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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

My vehicle is safe, thanks to Ford. Telematics goes over terrestrial phone networks, and when 2g shutdown months after the car was made, they replaced the modem with a 3g modem that was alreadt obsolete and now that 3g is shutdown, there's no more internet access to the car. Thanks Ford!

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Congratulations. You might be one of the few to survive the Cylon attack.

The Cylons will probably start their attack with some fake 2G cell towers, taking over all of the old IoT stuff.

I'm not certain - assuming their goals are consistent with other depictions they'll probably come armed with pre-wireless technology spoofing devices and a serial or parallel port so they can actually interact with and take over missile control systems.

Some day we might find an uneasy peace with the machines when we desperately admit we need their advanced technological capabilities to bridge PS/2 to USB-c so we can keep using our clicky IBM Model-M keyboards.

Does this explain the plot to Independence Day ;)?

They’ll probably need to start with a blue box to get remote access, and then we can blame everything on Steve.

Shhhh, that's how I work on reverse engineering old IoT stuff! SDR, loose admit-all policies, extremely low power, figure out what APNs and info it wants, and start capturing requests from it.

I love my 09 Jetta being one of the last years available without all of this nonsense.

Your comment is insightful and made me realise something I was quite unaware of in India - that allowing your automobile to track, collect and share data has become so mainstreamed in the US / west that it is considered "normal"! I guess I shouldn't be surprised - most people are unaware that Ford (and some others) collect a lot of personal data when you take your car to the service centre (for e.g. they download your contact list and call logs from your car when they run the diagnostic software)

More info here - Data could be what Ford sells next as it looks for new revenue - https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2018/11/13/ford-motor... and Ford Eyes Use of Customers’ Personal Data to Boost Profits - https://threatpost.com/ford-eyes-use-of-customers-personal-d... ).

> they download your contact list and call logs from your car when they run the diagnostic software

I'm inclined to believe you because I don't give cars access to my contacts and in general treat in-car software as already-compromised (I see the car manufacturer as more of an adversary than a partner), but do you have a source for this claim?

I remember reading about this a long time ago (5+ years ago I think) - it was Ford doing this and it did cause some mild outrage in the internet. Unfortunately I cannot find that particular article - Google has become shitty for finding old stuffs and possibly Ford PR has scrubbed the internet so that the public can't find it easily (a common practice in the evolving online marketing industry). I've added two sources to my earlier comment that disclose the gist of what I have claimed.

> Google has become shitty for finding old stuffs

yes, but in their defense, the Internet has become (or has always been) shitty at keeping old stuffs around, so even if Google indexed it the link would be dead or empty by the time you go to look at it. Google used to surface links to their cached copy that they used for indexing more prominently but I hardly ever see them anymore.

I don't give cars access to my contacts

It seems that many people are less smart than you are.

Every rental car I've driven in the last six or seven years has had some previous renter's entire contact list synced to the info-tainment system.

People are just too used to pressing "yes" buttons to get on with their lives.

We're finally seeing things like guest or hotel login modes for smart tvs/netflix/hulu etc where it wipes your credentials every time you turn the tv off. I wonder why phones don't have a "Connecting to rental" kind of option in their bluetooth configs. Like you I see rental cars with all kinds of crap in the pairing history.

Or car infotainment systems with rental mode would be awesome. Like if every time you pair a phone, the car asks if you want it paired indefinitely, or for N days. User sets N based on rental duration, and the car wipes the data after that.

Granted, it's much better for the phone to not send contacts to a rental car at all, but either solution would be a significant improvement.

I bought a used car (2010 Honda) with built in car gps unit. It’s not great but it’s always on. It had all the previous owners address look up history.

Good argument for using your phone..

This occurs not because the user decided to sync contacts, but because they wanted to play music. And both the auto manufacturer and the phone colluded to sync all contacts.

iOS at least now has a pair only music controls.

How do these cell systems respond to the network no longer existing? Do they continue trying to ping towers that no longer exist? Do they give up eventually and turn themselves off forever?

Probably try forever. The last head unit firmware added a deep sleep so it doesn't drain the battery and polled much less frequently (this was before 3g shut down and made the telematics much less useful anyway). Might have just been parked in an underground garage or driving through tunnels everywhere. I really should pull the fuse though.

The classic "my phone just munched 35% of its battery on a short subway ride frantically thrashing the radio in a search for signal" scenario.

When the 2G networks were sunset, Nissan offered a voluntary service campaign for some of their cars with 2G modems: either pay $200 to get a replacement telematics unit with a 3G modem, or they'll disable the 2G modem for free so it doesn't drain your battery trying to connect to a non-existent network 24/7.

But did Nissan disable the "we're collecting data and sending it off to the homeland: OK/Cancel" startup screen? No. So now every time I drive the thing, I have to push a button that does nothing so that I can see the screen.

One of but many little duck bites that has us firmly in the "never buy another Nissan" camp.

On Volkswagens, nag screens like that (and "menu disabled while vehicle is in motion" lockouts, and a million other things) can be tweaked with cheap dongles that let you change settings using your phone or laptop. Maybe there's something similar for Nissan?

Ya know, now that you mention it, there are apparently dongles of some sort (perhaps OBDC? It's been a while...) that give all kinds of extra info, maybe there's something like you mention. It's been a while since I've been over to mynissanleaf.com, perhaps it's time to go pay a visit for a search.

Thanks for the prompting.

