Mysterious Glitch Has Mazda Drivers Stuck on Public Radio (geekwire.com) 139
Drivers of certain vehicles in Seattle and other parts of Western Washington are shouting at their car radios this week. Not because of any particular song or news item that's being broadcast, but because an apparent technical glitch has caused the radios to be stuck on public radio station KUOW. From a report: The impacted drivers appear to all be owners of Mazda vehicles from between 2014 and 2017. In some cases the in-car infotainment systems have stopped working altogether, derailing the ability to listen to the radio at all or use Bluetooth phone connections, GPS, the rear camera and more. According to Mazda drivers who spoke with GeekWire, and others in a Reddit thread discussing the dilemma, everyone who has had an issue was listening to KUOW 94.9 in recent weeks when the car systems went haywire. KUOW sounded unsure of a possible cause; at least one dealership service department blamed 5G; and Mazda told GeekWire in an official statement that it identified the problem and a fix is planned.
some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:3)
some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed?
Re:some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Last I heard it was literally a Bobby Tables [xkcd.com] incident. Something part of the radio broadcast data for that station is being taken as control-plane data by the infotainment system and b0rking it up.
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That is hilarious and frightening at the same time. Wonder if the circuit has write access to the CAN bus?
Re:some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything connected to a CAN bus has write access to a CAN bus, just like everything connected to an ethernet network has write access to that ethernet network. The question is if any other device on the bus acknowledge what was written to it and what protocol was used.
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The infotainment is usually firewalled from the control can buses. It might get read only access to some of them if it needs to display days.
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There are vehicles where the driver's ability to change features in the body control module is done through the infotainment system. So it's not going to be as read-only as one might want.
And I don't trust the developers creating either the infotainment system or the BCM to understand and properly implement security on that communications link.
No, there is unidirectional Ethernet (Score:2)
You might think about the "shared bus" Ethernet from back when.
Nowadays Ethernet devices are connected mostly point-to-point and it is possible to make a link rx- or tx-only (unidirectional). Such mode can be used for network analyzers/IPS etc.
Re: some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:2)
Text buffer overflow? Corrupted text data broadcast by the station?
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Most major public radio stations these days simulcast in HD-Radio, a digital format that uses the adjacent spectrum to their analog bandwidth to simulcast higher fidelity programming, alternative content and accessibility content like text for the hearing impaired.
It is conceivable that some kind of code injection vulnerability exists in the Mazda entertainment system, since the only thing all the problem systems have in common is listening to this particular digital-enhanced station.
Re:some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:5, Informative)
Even without HD Radio, there is encoded text that is sent on the analog signal that encodes the track name, artist, and even album art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:3)
RDS has been used in europe since the 80s. You,d hope a decoder would be a solved problem unless some idiot decided he,d reinvent the wheel and got it badly wrong.
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Wheels are constantly being reinvented in devices. Open Source? Can't use it because of legal issues. Commercial? Too expensive, or doesn't come with source code, or it's for an RTOS you don't have, etc. Even if you do get a third party library it will have bugs and you will need to adapt it to your platform, which means code changes. And the engineers fixing the problems are rarely the ones who chose the libraries - it's usually a pointy haired manager, or a noob who did a google search 10 years befor
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Actually, in vehicles, there is only RTOS in use if you want to get anywhere. It's QNX. Everything runs on top of it, including infotainment. (Sure, the infotainment might use say, Android, but it's running as a guest VM under QNX host). Things like Android Auto or Apple CarPlay often use third party libraries built on QNX because it's standard.
It wouldn't surprise me if it was an HD Radio issue - HD Radio is so
Re: some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:2)
Android app: Yeah, very likely the radio control app runs entirely on Android in QNX's VM, and it's likely some half assed piece of shit that isn't broken enough for the user to notice under normal conditions.
Cobble it, looks good enough, ship it.
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Don't knock HD Radio until you've tried the Failfest that is DAB. Low bitrates, a lot of stations in mono (in the 21st century!) to save money on the huge multiplex fees, a recent(ish) codec change that doesn't work with any DAB radio made up until about 2010, slow retune so flicking between channels is pointless and lots of other issues.
Re: some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:2)
Andriod auto and carplay arent even vm wafe they are a remote desktop /touchscreen bluetooth input/output from your device.
