Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station

https://www.kuow.org/stories/we-didn-t-mean-to-ruin-your-mazda-s-stereo

by walrus01 • 4 years ago

729 520 4 years ago

walrus016• 4 years ago

Some further info: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/youre-listening-to-kuow-like-i...

greyface-• 4 years ago

“Between 1/24-1/31, a radio station in the Seattle area sent image files with no extension, which caused an issue on some 2014-2017 Mazda vehicles with older software,” the Mazda statement said.

ILMostro7• 4 years ago

Maybe a Russel Crowe gif saying "are you not infotained!?"

toomuchtodo• 4 years ago

It’s going to require hardware replacement to fix the unsanitized input vulnerability failure. Very unfortunate, quite the bug.

londons_explore• 4 years ago

I think press releases say "replace hardware" when often they mean "you have to bring the car in and we're going to flash new firmware".

Sometimes though, firmware can't be flashed by dealers (due to not booting), and then they'll swap the unit, and the old unit will be flashed and given to someone else.

Might be worth hiding an airtag taped to the circuit board!

silon42• 4 years ago

Hopefully this is a car where a stereo can still be replaced... (even if you need an angle grinder/chainsaw).

Cars where it can't are inferior.

throwaway3kmv9• 4 years ago

"radio station in the Seattle area sent image files"

If that's not a sign that people are making the simplest things Way More Complicated Than Necessary(tm) I don't know what is.

noahtallen• 4 years ago

I mean, yes, but at the same time, album art is a pretty normal thing to have along with music. And actual cellular data is just radios, but on different wavelengths and whatnot. So it’s not really a stretch to imagine sending arbitrary data along with music over a radio wave. And some of that data is actually very useful, like the track name or artist name.

Dylan16807• 4 years ago

I'll let the inventors of television know they were making a mistake.

And ID3.

consp3• 4 years ago

I don't know if that is true. Considering one of the issues with Mazda is text parsing. My ford doesn't transfer all the epg data from the radio module to the media unit and it requires a several hundred mb update when radio stations change their logo as people now expect radio station images since it is part of the dab standard.

JohnBooty7• 4 years ago

My wife's car has the HD Radio stuff, and it's pretty neat to see album art for songs playing over the radio.

I don't find it distracting. I treat it like everything else on the dashboard and I don't look at it unless I'm at a stoplight or whatever.

myself2486• 4 years ago

"sent image files" is an HD Radio function, and HD Radio is also known as NRSC-5, the standards document that describes it.

There's an NRSC-5 encoder floating around on Github, if you want to try your hand at it. Notably, it was implemented by an infosec firm, presumably because more garbage code like this is lurking everywhere, and it never gets proper testing because HD Radio is proprietary and its creators never intended an open-source encoder to exist. (To the point of hiding all sorts of details about the codec, but some educated guesses and comparison to similar codecs seem to have paid off.)

So, in this case it just crashes the radios so they boot-loop, but how long until someone figures out a payload that can do more damage?

crystalmeph• 4 years ago

At some point, I think we have to start asking if the addition of non-critical features like having a favicon for each radio station is worth the increased attack surface.

nicbou• 4 years ago

Car ownership has become pretty interesting in the last few years.

avs733• 4 years ago

I'm less worried about somebody attacking more radio and more annoyed that radio stations have taken to using an information mechanism designed to tell me what I'm listening to and used it to serve ads.

Unless we are calling serving unwanted ads as an attack.

But in a broader sense, I am absolutely unsurprised that there is terrible security on automotive hardware and software. Things like this are one of my major personal concerns about self driving cars.

shadowofneptune2• 4 years ago

The idea that an embedded system would validate files sent over the air using a filename extension is baffling to me. Extensions as a separate field from the name are a relic from the 70s. How much can checking the file for identification bytes really cost you?

epivosism• 4 years ago

Growing up in the 90s you could tell when digitification came in - radios and tvs started to take forever to change stations. Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing. Same for tvs.

I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new town cause it's too annoying.

More generally it seems like when industries are growing, there is competition in this kind of area, but later on this dies off. I wonder if there's a structural reason for this?

oakwhiz2• 4 years ago

It would be very cool to replace the stock radio with a software-defined radio receiver. I really doubt vehicle manufacturers would be interested in offering that, though.

yurishimo• 4 years ago

It's also expensive. The infotainment is the gateway to whatever you'd likely want to do and with the emergence of CarPlay and Android Auto, your "radio" is updating constantly.

