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A NY Times columnist had his car stolen by kids who were possibly using a repeater to rebroadcast his key fob:
Keyless entry systems typically only communicate with their remote fobs over the distance of a few feet, but he thinks that the gadget is capable of extending this range, fooling the car into thinking that the remote is within range even though it was actually in Bilton's House, about 50 feet away. He arrived at this theory after he consulted with Boris Danev, a Swiss-based security expert:
"It's a bit like a loudspeaker, so when you say hello over it, people who are 100 meters away can hear the word, 'hello,'" Mr. Danev said. "You can buy these devices anywhere for under $100." He said some of the lower-range devices cost as little as $17 and can be bought online on sites like eBay, Amazon and Craigslist.
Sounds creative and easy. Maybe those clubs aren't so silly after all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @10:25PM
I made plug wires out of vacuum hose, they looked just like plug wires. Didn't work, you could still start the car, the vacuum hose was somehow letting spark get from the distributor cap to the spark plugs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @12:44AM
Lots of rubber hose is conductive to prevent static charge buildup.
Cool that you found some that would run your spark plugs (assuming you are not bs-ing us).
How well did the engine run under load??
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday April 18 2015, @12:50AM
When I used to leave my car at airport parking lots, I used to take my distributor rotor with me.
I know it won't stop a determined thief, but at least it would make the casual slim-jimmer and hot-wirer work a bit to discover the problem then go get the correct rotor then return. I figured they would not want to attract attention doing hood-up work in the parking lot. At the least, I would force them to use a tow truck.
Another trick I had was a timer in the ignition wiring. It would let them get the car started, get onto the street, then shortly after getting to speed, the engine would shut down, leaving them with a "find out why it doesn't work" problem right in the middle of the street where they are the center of attention.
Anybody seen a Windows process I can launch that does nothing but ping a given address every ten minutes or so? In the event a laptop is stolen, start listening for it on the other machine you have already set up the laptop to ping to. Traceroute to it to find out where it is and who their ISP is...
After my go-around trying to nail "wuauserv", I have found out just how many services are running, and aptly named, it would be damned hard for anyone not intimately familiar with his machine, to discover another one.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @04:04PM
Anybody seen a Windows process I can launch that does nothing but ping a given address every ten minutes or so? In the event a laptop is stolen, start listening for it on the other machine you have already set up the laptop to ping to. Traceroute to it to find out where it is and who their ISP is...
That should be easy enough to do. I'm not intimately familiar with Windows, but I'm sure it has a task schedular you could use to run something. Alternatively you could create a batch file that does this, and have that automatically run on startup, either by putting it in the Startup folder of the start menu or add an appropriate registry entry.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday April 19 2015, @12:58AM
Yeh, I saw how easy that was to do by hiding it in the registry... I would write one, but it would take me some time to code it. I thought maybe someone already had a tidy little executable you could slip in and register it with some keys to tell it what IP to ping. Naturally, I would have it pinging my machine on my business line that has a static IP.
In the event of a missing laptop, I would have my other machine make detailed logs of the laptop's pings, so I could ping it back, traceroute it, and find out at least generally where it was.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]