadioZu, whatever.
On the other hand, the dance station in the Miami area calls itself "Revolution 93.5". It really depends upon the station and the market.
[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-2.1
It has nothing to do with 5G, which is a cell technology. 5G has low (600-900MHz) medium (microwave) and high ("mm wave"), and is far away from broadcast FM frequencies (USA is 88-108MHz)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G
https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/fm-frequencies-end-odd-decim...
Tangentially related, an old ham radio operator related his advice for putting up an antenna on your house: "Put the antenna up, but don't connect it to anything for a few weeks. Don't even run the cable yet. When people complain about it making their fillings vibrate or garage door open or whatever, you can show them that it isn't even connected to anything. This helps filter out the people who have nothing better to do than to complain."
Btw nice advice for the antenna... I'll try to remember it the day I'll finally manage to have an antenna again ;-)
I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new town cause it's too annoying.
More generally it seems like when industries are growing, there is competition in this kind of area, but later on this dies off. I wonder if there's a structural reason for this?
The actual circuit to make a radio work is also tiny. Some early smartphones included a radio tuner in the hardware.
This is the natural end result of a totally free market.
Step 1: Competion, therefore consumers are looked after
Step 2: Some companies are "winning" the competition more than others, some of them buy the "losing" companies.
Repeat until there's just one big player and they can charge whatever they want for whatever they can be bothered making available to people.
You have to hope the FTC steps in and stops one company just buying all of its competition forever.
I don't think that's much of a contributor. It's just really easy now to bring your own music (or podcast, or audiobook, or...) to the car with you via your phone, and I suspect people generally prefer to listen to their own curated music (or music a streaming service has curated for them) rather than putting up with radio ads, songs they don't like, etc. Just about the only benefit to listening to the radio would be to stumble upon new music, but you can do that with streaming services too. I guess some people like to listen to talk radio (NPR and the like), but most of that stuff is also available online.
I still have a fairly old car with an analog radio, and I haven't used it in at least 5 (but probably closer to 10) years.
Ditto for TV: the on-demand experience via Netflix (etc.) is just so much better than watching regular network or cable TV. Why would I subject myself to having to be in front of the TV at a particular time on a particular day to watch what I want to watch? Honestly, it baffles me that the standard cable TV model still even exists. Obviously the Comcasts of the world still make enough money off of it to make it worthwhile to sell, but it just seems like an entirely poor experience no matter how you look at it.
Maybe your comparison of live vs streaming TV is skewed because it takes so long to start a new stream that it's hard to imagine browsing content directly, instead of trying to imagine the content from movie posters.
Some codecs do reorder frames for efficiency though (H.264 can be 10 frames out of order but realistically only goes up to 3), which means you have to decode a few before displaying the start frame.
I tracked him down one time, and asked if his shows were recorded. He said nope. I had made a few recordings of his shows, and sadly the rest is surely lost to history.
This benefit has gone down a lot since the late 90s. There's a nice wikipedia article on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_homogenization
That said, I recommend listening to college radio wherever you are. I truly love the station from my hometown, WHRW broadcasting from Binghamton University. What a strange and beautiful melange.
I found out that listening to the radio gets you lots of excellent unknown-unknowns when it comes to music, especially if you listen to public radio (which, in my country, has almost no ads). For example, during my last trip I remember that tuning in to the arts-oriented public radio station got me the chance of listening to some great tango classical music which I would have never thought of purposefully listen to.
I'm 100% with you when it comes to TV, the cable signal broke or something (some decoding stuff, can't tell) a couple of years ago and I didn't bother calling in the TV cable guys to look at it and fix it. It is quite excellent. We do have Netflix, which we spend some time on but not that much lately, plus I do have a TV-sports station subscription which I use for major events (like the Olympics right now). For sports I have to be careful though not to visit any sports website that day in order not to have the results revealed too early (I generally do not watch the events live).
(My experience is with Vizio's WatchFree+, but the shows are syndicated so I don't think there's much difference from one offering to the next)
One night we were hit with some severe storms and I decided it was worth it to have an antenna and converter for emergencies. Did some research, purchased a box from a friend and a decent antenna, hooked everything up, turned it on, and 5 minutes later tore it all down again.
I'd gone too long without it and lost all tolerance for commercials.
"Punch a button" was only an option once you'd already saved that preset - no difference to the later digital version.
I was looking for a link to one, and it turns out that even some 1950's radios had a "wonderbar" signal seeker:
And I could never have been a Dish/DirectTV subscriber because the lag to change channels absolutely kills me.
Frustratingly, my Toyota Corolla will start up the radio immediately, but the on/off/volume control doesn't work for several seconds. If someone in my family left the radio blasting, I'm left mashing the button repeatedly until it kicks in. Ugh.
