I will not be buying or renting a Jeep Cherokee.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
BooMan, am I allowed to say holy fuck on your website? ‘Cause that’s all I’ve got. Yikes just doesn’t cover it.
Did you read the article.
It’s only been proven on a jeep Cherokee. Almost any car with one of those “entertainment systems” is vulnerable. So is any car that has a GPS-based navigation system wired into it as well.
Solution?
Don’t buy those systems. My GPS is iPhone-based and I refused the various dealer’s blnadishments regarding how convenient a wired-in entertainment system would as well. A $15 clip on my dashboard hoilds the phone and it’s charged through the cigarette lighter.
Further.
Jeep?
Chrysler?
Near the bottom of the barrel in terms of quality. Still. This doesn’t surprise me. That’s where they have been since Iocacca’s reign. “Build down to the public’s lowest level, advertise like mad and sell cheap” was his tactic. Rolling disasters.
AG
Townsend, not Iacocca. Townsend was a bean counter and a poor one. Chrysler’s McNamara.
Iacocca was responsible for the whole “bailout” movement that eventually led U.S. industry to its current state of semi-disrepair. His baby at Chrysler was the “K car” group, possiby the saddest collection of automobiles ever made in the U.S. Flimsy, dangerously badly handling, and unsafe on any level. Also of very low quality. Yes, they made money. In U.S. parlance, that made him a “good executive.” So it goes. Down like a motherfucker.
AG
The point was Townsend destroyed Chrysler before Iacocca got there.
My point was that Iacocca created himself as a media brand…one of the first non-media figures to do so…and then hustled money from the government to “save” a broken company. He then proceeded to use that money to make the worst cars he could get away with, and the company has never really recovered from that era. Ford recovered first…mostly because it did not take much government money if any… GM second, and Chrysler is dead last. Plus…that era was the death of Detroit and helped usher in the Rustbelt era.
Detroit’s Comeback Kid, eh!!!???!
Nice.
Great work, Lee.
See y’around the mansion.
Later…
AF
Dearborn’s Comeback Kid
Actually Iacocca used his personal brand to sell cars. I cars to be exact. That’s what he was good at since he was at Ford and sold America on the Mustang. I cars weren’t great but they were simple, got good mileage in an energy crisis and they were the first cars to have airbags. Iacocca was the first to use airbag safety as a selling point. GM spent millions and about 20 years lobbying against airbags and Iacocca decided to put them in every car.
The late 70’s Chrysler “bailout” were loan guarantees. Without them Chrysler (and the extensive defense businesses they had at the time) would have closed shop at a time of recession, sky high interest rates, and double digit inflation. Letting them fail at that time wasn’t ever seriously considered by serious folks though everyone was uncomfortable saving them.
Iacocca is a dick and he wasn’t much of a CEO for a ton of reasons including that the company was nearly bankrupt again when he retired and was only saved by Lutz, Eaton and the ’96 caravan update.
As for the decline in the Michigan economy, GM idiocy holds much more blame than Chrysler just by virtue of their size, but there is a long list of villains to pick from.
Finally, Chrysler didn’t really get saved by a bailout. They were given mandates and cash just enough to make it possible to find a buyer. They were a dysfunctional penny pinching mess with a severely bloated dealer network. In short, Obama flipped them. Now They are owned by Fiat and have an Italian CEO. The Chrysler 200 is an outstanding car and replaced the most un-sellable Sebring. The new Cherokee is miles better in terms of quality compared to the past.
But I still wouldn’t buy one any time soon because there many other cars that meet my needs and tastes better.
” They were a dysfunctional penny pinching mess with a severely bloated dealer network. ”
Just like they were under Townsend. Must be corporate culture like the “GM nod”. Anyplace that I ever worked the GM nod would get you fired pronto. But GM was for generations a hotbed of nepotism. I suppose that’s why the GM nod works. “You can’t fire him, he’s X’s nephew.”
Corporations are racing into the “internet of things”. The NSA is developing even more “zero day exploits” on our tax money and fighting universal encryption. And corporations are so lax on their own IT security that they are losing their customers data in huge hacks.
And the cybersecurity geniuses who run the government national security agencies are beggin Congress for even more power.
I said after Stuxnet that the most information-dependent economy on earth should not be developing the largest arsenal of offensive cyber weapons and then using them. We have absolute madness going on in IT security and it makes everyone vulnerable. Meanwhile the bright IT guys are invented ever more clever hacks and not figuring out defense.
If the OPM hack did not show what sitting ducks we are when the first massive deployments of self-driving automobiles are deployed. Oh yes, that the direction that this technology in the Jeep was going.
This is possible with all GM cars. Even if you don’t pay for Onstar, it is still alive and GM can kill the engine and lock the doors if it is stolen. Or, surely, if a hacker gets in. GM can also listen to conversations as can Samsung Smart TV’s. I never discuss politics or money if the TV is on (shades of 1984). Samsung has actually been cxaught and “apologized”.
Don’t know about Ford. Probably similar.
BYW, an electronics technician (and first rate paranoid) that I worked with claims that Onstar is embedded so deeply that if you remove the box, the car dies. You need a box that mimics Onstar.
If a couple of hackers can do this, imagine what big budget, cyber-spooks are capable of doing.
I miss black, rotary dial phones.
Heh– Valasek and Miller are two of the best security exploit programmers out there, anywhere. The “big budget” governmental agencies don’t have the best people (unless they go to Black Hat and recruit them!).