The actual circuit to make a radio work is also tiny. Some early smartphones included a radio tuner in the hardware.

Johnythree2• 4 years ago

SDR is not really the answer. To make a good radio requires high quality RF filtering, whether it be an SDR or a discrete design. The SDR part only replaces the IF stage and Detector.

p1necone• 4 years ago

More generally it seems like when industries are growing, there is competition in this kind of area, but later on this dies off. I wonder if there's a structural reason for this?

This is the natural end result of a totally free market.

Step 1: Competion, therefore consumers are looked after

Step 2: Some companies are "winning" the competition more than others, some of them buy the "losing" companies.

Repeat until there's just one big player and they can charge whatever they want for whatever they can be bothered making available to people.

You have to hope the FTC steps in and stops one company just buying all of its competition forever.

kelnos• 4 years ago

I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new town cause it's too annoying.

I don't think that's much of a contributor. It's just really easy now to bring your own music (or podcast, or audiobook, or...) to the car with you via your phone, and I suspect people generally prefer to listen to their own curated music (or music a streaming service has curated for them) rather than putting up with radio ads, songs they don't like, etc. Just about the only benefit to listening to the radio would be to stumble upon new music, but you can do that with streaming services too. I guess some people like to listen to talk radio (NPR and the like), but most of that stuff is also available online.

I still have a fairly old car with an analog radio, and I haven't used it in at least 5 (but probably closer to 10) years.

Ditto for TV: the on-demand experience via Netflix (etc.) is just so much better than watching regular network or cable TV. Why would I subject myself to having to be in front of the TV at a particular time on a particular day to watch what I want to watch? Honestly, it baffles me that the standard cable TV model still even exists. Obviously the Comcasts of the world still make enough money off of it to make it worthwhile to sell, but it just seems like an entirely poor experience no matter how you look at it.

sp332• 4 years ago

I have to agree with epivosism about the TV experience. Waiting for the digital decoder to catch an I-frame slows down browsing immensely and it's just a lot less fun. Tivos are better, because they have multiple tuners and can scan the channels above/below the one you're on, which helps a lot. But it's still not as good as pushing the button on an analog tuner's remote and getting a new signal in < 1/15 of a second.

Maybe your comparison of live vs streaming TV is skewed because it takes so long to start a new stream that it's hard to imagine browsing content directly, instead of trying to imagine the content from movie posters.

redwall_hp• 4 years ago

Yeah, I'm not aware of any radio stations near me that feature J-pop and Metal. Before I had a phone playing Spotify, I was burning CDs.

kylehotchkiss• 4 years ago

The mindless chatter of radio hosts is still enjoyable for me. After a long day of work, getting to listen to replays of which ever prank call they made in the morning while trying to merge through traffic is a nice way to unwind and begin the evening. Plus I appreciate their small attempts to get community together for events and do ridiculous giveaways.

walrus016• 4 years ago

I have one very good use for analog radio, which is the 50kW AM radio station that does traffic notices in my city every ten minutes. It's often more accurate and better described than looking at red lines on Google maps for traffic jams, and provides other unique local knowledge of construction, temporary detours, etc.

avisser• 4 years ago

... the only benefit to listening to the radio would be to stumble upon new music

This benefit has gone down a lot since the late 90s. There's a nice wikipedia article on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_homogenization

That said, I recommend listening to college radio wherever you are. I truly love the station from my hometown, WHRW broadcasting from Binghamton University. What a strange and beautiful melange.

profmonocle• 4 years ago

I can't count the number of times I had to stop in the middle of an interesting NPR story because I'd arrived at my destination and didn't exactly have time to sit around in my car until it ended. I never looked back from podcasts once I got into them.

paganel• 4 years ago

As a counter-point, I also have an older car with an analog radio and 100% prefer to listen to it while on the road than to listen "to my own music from the phone" (tangentially, I don't even have my own music on the phone, nor a Spotify-like subscription).

I found out that listening to the radio gets you lots of excellent unknown-unknowns when it comes to music, especially if you listen to public radio (which, in my country, has almost no ads). For example, during my last trip I remember that tuning in to the arts-oriented public radio station got me the chance of listening to some great tango classical music which I would have never thought of purposefully listen to.

