This story is interesting: One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about. Among the pre-installed bloatware—or spyware, if you’re being less charitable—was a voice assistant equipped with WebView, an Android system component that lets apps display content off the web.
This apparently always used about a third of processing power, even while idle, which isn’t great. There were also Baidu location services, a call recorder (!) , a DAB radio client that is pretty much useless in the U.
S. , and Adobe Acrobat, presumably so your passenger can entertain themselves with PDFs on the go. It’s interesting because it exposes all the insecurities in this piece of IoT software.
But I think the real story is that a random person was able to do this reverse-engineering with the help of AI. Expect a lot more stories like this in the future.
Originally published at schneier.com