The train slowed down in the late 90s and consolidation of syndication and station ownership picked up. Now a few companies own everything and they’ll pump every dollar until the spectrum is turned over to cellular.
The Company Execs already know the product and don't need to be told about it. But a jingle and a joke might close the advert sale.
I hate that more and more things are becoming software controlled. "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" is not a law that I want to apply to machines that can and should continue to function instantaneously.
There's a UX lesson here somewhere.
Especially in cars I vastly prefer mechanical controls for things like the stereo.
I think you're missing the part where the day to day changing conditions mean you have to switch the station then either accept the static or fine tune the station every couple of days. The switching was instant, but I still had to spend time tweaking it and count that as latency-to-ready.
Especially in the cars, without the automatic fine tuning you needed to adjust the frequency depending on where you were at the time.
While I usually don't bother scanning for new stations when I go to a new town, that's because I'm listening to music (or podcasts) with my phone. I don't even listen to broadcast radio in my home town.
About the only time I listen to broadcast radio is in a rental car and that's only because I don't bother pairing my phone with the car unless I'm going to be in it for a few days (and I always unpair and/or reset the pairing settings when I return it).
Pity it was a complicated modulation and waste of spectrum.
Also, one thing to remember is that FM radios have been "digital" for quite some time. I'm not talking about HD radio or DAB receivers. FM demodulation chips have existed for a long time (TDA7000 came out in 1983). They handle tuning, demodulation, and amplification all-in-one. The only slow part would be whatever microcontroller has to manage the interface in the receiver. You can even get FM transceiver chips dirt cheap like the one that is in the infamous Baofeng ham radio. It's got one chip doing all of the radio work.
The volume knob doesn't respond until about 8 seconds later.
I'm sure you can imagine situations (like in a driveway such as mine, where the neighbor's bedroom window directly overlooks it) where what was appropriate at 3pm when I got home, is not appropriate at 3am next time I start the car...
Being able to lower the volume should be immediate, and it should be obvious in their testings...
If they ever tested infotainment systems of course.
All in all, this means that I regret it if I forget to turn the volume down when I get out of the car.
AT1846S Single-Chip Transceiver
RDA 5802N Single-Chip Broadcast FM Radio Tuner
[0](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/teardown-tuesday-baofe...)
You’re totally correct. I just wanted to clarify the various ways that radio can decode FM digitally. Please correct me if I’m mistaken. I’m still real new to this world.
They simply never power of the Head Units, even if they go dark. And I am not talking of the constant power feature head units head since forever but the CPU actually doing stuff. Most of the time the satellite data is held fresh to give you an immediate position fix if requested.
If you completely detach it from power you would notice that there is a startup time.
The biggest thing that helped was realizing that the battery dies when the key fob was hung up with our other keys. Coincidentally, this was exactly the right distance for the car to constantly wake and sleep itself as it thought the key fob was entering and leaving its vicinity. Between adequate key fob faraday cages, making sure the interior lights are in the automatic or off position, and making sure all the doors are closed we haven't had a dead battery in a while.
What a pain in the ass.
Fast forward to today, and I recently bought a streaming radio component for my stereo. I programmed in the local station URLs, turned one on, and was aghast - TSC was still running the same goddamned ads, again and again and again. For 40 years.
So much for streaming Seattle radio stations. Blech.
P.S. You people from California know what I mean. Remember Cal Worthington? He drove me away from watching late night TV. I moved to Seattle to get away from Cal Worthington. Then he opened up a dealership in Seattle. Oh, misery. The DVR kept me out of the insane asylum.
If the KGB ever needed a false confession from me, they'd know just what to do. I'd fold like a cardboard box left in the rain.
They aren't the same. Also some of the ads included his daughter too. He seems like a nice guy.
I know he sounds like a nice guy. He probably is. But overdoing anything becomes torture after a while. I'll never buy anything from his company, and I won't listen to any radio stations that incessantly run his ads.
The same thing happens when hit radio plays the same hit song 3 times an hour. It isn't long before one starts to hate the song. Decades later, I still hate those songs. I used to like the new "Rasputin" cover. Radio killed it dead for me.
Can you imagine being one of those aging rock bands on tour, and all your fans want to hear are the songs you played 50 years ago? I'd slit my throat.
In addition to our friends in the diamond business, we also had Jack Roberts Appliance who was less offensive than the others.
But I dearly loved the old Ivar's commercials. That man knew how to advertise. I'd always go out of my way to eat at Ivar's just because. He was always "fresh" :-)
Rainier Beer also knew how to do ads right. I always picked Rainier because of their amusing commercials.
