Category: I.T.

I’ll do my best not to rant here, I got a new car, of course it’s connected, of course it defaults to sharing your location and everything else with Ford and its dumb affiliates, of course I diligently went through all the settings off the lot to disable all the data sharing, of course these settings found themselves back to enabled magically after a few days. And now Ford knows where I live, work, shop, eat, and everything in between. ~16 years ago society still cared about privacy, but multiple “scandals” quickly showed corporations there were no real repercussions legally or reputationally for privacy abuses. Since then it’s been a free for all, and a new generation of people has assimilated these practices as a norm. Let’s beat the piñatas for all they’ve got!

I’ve been trying to disable the cell modem in this car. Even if the car had a no-tricks UI for privacy settings (it doesn’t), I don’t trust software to truly report nothing back to the mothership. And so for definitive results, I want to pull the plug. Today I can, tomorrow, I’m sure cars will absolutely require a fresh slice of your private life before they deign take you anywhere.

Take a look at your car’s manual to find the fuse box and a mapping of what they control. In my case the box is by the passenger side’s right foot. It’s work to move the panels it’s behind out of the way. The manual points to a likely candidate:

Yup, sounds like the sort of shit I want to nuke

So I removed it and hoped for the best.

Next thing you know, gone is all the worthless bullshit Ford reimplemented worse than Apple so they too could suck up your data.

• 

• 

It brings me pleasure to see incapacitated corporate malpractice, but I know things will only get harder with time. At least I got me a 10 year respite.

What if you need a container to have a different time than its host? Well, LD_PRELOAD has a solution for you. While this solution generally works outside of Docker, I rarely find myself outside of a container these days. I like that it works in one without requiring special privileges.

Dockerfile:

FROM ubuntu:latest

RUN apt-get update --fix-missing
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install git build-essential -y
RUN git clone https://github.com/wolfcw/libfaketime.git
WORKDIR /libfaketime/src
RUN make install
RUN echo "/usr/local/lib/faketime/libfaketime.so.1" > /etc/ld.so.preload

ENTRYPOINT bash

Build with:

docker build -t faketime .

Run with:

docker run -ti --rm -e FAKETIME="1970-01-01 00:00:00" --name faketime faketime

Of course you can run the “date” command to confirm, but this fake time percolates to all processes in the container. I was reminded of the existence of LD_PRELOAD to hijack system calls recently, and remembered this old trick I had stashed in my notes.

And just in case it goes away, I mirrored the excellent repo this is based on here.