I'm 100% with you when it comes to TV, the cable signal broke or something (some decoding stuff, can't tell) a couple of years ago and I didn't bother calling in the TV cable guys to look at it and fix it. It is quite excellent. We do have Netflix, which we spend some time on but not that much lately, plus I do have a TV-sports station subscription which I use for major events (like the Olympics right now). For sports I have to be careful though not to visit any sports website that day in order not to have the results revealed too early (I generally do not watch the events live).

tagoregrtst• 4 years ago

It blows my mind how annoying it is to watch TV nowadays

meetups323• 4 years ago

The "free ad-supported television" offerings are actually pretty decent. It's a first-party software profit-center, so the teams making them have every incentive and capability to give them a halfway decent UX. Then on the flip side no-one actually advertises on them, so instead of ad breaks you get 2 minutes of relaxing music and nature montages every 15-ish minutes. Honestly preferable to Netflix's "go-go-go, don't-miss a beat, quick -- next episode is starting!" style.

(My experience is with Vizio's WatchFree+, but the shows are syndicated so I don't think there's much difference from one offering to the next)

macintux• 4 years ago

After the digital TV transition in the U.S. I didn't use my set for a few years since I didn't have a converter and didn't care enough to do anything about it.

One night we were hit with some severe storms and I decided it was worth it to have an antenna and converter for emergencies. Did some research, purchased a box from a friend and a decent antenna, hooked everything up, turned it on, and 5 minutes later tore it all down again.

I'd gone too long without it and lost all tolerance for commercials.

cachvico• 4 years ago

When you got to a new town, I seem to recall pulling a booklet out of the glove compartment, finding the right page, finding the right frequency for the station you're after, and tuning manually to that frequency.

"Punch a button" was only an option once you'd already saved that preset - no difference to the later digital version.

endgame• 4 years ago

Mid-late 90s radios could scan along the spectrum and stop when they found something.

hateful• 4 years ago

A lot of people say this has nothing to do with it. But for me personally, even when I started watching TV on the computer - which was always a specific Show or Movie, I would still "channel surf" the regular TV as a way to kill time. But once the digital boxes came out in the late 90s/early 00s, it would take 1-2 seconds to switch stations. Longer than I would have been on that station at all while surfing. This completely ruined it for me and I never channel surfed again.

sokoloff• 4 years ago

I channel surfed right up until getting my first TiVo box (probably around 2002?). That killed it dead for me, by completely changing how I consumed TV (for the better).

Cerium• 4 years ago

I stopped channel surfing the day we got a digital box. I used to be pretty fast on the remote with the keypad, and could cycle through a number of channels. I forgot how disappointing that digital box was.

rconti2• 4 years ago

I can't channel surf on YouTubeTV because of the UI.

And I could never have been a Dish/DirectTV subscriber because the lag to change channels absolutely kills me.

Arainach• 4 years ago

The degradation in responsiveness happened, but not for the reasons you state. In the 90s and 2000s, consolidation of media company hit a breaking point where one company owns the vast majority of stations in each metro area, they go on commercial at the same time, and you can't surf the way you used to.

ceejayoz• 4 years ago

Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing.

Frustratingly, my Toyota Corolla will start up the radio immediately, but the on/off/volume control doesn't work for several seconds. If someone in my family left the radio blasting, I'm left mashing the button repeatedly until it kicks in. Ugh.

cr3ative• 4 years ago

That's a pain. My VW stereo is similar, but it has a "Maximum start-up volume" setting which gets around this.

Spooky23• 4 years ago

The way you make money on the way down is different than the way up. Radio was a sleepy backwater medium that was mostly advertising for record companies. When deregulation happened, it became a hot, disruptive market where talk and new music genres grew and grew.

The train slowed down in the late 90s and consolidation of syndication and station ownership picked up. Now a few companies own everything and they’ll pump every dollar until the spectrum is turned over to cellular.

suifbwish• 4 years ago

I stopped listening to the radio when I realized I was spending half the time listening to commercials. (99% Commercials are complete mind rot or appeals to emotion btw; if any advertising moguls read this, no one wants to listen to bad jokes and jingles. Just tell me about the product and I might buy it)

_carbyau_• 4 years ago

I wonder how much of this is due to adverts being made for the Company Execs - not for you.

