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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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I think those are reasonable points, I'm not expecting that a few minutes of my thinking about this will solve it, just that a few years of smart tech people will. But I think just the location sharing part would be enough - you'd have to make it hard for the thieves to disable without totaling the car, but I think that's doable (just put it on the car's main board? put it in a random location? idk), and then if the cops just reliably physically repossess the car a few days after it's stolen that should make car theft a lot less attractive. A lot of new cars already have GPS and data.

  1. The adversary knows the location of X if X is transmitting EM.
  2. I think it might be hard to render it impossible for thieves to disable without totalling the car without catastrophic issues. After all, the chip's no good without the antenna, and it might be a bit tricky to enforce "the antenna is capable of transmitting to something" (not broken, and also not shielded) without enforcing "the antenna is in communication with a specific system" (the latter of which means any failure in that system or in connectivity bricks All Of The Cars).

The adversary knows the location of X if X is transmitting EM.

At an extreme, make it only transmit for a few seconds every 24h?

For 2 I don't mean enforce it at a software level, just make it physically difficult to disable