Search Results for: c

Dispelling Fears about Car Hacking

Real brief: the problem is cars operate on the CAN bus network, which was designed in the 1980s, when the internet didn’t exist. Learn about CAN here.

Speaking with Chris Valasek, physical access is still required to hack the car. For now. (I’d try coming in via Bluetooth.)

Read it online at Autonet.

Favourite line:

That’s how car hacking works: the system doesn’t ask where the message came from or who sent it, it just accepts and executes it.

Plus the ending, because it’s true.

To attack, it’d be more efficient to roll that newspaper into a baton, than go after the target’s car.

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Back to ‘Keri on Driving’ – Index

Blog tag = auto security

 

 

You Come for Cars, I Give you Laundry

I know guys *hangs head*

But I had 7 machines going at once! Meh, I know, still. Nor do you care about my favourite tiny towel.

If we’re just meeting: I used to live in a condo in downtown Toronto, bought a house on July 25, and never went back.

It’s a cottage I winterized into a house, and have been living in a construction zone since. I’m like a squatter with a mortgage. Blog tag = house

WAIT. I can actually car-ify this post..

The laundry arrived in a 2015 Subaru WRX, whose trunk will hold 7 loads.

Oh that mirror I had built?

It arrived on Friday, and when it was installed I got so excited my head hurt.

Then on Sunday, it fell off the wall HOW lucky I was home.

When the mirror guys came to retrieve it, he said, “I’ve been installing mirrors for 25 years, and never seen this happen.” This stuff always happens to me.

So lucky I was home. Never mind the massive amount of bad luck it would’ve brought, but it would’ve smashed into this.

Last week a trade was standing in the above, he stopped mid-sentenace, looked around with widening eyes:

Him – wait, you are _currently_ living here?
Me – this is a palace compared to where I’ve been. I slept on an air mattress for 2 months.

But I’m tired of it, tired of my jogging pants, you probably are too, but the end is so close guys… a little more electrical work, build my couch, unroll my carpet, then all I have to do is live in it, easy.

 

 

 

First CVT I’ve Ever Liked

Found in Subaru’s 2015 WRX.

Non-car nerds: CVT – Continuous Variable Transmission, a new type of engine that’s en vogue. Instead of fixed, mechanical gears, it uses a belt that can be programmed to have an infinite number of gears.

You can identify a CVT in 2 ways:

1 – when you stomp on the gas, it’s one second two second, and then the engine kicks in and launches

2 – the high-pitched, loud whine it emits

That whine is the sound of “improved fuel economy”, which is why automakers are switching to them; CVTs claim better fuel consumption than their mechanical counterpart.

I don’t like CVTs because of points #1 and 2.

But Subaru masked the loud whine, and instead there’s a little boxer engine growl, and they definitely solved the launch lag, because over and again I was, “woah I’m at 80 already? Nice.”