Month: April 2023

Car thieves have come up with yet another way to steal your car, and this one is rather creative. We’ll refer to it as “headlight hacking,” but as Dr. Ken Tindell of Canis Automotive Labs describes in his extensive and technical blog post, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

The method of theft begins at your car’s headlight module, but the only reason thieves have chosen this point of entry is because it offers them the easiest way to get hooked into a vehicle’s CAN bus system. For those unfamiliar, the CAN bus system of a vehicle is the method by which the numerous ECUs throughout a modern vehicle communicate with each other. Thieves are using this central nervous system to their advantage by executing an attack referred to as “CAN injection.”

Someone has developed a tool (disguised as a JBL Bluetooth speaker and sold on the dark web) that when wired into a vehicle’s control CAN bus, can impersonate the vehicle’s key fob. The vehicle used as an example is a current-generation Toyota RAV4, but it’s vital to note that this vulnerability is not specific to any particular OEM or model — this is an industry-wide problem at the moment. Thieves are pulling bumpers and trim pieces away from a vehicle, which allows them access to the CAN bus near the headlight connector. Much of a vehicle’s CAN bus systems will be found hidden deep inside a car, but since modern headlights are so smart these days, they require their own ECUs, which means they’re going to be wired into the whole car’s CAN bus system.

Once thieves find the correct wires to tap into, the theft device does the work for them. A simple “play” button on the fake JBL speaker injection tool is programmed to instruct the door ECU to unlock the doors, as though you have the actual key to the car in your hand. You turn the vehicle on in a similar fashion, and a thief can simply drive away with your car without ever coming into contact with the vehicle’s actual key fob.

What can a car owner do?

As of this article’s publishing, there isn’t a great defense against this sort of theft. On the good news front, a thief trying to steal a car this way will need to do some real work to get it. Ripping off body panels takes time, and so does wiring into the car. Basically, a thief would need to have uninterrupted access to your vehicle in a private area to make it work. Additionally, Lindell suggests that fixes for the problem are possible.

The initial fix he suggests automakers roll out would be a software update that recognizes the sort of activity on the CAN bus systems that this injection tool sends out. This could thwart the tool in the short term, but Lindell believes that thieves will find a way around it in the long term. As for a permanent fix, Lindell believes that a “Zero Trust” approach to CAN bus systems is the only way to go. Every message from one ECU to another would need to be encrypted and carry authentication codes that can’t be spoofed. Additionally, every ECU would need to be equipped with secret keys, and every car would need to carry its own secret keys to prevent a universal key extractor from being created. Developing such a security system would take considerable time and effort from a vehicle manufacturer. 

We talked with some security experts at VOXX Electronics, which is both an OEM supplier and aftermarket option for vehicle security systems, to get some perspective on this issue and what might work to defend against it. Both VP of marketing Jonathan Frank and security product manager Chris Libardi tells us that CAN bus-style attacks are hardly a new thing in the automotive space.

“Whatever they’re being referred to as they are out there, the hacks are not new,” Libardi tells us. “They’ve been going on for a dozen years. As long as there’s been CAN, there’s been ways to hack around it.”

The problem experts and the public is seeing today is that CAN bus hacking is getting easier because the CAN bus now stretches to more accessible parts of the car, such as the headlight modules used in this vulnerability. Years ago, it wasn’t so easy.

“In order to do CAN bus-style stuff, you had to gain access to the wires, which were interior, so you’d have to physically break into the vehicle gain access, get under the dash, get to a CAN network set of wires,” Libardi says. “It wasn’t as easy. It’s becoming more prevalent now because typically to do this you had to be very, very, very well educated and have a lot of expensive equipment, and have the actual CAN bus messaging and all that, that would be required to do something like this. It’s just becoming easier.”

Tindell at Canis Automotive Labs suggests that folks try and park their vehicle in places that don’t allow easy and uninterrupted access to its headlights. VOXX Electronics recommends one of its aftermarket systems (the Viper DS4) as a theft deterrent, though, as it says thieves won’t be able to start the car up with its system in place. The CAN injection allows thieves to bypass an OEM system, and VOXX says that a thief could still even unlock the car doors with its system installed, but they’d need to find a way to hack the Viper system on top of that for the vehicle to fire up.

