Doing security in the automotive space has given me a new awareness for just how many computers there are in a car, so I decided to ebay and tear down a duplicate of the telematics module on my partner's Subaru One side of a circuit board. A large chip is in the middle, The other side of the same board. This has multiple antenna
The first picture shows an NXP SPC5605BVLQ6, which is POWER-based (at a whole 64MHz with 64K of RAM and 768K of flash). It has support for multiple CAN interfaces, which is a bus commonly used in automotive applications (please don't try to learn more, you'll end up upset)
The other side is more interesting - it houses a Continental-designed LTE+wifi module (fccid.io/LHJ-LNADVW/Use…), which I've removed the metal shielding from. The most interesting part of this is that it has a Qualcomm MDM9215 LTE modem inside, along with Wifi + LTE support chips.
The MDM9215 is interesting. It's a commonly used LTE chip on embedded devices, because it's got a built-in Cortex A5 application processor. Every time I've found one, it's running Linux and has had a serial console.
There's what looks like a debug port near that module, and there's also another edge connector that doesn't plug into anything. I'd guess that one is wired to the NXP part, and one is wired to the modem module.
tl;dr - I have no meaningful evidence of this at all yet, but there's absolutely a non-zero chance that my partner's car is violating my copyright
Oh right! I should have explained what a telematics module is. It provides a wifi hotspot in the car, it's the thing that makes OnStar work, and it reports various aspects of your car's use to the manufacturer so they can do things like tell you to come and get your tires fixed.

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More from @mjg59

26 May
Welp, Freenode is now just shutting down channels that have topics indicating that the channel has migrated to another network, and is instead redirecting them to unofficial channels on Freenode: pastebin.com/dcivQs9Y
I really wasn't joking about the rakes
(One of the affected channels was #sudoroom, one of my local hackerspaces)
Read 7 tweets
25 May
If anyone's wondering how the community feedback process for Freenode's proposed policy changes is going, the channel is currently discussing the nature of property rights with the hypothetical of the government giving your house to someone else as reparations
Ah, we've now moved on to the stage where the new Freenode owner starts complaining about cancel culture
Ongoing discussion of antifa being a terrorist group, well managed community feedback forum this
Read 16 tweets
16 Feb
In my time at Google I saw people earnestly engaging in racism, sexism and transphobia and arguing that they were just rationally debating the issues. On a mailing list with over 30,000 subscribers.
I don't think Google attracts this people disproportionately. They're a meaningful part of the industry.
The other common part of this is that when you push back, they'll just claim that this viewpoint is within mainstream conservatism and are you *really* trying to say that a position held by a significant percentage of the population is wrong or unacceptable
Read 5 tweets
15 Feb
These lights had a non-smart controller and the blue was consistent along the entire length. I've tried multiple WiFi and btle LED strip controllers and all have this behaviour - red and green are fine, the blue fades quickly. All using the original PSU. Anyone have any ideas?
Oh, hmm, I'm actually only seeing about 4.5V on the output despite 5V on the input. Guess I need a beefier PSU?
Ok a nominal 2A PSU is still only giving me 4.9V on the output
Read 4 tweets
25 Aug 20
If I ever get asked "What happens when you type a URL into the browser and hit enter" we are having an exciting journey via hardware interrupts, the kernel, display servers, toolkits and accessibility interfaces
Oh gosh I forgot about the scan matrix let's start there
This is *such* a terrible interview question
Read 6 tweets
12 Jun 20
People think that biological sex is this straightforward thing where if you have two X chromosomes you're female and if you have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome you're male and this is extremely not how things work.
The most obvious cases: you can have a single X chromosome. You can have three X chromosomes. You can have two X chromosomes and a Y chromosome. You can have an X chromosome and two Y chromosomes. Basically the only thing that doesn't work is having zero X chromosomes.
Ok so how about we say "If you have a Y chromosome you're male and if you don't you're female"? Well, no, that also isn't how things work. There's a gene on the Y chromosome called SRY. If that ends up on an X chromosome, you have XX people who are usually assigned male at birth.
Read 15 tweets

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