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Comment by wallaBBB | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the Kia Boyz - immobilizers have been mandatory in most of Europe since late 90s, in Canada since 2007. Basically there is something to put on (lack of) regulations as well as on HKMC.

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In the USA, we believe we don't need regulations, the Free Market(tm) will punish corporations that don't behave in a way that benefits their customers!

Insane to me that so many people believe this...

I’ll certainly never buy another Korean car.

And never an American one after the Pinto, and never a German one after the VW testing scam, and never a Japanese one after the recent safety scandal? I guess you can still get a Jaguar, so your mechanic won't complain.

I drive a car made in the 1990s

I was planning to upgrade it

I might not...

I had been planning to keep driving my car for quite some time, but recently it's developed a weird engine noise and a check engine light that nobody can resolve. I'm not sure I'll be able to give EV charging a few more years to sort itself out.

VW didn't really affect the customers.

How big of a difference was the actual safety of the Japanese cars? Are the corrected numbers poor, or still pretty good?

Citation needed for the claim any significant fraction of the US population believe that regulations are completely unnecessary.

This runs directly contrary to my lived experience here, so unless you can provide evidence it sure seems like you're just stereotyping an entire nation to engage in ideological warfare.

It doesn't need to be the population believing that regulations are completely unnecessary.

It just needs to be a sufficient number of politicians understanding that their donors and prospective donors find specific regulation of their industry overbearing.

That's absolutely true (and a very good point), but that's not what the GP was claiming.

Forty-nine states recklessly allow florists to sell flowers without a license. Only the good people of Louisiana are safe from dangers of unregulated flower purchases.

The problem isn't that we need better locks, but that we need locks at all.

Within my lifetime we've gone from leaving the backdoor unlocked at night and leaving the car keys on the seat (or in the ignition) from being the normal practice to being unthinkable.

You're focusing on the wrong govt policies.

Please, nobody ever left their doors unlocked all the time, if trust was _really_ that high there wouldn't have been locks at all.

We did when I was a kid. Nobody locked their doors in my town. In fact multiple people just had blanks over the holes meant for deadbolts.

Then the local powerplant shut down, and the manufacturing associated with it left as well. The largest employer in the area besides those two moved operations to China. Then methamphetamine became popular and then heroin, too.

Now you can't leave anything unlocked or outside.

> We did when I was a kid. Nobody locked their doors in my town. In fact multiple people just had blanks over the holes meant for deadbolts.

Yeah, because you guys had a warped perception of crime.

Virtually all crime now is significantly lower than it was just 20 years ago. You might not believe that, but it's true!

What's happening here is people's perceptions are being warped, almost certainly due to political propaganda. But the numbers don't lie, just take a look at the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

I hear you, and nationally that is probably true. But locally it's just not. There genuinely wasn't crime here outside of drunk fights once a year at the local pool hall.

Now there is genuine crime. Drugs and murder.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that your argument doesn't apply on the local scale. Using macro data for micro experience is a bad idea.

This is also the reason that argument falls flat in a lot of places.

I'm sorry you never got the chance to live in a high-trust area.

A lot harder to find one now.

For the majority of my childhood and teenage years the door was never locked. I don’t think it’s a British thing to leave your keys on the seat, but they were always in the hallway, right next to the unlocked door (like everyone else I knew).

I’m trying to think of the point this changed, and I can’t, but I would guess around 2008-2010 or so.

Yikes. This is more of an incredible claim than the counter. I'm shocked that you are willing to make it so confidently.

We did when I was a kid and my uncle still does. It’s sad that it’s hard for you to fathom safe communities.

For sure we did. Our backdoor, and that of all the neighbours was unlocked day and night. Same for my grandmothers' house and her neighbours. 1970s.

Or to put it another way:

Social problems and regressions cannot be resolved with ever more esoteric technological or draconian political solutions.

Maybe that's the goal. By creating the Kia Boyz situation, through omission of proven controls used in other countries, we created a nice conduit for more draconian measures.

There are political solutions

From my understanding immobilizer bypass tools are cheap and plenty.

Even if that’s true, they are clearly nowhere near as “cheap and plenty” as watching a Tik Tok video. The spike in crime was far greater than normal random variation.

Not really. At least not for those immobilizers that don't use "proprietary" ciphers. Automotive loves security through obscurity until it bites them in the ass. Today most manufacturers have moved to AES128, which is not cheap to brute force, especially if there is a rolling code (should be the case for many)

But you are right that there are many (older models) that use ciphers with know quick exploits: TI's DTS40/DTS80 (40/80bit, proprietary cipher, in many cases terrible entropy), models from Toyota, HKMC, Tesla. About 6s to crack in many cases.

NXP's HTAG2 - most commonly used one in the '00s - 48bit proprietary cipher, a lot less exploited in the wild than the TI's disastrous two variants.

you can just reprogram a new seed via canbus, don’t need to brute force it

Those type of attacks (CAN injections) are very OEM specific, and come from deep insider knowledge, not something you fuck around and find out. I’m assuming you’re referring to Toyota, but anyways please give direct reference to the attack you’re referring to.

Keep in mind any need for expensive equipment is already a deterrent for many.

1-4k for the tools that they then amortize across many cars stolen and stripped or shipped overseas.

Idk what the pattern is where you are, but the majority of stolen cars where I am are not sold or stripped or anything like that. They're used for N days and then ditched somewhere. Used either for joyriding, living in, crash&grab, or whatever.

One of my old neighbors had their same car stolen like 2-3 times, always ditched and found after some number of days missing.

That was the big shift here for the Kia mess. Normally the thieves tend to be professionals so the stolen ones are at a port or being stripped soon afterwards, but when that hit TikTok there were a lot more joyrides and brief use for theft/robbery because it was a bunch of teenagers who didn’t have much of a plan.

We have a phrase for that, "security by obscurity" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

Probably why great grandparent used that phrase. ;)

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