The criminal gangs are not particularly big-budget…
But there are only two of them, not a team that’s working full time.
And people make fun of my 1988 Pontiac 6000 LE Safari wagon. Heh.
Certainly makes me happy I drive a 2006 Scion xB with none of those expensive bells and whistles. I’d already been planning to keep my little box on wheels till it died; this encourages the resolution.
Miss my 1993 Buick Roadmaster. Traded it in with 192K and it was still running good. 5K miles between adding oil and never any trans work other than fluid changes. With a set of Goodyear Tripletreds it rode through snow like a tank. Seats felt like a Barcalounger.
Not sure, but if your car’s computer system doesn’t have an assigned ip address (i.e. not directly connected to the internet), I think it is not easily vulnerable to hacking. I don’t see how you could gain control through a built-in gps or digital radio. The signals being sent back and forth between your radio or gps and the satellite do not contain a hackable instruction set, in my (fairly weak) understanding of such systems.
You can’t hack a computer that isn’t connected to the network without sitting down in front of it, at a connected terminal– thats one way that the computers at the national labs are kept safe from hackers.
The problem with the jeep and other vehicles like it is that it does have an ip address, and so it can be hacked.
Apparently the most vulnerable models were those that were being engineered for remote diagnosis of problems by the manufacturer’s service operation. Some IT folks think this is an evolutionary midpoint in moving the technology to self-driving vehicles (which Google is reported working on) in which remote service departments can fiddle with problems like NASA does in keeping space probes going.
The computer security exports who conducted the demonstration for Wired are trying to get the public aware that a lot of the technology is being rushed forward without adequate consideration of the security implications of interfacing the internet to devices that do some serious stuff instead of just displaying information.
The other thing at issue is the business model for this new technology. It is likely to be a service model instead of a product model. That has some risk implications for the companies that will be deploying those services.
Like Windows remote access.
I’ll stick with my prehackable 2002 Mazda Millenia, complete with factory cassette player and cd.
I’d never buy an American car, period. Daimler, though German, is not a shadow of the company it once was. Not that any manufacturer is above getting hosed in this way. New and complex technology inevitably has bugs that smart hackers can exploit. Reading this, I’m glad to be driving a 13 year old BMW. It doesn’t even have bluetooth. My wife’s car is a 7 year old Lexus. No one will be remotely hijacking either.
I’ll bet the new models have all the gadjets.
When they can hack a toaster the prophecy will be fulfilled.
I just bought a 1996 Toyota diesel 4WD pick-up with 61k on the clock which could probably tow that Jeep Cherokee inverted all the way up Pikes Peak.
One of the comments made in the article was about designing cars now to be smartphones. Personally, I don’t want a smartphone car. I want a safe, comfortable, reliable car that gets me where I want to go. The more crap you add to it, the more things there are to break down.
We continue to make things better and better till they are …..not.
OT: Another unfortunate accident happens to a prominent neo-con.
John Helmer, Dances with Bears: RADEXIT AND APPOPLEXIT – RADOSLAW SIKORSKI AND ANNE APPLEBAUM ARE BOOTED OUT OF POLAND
Yes, consider the source. But the events look like a guy who traded on his electoral office to legitimize his wife’s neo-conservative agenda in the US might have had an unfortunate political accident.
OT:
Because…ALL Lives Matter…right?
……………………………..
Black Woman Locked In Psych Ward For 8 Days Because Cops Couldn’t Believe She’s A Businesswoman
Author: Kerry-Anne March 24, 2015 1:41 pm
An African American business woman from Long Island was drugged and locked in a hospital psych ward for eight days because first police, and then doctors could not believe her high-powered career was real.
The hideous ordeal began last September as 32-year-old former Citigroup banker Kam Brock drove her BMW through Harlem. The NYPD pulled her over, accused her of being high on marijuana and impounded her car. No weed was ever found in the vehicle.
The next day, she went to pick up her vehicle and confronted officers about her treatment. She was forcibly sedated, cuffed, and sent to Harlem Hospital. On arrival, she was locked up in the psych ward as an `Emotionally Disturbed’ person.
“Next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out,” Brock recalls. “I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.”
But this was only the beginning of her nightmare. As the New York Daily News reports:
Kam Brock’s frightening eight-day `One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ ordeal at the mental facility included forced injections of powerful sedatives and demands she down doses of lithium, medical records obtained through her suit filed in Manhattan Federal Court show.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/03/24/black-woman-locked-in-psych-ward-for-8-days-because-cops-cou
ldnt-believe-shes-a-businesswoman/
hope she sues the h* out of them and gets her story made into a few Lifetime movies to publicize it even more
OFFS. So much for De Blasio’s political future. Bratton’s locked him in isolation too.
Shades of Soviet practice under Stalin. I hope she can bankrupt the city and sue the officers personally.
The asset seizure law drove this one. The NYPD officers wanted to auction off that BMW.
This case and the one in Waller TX also raises the possibility of rape occurring.
This is increasingly looking like a cop war on the public.
Keep in mind the hackers themselves said this is a really hard time consuming thing to do and must be done one car at a time. Not something someone/a hacker will take on unless they want to murder an individual.
That said this should serve as a wake up call.
Finally, many of these electronic devices also optimize engine management and greatly increase fuel mileage and/or lengthen the life of the car. All good for the consumer and environment.