That is why it is so popular. Google and apple can make updates and stuff and dont have the hadsle of updating every single infotainment system
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Industrial automation programming patterns are very different from the ones that assume the full attack surface of being open to the Internet. Not that you trust the data, but certainly more assumptions are probably made. With all these broadcast systems being handled by supposed pros, bad data would hopefully be rare.
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Since this data isn't required or necessary (it doesn't send instructions, only information), and it gets retransmitted repeatedly, I would assume that anything that doesn't validate with at least a checksum would simply be discarded.
At least one part of the carrier data stream uses 10 bits out of every 26 for error correction, if you trust Wikipedia. RDS/RDBS doesn't encode audio - it's just text and not a lot of it. So it can just send it again and again and your radio will eventually read it correctly.
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"But regarding HD radio, nothing irks me more than the analog signal being sent with zero adjustment delay to the HD version"
Here in europe they solved that problem by not even bothering to link DAB and FM broadcasts. You guys might think HD Radio is a POS but IMO DAB isn't great either for a whole host of reasons yet governments keep pushing it so they can sell off the FM band (for what who knows, its only 20Mhz wide).
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In theory, DAB+ should be better than our "HD" Radio, but in practice, it looks like you just have worse subchannel cramming so the bitrate actually seems worse. In my case HD Radio sounds pretty bad - good dynamic range compared to the limits of FM analog but terrible compression artifacts that almost make it not worth it.
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All DAB+ achieved was obsoleting 20 years of MP2 DAB radios. As you say , the quality is no better , the stations simply use a proportionately lower bit rate that they can get away with with AAC+. The only advantage is to them paying lower transmission fees , not to the listener or enviroment especially if - like me - they had to go buy a new radio to hear some stations that switched codecs.
Re: some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:2)
It wouldn't surprise me if this is exactly what happened.
Maybe someone at the station also thought "eMoJiEz wOuLd lOoK sO kEwL!" on RDS displays, and the radio which likely does not sanitize data input freaked out upon recieving the non standard characters.
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Forget Unicode. They don't even support ASCII despite using 8 bits per character. Although it could be that the encoder was fed bad data in ASCII or Unicode and still ended up broadcasting non-standard characters. Fixed code pages assigned to the radio at the factory. If you drive into a country that uses a different code page, it will be displayed in your own code page with totally different characters.
I gave up trying to read further. The documentation almost seemed like a game for how needlessly com
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RDS has been used in europe since the 80s. You,d hope a decoder would be a solved problem unless some idiot decided he,d reinvent the wheel and got it badly wrong.
SQL was created in the 80s as well, that doesn't mean we don't have an endless string of injection vulnerabilities being exploited on the daily. But to you "reinvent the wheel" example, unless your code is at some point executing a call to a Fortran interpreter to run a function, you're almost certainly using something that has at some point been reinvented. As new languages come and go even old standards need to have interpreters and communications systems reinvented.
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It's even worse. Since I doubt the radio station was transmitting malicious digital content, the radios crashed over legitimate data transmitted.
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Yes, it would be very interesting to look at the packet and payload format. It could be the transmitter transmitting something out-of-spec that most receivers ignore, like "please allocate memory for the following _unreasonable_length_ byte message." Or it could be invoking a seldom used feature that most receivers ignore and that cruft never being taken out of the transmitter. Even if you look at the relatively simple standard like HTTP, it's chock-full of seldom used features.
Re: some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:2)
I'm wondering if some intern at the station tried sending emojis through the RDS data stream, and the radios choked up on it.
It could've been something this simple.
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Or unicode.
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According to Wiki, RDS uses UTF8.
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Which makes it possible for a developer to treat most messages as 8 bit ascii...
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It doesn't have to be malicious to be malformed in some way.
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It could possibly be malformed, but it's still shameful for firmware to crash on merely malformed input that comes from a 3rd party. It shouldn't crash even if the input is malicious, of course.
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Oh certainly, that doesn't excuse Mazda by any means, but we can't be sure that the radio station didn't also do something it isn't supposed to.
Re: some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:2)
It wouldn't surprise me if these radios lack input sanitizing, and other security measures because "It's not a critical part of the car". :-\
Re: some kind of EBS / EAS auto tune that failed? (Score:2)
Mazda only farms the radio software from a 3rd party, who in turn farms from another source, etc.
