This article in Wired considers the vulnerabilities of supposedly theft-proof electronic systems. Turns out there are “back-doors” in some of these technologies.

He called an acquaintance who worked at a Honda dealership. I listened, awestruck, as Montes fed the guy a barely credible story about a cousin who had dropped his keys down a sewer. The dealership employee was at home but evidently could access the Honda database online. I gave Honky’s VIN to Montes, who passed it along to his friend. We soon had the prescribed sequence of pulls, which I scribbled down in my notebook.

I walked outside and approached Honky. The door lock would have been easy – a thief would have used a jiggle key, and a stranded motorist would have had a locksmith cut a fresh one. I just wrapped the grip of my key in tinfoil to jam the transponder. The key still fit, but it no longer started the car.

Then I grabbed the emergency brake handle between the front seats and performed the specific series of pumps, interspersed with rotations of the ignition between the On and Start positions. After my second attempt, Honky’s hybrid engine awoke with its customary whisper.

The story is interesting on many levels, but I was really taken by the interface to this back door. Our user model for automobile controls sees the different systems as entirely separate. Who knew the emergency brake could talk to the ignition?

I have always loved the idea of neat little tricks; unexpected ways of interacting with something, outside of the fixed rules of how you’re supposed to use it. It’s not so much the idea of unauthorized access, but simply the secret Toontown world that lurks beyond the mundane and familiar. I remember during the dial telephone era there was a way to get your own phone to ring back (it may have worked with tone, but I remember it as a dial hack); Dial 57 and the last 5 digits (or something) and then hang up, or hang up twice in succession. And the phone would ring. Great for messing with family members or when visiting someone else’s house.

The outcome was fun, but I’ll emphasize that much of the pleasure came from this possibility of navigating cleverly outside the interaction flow of receiver/dial tone/dialing/ringing/other party answering.

Sure, we’ve got Google hacks nowadays where there oodles of hidden functions, but it’s basically a command-line interface that reads more codes that you know about. So what? Isn’t that what Unix was? The delight (and I’m not talking about usefulness, just the fun and discovery) comes from the rupturing of the interaction model and the seemingly irrelevant actions leading to some new effect.

I don’t need anyone to reveal security vulnerabilities, but I’d be curious to hear about any favorite back doors!

Famed blogger/writer/Internet-activist Cory Doctorow will custom-inscribe his books for you

If you’re interested in a signed, inscribed copy of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town or my collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, you can call, fax, or email your order to the store, and they’ll get me to sign copies with your inscription.

So if you pay your money, Cory “has to” write whatever you tell him? Oh, hilarity could ensue! Someone needs to coordinate many purchases (yeah, this prank isn’t free. You have to buy the book) and similar requests for inscriptions.

Perhaps, recycle some existing Cory-friendly memes:

• The Internets are tubes
• All Your Base Are Belong To Us
• Snacks On A Plane
• Y’arr I’m a pirate

or, make up your own future meme and hope that Cory blogs about it when he gets millions of inscription requests

• Donuts are for rolling, not strolling
• Deely boppers, my ass
• I ate my own tickle

or, make fun of the author or the book

• This book sucks
• I didn’t write this book
• I hope you hate this book

or, take on some of Cory’s information/free/privacy causes

• I hereby certify that I did not write this book
• This book is hereby released under a Creative Commons license
• I do not need to see your privacy policy
• Steal this identity

I’m sure someone can do better than I can. Any ideas?

Some interesting innovations in products (both aimed at kids) that help you complete a feedback-less task more effectively.

Squidsoap [via Strange New Products

] is a pump that puts black ink on your hands when you pump out the soap; your hands are clean when they are free of ink (and happily, also free from invisible germs and gunk).

Listerine Agent CoolBlue is similar to good ol’ Disclosing Tablets; it stains the placque on your teeth so you can see where you need to go back and brush.

Cleaning is a great category for this sort of thing; as we are more afraid of germs that we can’t detect, we need some mechanism in our tasks to ensure that we’re completing them properly. Consider vacuuming; one way to know you’re done with the carpet is that you stop hearing the noise of dirt shooting past the rollers.

I’ll be keeping my eyes open for other examples like this.

I attended the interactive city summit earlier this week (held in SF as part of ISEA2006: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge.)

It was an unusual event for me to attend, since the bulk of the people seemed to be strongly into the issues around new urbanism, planning, technology of the future civic life, if-you-can-dream-it interactivity, etc. I admit I hadn’t thought about this stuff in great depth and so it was a lot of new thinking; although many of the examples shown were things that go through the design and technology sections of the blogosphere I frequent.

I think like so many events, this one struggled a bit with the identity. They repeated the notion of a summit several times, and one possible output was a document that could be sent to a city planner or a design planner or any number of agencies. But an event with a goal like that – a goal of producing a collective output – needs to really structure and facilitate the discussion and creation of output. The emphasis here was on invited presentations (and some good freewheeling discussion), and on quickie presentations from attendees. I don’t see how that sort of content can accomplish the stated goal. And that’s okay, I think the format wasn’t bad. We had the usual problems with acoustics and presenters with tiny type, presentations that ramble without a clear thesis to support, heavily accented presenters, etc. but I think for the most part it was a pretty good event.

Matt Jones gave a stimulating hyperlinked talk (while the laptop-enabled in the audience checked out links and videos concurrently). He showed us this amazing video of the Sultan’s Elephant – an artistic spectacle that you must check out.

