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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Technology
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And here I was thinking these blow-and-go contraptions were self contained. I should have known better.
They want to be able to remotely disable vehicles, but in the process have made us vulnerable to all sophisticated actors to do so. Our leaders have their priorities all screwed up.
Once again proving backdoors are fucking idiotic.
Not sure that I would really agree that these are backdoor. Since disabling the vehicle remotely is kinda the express intention of this device. Just a consequence of how they designed them to not be circumvented by the operator.
Why is remote access the intention? Should the device not verify the alchohol % locally and then mechanically allow the car to star or not? What part of that needs any form of remote oversight?
Uhhh nope, there's no reason for a remote connection.
Interlocks are for people who have had a DUI, by your logic ankle monitors should not be able to be accessed remotely.
Don't break the law If you don't want to be monitored by the state.
I can't tell if you're being serious or not.
It makes sense - a self-contained device can be circumvented. A connected solution is much, much harder to fool
Please explain further because I do not believe that.
Someone knowledgeable enough could tamper with the local equipment to get it to give false negatives, or always pass regardless of blood alcohol content. If it doesn't phone home, the company (or the court) doesn't know it's been tampered with.
This is all theoretical, I know nothing about this tech.
If it knows it's been tampered with, it doesn't need to phone home, it can be disabled locally...
If somebody is good enough to tamper with the part that checks for BAC, why not also tamper with the part that phones home? Would they even need to?
The device doesn't just phone home while driving. It does it constantly. It's likely that any tampering would alert the vendor and by proxy the court.
It could phone home regularly without the ability to receive command to disable the car. Sounds like lazy enforcement.
I agree with you in principle but you could just have the person show up once a week for tamper checking. Those interlock devices are punishment for DUI/DWI so making the user show up once a week wouldn’t be too harsh, imo.
Showing up once a week isn't a problem if it's only a handful of people going to the same place.
However, when you have a lot of people on this device in a small area, you'll have to ask them to go farther and farther away. Or else you're going to outsource who is checking on the device, and that's going to start driving up the price for this service.
According to some stats I found there were about 350k interlock devices in use in the entire US in 2016. That's a tiny fraction of the amount of drivers we have. Unless they're all concentrated in the same spot and have tripled or more in numbers this isn't going to be a problem in a population of 350 million.