I wonder how many links there are in the chain between the anonymous programmer who wrote the radio software and Mazda? I'd guess quite a few.
But Mazda still holds the bag in dealing with these defective and corrupted radios.
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Those Pledge Drives are getting more aggressive! (Score:5, Funny)
One can hope there is a silver lining in this cloud.
Re:Those Pledge Drives are getting more aggressive (Score:5, Funny)
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I know you are making a joke... but KUOW has developed a bad reputation over the last decade or two. One somewhat recent episode - a few years ago they tried to pull a sneaky buy out of another local NPR station (KPLU, which is now KNKX) for what appeared to be underhanded reasons. So if any NPR station *were* to do something weird like bribe a car company to lock in their radios to a station, it'd probably be KUOW (no, I'm definitely not claiming that's what happened).
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as my witness (Score:3)
I thought turkeys could fly.
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The next thing you know, the Phone Cops will be going after them.
Re: Those Pledge Drives are getting more aggressiv (Score:2)
And when the word gets out quick about what they have done, heads will roll.
It's a stupid idea anyway, because nobody is going to put up with a radio is stuck on one station and they would try to get it fixed. And there is the possible criminal charges which first and foremost will get their FCC license revoked.
There is no real payout for this, but the repercussions are dire.
Now if only (Score:5, Funny)
Now if only this would happen to everyone with a lifted pickup truck...
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I would counter with, "If only this would happen to everyone with a Prius."
But...
Re: Now if only (Score:2)
Can you spot the radio panel on a Pirus?
Nope, because the owner tunes the radio once to NPR then rips off all of the dials to keep it on NPR.
Re: Now if only (Score:2)
Imagine if someone modded a "Mr. Microphone" to haxxor those radios by sending bogus RDS data to change the station.
Gangsta rap turns to country (or visa versa).
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Sample bias? (Score:3)
Event affects people living in Seattle...
Discussion among affected people occurs on Reddit...
I mean come on - is anyone actually surprised these particular radios were all tuned to NPR at the time?
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The problem seems to have also occured while scanning through channels too. If there were regular public radio listeners then they wouldn't be complaining to loudly about it.
Wouldn't have noticed (Score:2)
Hah, I wouldn't even have noticed if I drove one of these vehicles. I usually joke that my car could get stuck on Public Radio, and it would take me months to notice. I guess it finally happened!
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Same here. My car's radio is tuned to a station playing mostly 80s-90s music with a few short news and traffic reports every half hour. Haven't changed the channel in years because why would I?
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Aside that, I never listen to stations playing a certain type of music all the time. I prefer stations with less music (none would be ideal).
You see?
Re: Wouldn't have noticed (Score:2)
Tuning to a blank AM station while a severe thunderstorm is happening nearby is quite relaxing.
Fucking 5G! (Score:2)
at least one dealership service department blamed 5G
Fucking 5G!
LOL
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Or they are so far up their own posteriors that they cannot differentiate reality from their own ideological echo-chamber.
Re: Fucking 5G! (Score:2)
It proves that dealers will make up any BS necessary to make the customer go away.
I hope they eventually succeed at that goal.
Re: Fucking 5G! (Score:2)
I mean, I've literally had Mazda tell me that it's not their technician's job to troubleshoot and fix things. Go figure it was for the radio on a 2017 model that I'm STILL fighting with them over it freezing.
Re:Fucking 5G! (Score:5, Funny)
Let's hope that nobody tells people that if their car stereo is stuck on public radio, it's because of a 5G vaccine microchip bug, and their car is trying to give them Covid autism.
But 4chan probably already has.
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Re: Fucking 5G! (Score:2)
5G is the Swiss army knife of conspiracy theories.
Voices in your head? Positive Covid test? Car breaks down? House burns down? Damn, it's gotta be 5G!
Listen to Car Talk (Score:2)
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Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me that it's been a long time since you listened to Public Radio, but Whad'Ya Know?
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Has Garrison Keillor finally retired for good? I swear, that guy came out of retirement almost as often as Hayao Miyazaki...
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I thought he was basically railroaded out for some sexual harassment claim from one of his staff.
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You're smoking something, roll down that window and get some Fresh Air.
"Mysterious Glitch" -- Not just in cars! (Score:5, Interesting)
The "cure" has been to leave the TV receiver turned off for several days and then to turn it on and quickly try to change the channel (away from TVO) during the TV's boot-up procedure. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. If not, wait and repeat.