The Company Execs already know the product and don't need to be told about it. But a jingle and a joke might close the advert sale.

brewdad2• 4 years ago

The worst are the radio ad with car horns. I'd say they should be illegal but my local police dept is now running anti-DUI ads on the radio complete with 'police are pulling you over' siren blips. So that ship has sailed.

spoonjim2• 4 years ago

EVERYTHING has more latency these days. Phone calls. TVs. Radios. Computer keyboards. PROFESSIONAL WIRELESS MICROPHONE SYSTEMS. It blows!

ratsmack• 4 years ago

For an old timer like me, cell phones are about as functional for voice communication as the toy walkie-talkie's were that I played with as a kid.

eloisius• 4 years ago

It really is awful, and it seems like most people just don't care, or don't even know that they could care. Perceived latency was a bit motivation for me to ditch macOS last year and go back to Linux. I haven't got benchmarks to prove how it felt to me, but it felt like everything has become spongy and asynchronous. Even with a decked out iMac and fast SSD, it feel like applications don't launch immediately. There's enough lag time that I sit for a second thinking 'did I double click or not? Did it launch and then crash? Oh, here it comes'. Keyboard input feels laggy.

I hate that more and more things are becoming software controlled. "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" is not a law that I want to apply to machines that can and should continue to function instantaneously.

jart2• 4 years ago

Did they do that in order to make room for the Internet? I assume the channels switched instantaneously because they were broadcasting every single one to your home simultaneously. But maybe they wanted more room on the existing wires to store Internet traffic? So they changed the channel change button to ping a server to ask for the other channel to be broadcast. Could anyone confirm if my understanding is accurate? Either way, it definitely ruined the TV viewing experience. But for the Internet, it was worth it.

roywiggins• 4 years ago

Digital over-the-air TV works similarly to analog over-the-air, but it's slower to change channels because the TV has to wait for a frame that isn't a delta from a previous frame to display a coherent image. That's just sort of par for the course with modern digital compression, you could increase the number of such frames but then the compression gets less effective and you'd still have more of a delay than with analog.

zargon• 4 years ago

We're talking about over-the-air radio and tv. There are no wires. Or internet.

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing. Same for tvs.

There's a UX lesson here somewhere.

Especially in cars I vastly prefer mechanical controls for things like the stereo.

viraptor• 4 years ago

punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing. Same for tvs.

I think you're missing the part where the day to day changing conditions mean you have to switch the station then either accept the static or fine tune the station every couple of days. The switching was instant, but I still had to spend time tweaking it and count that as latency-to-ready.

Especially in the cars, without the automatic fine tuning you needed to adjust the frequency depending on where you were at the time.

djur• 4 years ago

Growing up in the 90s my experience was that you turned a knob until you heard what you wanted to hear, and as you traveled you occasionally had to jiggle the knob as the signal shifted. I don't remember any time where a delay was introduced for terrestrial radio.

Johnny5552• 4 years ago

While I usually don't bother scanning for new stations when I go to a new town, that's because I'm listening to music (or podcasts) with my phone. I don't even listen to broadcast radio in my home town.

About the only time I listen to broadcast radio is in a rental car and that's only because I don't bother pairing my phone with the car unless I'm going to be in it for a few days (and I always unpair and/or reset the pairing settings when I return it).

hed• 4 years ago

There was a great period in the mid-late ‘90s where TVs just worked when you connected to cable or antenna, no set top box, tuning was near instantaneous and there was enough enrichment that even station ID and program info could come in with the broadcast.

Pity it was a complicated modulation and waste of spectrum.

wildzzz• 4 years ago

I've got a brand new Kia. The FM radio comes on so fast, it's surprising. Every car I've ever had always has had some sort of warm up time or a splash screen on the infotainment system while it's booting up. This Kia has none of that. Audio is immediately present and tuning to other stations is immediate as well. It's almost a little unnerving how quickly audio comes out since we've always been used to slower FM radios, CD players, satellite radio, and music streaming apps that just take short moment to go to the next station or song.

Also, one thing to remember is that FM radios have been "digital" for quite some time. I'm not talking about HD radio or DAB receivers. FM demodulation chips have existed for a long time (TDA7000 came out in 1983). They handle tuning, demodulation, and amplification all-in-one. The only slow part would be whatever microcontroller has to manage the interface in the receiver. You can even get FM transceiver chips dirt cheap like the one that is in the infamous Baofeng ham radio. It's got one chip doing all of the radio work.

kens• 4 years ago

Maybe you're thinking of a different chip for digital FM? The TDA7000 chip is completely analog, with R-C filters, oscillators, mixers, a variable capacitor and varactor diodes for tuning, and so forth.

myself2486• 4 years ago

My Toyota does the worst of both worlds -- the audio portion comes up immediately, with whatever volume setting it had when it was shut off.

