Tech

Could Your Tire Sensors Be Used to Hack Your Car? What to Look Out For

Here’s a case for buying older cars if we’ve ever seen one. Do you drive a vehicle newer than 2008? Your car’s tire pressure system could be used to track your location.. A group of researchers at IMDEA Networks Institute — an English-speaking data networks research organization based in Madrid — discovered this privacy risk after a 10-week study in which they collected roughly 6 million wireless signals from more than 20,000 cars. Their findings point to a serious hacking threat hidden in the tire sensors of most modern vehicles.. The TREAD Act of 2000 mandated that modern cars come equipped with TPMS for road safety. The system works by releasing wireless signals through tiny sensors attached to each tire, which communicate each tire’s pressure information to the car’s electronic control unit. A warning light on the vehicle’s dashboard indicates low tire pressure.. Instead of using a camera with a clear line of sight to the car, hackers can hypothetically track it using the wireless signals emitted by the car’s tire sensors. That signal is continuously sent out as an unencrypted unique ID number.. Basically, anyone nearby with a cheap radio receiver can pick up the signal and later recognize the same vehicle without ever seeing the license plate.. “Our results show that these tire sensor signals can be used to follow vehicles and learn their movement patterns,” Domenico Giustiniano, research professor at IMDEA Networks Institute, said in the peer-reviewed report. “This means a network of inexpensive wireless receivers could quietly monitor the patterns of cars in real-world environments. Such information could reveal daily routines, such as work arrival times or travel habits.”. The researchers were able to capture signals from more than 50 meters away from moving cars, through walls and from inside buildings. The tire pressure readings helped reveal the vehicle type, its weight and the driving pattern of the driver. It’s a cheap, tough-to-detect, potentially covert tracking method.. While this may be a startling discovery, Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET it’s not the only privacy threat in your car’s computer system.. “Any method that can be misused to surreptitiously track people’s movements without their knowledge is concerning,” he said. “But so are all of the technologies in modern cars that intentionally violate drivers’ privacy by collecting and sharing data for purposes of advertising, insurance risk assessment, and more. It’s sad that drivers have to worry about this, and everyone should learn how to protect themselves whenever possible while manufacturers are pressured to do better.”. This isn’t the first time a group of researchers has raised the red flag about this sensor system in cars. A 2010 study by researchers at Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina warned of the potential privacy threat hiding in a vehicle’s tire pressure system. Sixteen years la

Tech

Rabbit’s Cyberdeck is a modern take on a netbook

When you think of an AI-forward PC, you might think of something like NVIDIA’s $3,999 DGX Spark — a computer with enough computing power to run complex large language models locally. That’s not what Rabbit is trying to build with Project Cyberdeck. Instead, the company’s goal is to produce a device tailored for vibe coding, and Engadget was given an exclusive first look at the upcoming PC. Rabbit began working on Project Cyberdeck after the company’s CEO, Jesse Lyu, saw how much his software engineers were using Claude Code. Lyu thought a small form factor PC, like the netbooks that were popular in the late aughts, with a command line interface would be ideal for on-the-go vibe coding, but when he went online to look for something that fit the bill, he was disappointed.”They all come with shitty rubber dome keyboards,” Lyu says of low-cost PCs like the latest Chromebooks, which use flexible silicone sheets under their keys to save on space and cost. “They’re not something you would enjoy typing on for an extended period of time.” So Rabbit decided to build its own device. For inspiration, Lyu and company looked to an unlikely source: the Sony Vaio P. The Cyberdeck takes inspiration from the Sony Vaio P. SonySony’s netbook was only briefly available from the start of 2009 to about the end of 2010. At the time, the 8-inch Vaio P was the world’s lightest netbook, weighing just 1.4 pounds, but it had a host of issues. It was also expensive, costing considerably more than other Intel Atom notebooks of the time. In 2009, the most affordable Vaio P would set you back $900 (about $1,365 adjusted for inflation). With Project Cyberdeck, Rabbit is aiming for a device that costs about $500, and hopefully avoids a similar fate.I saw a few early renders of Project Cyberdeck, which Rabbit isn’t ready to share publicly yet. Imagine a cross between the Rabbit R1, Vaio P and the original Nintendo DS. It looks cute. All the renders had four USB-C ports to allow users to connect the device to external monitors and peripherals, though the actual IO specs are as-yet undecided. The company is in the process of sourcing components and working towards a final design, so details can — and will — change. I saw some of the parts Lyu has been testing in his office, but no final prototype as such. For one, Rabbit still needs to decide on a chipset. The company is aiming for a performance benchmark relative to the Raspberry Pi 5, which has a Broadcom BCM2712 quad-core Arm Cortex A76 processor clocked at 2.4GHz. With 16GB of RAM, the Raspberry Pi 5 can run two external monitors, a capability Rabbit hopes to match with the Cyberdeck. The idea here is to make a device that’s powerful enough it won’t feel slow when it’s communicating with Anthropic and OpenAI’s servers, but affordable enough to make it a no-brainer purchase for developers. The company confirmed Project Cyberdeck will run Linux. Rabbit will allow users to modify the operating system and install any third

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Yeti’s Durable New Portable Power Station Doubles as an Off-Grid Solar Generator and UPS

Goal Zero’s newest portable power station comes with a more durable build and additional capabilities.

Tech

My Favorite Gaming Headphones From SteelSeries Cured My Battery Anxiety

I’ve used a lot of great wireless gaming headsets, but this pair from SteelSeries helped me stop worrying about battery life, making them worth the high price.