Hackers use wi-fi laptop to control EVERYTHING on a modern car

Remember that stunt Jeff Gordon pulled on an unsuspecting car salesman a few months ago?  The one where Gordon was disguised as any off-the-street Joe Shmoe and took a car for a test drive and terrified the crap out of that poor guy?

This is scarier...


Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek - two top-rate hackers out of Indiana -went into the guts of a Toyota Prius, jimmied-around with thirty-something on-board computer units and were able to take charge of dang nearly every function of the car.  Using a wireless laptop they can steer, put on the brakes, honk the horn, fake the speedometer reading, switch on the headlights and even tighten and loosen the seatbelts.

My dad has long proclaimed that "Cars only need gas, air and electricity to work: they don't need a computer!"  After watching this video, it's hard to argue with that.

Crash here to read more about this amazing hack, which was funded by the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (the kind folks who brought us the Internet).

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"Hitler did nothing wrong"

Worst. Wi-fi network name. Ever.

That is a screen capture I made of my iPad this past Friday when I was at Mysticon at the Holiday Inn Tanglewood in Roanoke.  The hotel itself deserves bigtime props for opening up its own wi-fi network to all of the convention goers.  That's what I was doing when I was inside my iPad's network settings and saw... that.  We were waiting for the Peter Davison panel to begin in one of the hotel's ballrooms.  I haven't even made the image a JPG as usual: that's the original PNG file.  All I did was change the file name.

I know wi-fi SSID names need to be unique but c'mon: that is beyond the tasteless.

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