[brk]

It is obvious in retrospect because this concept has been around for 30 years. A common killswitch mechanism that I remember being implemented in the early 90's was a system that tied into accessory devices. On my friends car you had to put the key to ACC, then turn the cruise control on and off, and then engage and disengage the parking brake before the car would start. No other obvious lights, buttons, switches, etc. And you could install the killswitch device to tie into basically any 2 systems that used battery power.

[pmontra]

My father disconnected the distributor (correct word?) and took a piece of it with him. Definitely a killswitch. That was in the 70s. Cars got more complicated around 1980.

[function_seven]

Mine removed the starter relay at night. (The car didn't have a distributor AFAIK, or if it did, it wasn't as accessible).

This wasn't to foil thieves, it was to frustrate the repo man.

[jjav]

> My father disconnected the distributor (correct word?) and took a piece of it with him.

Yes, my dad was used to removing the rotor from the distributor (small piece, easy to pop off and unless the thief just happens to have the correct model handy, the car can't run) back in the 60s (maybe he did it earlier).

I'm pretty sure some form of this has been popular for just about as long cars have had an electrical system.

[passer_byer]

My hack was to purchase a 2017 vehicle with a 5 speed manual transmission. I reckon 95% of would be thieves can’t easily drive it away!

[sitzkrieg]

my trick too, esp in some areas. getting harder and harder to find outside of sports cars :-(

[Tempest1981]

Yep, removing the rotor from under the distributor cap (correct), which disabled the ignition system.

[K0balt]

Yeah, but he did he get a 1.2 million dollar grant? Yeah, I didn’t think so. This guys kid is gonna have a better story.

(/s)

[borski]

Dropbox wasn’t a new idea either. rsync had existed for many years.

[brk]

But Dropbox made rsync more user friendly and available to people who weren't techies.

The concept of a starter interrupter has been around almost as long as the automobile itself. Ways to engage and disengage that interrupter have evolved and advanced over the years. Older folks will remember cars with a keyswitch on the front fender, and then a keypad inside, and then hidden switches like I described in my OP, and then IR and RF remotes, and so forth.

The basic concept in the linked article is not very novel, IMO. The specific implementation is cute, and somewhat current in the sense of evolution of these systems. But the whole thing is as noteworthy as the next arm64 advancement.

[positron6000]

"i'm not a 'car guy' - where can i get a simple interface for a killswitch that only needs to be installed once and can be controlled from an app?"

^ this is where the value is, which is what the $1.2m is intended to explore.

[dghlsakjg]

30 seconds on aliexpress found me this: https://a.aliexpress.com/_mPSrPR0

No Bluetooth, but it does have a dedicated RF remote.

Edit: figured out the keywords I needed for the exact product you want “bluetooth immobilizer”

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mNgigFk

[K0balt]

I can get you like, 10,000 AliExpress links for 1.2 mil, but the paper would probably suck.

[dghlsakjg]

So does this “project”.

There are dozens of already existing products that are designed to do exactly this for pretty cheap.

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mPSrPR0

[andirk]

I love rsync. Used it to batch some few million image files for Sephora makeup company to a couple different servers.

[rhaway84773]

And despite being around for 30+ years it’s not broadly adopted despite a significant rise in car thefts.

[vkou]

Is there actually a significant rise in car thefts? Or did we just hit an acute rise in car thefts of two particular models, caused by the discovery (Well, publication, really) that they are still using 30-year-old security?

[janalsncm]

Good question, it seems like car theft is on the rise, yes. And it’s spiking in particular metro areas (Milwaukee, Chicago) more than average, although national trends are also up.

https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CCJ%E2%80...

[andirk]

In California, if youre car is stolen and then found, the cops will give you a fat ticket and tow your car and then give you a ticket for it getting towed. Somehow getting the car towed is also a ticket.

[kid64]

Yep. Shameless re-victimization.

[andirk]

Moving illegally parked cars for the myriad reasons it is necessary is completely understandable. The fuckery, though, is beyond the pale. It should be a fine of the cost of doing business of moving your piece and not a penny more. Instead it's a racket

[mywittyname]

A salient issue has been that Hyundai/KIA didn't implement any anti-theft mechanisms on certain models, and recently the details about how to steal these cars has become popular knowledge, and now people who own the affected models can't even get insurance on them.

There's been some other exploits to infotainment systems, but AFAIK, they are all limited to proof of concepts. And the radio-repeater that almost works occasionally on some cars with wireless key access (better implementations have proximity detection which prevents this attack vector).

As it turns out, immobilizers are pretty damn effective.

If I owned an effected Hyundai/KIA, I'd do like we all did with 90s cars and put a killswitch in. It's not professional car thieves hitting the bulk of these cars, but mostly bored people showing of. So if YT can't show them what to do if the car won't start, they will go away.

[balder1991]

Another question you can ask is was there any incentive before to not report car thefts?

[darau1]

I would say because of how it must be installed, and that it is probably not common knowledge. In my country, it is not unheard of, but I hadn't heard of it until my electrician mentioned seeing one on a car he worked on recently. I asked if he can install one for me, and he said he doesn't know how, nor did he know the name of the person that installed the one on the other car.

[thriftwy]

In some countries, it is.

[xattt]

> On my friends car you had to put the key to ACC, then turn the cruise control on and off, and then engage and disengage the parking brake before the car would start.

That’s a cute trick, but if a current day equivalent is integrated into modern day cars (i.e. CANBUS-based), then the security is already defeated.

No one challenged the security of the “cruise control cheat code” of the 1990s simply because there were no devices small enough. The other bit is that criminals weren’t sophisticated enough.