They’re the data carrying lines, if you cut them it’ll still charge, but no USB data can use the port.

Nothing is perfect. Your goal is to make attacks expensive as shit. Like ideally requiring dozens of hours of electron microscope time to pull off.

You can do a lot to that end though.

Use a mostly read only OS if you can, if you’re enterprising, a custom yocto build with most of the rootfs read only, otherwise a statically defined system like nix that can be readily deleted and rebuilt in minutes. There are configs out there for deleting root on every bootup and having the system automatically repopulate the filesystem. Enable secure boot if you can, it’s frankly your best line of defense. Any of these options are sufficiently weird that designing exploits for them would be a suffer fest.

Forget nail polish, fill screw holes with RTV and if you’re enterprising, the USB ports. At that point you can still get into the system but it’ll be obvious that someone scraped the shit out. You can simply swap the ports for fresh ones with a solder job if needed. If you don’t need this, use epoxy, get some all over the case seam. For the charging port, if it’s USB C PD, I’d need to reread the spec but you should be able to cut D-/D+ and the SS lines with an exacto blade right next to the connector and still be able to charge, just don’t hit the VCC, GND, and CC lines.

Finally, make a kwikset key trap and use it as either a lockbox lock for your stuff or the lock to your house. Kwikset should lull people into a false sense of insecurity but if they try to pick it they’ll suddenly be in a situation where they either need to go overt or somehow replace your lock before you get back. Keep things weird, your goal is to get an adversary, even one with infinite resources, to make ridiculous mistakes.

Depending on the chipset you can usually set rtc wakeup timers, though that typically implies sleep rather than power off so you’d still have some power draw when the device should be off. Similarly, if you’re trying to log GPS you’ll have to wake up for enough time to get a GPS lock so even at something like a 10 minute logging interval you’d get some noticable power consumption. Much much more if you’re trying to log voice or video.

Did you read the article? There were a couple cases were very early Android phones were modified to appear to be off but stayed on. This is fairly common knowledge, but it’s not particularly hard to defeat.

Everything your phone does requires a deterministic amount of power. Spying on people in particular requires even more power than normal because you need to run the power hungry gps in addition to the modem and cpu.

If you turn off the device it should be significantly cooler to the touch, not a degree above ambient. If it’s at 100% charge but a power bank with a read out is showing it still charging, that’s a problem. Is the bootloader image different? You can verify that to some extent. When you turn it back on has it been drawing down the battery anyway? Does it require an unlock password instead of biometrics as it normally would (assuming a particularly sloppy setup)?

This isn’t rocket surgery, in reality nobody is modding everyone’s phone to stay on forever because unless you’re an absolute troglodyte (aka the fucking old school mafia bosses they did this to) it’s going to be painfully obvious your phone is acting weird.

At least that one has an off button

I rented shit at home depot and had to use fucking clear. They’ve broken containment.

No, 9/11 security theatre

Let’s not forget that the Concord failed in 2003. I wonder what started happening around then that made that actual flying part a smaller fraction of the overall time spent traveling…

Even if you can step through a portal and instantaneously get to London from NY, if you still have to go through the rest of the airline process the time savings just isn’t that huge.

The western world has a very black and white view of the conflict. The Taiwanese/Chinese view it in a much more complicated way that’s a bit hard to grasp as a westerner.

Yeah until we literally run out of roofs, fields, parking lots, and fucking ocean space and are contemplating a fucking Dyson sphere I really don’t understand these projects.

If you absolutely have to hand over your phone, turn it off completely, like hold the power button and then tap the off icon. That will dump any keys out of RAM, which is why it always requires the full password to unlock when you turn it back on. Both in terms of how your phone works and the leaks we’ve seen, the cracking tools the police have are overall significantly less likely to be successful when used on a phone that’s been turned off and not unlocked since.

Also, IIRC iphones have a feature where they will dump at least some of the system keys from RAM if you push the lock button five times. I’d still trust fully off more but that’s easier to do covertly.

They mean the Bluetooth MAC address. It’ll capture your phone’s and can tell who the manufacturer is but the rest of the address is randomized. That said, lots of watches/earbuds/assorted smart Bluetooth things aren’t randomized because manufacturers are lazy.

And if your nav system crashes, so does your car

Yes, but it’s harder to fight such a large incumbent when all the money is just going to the incumbent

This seems like an odd move. Let China pay money to use ClosedAI hallucinations instead of using the money to develop their own hallucinations that the US has no insight into.

There’s no technology transfer if they just using the hallucination outputs, it’s just free money for trash.

Intrinsically/semantically no but the expectation is that the texts are encrypted at rest and the keys are password and/or tpm+biometric protected. That’s just how this works at this point. Also that’s the government standard for literally everything from handheld devices to satellites (yes, actually).

At this point one of the most likely threat vectors is someone just taking your shit. Things like border crossings, rubber stamped search warrants, cops raid your house because your roommate pissed them off, protests, needing to go home from work near a protest, on and on.

RF analysis is kinda difficult, you’d need to take the car out into the middle of nowhere and have access to fairly good equipment. A tinySA would maybe work if you’re very patient but data transmissions are generally very bursty so it may be difficult to nail down where it’s coming from in a sane amount of time.

One option would be to try to figure out if there are any FCC filings for your car. All filings will have pictures of whatever module is being used and what antenna systems it uses which may give you a good idea of where it is and what it looks like. There should be an FCC ID mentioned somewhere at the beginning or end of the cars manual. Googling that should bring up some stuff.

Not wrong, but the issue is complex. Drones are very obviously one of the bullets in any upcoming conflict. It’s not really about spying and phoning home, it’s that it would be insane to try to tell China “hey, don’t invade other countries mkay?” And then say “oh also we need ammo to stop you but we don’t have the ability to make brass cases or gunpowder anymore, can you send us some”.

Now, while we “can”, to some extent, manufacture components and complete systems, the thing about a war is that it’s basically a wizard duel but with money hoses. You can’t win if the Chinese are producing slaughter bots for $500 ea and the US equivalent is $100,000 (literally). Congress is praying that this will light a fire under US and more friendly foreign manufacturing supply chains to invest more because they might have a chance of breaking into a lucrative market. That said, it probably just paves the way for a two tiered market where China makes their slaughter bots for $500 and the US makes them for $50,000 but all the civil use cases get caught in the cross fire for the short to mid term…so everyone still loses, just harder.

Its like we’ve adopted the economic policies we forced on third world nations, and found ourselves with a third world economy

Foucault’s boomerang at work, just like US counter insurgency tactics now being employed by US police.

I’m adjacent to the industry. This is dumb but I understand the reasoning. We’re getting left behind in the electronics world. Nobody is creating hardware startups because every few months there’s a viral blog post with a “hardware is hard” title on HN and none of the VC assholes want to fund anything but web based surveillance capitalism ad tech because it’s a surefire way to make money. Even if you do get funded and you’re US based you’re absolutely doing all your manufacturing in China if you’re remotely consumer facing (b2big-b has different rules). That means Chinese companies get all the benefits of all the labor from your highly trained engineers when they get the design files. If you try to build anything at volume in the US you have strikingly few options for boards and parts. Everything is whole number multiples of fucking PCBway and half the time it’s lower quality unless you’re paying aero-defense prices which is the only business anyone wants.