The volume knob doesn't respond until about 8 seconds later.

I'm sure you can imagine situations (like in a driveway such as mine, where the neighbor's bedroom window directly overlooks it) where what was appropriate at 3pm when I got home, is not appropriate at 3am next time I start the car...

thakoppno• 4 years ago

The Baofengs have two FM chips according to this teardown. [0]

AT1846S Single-Chip Transceiver

RDA 5802N Single-Chip Broadcast FM Radio Tuner

[0](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/teardown-tuesday-baofe...)

You’re totally correct. I just wanted to clarify the various ways that radio can decode FM digitally. Please correct me if I’m mistaken. I’m still real new to this world.

jhoechtl4• 4 years ago

I've got a brand new Kia. The FM radio comes on so fast, it's surprising. Every car I've ever had always has had some sort of warm up time or a splash screen on the infotainment system while it's booting up

They simply never power of the Head Units, even if they go dark. And I am not talking of the constant power feature head units head since forever but the CPU actually doing stuff. Most of the time the satellite data is held fresh to give you an immediate position fix if requested.

If you completely detach it from power you would notice that there is a startup time.

consp3• 4 years ago

Does your by any chance have remote onlocking or nearby unlocking features (or are the radio modules installed by default)? Some cars start the boot sequence well before you enter the key/car for the infotainment systems.

WalterBright5• 4 years ago

When I first moved to Seattle 40 years ago, there was one company that advertised on the radio all the time, The Sxxxx Company (you Seattlites know who that is). Their ads all sounded exactly the same, and I grew to hate TSC. I switched to listening to KNHC which never ran ads because I hated TSC. I stopped listening to the radio entirely when I could play cassettes, and later USB sticks.

Fast forward to today, and I recently bought a streaming radio component for my stereo. I programmed in the local station URLs, turned one on, and was aghast - TSC was still running the same goddamned ads, again and again and again. For 40 years.

So much for streaming Seattle radio stations. Blech.

P.S. You people from California know what I mean. Remember Cal Worthington? He drove me away from watching late night TV. I moved to Seattle to get away from Cal Worthington. Then he opened up a dealership in Seattle. Oh, misery. The DVR kept me out of the insane asylum.

konspence• 4 years ago

"Now, you have a friend..."

charcircuit• 4 years ago

Their ads all sounded exactly the same

They aren't the same. Also some of the ads included his daughter too. He seems like a nice guy.

walrus016• 4 years ago

Let's not forget Vern Fonk insurance.

diggum• 4 years ago

I couldn't stand the Cal Worthington commercials, but I'll remember them fondly because a sweet, elderly neighbor with dementia misunderstood the repeated phrase at the end of the song, and would loudly sing along with some rather improper words that were VERY funny to a kid.

In addition to our friends in the diamond business, we also had Jack Roberts Appliance who was less offensive than the others.

astrange5• 4 years ago

When I first moved to Seattle 40 years ago, there was one company that advertised on the radio all the time, The Sxxxx Company (you Seattlites know who that is).

That's the trick. Everyone in the country knows them, but thinks they're local because the ads are so boring. It's a chain!

RedShift1• 4 years ago

I remember those analog tuners and I hated them, you could never get the frequency exactly right and over time it would "wander" so you had to retune. I will take digital FM tuners over analog ones any day, perfect tuning, no wandering, easy channel changing and much better quality.

Also I own a 2012 BMW and its infotainment system works just fine. If the car is coming from deep sleep it takes like 5 seconds to start but it shows the BMW logo and it's a nice touch. With a warm start it's on immediately. Channel changing is also fast, not instant but with the benefit of not hearing any static in between.

Not to say all cars are perfect, I have seen cars with terrible infotainment systems which are slow and buggy, that's just a thing to keep on your list to inspect before buying a new car.

jhoechtl4• 4 years ago

I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline

In all fairness its partly because of the compression algorithms used like Forward Error Correction FEC and progressive frames vs. immediate frames which simply takes some time to construct an audible / visible representation of the digital data.