EDIT: though it does not look like the tool will disable the nag screen, LeafSpy Pro does a lot of other things Leaf owners might find handy, such as change the backup warning tone, door unlock/lock behavior, et. al.

> door unlock/lock behavior

I just imagined the wireless unlock button sequentially stepping through the 16 lock/unlock states for a 4-door vehicle. "The car is locked. 13 quick clicks later, both front doors are unlocked and both back doors are locked."

OBD2 / OBDII refers to generic powertrain diagnostics (engine, emissions, etc) for all vehicles. Plenty of dongles for that. But I mean something that emulates the tool a dealership would have for specific makes of vehicle, which goes far beyond just the engine, extending into every module, possibly like what you found. Although usually it would be for a family of makes, not just a family of models.

For VW/Audi/Skoda/Seat the popular ones are VCDS and OBDeleven (the name of the latter being a play on OBDII, confusingly, being that I am trying to differentiate actual OBDII... ugh).

OBD, yes, of course. I spent a lot of time with ODBC years ago, and I can’t seem to keep the letters straight in my head.

I went from a Nissan LEAF to a VW ID4. Now I have to press "OK" to confirm a driving profile instead of a legal agreement every time I turn on the car, and my app has even fewer features than NissanConnect EV had. The grass is always greener on the other side, as they say.

My Volvo has had this happen. I have no idea if it still pings anything but the app access has been shut down.

Annoyingly every so often the car gives me a warning that the Volvo service has expired. I’d love to turn that off. But it must still be trying to connect to something.

Yeah, I still get the warning every so often that Ford has access to my GPS for trip tracking... I think if I factory reset the headunit, that'll go away, but then I lose my presets. If I had thought about it, I could have deassociated while the modem was online. :(

My 2016 Mazda was never connected in the first place, but I've left my wife's 2017 Volt connected because I do actually find the monthly OnStar report that's emailed to me to be useful. I also like notifications of low-tire pressure, engine-oil life, etc.

For something like low tire pressure, won't a monthly report be too late?

It sounds like the monthly report and the notifications for tire pressure and the like are separate things

Can't this just be shown on the dashboard?

I had a similar warning come up on a hire car last month.

Soon the car will just purchase its own new tires, or drive itself around town in search of a working air pump.

Or it will just auto-dial the nearest tow service and leave the bill to you.

And it will also pay for it with the money it earned from offering rides to people. :-)

Low gas should come in a monthly report you can pickup it up on your way walking your empty car home. Or a door is open report that you can receive as you lay on the side of the road.

I have a 2012 Mini with no connectivity at all that has tire pressure warnings.

There's some kind of corollary to Zewinski's Law of Software Envelopment: device developers are incentivized to "innovate" their product to the point it can send email.

Yes, it shows on the dash and in the monthly reports.

Unless a tire is punctured, it only loses air slowly over time, but not enough you'd really notice looking at them, but still enough that it's bad for tire wear. It's a nice reminder to me I need to add air to the tires.

The car's dashboard display also shows the tire pressures, but:

a) My wife, for whatever reason, seems blind to anything the car shows her on the dashboard. :-(

b) She'd have to put the dashboard to the screen which shows tire pressure. The TPMS doesn't alert till pressure is quite low. They are supposed to be 36 PSI. The TPMS won't alert till they are below 25 PSI or some such.

I have also had your experience, but my resolution was just to swap cars for a day every couple weeks. The threshold on her car was higher though, I believe 29 (same ~35-36 normal range), so if they dropped she'd at least be alerted sooner if I didn't see it.

I also like notifications of low-tire pressure, engine-oil life, etc.

Both things that have been done with non-connected cars for decades.

Sometimes the person driving the car does not (want to?) pay attention or has "ceded responsibility" for car maintenance, and it's nice to get these reports without needing to periodically remember to check the car manually.

Though my wife and I just celebrated 26 years of marriage and have open lines of communication, her telling me anything about the car she's driving is very hit or miss. So the monthly email is helpful. :-)

Hardware

- VoCore Lite

- USB to ODB2 cable

- Murata 1" x 1" DC-DC converter

Software

- Your choice of Linux flavor

- FreeDiag, looks like it is still under active development: https://github.com /fenugrec/freediag/

- Your own glue code to consume data, munge, and send updates.

I think I might do this. :D

Ford does sell 4G cellular hardware updates for certain vehicles. One of my relatives bought one for her Fusion sedan.

Yeah, There's an upgrade available, but it costs money (even when they were offering to pay the labor for some people), and the functionality isn't worth it for me, especially once they changed the power tradeoff and the car doesn't get the messages in a reasonable amount of time. It's nice that it doesn't kill the battery, and I understand the tradeoff, but if I don't know how many hours it will take for internet based remote unlocking to get to the car, it's not useful.

Minor nitpick - 2G hasn't shut down, and the way things are it probably never will.

I think it is in the US? At least carriers wouldn't let my 2G devices online anymore.

In a large number of places, it's either already shut down or will be shut down soon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Past_2G_networks

Minor nitpick - 2G hasn't shut down, and the way things are it probably never will.

AT&T's 2G network shut down January 1, 2017.

The old Sprint 2G network shut down at the end of May.

T-Mobile's 2G GSM and Verizon's 2G network shut down at the end of this month.

What do they use for 2G M2M links?

Upgrade them to 3G M2M links... And then later 4G. But not at the exense of the network operator.

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