Most annoying! We have talked with others who have experienced the same problem, so it is not just our TV. We took the set to a local Ottawa repair shop and they tried to fix it but were unsuccessful. Shame on Sony.
All your speaker are belong to us! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All your speaker are belong to us! (Score:4, Informative)
The answer is always Miata.
Re: All your speaker are belong to us! (Score:3)
WHAT YOU SAY?
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Could be worse (Score:2)
...stuck on Fox "News"
Love Mazda (Score:2)
I had a really nice Mazda 6 with I couldn't get without a damn Bose and it was awful. The black magic they used to exercise that so I could get a decent deck was truly arcane.
Not surprised that ANY OE stereo has issues like this once in a while - anyone get bit with the "I updated my Samsung blu-ray player and they pushed a bad file" bug?
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Is it even possible to replace a modern A/V system? They're so hooked into everything.
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Is it even possible to replace a modern A/V system? They're so hooked into everything.
It was ACTUALLY a double-din changeout with a facia remove. There were just components everywhere so you couldn't just "buy clips" and swap stuff out.
My 2018 Impreza took a double-din as well; there's a very good pro audio shop where I live that did that setup for me - not cheap but so worth it. Their wiring looks like Ethernet porn . . . . straighter and cleaner than factory looms.
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What else is controlled by that besides audio? Backup camera? Any other vehicle functions?
Could be worse (Score:5, Insightful)
There are FAR worse radio stations you could have your radio stuck on than public radio. Their weekend programs can be quite entertaining and getting some fairly middle of the road news and commentary would benefit some people.
"Public Radio" (Score:2)
So... just radio then?
Reminds me (Score:2)
Back in the early 90s I had a 13 inch RCA color TV. It was a contemporary set.
If I switched the set into one of the cable modes, and switched it to channel 96 while having an OTA antenna hooked up, the set would lock up for a long time on that channel, with all of the controls being unresponsive.
I don't know what was being broadcast on 96, whose frequencies IIRC fell into the old high UHF TV broadcast band which was reallocated for cell phone and other radio services some years prior, but th
Thank you for Calling Mazda Support (Score:2)
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What we need is better separation and open protocols between systems. The radio should not be so integral to the vehicle that it cannot be replaced with a different, compatible unit from another manufacturer.
Re: Why We Need Right to Repair (Score:2)
True. But on the flip side boosting car stereos will become a "thing" again.
Be careful what you wish for.
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The warranty is what requires them to fix it, not the fact that it's hard to repair by anyone else.
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OK, I still contend that Mazda would be exactly as on the hook as they are now even if Washington had a strong right to repair law - unless that law specifically exempted manufacturers from responsibility for fixing defects.
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firmware update $29.99
dealer USB KEY $19.99
labor $59.99
Re:Fortunately (Score:5, Informative)
According to Pew Research, 83% of the US population aged 12 and older listened to terrestrial radio in any given week in 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/jo... [pewresearch.org]
Re:NPR you say? (Score:5, Insightful)
One is far right and the other is far centrist? Hmm, don't get your point.
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I think NPR catches a lot of flack for what the local affiliates spew. In Minnesota we have MPR which is a non stop stream of far left agendas with some content from NPR stuffed in the middle.
Unfortunately the Media Bias Chart ( https://adfontesmedia.com/ [adfontesmedia.com] ) doesn't rank local affiliates. I find it to be pretty accurate though.
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"Far left" in America is what Europeans would call "Centre-right"
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CNN has no monopoly nor trademark on this - regardless of of what you hear.
I used to sit in a cubicle facing the requisite office big screen TV, and it was locked on CNN. This was during the missing Malaysian airliner coverage which CNN covered literally 24/7.
So I spent 50 hours a week watching MH370 coverage for an entire year. It was awful.
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A good example of this was some fires in CA two years ago. I was at the gym, could see the smoke out the window, and every other station was covering the fires, including the national ones. CNN was running some guy with some cla
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The Hopkins study wasn't really a John Hopkins University study though. It was a working paper where one of the authors happened to work at John Hopkins. That professor isn't even from the medical part of the university but rather the economic department. There were three authors and none of them were from any medical field (two were economists and one a political studies advisor).
Is this an excuse for CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NPR, etc. to not at least mention the working paper and comment on it? No.
Before you say
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