JohnBooty7• 4 years ago

Our first cable TV "remote" was freaking amazing. Similar to this one:

https://www.nj.com/parenting/guest_bloggers/2011/09/the_thin...

Freaking incredible. You could physically switch to any station instantly.

    punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing

The digital-enhanced FM stuff in cars now, like what's being referenced in the article, isn't laggy in my experience. Not quite as instant as a full analog radio, but it's as snappy as any other digital FM tuner dating back to the dawn of digital FM tuners in the 1970s or whatever.

The FM signal is still analog; there's just some digital metadata embedded in it that receivers can optionally demodulate. In my experience the audio starts playing immediately and then the digital metadata (track name, thumbnail) pops up a bit later. So you can still flip through stations with little perceptible lag.

FWIW, I'm the type of guy who keeps CRTs around for his retro systems because he enjoys true zero-lag gaming.

piperswe• 4 years ago

In many areas, the FM signal is digital "HD Radio," which does introduce some lag

encryptluks2• 4 years ago

I thought by purchasing a car that I owned it but boy was I wrong. It will hopefully be the last time I spend more than 40k just to rent something from the manufacturer.

pigbearpig• 4 years ago

Well, maybe they can try to listen to the 99% Invisible podcast in the meantime. Oh wait, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-....

2016 was apparently a good year for Mazda infotainment systems.

GrifMD• 4 years ago

For those curious, I skimmed the transcript and basically a "%" followed by a "I" in an audio file name cause a weird shutdown behavior on the infotainment system.

derbOac• 4 years ago

I have a different model car and I've been noticing a similar thing since getting a new phone, where sometimes it will just freeze and reboot when bluetooth is being used, and I can't quite figure out why. I thought it was random but am now wondering if there's a pattern I haven't noticed yet.

CSSer9• 4 years ago

It’s just bad code and even worse error handling. The program runs a heartbeat that lets the rest of the car know all is well when things are running smoothly. When the program hangs, the heartbeat stops. When the heartbeat is interrupted for long enough, it’s programmed to reboot. With that in mind, when the owner queues up the podcast the system attempts to decode an unsanitized string (the podcast title) as if it were percent/URL encoded. When it encounters an error because “% I” is not a valid character reference, it hangs.

The worst part is that the car owner was told that a firmware update would “likely” fix it but they would have to pay for it.

withinboredom2• 4 years ago

Now someone like Taylor Swift just needs to title a song with a whole bunch of known exploits to infotainment systems and we're all set.

david_allison• 4 years ago

https://github.com/Hamled/mazda-format-string-bug#readme

dudeinjapan4• 4 years ago

Growing up in mid 90s Seattle the debate was always between KUBE 93.3 for hip-hop or 107.7 "The End" for alternative (KNDD). This debate destroyed friendships. Getting stuck on KUOW would be a kafka-esque purgatory.

clemailacct1• 4 years ago

Remember the T-Man show in the morning on KUBE93?

dudeinjapan4• 4 years ago

Oh man of course I do!!

tomcam• 4 years ago

I was bi. I listened to both. And KUOW

jeramey• 4 years ago

But us pop kids still stuck to 101.5, annoying everyone with our bad taste.

kristopolous• 4 years ago

I dunno. NPR has good variety and a little something for everybody.

Just make sure to adjust your schedule so you're on the road at the appropriate half hour time slots for your tastes and I'd say "bug closed"!

kortilla4• 4 years ago

NPR has good variety and a little something for everybody.

NPR listener demographics disagree. http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wnmu/files/MasterMedi...

notreallyserio2• 4 years ago

I was one of the weirdos that listened to 89.5, a station ran by a high school.

darknavi2• 4 years ago

Dude, C89.5 was the shit. No shame in that.

What a cool program if you think about it. I wish more highschool was tangible skills like that.

dudeinjapan4• 4 years ago

Run by Nathan Hale I remember it well. My buddies and I at Lakeside were inspired by this to try to get our school to run its own station, when that got denied we looked at options for building a pirate radio station but ultimately decided against it. We ended up building a recording studio at Lakeside instead.

RyJones• 4 years ago

I still listen to it!

Also KBRD 680, when I can. A radio station playing public domain music picked by a parrot? sign me up

darknavi2• 4 years ago

Mid 2000s here. It was a fight between The End and C89.5 for us.

micro_cam• 4 years ago

Can't forget KCMU 90.3 (which latter became KEXP)

dudeinjapan4• 4 years ago

KEXP Kevin Suggs is a demi-god of sound engineering.

