RIP: TINA TURNER!

83, peacefully after a long illness and apparently an extensive battle with intestinal cancer at her home near Zurich, Switzerland.

This Rolling Stone is one heck of a long and loving read. She was an amazing music icon whose last album was released in 1999! She has performed since then, perhaps most noticeably at the 2008 Grammys with Beyoncé! And no one will forget her tumultuous marriage with Ike Turner.

For me, aside from the radio, I think my first real exposure to her was when the movie Tommy was released. They showed it at the biggest theatre in Phoenix, the Cine Capri, a Cinemascope screen, and they brought in rock concert speakers for the showings! She was unforgettable as the Acid Queen.

What an amazing woman. She will truly be missed.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tina-turner-dead-obit-192002/

Teslas have no AM radios, Ford is going to eliminate it: the Gov't wants to require it?

There's a lot going on here.

Teslas have never had AM radio in their cars. Recently, Ford announced that they were eliminating AM from their 2024 Mustang and probably from future models. WELL, Congresscritters can't have that! So they've stepped in and eleven of them have co-sponsored a bill to REQUIRE car manufacturers to include AM radio at no cost to the buyers!

There's a few issues at play here.

The bill's originators say the government needs a medium that ensures emergency broadcasts can be received by everyone.

Contrary point: for a broadcast to be received, the radio must be turned on and tuned to the correct frequency. And an awful lot of people carry portable radios in their pockets most of the time these days that can receive emergency broadcast messages. This was demonstrated with people receiving government broadcast messages during the pandemic.

Additional point: AM radio - and FM - are rapidly declining markets due to streaming. Is this an effort to prop up a buggy whip market?

For the car makers, there is a very, verymajor technical issue here: EMI. Electro-magnetic interference. You might have noticed EMI first-hand if you've ever listened to Bluetooth headphones while making microwave popcorn: it's not uncommon for there to be a little bit of EMI leakage from the microwave, and Bluetooth is a very weak signal, so your headphones are frequently a little staticky while making your popcorn.

Guess what?

Electric cars - I'm not sure whether hybrids also have this problem - generate HUGE amounts of EMI! It is extremely hard to get a clean AM radio signal inside an electric car.

THIS is probably the biggest reason why car makers don't want to bother with AM radios in future cars - they know it's going to be one giant humongoid PITA! They don't want to have to repeatedly try to explain to the average customer why the AM signal, which is never of that great of quality, is even worse in their brand-new car.

I'm not going to get into the details of what the differences are between AM and FM radio types. But if you've spent any significant time listening to AM during the summer, you've probably heard the *pop* with nearby lightning strikes and such. AM is very sensitive to EMI. FM is not. AM has the advantage of the signal carrying a lot further than FM, but with much poorer signal quality. each mode has its trade-offs, but each is also losing market share to the internet and streaming. For me, the only time I listen to the radio is when I'm in Phoenix and I'm frequently listening to NPR or the local classical station. Otherwise, I'm streaming music or podcasts from my iPhone. And I've been doing that for 20+ years now.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/05/ev-advocates-join-tech-groups-and-automakers-to-oppose-am-radio-mandate/

Interesting attack on smartphone fingerprint locks

This works against both Android and iPhone devices. However, Apple went to facial recognition a few generations ago, so you've got a much older iPhone if you're still using a finger print reader.

The attack is not quick and straightforward. It requires the attacker to have physical control of the devices and can take up to hours to execute. But it is quite clever!

The phone is partially disassembled and a chip is mounted onto the system board. A memory card with a database of fingerprint data is part of this attack system. The basics of the attack is quite simple: while you and I may not have identical fingerprints as far as a fingerprint expert is concerned, they might be similar. This attack exploits a vulnerability in the system and "...manipulates the false acceptance rate (FAR) to increase the threshold so fewer approximate images are accepted."

Meaning that if your fingerprint is similar to mine, and yours is in this fingerprint database, through this system your fingerprint might unlock my phone!

Now, one thing the manufacturers did to prevent multiple attempts at unlocking phones was to code in a hard limit as to how many unlock attempts that you get. This system TRIPLES that limit!

Pretty darn clever.

Now here's the killer: the parts to make this are about $15.

And the database of fingerprints? Biometric database breaches. Not difficult to obtain.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/hackers-can-brute-force-fingerprint-authentication-of-android-devices/

https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/05/24/0435205/brute-force-test-attack-bypasses-android-biometric-defense