Carlton Supporters Club

I've been driving a Kia Sportage Hybrid for the past 5 weeks.

5.2L/100km (35% less than equivalent non-hybrid) and a full tank range of 860km.

I think I have the best of both worlds.......

I liked the look of the Turbo Diesel Sportage, think I read it did 5.4km on the hwy. Thought for less money than the Hybrid  it was the value pick in the Sportage range  being AWD and having a bit more grunt than the hybrid.

I was listening to the wireless the other day when the motoring program came on.  The usual expert (Toby Hagon I think) was talking about the influx of cheaper Chinese EVs and the impact they’re starting to have on car sales.

A talkback caller asked about the Chinese EVs being used for surveillance and intelligence gathering.  To my surprise, Toby agreed with the caller and proceeded to itemise the ways that modern vehicles could be used to collect information about their drivers and what gets caught on dash cams.  AI means that it’s now possible to process all of that data in the hope of gleaning something useful.

I’m sure that bad actors and other nefarious characters will be licking their lips in anticipation of finding out what I’m up to.  Good thing the 79 Series has bugger all in the way of electronics 😇

So if I get a bearing on all the info circulating on the internet, Chinese hardware and Russian websites are benign, but vaccines have microscopic integrated circuits in them that track our every mood and alter our thought process!

The biggest thing to worry about in regards to Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and the most predictable trait, is that they sell out to the highest bigger without any regard to morality.

Putting hardware in place isn't about the public, it's about using the public as the distribution method. As you should well know working in IT, the car outside your office can be listening to devices on your network, and that widget / device on the accounts payable desk might not be yours to control. Some $2 novelty gadget the Billy bought Betty for Valentines Day!

We were recently alerted to stop using circuit boards manufactured in China, these are supposed to be bare boards without components, but security groups have found serial decode chips embedded within multilayer boards. You have to X-ray these boards to find them. Tiny chips capable of parroting away your data, and they cost a few cents per thousand devices, they are inconsequential like gains of sand.

Do you really think a country that spends billions of nuclear weapons or military hardware will blink at the trivial cost of adding millions of serial decode chips to devices distributed everywhere? Billions of such tiny devices would cost less than one warhead.

As you point out it's not just about military or politics, actually it's probably more about stealing IP, because that is the high cost high value proposition.

All nations would be doing this stuff given the opportunity, the naivety is thinking they wouldn't!

the arrogance is thinking they would. No car is listening to devices on my network, your car usually isn't connected to home wifi.  It might pair with your phone but when it's off that's that.

Data leads to information.
Information is power.

There may not be a purpose for it.....yet....but its better to have it and not need it, than vice versa.