it's for your own good

[dilletante]

because our cool new car has a fancy computer & electronic display built right into the dash, it can query the various chips in the engine & get a hardware diagnostic dump.

but it won't display it. it's not for you.

if, and only if, you have a cell phone synced to the car via bluetooth, you can push a button to generate the hardware report and

Comments

[twoeleven]

if i had a car like that, i'd take it as a challenge. time for a little recreational SIGINT and perhaps some recreational cryptanalysis.

[chienne_folle]

Wow, THAT'S infuriating!

It wouldn't surprise me if someone, somewhere had figured out how to work around this and get the report for themselves ... then posted the how-to on the web. How to hack into all sorts of things that customers aren't supposed to access is posted on the web, so maybe this is, too?

[intuition_ist]

you know people who could probably make the car divulge things it didn't know it knew. :)