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Daily Archives: December 15, 2024

Hackers Can Jailbreak Digital License Plates to Make Others Pay Their Tolls and Tickets

Wired: “Digital license plates sold by Reviver, already legal to buy in some states and drive with nationwide, can be hacked by their owners to evade traffic regulations or even law enforcement surveillance. Digital license plates, already legal to buy in a growing number of states and to drive with nationwide, offer a few perks over their sheet metal predecessors. You can change their display on the fly to frame your plate number with novelty messages, for instance, or to flag that your car has been stolen. Now one security researcher has shown how they can also be hacked to enable a less benign feature: changing a car’s license plate number at will to avoid traffic tickets and tolls—or even pin them on someone else. Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By removing a sticker on the back of the plate and attaching a cable to its internal connectors, he’s able to rewrite a Reviver plate’s firmware in a matter of minutes. Then, with that custom firmware installed, the jailbroken license plate can receive commands via Bluetooth from a smartphone app to instantly change its display to show any characters or image. That susceptibility to jailbreaking, Rodriguez points out, could let drivers with the license plates evade any system that depends on license plate numbers for enforcement or surveillance, from tolls to speeding and parking tickets to automatic license plate readers that police use to track criminal suspects. “You can put whatever you want on the screen, which users are not supposed to be able to do,” says Rodriguez. “Imagine you are going through a speed camera or if you are a criminal and you don’t want to get caught.”

AirNow.gov – Home of the U.S. Air Quality Index

Get air quality data where you live. Search by zip code, city, or state. “The Air Quality System (AQS), formerly the Aerometric Information Retrieval System (AIRS), is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) repository of ambient air quality data. AQS stores data from over 10,000 monitors, 5,000 of which are currently active. The system contains… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 14, 2024

Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 14, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on… Continue Reading

Old Maps Online

TimeMap.org presents a world map with a slider bar that starts at 4000 BC and ends at the present day. As you slide through time, you watch empires rise and fall. Any interesting civilization or event you spot can be instantly researched — just click on it and the relevant Wikipedia article appears in a… Continue Reading

25 enchanting images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice awards

PopSci – A lounging seal, a bloodied-but-undeterred honey badger, and a cheetah cub given a second chance at life: the finalists for the 2024 Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice awards absolutely captivate. After selecting 100 Wildlife Photographer of the Year finalists from 60,000 entries, the judges picked out an additional 25 images to… Continue Reading

Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits

Pluralistic: “Of course you should do everything you can to prevent fires – and also, you should build fire exits, because no matter how hard to you try, stuff burns. That includes social media sites. Social media has its own special form of lock-in: we use social media sites to connect with friends, family members,… Continue Reading