PascLeRasc• 4 years ago

What about KEXP? I love listening to that station though I’m sadly not in Seattle.

1970-01-01• 4 years ago

I'm thinking somebody forgot a "." in their station logo and this is the result.

Station Logos use file-naming conventions with version numbers (this is accomplished in the image client). This is useful for storing and cataloging station logo images in the receiver.

https://hdradio.com/broadcasters/engineering-support/station...

wyldfire• 4 years ago

Seems like the receiver should use values it can trust to index the logos. Some kind of simple hash would be trivial to implement and likely as effective.

If this is what could happen when you omit a dot, good luck if there's a malicious payload. Infotainment systems generally won't get the safety critical audits/oversight that other car systems would get.

mbreese2• 4 years ago

Probably more related to this line:

It is critical that the station call sign be transmitted correctly. Station Logos follow a file-naming convention that includes the station call sign. This way the receiver can quickly read the call sign and determine if the Station Logo is already archived for immediate display. The filename for a Station Logo includes the station call sign, the program number, and the version number.

Sounds like they didn't sanitize their inputs. This is going to be a huge hassle for everyone involved.

nomilk• 4 years ago

I hope for Mazda's sake there aren't any stations called bobby tables.

JoBrad• 4 years ago

Weird that other car models aren’t affected, though.

Terry_Roll2• 4 years ago

I think someone might have found a way to deliver malware over the air just like tv's can get updates over the air. Unless you have a SDR listening and logging you wont spot the hacks, but digital transmissions make it easier to deliver multiple signals so you can deliver fake radio stations, tv programmes all sorts.

Hacking digital equipment is a very creative job as many will know and the one's who have the most experience are the military, been doing to other country's before consumer electronics made it possible to hack their own population.

I cant even say follow the money because alot of countries can and do print what they like.

divbzero• 4 years ago

“Luckily I am an NPR listener so that’s fine,” Smith said.

Many Seattleites would also be happy if it were stuck on KEXP.

dihydro2• 4 years ago

I love the Song of the Day podcast from them. Highlights so many good artists.

whalesalad• 4 years ago

Not that big a deal, just need to find the UART port and get out your old reliable RS232 cable, reverse engineer the device, then you should be able to change the radio station.

jaimex2• 4 years ago

You can probably just use Forscan to program the change already.

consp3• 4 years ago

Does it now support non ford based models as these are of Mazda's own design and at least the infotainment is not comparable to ford sync which runs qnx (or Windows CE embedded for older versions). The relationship ended in 2015 afaik.

aksss4• 4 years ago

You laugh but tapping into the UART on the Mazda CMU is totally a thing. https://mazdatweaks.com/serial/

I think people have even managed to side load electron apps on it.

Mazda’s CMU may be the closest thing to DD-WRT in a car that you can get, but confess I’m not too familiar with what else might compete for that title.

dihydro2• 4 years ago

99% Invisible found out that Mazda has a bug in their radio that cannot parse special characters. See their article here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-...

CSSer9• 4 years ago

Mazda’s response at the time was pretty disheartening too. Pay us for a firmware update and it’ll probably fix it. The owner said ‘no thanks’ because it was too expensive (and honestly ridiculous in principle in my opinion). Now Roman Mars, the owner of 99% Invisible, releases a separate version of every episode with “Mazda safe titles”

pronlover723• 4 years ago

Seems like he should do the opposite, Only release versions with Mazda unsafe titles with a note "Doesn't work on Mazda. Contact their customer support here to complain"

dehrmann• 4 years ago

the owner of 99% Invisible

Nit: he sold it.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/26/22403852/siriusxm-roman-m...

aidenn0• 4 years ago

I have a Mazda, and it also parses ogg metadata strangely; if you have multiple fields starting with "ARTIST" then it will fill the artist field with all of them, but without erasing the buffer first.

When I first loaded my music collection, it stuck in a reboot loop, so I have a script that sanitizes the metadata for exporting to my car

cipheredStones• 4 years ago

Maddeningly, that episode never arrives at the actual bug. Via a thread the Mazda owner posted on Reddit, I found this great writeup: https://github.com/Hamled/mazda-format-string-bug#readme

TLDR: The problem is the `% In`, and specifically the `%n` - when printf sees that, it tries to store data in memory. Failing to do so, it crashes.

unwind• 4 years ago

This is so weird.