Of course, installing an aftermarket security system on your brand new car isn’t something most folks want to do, but in terms of OE solutions, answers are short for the time being. We’ve reached out to a few different automakers for comment and to see what they might have to say about this new way of stealing cars, and will update this post upon hearing back.

But lastly, if you notice that someone has been tampering with the trim or body panels near/around your headlights, you may want to contact the police, because a thief could be readying their CAN bus injection theft.

The bus was stuck. San Francisco’s eastbound 54 Felton line was heading up a narrow residential street when a white SUV coming the other way stopped in the middle of the road. It was a rainy Sunday evening last month, and the bus driver leaned up to the windshield and peered through the haze at the SUV’s pulsing hazard lights before slumping back and exclaiming in surprise, “What the hell? No driver of the car?!”

The 54, brought to a halt by an autonomous vehicle belonging to Alphabet’s Waymo, isn’t the only bus that’s run into trouble with San Francisco’s growing crowd of driverless vehicles. Bus and train surveillance videos obtained by WIRED through public records requests show a litany of incidents since September in which anxiety and confusion stirred up by driverless cars has spilled onto the streets of the US city that has become the epicenter for testing them.

A San Francisco public transit bus encounters a Waymo autonomous vehicle in its path on March 5.

Courtesy of SFMTA

As the incidents stack up, the companies behind the autonomous vehicles, such as Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, want to add more robotaxis to San Francisco’s streets, cover more territory, and run at all hours. Waymo and Cruise say they learn from every incident. Each has logged over 1 million driverless miles and say their cars are safe enough to keep powering forward. But expansions are subject to approval from California state regulators, which have been pressed by San Francisco officials for years to restrict autonomous vehicles until issues subside.

Driverless cars have completed thousands of journeys in San Francisco—taking people to work, to school, and to and from dates. They have also proven to be a glitchy nuisance, snarling traffic and creeping into hazardous terrain such as construction zones and downed power lines. Autonomous cars in San Francisco made 92 unplanned stops between May and December 2022—88 percent of them on streets with transit service, according to city transportation authorities, who collected the data from social media reports, 911 calls, and other sources, because companies aren’t required to report all the breakdowns.

The records obtained by WIRED are more focused. They follow a previously unreported directive to staff of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency handed down last October to improve record keeping of incidents involving autonomous vehicles. Muni, as the agency is known, standardized the term “driverless car” when staff report “near-misses, collisions or other incidents resulting in transit delay,” according to the directive. Agency logs show 12 “driverless” reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023, though Muni video was provided for only eight of these cases. Overall, the incidents resulted in at least 83 minutes of direct delays for Muni riders, records show. 

That data likely doesn’t reflect the true scale of the problem. Muni staff don’t follow every directive to the letter, and a single delay can slow other lines, worsening the blow. Buses and trains cannot weave around blockages as easily as pedestrians, other motorists, and cyclists, saddling transit-dependent travelers with some of the biggest headaches caused by errant driverless cars, according to transit advocates.

San Francisco officials say they want to be supportive of new technology, but they first want to be shown progress on addressing failures—like random stops in front of buses and trains. “What we’re seeing is a significant uptick in traffic and other kinds of chaos on our streets,” says Jeffrey Tumlin, Muni’s director of transportation. “We are very concerned that if autonomous vehicles are allowed limitless, driverless operations in San Francisco that the traffic impacts grow exponentially.”

For Muni’s 54 bus, which traverses San Francisco’s southern edge, the vehicle blocking its way early last month was a driverless Waymo that got stranded between rows of parked cars. A human driver would have reversed, clearing space for the bus, which isn’t allowed to back up without a supervisor. Instead, the Waymo Driver, as the company calls its technology, alerted a remote “fleet response specialist” to help. Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp says that this worker provided guidance to the car that “was not ideal under the circumstances” and made it challenging to resume driving. 

That left the Muni driver in a bind. “I can’t move the bus,” the driver said to one of two riders on board. “The car is automatic driving.” The driver radioed managers and doffed their cap: “Whoosh … Half hour, one hour. I don’t know. Nothing to do.” Thirty-eight stops and about five miles remained ahead for the 54. The driver, looking out at the Waymo, expressed disappointment: “This one not smart yet. Not smart. Not good.”  

This is quite the pretty picture for space fans.

SpaceX stacked its giant Starship vehicle on Wednesday (April 5), lifting the Ship 24 upper-stage prototype onto the Booster 7 first stage at the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas.