There was a great presentation from Rebar, who did the widely blogged PARK(ing) project, where they created small parks in parking spaces; putting down sod, a bench and a plant in a parking space and feeding the meter for a couple of hours.

Troika spent a lot of their time defending themselves (needlessly?) from their work in the commercial domain, under the rhetoric of art vs. design. I didn’t fully understand their stance. They showed the widely blogged SMS Guerilla Projector; a handheld device that takes a text message from a phone and projects it at great distances. In some experiments they shone messages into people’s apartments, and they bemusedly described people calling the police. Ha ha? Their next slide was about empathy, which they seemed to have none of; creating technology experiences that surprise and sometimes frighten people, so they can study their reactions? They need to take a look at an ethics committee guidelines for human subjects! (NB: I was reminded of the disturbing potential for this stuff when I saw Rob Walker’s post about a popular (among cynical edgy youth, no doubt) text message in Iraq: “Your call cannot be completed because the subscriber has been bombed or kidnapped.”

In an excellent lunchtime discussion we brainstormed on the key issues where technology impacts urban life, and it seemed to me that most of the issues fell into three piles: preserving old stuff, ensuring we don’t fuck up the old stuff (those are different), and enabling new stuff. Of course, today I see this post about the closing of an historic neighborhood store. The post is not significantly high-tech (it uses pictures, and it has a broader reach since it’s on the Internet), and is not significantly unique, but I enjoyed mmediately stumbling across an example of a model that we were just refining.

I took public transit in from Montara both days, trying BART on the first day and MUNI the second day. Thinking I was pretty smart, I drove up to Stonestown Galleria on 19th, parked my car, and took the MUNI right to the front of the place. When I came back after lunch, my brand new car was gone. Towed. The conference was free (including food) but this stupid mistake cost me nearly $300 in fees and taxi! Not to mention stress and wasted time. And somewhat ironic, given the conversations we had been engaging in around surveillance, technology, privacy, and the like. How did they know that I wasn’t a customer at the mall and I wasn’t shopping while my car was there? I parked around 9:35, and the towing receipt read 10:30. What time did they call the towing company in order for them to be writing the thing up at 10:30? Couldn’t have been much after I parked. Did a security guard simply observe me walking away from my car and onto the transit platform? If I had gone into McDonald’s and then come out again, would they have figured it out? Were they monitoring me, or the car in the lot?

I’m not defending my choice, or their response, but it certainly raises some questions about how the heck they knew. Liz Goodman had just mentioned the highway signs that tell you your speed and if you are over, and she commented on the different emotional impact and social perception of a technology that monitors you for your information and a technology that monitors you for someone else’s usage. The highway sign, in her example, doesn’t write you a ticket, or tell the cops, it simply tells you about your behavior, presumably to warn or shame you into driving normally (or to reinforce your choice of compliance). I certainly wondered about whatever technology was used to identify my misdeed.

Click to enlarge
Two items across the gutter (in the business section of the SF Chron, of all places) that use similar exercising imagery. One is literally for exercise gear; the other is a metaphor.

The left-hand ad is for a Soloflex gizmo that vibrates. And you stand it on and lose weight.

?

Sounds like something from The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices! Soloflex, supposedly a brand we’re familiar with (the first TV infomercials on film, the earliest users of infomercials for exercise equipment), offering ridiculous quackery!

The perhaps ironic/perhaps not references to God are also strange.

During our recent vacation we took an interisland flight from Honolulu to Lihue on Kauai. The Honolulu terminal is laid-back, to put it mildly. I’ve boarded from the tarmac elsewhere and it’s usually very clear where you can and can’t walk; with barricades, and people blocking your path and pointing which way to go.

Not so in Honolulu. The boarding area is rectangular, with one wall facing the tarmac and a series of doors, each a different gate. When you go through the gate and surrender your ticket, they tell you nothing about where to go next. You are standing on the tarmac facing a whole bunch of planes. Each gate leads to roughly the same place, with no wayfinding or anything to guide your passage to the plane itself.

We looked at the different logos and figured which gathering of small planes would be the one from our airline and we started wandering that way. Some passengers were cutting across the open paved space, others were walking along the edges. Eventually we found some ground crew who tried to figure out which plane we should be on; but the interaction was so slack that clearly this was not part of their ordinary role.

It hardly seemed safe; it absolutely wasn’t secure, and it was ridiculous customer service. There’s a difference between the Aloha Spirit and just leaving people to fend for themselves with no information or guidance. I wasn’t impressed.

CanUX 2006

is announced. You can see a cheesy picture of me on that site if you click on the 13 in the banner. Geez, last year (when I was a speaker) they didn’t have a website!

Great event last year, wonderful location, good vibe. It was ridiculously cheap last year; this year it’s extremely reasonable.

Peter was bored by The Descent and his post finally motivated me to write about their use of Dali in the poster (except that Dali’s piece was a a Human Skull Consisting of Seven Naked Women’s Bodies and the six Descent ladies are certainly clothed)

The Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in Nanjing, China offers a seemingly inevitable user experience: permission to abuse the staff. You can break stuff, yell, or even hit the folks who work there (one wonders if this would be any fun if sanctioned). Local psychology students are also available for personal counselling. Argument Sketch, anyone?

[via Slashfood]

Now hiring, Honolulu, HI

Employment opportunities in a tourist economy.