Divemedic

Subscribing to Your Car

Imagine that you just bought a brand new or even a used 4×4. Then imagine that you can’t use the optional equipment without paying a monthly fee to the manufacturer. The air conditioner costs $15 a month, the ability to tow a trailer is $20 a month, and engaging the four wheel drive sets you back $40 a month. Heck, even the seat warmers cost $4 a month. It will cost you $20 a month to use your key fob to remotely unlock or start your vehicle. Sounds crazy, right? Who would buy a $45,000 truck, only to have to pay more to use most of the features that you already paid extra for?

Auto manufacturers are already doing it, and they stand to make billions in profits with the new scheme that doesn’t require them to do a thing to rake in the dollars. Toyota has already started the project. So have BMW, Subaru, Ford, Lexus, GM, and Tesla. If you think that you are immune because you own a used vehicle, think again.

Buried in the agreements that you signed when you bought the vehicle, the manufacturer retains all rights to the options installed in your car. They are letting you use them as part of a free trial. Ever since the 2018 model year, these hidden restrictions have been installed in software of new cars, allowing them to turn virtually anything in your vehicle into a subscription service that can be taken away from you at the manufacturer’s whim. You are one over the air software update from getting fleeced.

Some of the options proposed: limiting the performance of your car unless you pay extra, limiting the range of electric vehicles unless you pay extra for “bonus miles,” as well as simpler things like options and extras.

The last time I posted on this, I predicted that a new industry would take off: an industry centered around hacking your car. It turns out that I was correct. That day is already here. I drive an F150, and people are already doing some interesting hacks on Ford vehicles. Enter a piece of software called FORScan. You can already do some interesting things. Reprogramming your temperature gauges to bee more than just meaningless scales, for one thing.

Adding options that aren’t available to your model like automatic folding mirrors, daytime running lights, and more are possible.

Manufacturers are already taking steps to combat this, but the war over controlling vehicles is happening. Manufacturers are putting in software the requires you to be an authorized mechanic to access the electronics on the car.

One repair industry executive told a conference in January 2020 that he had heard of “at least two [other]” car makers moving toward an authorized-access model. Volkswagen may be one of them. Ross-Tech’s Vega said that the electric ID.4 is the first U.S. Volkswagen model with Vehicle Diagnostic Protection, requiring authentication from VW servers to alter nodes. Volkswagen (which did not return emails for comment) has seemingly not offered access to customers, or software like VCDS. As of July 2021, VCDS’s founder and its most fervent customers were trading anger, disbelief, and Right to Repair links in a long-running thread.

I don’t see it as any different than the fight over unlocking your cell phone, but with this much money at stake, you can bet it will be a big fight. In fact, I have already done a few hacks to my truck. I got rid of that annoying automatic start/stop feature in my F-150, for one thing.

By Divemedic, ago

Snack Wars

My wife works as a teacher. Most teachers keep a mini fridge in the classroom for storing their lunches (mostly due to school food being hideous). One of the substitute teachers that works at her school is famous for eating the food out of the rooms of the teachers he substitutes for.

Once, he at half of a teacher’s candy bar and left a Post-It note stuck to it that read “Sorry, I was hungry.” There were teeth marks still in the candy bar. Teachers all over the school have complained about this guy.

I was talking to one of my wife’s friends, and she was upset because she has been out of school for a couple days, caring for her mother. She left her daughter’s lunches (who is a student at the school) in her fridge and the substitute ate them all. This woman is pissed.

So in typical Divemedic fashion, I suggested a mechanical ambush. My suggestion is that they make some cookies using chocolate flavored laxative as the chunks, then leave them in your fridge with a note saying “don’t eat these.” Then if he eats them, it’s not on you. I was shot down.

Whatever. I bet he would never eat your food again.

By Divemedic, ago

Cracker Ass Crackers

Scratch a liberal and you will find a racist. The mayor of New York joins a long list of Democrats who get to make racist comments while no one in the press seems to care. Listen as he calls white cops a bunch of “crackers.”