The lift and its aftermath were captured on video, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk shared via Twitter (opens in new tab) early Thursday morning (April 6). 

The footage, apparently captured by a drone, shows off gorgeous seaside scenery as well as the 394-foot-tall (120 meters) Starship, which will become the most powerful rocket ever to fly when it lifts off — and that should happen soon.

Related: SpaceX’s 1st orbital Starship looks supercool in these fueling test photos

Indeed, Wednesday’s stacking was prep work for the first-ever orbital flight test for Starship, as Musk noted in his tweet: “Starship preparing for launch,” he wrote as a sort of caption for the 47-second video.

Various reports have indicated that SpaceX may be targeting a try as early as Monday (April 10). There’s no firm target date, however; SpaceX has yet to announce one, and it’s apparently still waiting on an orbital launch license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. So we’ll just have to wait and see.

Both of Starship’s stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that Musk thinks will make Mars colonization and a variety of other bold spaceflight feats economically feasible.

Though Starship has yet to go orbital, SpaceX has already booked a handful of deep-space missions with the stainless-steel vehicle. For example, NASA chose Starship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis moon program, which aims to put boots down near the lunar south pole in 2025 and then go on to establish a base in the area.

In addition, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa bought a Starship flight around the moon, paying the way for himself and a group of eight artists. And Dennis Tito, who made history in 2001 as the first paying passenger to reach the International Space Station, plans to fly on another Starship circumlunar mission, along with his wife and other crewmembers who have yet to be named. The target dates for those private moon flights are still being worked out.

Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Dawn Aerospace’s robotic space plane flew with a rocket engine for the first time last month, taking a major step toward the company’s goal of building a fully and rapidly reusable craft. 

Last week, the 15.7-foot-long (4.8 meters) Mk-II Aurora flew three times, and “all test objectives were achieved,” Dawn representatives said in a statement (opens in new tab) issued on Wednesday (April 5). The company also released a one-minute video showing the sleek space plane flying over New Zealand’s stunning South Island, close to the Glentanner Aerodrome where the tests were carried out.

In August 2021, the Mk-II Aurora debuted with five test flights using surrogate jet engines, but the plan was always to pivot to a rocket-powered engine. In the latest series of tests, which took place once each day from Wednesday (March 29) to Friday (March 31), the Mk-II Aurora flew to a height of 6,000 feet (1,830 m) at speeds of 196 mph (315 kph), which is similar to those the space plane had achieved during its 2021 test flights, Dawn team said in Wednesday’s update.

Related: Space planes: evolution of the winged spaceship (infographic)

“This is a phenomenal achievement for our small, but extremely capable, team in New Zealand and the Netherlands,” Stefan Powell, the CEO of Dawn Aerospace, said Wednesday in a different statement (opens in new tab). “To my knowledge, Dawn now operates the most rapidly reusable rocket-powered aircraft in the world.”

The latest test flights aimed mainly to validate the plane’s rocket engine. So the height reached by the plane was not a key factor, and future flights are expected to increase both speed and altitude. 

The Dawn team envisions its Mk-II Aurora, which can carry a small payload of 2.2 pounds (5 kilograms), not only to be able to fly more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) high, but to do so twice per day when it carries out commercial operations, such as sending satellites into space. When that manifests, Mk-II Aurora will become the first fully reusable satellite launcher.

Back in December 2020, Dawn Aerospace was approved to fly the Mk-II Aurora out of a conventional airport alongside civil airplanes. This approval, granted by the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority, the agency responsible for the country’s aviation safety and security, was another major win for the company. 

Airports usually wait until launched rockets exit Earth’s atmosphere and sometimes even reroute commercial flights because rockets can leave debris in their wake that can impact passenger planes. Dawn’s team says the Mk-II Aurora stands out in this regard because it is designed to take off and land on a runway, just like an airplane. The space plane thus would not need any special restrictions or dedicated runways.

All of these milestones, including the success of the latest test flights, advance Dawn’s goal to produce reusable space planes in a scalable and sustainable way, as the company looks toward achieving 100 to 1,000 flights per plane.

“Sustainability is important to us,” Powell said in his statement on Wednesday. “Beyond being the responsible thing to do, there is no point in building something if we aren’t going to be able to use it.”

As of late 2022, Dawn had raised $13 million to build a successor to Mk-II Aurora that would be able to carry a 550-pound (250 kg) payload to orbit.

