I’m sure everyone has heard of or seen this already, but since it doesn’t happen too often, I thought I might as well blog about it. Basically an actor, comedian Eddie Giffin, crashed a 1.5 million dollar Ferrari Enzo….that wasn’t even his. Ouch!
I am sure this is extremely old and I am way behind the times, but I stumbled upon this tonight and laughed out loud. This is quite funny!
I bought a 2006 Honda Civic a few weeks ago and since my wife and I have thouroughly enjoyed the GPS navigation unit in her car, we decided to hunt down (more on this later) a 2006 Civic with GPS navigation as well. Today, while trying to find out how to pipe DVD video to the in-dash GPS navigation LCD screen, I ran across a link on how to hack the splash screen for the Acura/Honda factory GPS navigation units.
It all started with this link. Hack-a-Day covered the original hack by a hacker/coder named Bysin (supposedly has been sent to jail for developing SPAM software and selling it… it is unknown if this is the same guy or not) and posted a link to this page. This page then linked to a thread on the AcuraZINE TSX Forums. And from the AcuraZINE thread I found this link that shows how to hack my car specifically.
I did a lot of reading through the different links and saw a lot of successes as well as a number of screens available for download for the Acura system (well, they actually work on the Honda system, too, but I don’t want to sport an Acura logo in my Civic… even though Acura’s are very, very nice cars!). Guicide posted a very good how-to on hacking the 2006 Honda Civic’s GPS navigation splash screen.
My first attempt at doing this was successful. I am extremely excited about this and hope to be more creative in the future. Here is the original image:
And here is my first attempt at a hacked splash screen. Like I said, I hope to get more creative with this in the future.
The image is a little grainy, but hey, it’s a 256 color bitmap image. That’s the way Honda wanted it. I am assuming the images posted in some of the links above are the original JPEG images and won’t look that clear once they are converted to an 8 or 16-bit, 256 color image. Anyway, I’ll post more images in the future if I can come up with something more clever than what I have posted here.
The image looks really cool in the car. I don’t know if it is because it is different than the original image or if it actually looks kind of cool. Whatever it is, I like it! Below is a photo of the image on my in-dash GPS navigation LCD screen.
Until next time…
Leftlane News has posted an article about car thieves stealing cars using laptops to open the doors and start the car. A lot of modern vehicles come with remote-driven keyless entry and the ability to start the engine remotely as well.
I guess the algorithm used to unlock a car is similar to the ones used to open your garage door. I remember when crooks used to ride around in neighborhoods opening garage doors and breaking into homes. I also remember back in the day that most car alarms had a number of different codes they would use to unlock the doors and some had a completely random code each time. Do we not use the same technology or has the cracking software got increasingly more powerful?
I don’t know what all is involved in breaking these codes to do this but the article states it could take up to 20 minutes to crack a car’s code. Sounds a lot like WEP cracking to me! I wonder if the Airsnort suite of applications work on cars as well?! 
I am sure it is a similar concept. Anyway, this article and use of technology is very interesting.