Civil Rights and your car.

[mekender]

An electromagnet is not an explosion, it's just a magnet that is electronically activated.
The idea would be that when crash sensors activate, the electromagnet activates, and erases the memory.

Yes I know, I was deliberately referring to the 'shaped charge' text he has, but struck.

This particular area of technology isn't really my thing (had a roomate who messed around with reprogramming ECU's in the late 90's), but I suspect a modern ECU with 'crash recorder' functionality would use flash ram, which isn't sensitive to magnetic fields. Problem.

So you're back to explosives (or thermite), or a homemade attempt at EMP, and once again it's PMITAP time.

a Air Force study of hard drive wiping technologies a few years back determined that wrapping a hard drive in thermite was not sufficient to destroy classified data... so, how is the data stored that you want to destroy? And how sophisticated can the lab be that tries to recover it?

[HTRN]

First, the data isn't stored on a hard drive, I believe it's some sort of flash memory, or perhaps an eprom. A magnetic pulse may or may not destroy the data.

Second, the system is usually built into the existing computer. How do you trigger it? If it's an automated system, you might lose control of the car at a bad opportunity.


HTRN

[Greg]

First, the data isn't stored on a hard drive, I believe it's some sort of flash memory, or perhaps an eprom. A magnetic pulse may or may not destroy the data.

Second, the system is usually built into the existing computer. How do you trigger it? If it's an automated system, you might lose control of the car at a bad opportunity.

HTRN

Yup, hard drives would be completely inappropriate, too large, heavy, power-hungry, fragile... we're talking embedded systems here. I've read about data storage on eproms or flash- IIRC eproms can be vulnerable to magnetic fields while flash is not.

All this stuff seems to be built into (I think) the ECU (engine control unit, the computer that runs your engine- there is a market in reprogramming these for performance enthusiasts, very interesting subject) or (more commonly I think) the airbag deployment controls/sensors. Deliberately frying your ECU is a poor plan- frying your airbag controller would leave your car somewhat more, um, *drivable*, but could still get expensive.

[Dub_James]

Modern ECUs have the Microprocessor, I/O ports, ROM, scratchpad RAM and a couple of Megs of Flash on the same die.

Used to do some work with them in Intel.