Surprising no one, no one cares when a liberal is a hypocrite. If the left didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all. If Hizzonor gets to call the cops that work for him “crackers,” do cops get to return the favor?

Let’s be honest here.

It’s important to recognize that the people in the cancel culture are not actually offended.

They PRETEND to be offended. Why? Because that’s where the power is. They just want the power to ban people who think, speak or write differently. They’re using the gimmick, the tools, any means available.

Remember, the hard core left believes “by any means necessary.” If it means pretending to be offended for now, that’s what they’ll do. Whenever they can drop the mask and rule with a naked fist, that’s just what they do.

This began years ago, when young women realized that they could destroy any man they wished, merely by alleging sexual harassment. I came to realize this one day when I saw a young woman at one job who had filed several harassment complaints, but would also run over and plop into the lap of male employees, as long as those men were attractive.
It’s about power, and alleging that you are offended grants certain people with immense power.

By Divemedic, ago

Antifa is Just an Idea

It turns out that the car driven through the crowd at the Quebec trucker’s rally (edited to correct my error) in Canada that I posted about yesterday was driven by an Antifa operative.

Dave Zegarac was arrested and taken into custody an hour after the attack following a brief struggle with police. According to CBC news, David Zegarac is a far left Antifa activist. He now faces 11 charges: four counts of assault with a weapon, two counts of dangerous operation of a conveyance causing bodily harm, dangerous operation of a conveyance, two counts of failure to stop after an accident knowing that the driver was reckless, and two counts of failing to stop at the scene of an accident.

According to his Wikipedia page, David  Zegarac is a 43-year-old musician from Winnipeg who describes himself as Indigenous, Serbian and Irish. He was a member of several Canadian punk bands. According to multiple women and his Wiki page, his record label dropped him in 2015 because the only way this incel Antifa commie loser could get laid was to rape women. In my opinion, he has probably since moved on to buying small dogs and large jars of peanut butter.

By Divemedic, ago

Tyranny in Canada

For two years, we have been watching as people the left have been calling “peaceful protesters” killed people, burned down cities, and took over city blocks at gunpoint.

Then the left began to say that anyone who refused to follow mask and vaccine mandates deserves whatever they get in the form of violent physical attacks.

Some Canadian truckers decided to protest by parking trucks in Quebec and honking their horns. That, to the left, is violence that goes too far.

Now the cops are threatening the arrest of anyone who brings food, water, fuel, or any other supplies to the protesters. The blockade was supposed to begin at midnight, but the cops aren’t waiting.

My advice to the truckers: Do what the left has been doing. Wait for the cops to commit violent acts. Make sure a dozen people stream video of the event out on the Internet. Make them famous for beating up an old woman who is handing out sandwiches to hungry protesters.

Right now, it is the court of public opinion that matters. We need as many undecideds, as many soccer moms as possible to see the communists for what they are. Make THEM look like the crazy paranoid nutjobs.

Right now, this is about winning the PR battle. If we can get Suzie Soccermom on board, we win and they lose. If we can get a million trucks to simply stop delivering, they will HAVE to cave. The country will descend into chaos within 48 hours of no food deliveries.

Make it so no one gets food if the protesters in Quebec don’t get food.

By Divemedic, ago

Computer Security Problems

My wife and I got a security alert that our personal information was found on the dark web. I decided to do a computer security update on both of us, including checking her password wallet. We use LastPass to store our passwords.

The idea being that all you have to do is know the master password for the LastPass, and then allow LastPass to generate and store all of the other passwords you need. They can be as long and complicated as you need them to be. I began using it after I struggled with passwords a decade ago.

With a tool like that, there is no need for short, easy to remember passwords that are easy to guess or on the list of weakest passwords. There is no need to reuse a password. You can use a random password like Defw;n%348mEoi and know that no one is going to guess it, you will never need to remember it, and as long as you keep the master password secure, things are great. You password is stored in an encrypted format that uses your master password as the decryption key. No one, not even the company that makes LastPass, can access your wallet without knowing the master password.