Follow Sharmila Kuthunur on Twitter @Sharmilakg (opens in new tab). Follow us @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab), or on Facebook (opens in new tab) and Instagram (opens in new tab).

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Google is taking a bold step in the world of online travel planning. The tech giant is piloting a price guarantee for airline bookings. Now, certain flights departing U.S. airports will come with a money-back promise. If a Google-guaranteed ticket price gets cheaper before the time of the flight, Google says it will step in to compensate for the difference.

The feature was announced in a Monday blog post along with a couple of other new changes meant to enhance Google’s travel tools. The new price endorsement, though, is by far the most interesting of the shifts. The move is seemingly intended to remove some of the consumer doubt from the equation of when/if/how to buy plane tickets, and to attract more users to Google’s flight search platform. And in some ways, it seems like a genius plan. Plane tickets are infamous for their rapidly fluctuating prices that may even shift based on your individual browser activity. Any way to reassure consumers of their choice seems like a solid way to boost sales.

However, with a price guarantee, the tech giant is entering into murky waters where things have gone wrong for companies before. In not-too-distant history, MoviePass reached corporate notoriety for its mismanagement of a fixed-price ticketing promise that ultimately tanked the company and led to a federal investigation and lawsuit. Google clearly isn’t taking on that level of risk, but could still theoretically find itself in the red.

Yet Google sees nothing but sunshine ahead for its flight search. “We’re confident that in most cases, the flights we’re guaranteeing won’t get any cheaper before departure,” a company spokesperson told Gizmodo via email, in response to a question about safeguards to prevent Google from losing money on the new feature. “Our hope is that people will trust Google Flights to help them find a great deal on their next booking, and the price guarantee could build that trust even further,” the spokesperson added.

How Will Google’s Flight Search Price Guarantee Work?

The company has launched a pilot version of the price guarantee feature for U.S. users searching for and purchasing tickets departing from U.S. airports. Tickets given the guarantee will have a little badge that shows up next to the listing in a flight search.

The badge indicates that Google is tracking the cost of that ticket, and believes it won’t fall below the current displayed price before the plane in question takes off from the tarmac. “This prediction is based on our historical dataset of flight prices,” the spokesperson said—offering few details on the underlying algorithms. If a user opts to buy a price-guaranteed ticket through Google and the flight cost does indeed fall, the company will pay the difference out to its customers. There are some additional restrictions on the feature, however.

Price differences must be greater than $5 in order to be compensable, according to a Google support page. Users can only receive up to $500 total back per year for up to three guaranteed bookings (so, trying to short Google’s flight prices probably won’t work out in your favor). The guarantee won’t show up on any flights more than 60 days out, Google spokesperson’s clarified, so it’s really only for relatively last-minute planning.

Also, big caveat: If you’re hoping to receive the full benefit of the guarantee, you have to be an adult Google Pay user with an account at the time of booking. Further, you have to be signed into your Google Account at the time of booking, pay in USD, and be using a U.S. billing address and phone number.

A company spokesperson further told Gizmodo that flights will only be eligible for the price guarantee badge if they’re offered by an airline participating in the “Book on Google” program. “Given these stipulations, you are most likely to see the guarantee offered on Alaska, Spirit, and Hawaiian Airlines flights,” they added.

Notably, the guarantee does nothing to protect consumers from flight cancellations, flight changes, or extenuating circumstances requiring a trip cancellation. This is not a travel insurance policy, just a way for Google to encourage its users to feel more confident pulling the trigger on tickets.

What Other Travel Features are New in Google Search?

In addition to the price guarantee, Google has also added a new way to quickly scroll through hotel details on mobile. Photos of lodging are now organized in Instagram story-esque arrays of tap-through content.

Finally, attractions now include pricing info directly in Google Maps and Search listings. You can book your ticket to certain tours, museums, sites, and events directly through these platforms and find suggested, related experiences. Notably, these Google-displayed prices don’t come with any sort of guarantee (yet).

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On April 3, 1973, a man named Martin Cooper was walking through the streets of Manhattan carrying something no one had ever seen before: a cell phone. As he strolled, he made a call, and he made history. Today is the 50th anniversary of that revolutionary moment. How far we’ve come.

