09:11 – Barbara is off getting an oil change and inspection for our 1993 Isuzu Trooper. I just realized that the Trooper is old enough to drink in all 50 states. Other than getting the Trooper done, cleaning house, and mowing the lawn, she’s taking the weekend off. She’s playing golf tomorrow with her friend Bonnie.
Kit sales remain good, particularly international sales. After shipping three more science kits to Australia yesterday, I finally got an order from Canada, the first this month. Normally, 90%+ of our international kit sales are to Canada, but that’s sure not true this month.
More science kit stuff for me today and tomorrow. I’m trying desperately to get ready for the second half of the month, when kit sales will really spike. Barbara’s going off to a week-long craft thing with Bonnie later this month, so it’ll be just me.
Hah, per our conversation regarding drone defenses of a little while ago:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3190146/Caught-Fisherman-manages-reel-drone-flying-high-San-Diego-pier.html
A fishing pole and some practice casting WILL catch you a drone 🙂
nick
I’ll bet on my Shilka.
In the Great State of Texas, we have moved to a common registration and inspection sticker. To get your registration sticker now, you must have had a vehicle inspection performed in the last 90 days with proof in the state computer system. And proof of liability insurance. Nothing can go wrong with this process, right?
http://www.ksat.com/content/pns/ksat/news/2015/04/23/drivers-feel-texas-two-step-confusion.html
I had heard that the vehicle registration stickers were going to be RFID’d a couple of years ago but I have not heard anything about that recently. The chip will be just like the EZ tag for the tollways. Surely they will not track our vehicles. Surely not.
They do already.
TxDOT and the toll road authority use antennas to read your tag as you pass certain landmarks, and under some bridges. It’s how they get the traffic speed info for the TranStar App. They also read bluetooth devices as they pass. They insist that nothing about the bluetooth is personally identifiable, and anyway they don’t keep the data long…..
Cell tower records are commonly used by law enforcement to establish that your phone, and then likely you, were at or near a place at a given time. In Canada those same records were subpenaed in a civil divorce case. Haven’t heard of any civil use in the US.
The cops are spoofing cell towers now (google stingray device) to collect masses of data from unsuspecting and UNSUSPECTED (ie innocent) people. It’s so secret that jurisdictions have dropped prosecution rather than have to explain the system in court.
I haven’t confirmed it, but I suspect that the traffic speed data on surface streets, shown on google maps, comes from unwitting uploads by people running the app. (when the app says it needs access to your data connection, most people assume that is so it can DOWNload, never guessing that it is UPloading their position and speed…) I bet that law enforcement has access to that data if they want it.
But if you aren’t doing anything wrong, why would you object?
nick
Right? Right? And it’s SO useful, right?
Supposedly, the Transtar system does a one-way hash on the RFID from the toll tag to get speeds. If so, they can’t track after the fact.
It would be interesting to do an FOIA request on the source code.
And it is d@mned hard to find any real info on it. I finally came across an article this year that had the bluetooth usage info in it. Now that I know what to look for, I see the readers all over the place.
nick
Even creepier, as a way to track advertizing effectiveness, someone can track what radio station you have playing in the car, using spurious emissions as you pass their monitoring point. IIRC in the article the monitor was located in a roadside billboard. There are a lot of spurious and inadvertent emitters in your car. I’m sure you could get a snapshot as cars passed, if you were sufficiently motivated.
Nick – maybe there’s a market for retrofitted TEMPEST qualified automobiles …
Tracking FM radio station usage by local oscillator leakage has been around a long time – I recall reading about it at least 20 years ago.
@jack, and wouldn’t that pretty much make them EMP resistant too?
Let’s see, grounding straps and foam at every gap, gold foil on the windows, what am I missing?
nick
OH and when they fail inspection, the inspector has to say “Sorry, I can’t tell you WHY you failed, it’s classified.”
Connecticut did away with registration stickers. They used to go on the rear license plate, but there were too many problems with them being stolen, or just not getting around to putting them on. (I carried mine around in the glove compartment quite a while.) We don’t have safety inspections but we do have emissions tests and they stopped putting stickers inside the windshield. The cops go by what their computer says.