The app will even generate secure passwords for you at the touch of a button. You can the specify the length of the password, as well as characters used. I have mine generate 15 character passwords that contain an upper case letter, lower case letter, numerical digits, and symbols.

That is why I was so disappointed when I opened our LastPass wallets to run the built in password security analyzer. It checks all of your stored passwords to ensure that they are strong, and that they are not duplicated. My score was fine, a 94 out of 100. My wife’s security score was a 50.2. I opened the detailed report to see why. That was when I discovered that she had more than 200 passwords stored, and:

  • 140 of them were classified as “weak” passwords.
  • 112 of them were duplicates of another password.
  • 40 of the “weak” passwords had a score of less than 10 out of 100
  • 10 of the duplicates were the word “password” or a variation of it
  • 5 of the duplicates were simply her name

Even worse, her master password was one of the passwords stored in her wallet. Now to the positive side, the passwords to financial accounts and other high risk passwords were valid, high security ones with scores of 75 to 100. She just didn’t see the risk to having low security passwords to store shopping accounts like those used for customer loyalty cards or online shopping retailers.

So we had to have a conversation about computer security, why I pay for us to have a secure password wallet, and why it’s a bad idea to not use it correctly. I had to point out to her that computer criminals are more active that ever before, and barely a week goes by that we don’t get a notice that one company or another that we do business with has had a data security breach.

Imagine that you do business with an online retailer. Say, an online pet supply store. Their data is compromised. The hackers now have your name, address, password, your pet’s name, and your email address. They now cross reference that email address to others retailer where you reused the same password. Now they are gaining small, seemingly insignificant details of your life until they hit the big one- they gain your SSN, credit card number, and date of birth from a breach of your hospital’s computers.

So I am spending time today to correct and update all of her passwords. My goal is to get her security score above a 75 by the time this post goes live.

ANOTHER TIP FOR SECURITY: LastPass allows you to store secure notes for each retailer. For your security questions, have the password generator create another random password and store that in the notes as the answer to your question. Then if you ever need it, you have a secure answer to that question about your mom’s maiden name that some hacker can’t get from another source.

DISCLAIMER: As usual, I will inform everyone that the products and services I mention on this site are not paid advertisements. I have no connection to them whatsoever, other than being a paying customer. I receive no discounts or special pricing beyond that which is available to anyone else in the general public.

By Divemedic, ago

Hungry Like the Wolf

When I was a teacher for those seven years, I got to see the weird and stupid things that teens and children do on an industrial scale. We had one group of students who called themselves the “wolfpack.” They dressed with ears and tails and travelled the hallways of the school in a well, pack.

When one would howl, you would hear the rest of them howl in response, even when separated by an entire schoolyard.

When one of them was being bullied, the other members of the pack would rush to defend their mates. This was probably the most sane part of the entire thing.

They went to the school office and demanded to all be assigned to the same class schedule so they could remain with their packmates. The school denied the request.

I was reminded of that story when I read this article from the Daily Mail that I found because of wirecutter. The person in this article is obviously unhappy with himself. He first decided that he wasn’t a man and declared himself to be a woman. Even though the article keeps using the pronoun “she,” this nutbar is actually a man pretending to be a woman who thinks he is a wolf. Or something. Is that literally violence to refer to transspecies people as people? Or does that only apply to transgender? What pronoun does a wolf use? This shit literally gives me a headache.

At its core, trans anything is the manifestation of a mental illness. It is a psychosis that the psychology industry has decided is no longer a mental illness. From my favorite Christmas movie:

You believe yourself to be Judge Harper, yet no one questions your sanity because you are Judge Harper.

In this case, the loon appears not to be a danger to others. In that case, I don’t care if he believes himself to be a woman or a wolf. Just don’t ask me to play along with him.

On a side note: The only good version of Miracle on 34th Street is the 1947 version in black and white, starring Maureen O’Hara and Natalie Wood. The abomination that was the colorized version doesn’t count, nor does the 1994 remake

By Divemedic, ago