Not only have we seen the passing of half of a century since, but we’ve also lived through technological advances that have allowed a huge portion of humanity to have access to a cell phone personally or through someone in their close circle. It’s turned into something we assume everyone has—in one more part of our lives, a piece of technology that we carry around in our pockets that immediately connects us with the world.

Everything began with Cooper’s phone call that day.

This was what the first call made on a cell phone was like

Dr. Martin Cooper worked at Motorola at a time when his company and the rest of the phone industry were keeping a close watch on AT&T and Bell Labs’ efforts to create a telephone system connected that cars that would allow users to make calls with cellular technology. AT&T’s system, however, had two big limitations in the beginning. First, there was the fact that simultaneous connections were very limited. And second, the price was too high.

Cooper, who today is considered the father of the mobile or cell phone, thought that a system that forced users to stay in their car to make calls wasn’t a real mobile alternative to the telephone. That’s why he started to work on his own version. Cooper developed his first prototype in 1973 in just 90 days and then planning a public demonstration before the press.

For the demonstration, Cooper thought the best idea would be to go out on the streets of Manhattan and make a call while he was walking instead of calling from a conference room, which could be done using a cabled telephone. He decided that the first person he would call would be Dr. Joel Engel, the director of AT&T’s cellular program, who was also his rival and that of his company, Motorola. According to the father of the cell phone, who has told this story many times, the call went like this:

“I said, ‘Hi Joel, it’s Marty Cooper.’ ‘Hi Marty,’ he says,” Cooper recalled, and then told Engel, “‘I’m calling you from a cell phone, but a real cell phone, a personal, handheld, portable cell phone.’ There was silence on the other end of the line. To this day, Joel doesn’t remember that call and I’m not sure I blame him.”

That’s right, the first cell phone call also included a bit of trolling, but it was still an historic moment. Cooper said the biggest thing he and his team feared before the demonstration was whether the phone would turn on, “and luckily, it worked.” This is the first cell phone call made in public, but as expected, Cooper and his team had done experiments at the labs at Motorola. At that time, they only had two prototypes, both of which were nearly 10 inches (25 centimeters) tall and weighed a little more than two pounds (close to one kilogram).

Although the call was made in 1973, the first commercial cell phone model didn’t go on sale until 1983. The mythical DynaTAC 8000X was a type of brick with more buttons than the prototype Cooper had used and a sleeker design. Of course, it still ended up being a huge and expensive phone (it cost $4,000 upon release, which is even more money today) that took 10 hours to charge its battery. Nonetheless, it was still a phone that revolutionized the world of telecommunications and captured international attention by appearing in movies like Wall Street (1987), where Michael Douglas used it to make calls from anywhere.

Cooper explained that one of the reasons he decided to develop a cell phone was the fact that being tied to a cord, or a car, wasn’t a true mobile phone. In an interview with Bloomberg in 2015, Cooper said cords went against human nature.

“People are naturally inherently mobile and yet for a hundred years we had been told that the only way to communicate was over a pair of wires, wires that kind of leashed you to your desk, that tied you to your home when you wanted the freedom to be everywhere,” Cooper stated. “That is the nature of what communications ought to be. Portable means freedom.”

Our lives today are shaped by that portability. Cell phones have been evolving at an incredibly fast past, especially over the last two decades. Since the arrival of smartphones, cell phones can do much more than make phone calls or send text messages. Cooper told CNBC during 2023’s Mobile World Congress that technology 50 years ago was primitive.

“There was no internet, there were no large-scale integrated circuits, there were no digital cameras,” he said. “The idea that someday your phone would become a camera and an encyclopedia had never entered our minds.”

In fact, curiously, making phone calls with these devices is one of the most cumbersome things we do nowadays. Instant messaging, social media, and even videocalls have turned into the primary methods of communication for many people. Who hasn’t heard someone say that they prefer to receive a text message over a phone call?

Cooper himself is surprised at all the advances in cell phone technology, but even so, he believes that smartphones still have to evolve to get to their best version. He stated that smartphones do too many things, but don’t do one thing perfectly. In fact, Cooper believes that the smartphones of the future could be implants in our ears.

Half a century ago, Cooper made the first call on a cell phone. Today, we have devices that we continue to call mobile phones or cell phones, but in reality, they have much more processing power, RAM, and storage than the average computer from even a few years ago, as well as immediate access to the internet and all of the possibilities that come with that. None of this would have been possible without visionaries like Cooper and others who took those first giant steps in the search for a truly portable form of communication.