Easy way to detect this without an RF detector - use a "usb charge doctor" which is a super cheap voltage and current measurement tool for USB. If the cable draws current with nothing attached, dissect it.
Incidentally, my theory about the website and product is that this is a firmware reuse of a fleet tracking product. The manufacturer is likely an electronics manufacturing outfit that adapted the layout to match the new application but didn't have in-house firmware developers and instead reused a popular low-end fleet tracker firmware for the same chip. These are used for stuff like taxi dispatch or package pickup so you can see the entire fleet on a map and call whoever is closest to your destination. It doesn't need precise location.
Incidentally, my theory about the
website and product is that this
is a firmware reuse of a fleet
tracking product.
Yeah, there are already off-the-shelf products like [1] that combine GPS, battery and SMS sending. Presumably this product is a variant of one of those.
I've never tried it now that I think about it, but how standardized is the USB-C cable drain? I would assume that, with perhaps some minimal difference for length, all normal in-spec cables would be pretty similar, but I don't actually know that and would be curious if anyone has checked a few.
If there is a standard baseline though then the OP's advice doesn't meaningfully change, it just becomes "If the cable draws current over the baseline with nothing attached, dissect it" rather then "if it draws any at all". Any spy chip would still have to be on top of whatever else is needed to make the cable work at all, so it's not really a different problem unless standard cables have enough delta between them to hide a spy chip drain in. And even if that's true between manufacturers, if within a single manufacturer cables were pretty steady that might merely become a reason to source exclusively from one/a few reliable ones that stable baseline draws can be established for?
After also reading the discussion in '17. How come this is trivially easy to make, very cheap and still we have a massive stolen car problem in Europe? Some cars in my country have >1% chance of getting stolen in a given year. The incentives must be off somewhere? This is a device that could only be triggered after theft, thus hardly any privacy concerns, and still give quite a good location (perhaps improved with glonass and other sattelites). They can't be found easily (so small, only transmissions after stealing) and placed on any given wire in the car. Seems only beatable by placing the car in a cage after theft.
Anecdotally, there are still a few issues for the extreme ends of the market - luxury (high effort, high returns) and bangers (very low effort, typically cut for parts). Anything in between (“sensibly priced cars”, to use a clarksonism) is too much effort and risk for not enough returns.
But yes, it’s nowhere as bad as it was in the ‘80s/‘90s. This has to do with social changes (the drop in heroin use and crime, and general improvement in living standards) as much as with technological ones (alarms installed by default, electronic locks on injection).
UK != Europe, saying that I don't know if 660k thefts EU-wide in 2016 [1] constitutes a "massive problem" or not, comes to around 0.1% thefts per person (assuming a rough 500 million EU population).
Various services exist for this already, but someone has to pay the ongoing SIM fees. Criminals are also surprisingly good at removing them, and the higher value cars are usually stolen with the keys and then immediately containerised for export.
Or the cars are stolen for use in some other crime and then abandoned, sometimes even before the owner knows about it.
The Israeli Ituran has a similar service for cars, although I think they are based on cellular location and not GPS.
There are few problems with that though- thieves know where and how to disable the device, even if you can locate the car you need someone to go and fetch it- most of the times this will be in place you don't want to go to alone, and a problem unique to Israel is that thieves can cross the border to the Palestinian Authority before you can deploy any police force to stop them.
That would imply an always-on mobile phone connection inside the car, which is bad for privacy because now the phone company knows the car's rough location at all times.
They do, I developed the basis for a pet tracker more than 10 years ago, actually the highest cost for them is the cellular plan and monthly service fees for the service.
I wish every wifi network just had a 64kbps always-open connection that anyone could use. But I guess we can’t have nice things unless it’s a pay-product by a telecom.
At first read I was ready to write this off as a legal nightmare, but it’s interesting as a service concept. Run a router that supports this always-open (or rather, widely known auto mechanism) protocol, maybe get some kick back.
That said, low data SIM cards are getting more and more feasible. My stepdad runs an android at a remote location for weather data, and with something like hourly, double digit count byte uploads he stays under the monthly limit to where the sim is essentially free.
What's a good RF detector to get? This post ends with the author pointing out that the implant can be detected with a cheap RF detector. I'm interested in getting myself an RF detector to play with but I'm overwhelmed by what I see on Amazon.
Plot twist, cheap Chinese RF detector has snooping built in, turns off radio when RF detector is in use, silently goes back to reporting when unit is not in use.
I guess the secure solution is to carry around your own X-Ray verified lightning-USB dongle and high voltage fry any dumb cable you find yourself needing.
It's probably just his DC power supply he has handy.
As far as 120/240 thing, if you have a component not meant for that kind of voltage, it might fail open, or it might fail short.
If it fails short, high amounts of current might be allowed to flow through other components which would carbonize so even more current would flow. And maybe catch fire.
Incidentally, my theory about the website and product is that this is a firmware reuse of a fleet tracking product. The manufacturer is likely an electronics manufacturing outfit that adapted the layout to match the new application but didn't have in-house firmware developers and instead reused a popular low-end fleet tracker firmware for the same chip. These are used for stuff like taxi dispatch or package pickup so you can see the entire fleet on a map and call whoever is closest to your destination. It doesn't need precise location.