That's the trick. Everyone in the country knows them, but thinks they're local because the ads are so boring. It's a chain!
Also I own a 2012 BMW and its infotainment system works just fine. If the car is coming from deep sleep it takes like 5 seconds to start but it shows the BMW logo and it's a nice touch. With a warm start it's on immediately. Channel changing is also fast, not instant but with the benefit of not hearing any static in between.
Not to say all cars are perfect, I have seen cars with terrible infotainment systems which are slow and buggy, that's just a thing to keep on your list to inspect before buying a new car.
In all fairness its partly because of the compression algorithms used like Forward Error Correction FEC and progressive frames vs. immediate frames which simply takes some time to construct an audible / visible representation of the digital data.
https://www.nj.com/parenting/guest_bloggers/2011/09/the_thin...
Freaking incredible. You could physically switch to any station instantly.
punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing
The FM signal is still analog; there's just some digital metadata embedded in it that receivers can optionally demodulate. In my experience the audio starts playing immediately and then the digital metadata (track name, thumbnail) pops up a bit later. So you can still flip through stations with little perceptible lag.
FWIW, I'm the type of guy who keeps CRTs around for his retro systems because he enjoys true zero-lag gaming.
47 CFR § 2.1(c): Harmful Interference. Interference which endangers the functioning of a radionavigation service or of other safety services or seriously degrades, obstructs, or repeatedly interrupts a radiocommunication service operating in accordance with [the ITU] Radio Regulations.
So looking at the specification here:
https://www.nrscstandards.org/standards-and-guidelines/docum...
...
On page 20, We see that images need not have an extension, because the transport stream is required to specify a mime-type. If one can prove that somehow that mime-type was not set, then perhaps the radio station and/or the technology provider for their broadcast transmission equipment could be held liable. I'm not sure how the process of discovery would look for something like that.
Seems more likely Mazda could be in the position to sustain significant warranty claims in court if their hardware is found to be defective, or their testing & QE procedures to be lacking.
"So who, or what, is responsible for trapping these Mazda owners in a public radio echo chamber they can’t escape, even by car?"
My knowledge and following of music is spotty, so radio is key to my discovery of new songs. On long road trips I tend to find good new (to me) songs, as well as get amused by some weird ones. A few highlights from the odd but fun stuff:
- Driving through rural Ohio at midnight I randomly seeked to a station playing "Clean Up the Ghetto by the Philidelphia International All Stars. - On a Sunday morning in southern Mississippi I heard some happy old dance music accompanied by the jolly but incomprehensible New Orleans drawl of the DJ. - Driving through West Virginia I heard "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" 3 times on the same morning on different stations.
I don't road trip extremely often but surfing the radio is something I look forward to when I do! I usually get a taste of the local culture and a window outside of my urban tech bubble.
This is based on the line "...causing radios to reboot when they connect to KUOW’s 94.9 FM signal."
NRSC-5 In-band/on-channel Digital Radio Broadcasting Standard:
https://www.nrscstandards.org/standards-and-guidelines/docum...
My theory is that the radio station sent some unicode characters on their RDS feed that crashes the system, it probably cached it (These head-units run on Linux, and is well known in some hacker circles), so now it's in some kind of loop. It won't be the first time that RDS feeds with some unusual combinations crash the head-units. If Mazda has a new firmware, these can be upgraded via the USB ports by booting into a recovery mode.
Apparently the radio evaluates image files based on the extension on their name, and not by looking at the image headers. If you send a radio station logo with no file extension it gets stuck in a permanent reboot loop. :-(
Just imagine a smart car + NSO software. Could turn it into a moving surveillance machine.
Or if can control it maybe cause some 'accidental deaths' looks like a single car fatality.
I would hate to see electronic warfare break out it seems like everything will just be totally bricked.
The Sirius menus on my wife’s Subaru have been broken for years due to some problem with the guide format changing. Sirius don’t care because you can still tune to any of their stations with the dial, but there are hundreds.
Sorry but what? FM radio station switched to 5G phone standard? And supposedly the 3G receiver in the car is affected? shakes head
Interesting that this essentially seems to brick the unit and no reset can fix it.
The infotainment system is not great. Lots of little bugs and quirks and uglies, so I'm not surprised that it suffered this glitch.
In short, you can’t test a negative. It’s easy to test “when the car receives a transmission in X format, Y happens”, but not “there does not exist a transmission format X such that when the car receives it, Y happens”.
Memory safe languages can help here, as would fuzzing. But the only true test would be a formal verification, which is a real pain (and even then you’re only testing against a single Y).
What you really want is “there does not exist any transmission that could result in any bad behavior”, which can only really be tested in that large scale fuzzer we call Production.