Just as grand dad warned...

WARNING: ACERBIC SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Remember when power windows first started turning up in cars, and people who had them suddenly thought their effluent had no aroma?

If you can, you’ll probably also recall your dad, or your uncle, or old blokes generally, warning “you don’t want those, all that electrickery gadget bullshit they’re putting in cars, it’s just more stuff that will go wrong”, or something similar but with more swearing.

Well, the bad news is that their warnings have finally come home to roost, and that one of those many gizmos car companies have been shoehorning into our vehicles -- keyless entry -- has turned around and bitten us on the butt.

Oh yes, cars in America and Canada are now being stolen, in increasing numbers, by nerds who crack their digital locks and drive them away, and the only way to stop them is to keep your keys in the freezer, according to a report in The New York Times.

Its author, Nick Bilton, who lives in Los Angeles, has actually had his Toyota Prius hacked into three times in the last month.

This seems unlikely to us, because who would want to steal a Prius? But in LA it seems they are inexplicably desirable.

Bilton actually saw the thieves -- a couple of teenagers on bicycles -- who simply pointed a small black device at his car and then opened the door.

Police in Toronto have issued a warning that light-fingered types "may have access to electronic devices which can compromise" a vehicle's security.

One tactic is to use what’s misnomerly called a “brute force” attack, which involves cycling through millions of possible combinations with a laptop until they pick the unique code used by your key fob.

Apparently some thieves used this technique to steal David Beckham’s BMW X5 in 2006, before the thieves eventually dumped the car, saying it smelled too strongly of hair product.

Don’t think you’re safe because you live in a far-off island with fewer Priuses, either. If you’ve got keyless entry, you should be worried, because Victoria Police has confirmed that the same thing is happening here, with valuables being stolen from cars, broken into using “devices”.

NSW Police would only say that criminals are becoming “increasingly tech-savvy” with car break-ins.

There are, if you’re really bored, YouTubes of people using a new “mystery device” that can imitate your key and let them steal your car.

Bilton’s research showed that his Prius was most likely opened using something called a “power amplifier”. Basically, when you walk up to a car with a proximity sensor and try to open the door, the car sends out a signal looking for the key, which needs to be in the immediate area.

The amplifier increases this distance so that even if your fob is inside your house, it will detect it and open the door. That’s bad.

The solution, we’re told, is to keep your keys in the freezer, which creates a “Faraday cage” and won’t let the signal in or out.

A better solution, as your grandad/uncle/grumpy neighbour will tell you, is to buy a car without any of these new-fangled devices, which were always going to lead to this kind of trouble.