I read [1] which someone linked to, and it all seems to make sense. But it doeesn't!

I tried compiling this with gcc 11.2.0:

    #include <stdio.h>

    int main(void)
    {
      printf("%99 Invisible", NULL);
      return 0;
    }

And it won't compile. I get:

    test.c: In function ‘main’:
    test.c:5:14: warning: unknown conversion type character ‘ ’ in format [- 
   Wformat=]
        5 |   printf("%99 Invisible", NULL);
          |              ^
    test.c:5:10: warning: too many arguments for format [-Wformat-extra-args]
        5 |   printf("%99 Invisible", NULL);
          |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

which I would expect; you can't have a field width (the "99") and then the space-padding flag; flags go first. Also I can't find any coverage of %I (capital 'I', as in "Invisible") in the manual page for printf(3) on that system but that might just be an old manual page, GCC does seem to recognize it.

Removing the cruft and trying plain %In gives a warning, but I guess whoever built the car's radio UI ignores warnings.

I guess it's possible that the system doesn't use a standard-compliant enough C library, so it's printf() implementation does something ... creative with this string.

Anyway, classic case of the lovely foot-gunnery that is %n in the wild! Sorry for all the car owners, of course. :/

EDIT: A commenter pointed out that the above are "just warnings", oops. :) More oops on me for not spelling the freaking title correctly, of course it's "99%" and not "%99" .. .need more coffee, clearly. Sorry.

For people less used to C, the error here more or less seems to boil down to passing an untrusted string as the special "format string" for the printf() function. That function will interpret the contents of the string, and the percent symbol is how its special formatting directives start. Characters following a percent symbol will cause it to do stuff. The proper fix is usally to change

    printf(string);

    printf("%s", string);

or use some other I/O function altogether. The above simply says "here's a string", by using the programmer-selected string "%s" as the format, instead of the untrusted string coming from the outside.

[1] https://github.com/Hamled/mazda-format-string-bug#readme

mckirk• 4 years ago

Oh god. Format string bugs in infotainment systems that can be triggered by careless radio stations. What could possibly go wrong.

hughrr• 4 years ago

My Citroen does that. If you connect to it with BT and play anything with Cyrillic characters in the title from Apple Music it trashes the display trying to render it.

rwmj• 4 years ago

My Toyota - a Japanese car - cannot display song titles in Japanese. I kind of assume this is a localisation issue rather than something that would happen in Japan though, although the car entertainment is terrible in many other ways too so who knows.

oasisbob2• 4 years ago

Wow. Not many automakers can claim to have an infotainment system notorious enough to get coverage on local public radio and a design-oriented podcast.

Weird intersection.

tomkat0789• 4 years ago

I see several comments expressing that they haven't used the radio in years. I still use mine every time I get into my mid-2000s Honda! I'd be cursing the tech gods if they locked me into a single station! I guess I'm not the only one or nobody would have noticed the bug.

My knowledge and following of music is spotty, so radio is key to my discovery of new songs. On long road trips I tend to find good new (to me) songs, as well as get amused by some weird ones. A few highlights from the odd but fun stuff:

- Driving through rural Ohio at midnight I randomly seeked to a station playing "Clean Up the Ghetto by the Philidelphia International All Stars. - On a Sunday morning in southern Mississippi I heard some happy old dance music accompanied by the jolly but incomprehensible New Orleans drawl of the DJ. - Driving through West Virginia I heard "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" 3 times on the same morning on different stations.

I don't road trip extremely often but surfing the radio is something I look forward to when I do! I usually get a taste of the local culture and a window outside of my urban tech bubble.

rconti2• 4 years ago

Love the self-deprecating humor:

"So who, or what, is responsible for trapping these Mazda owners in a public radio echo chamber they can’t escape, even by car?"

js22• 4 years ago

I have a 2016 CX-9. It’s been years since I looked into this, but the Mazda infotainment system is running Linux. You used to be able to login to it over the USB port, but they locked that down at some point with a firmware upgrade so that you could only get to it over a serial connection that you could get to if you were comfortable removing the console.

The UI is developed by a U.S. company and I think is JavaScript based.

Ah, here you go:

https://mazdatweaks.com/

(I retrofitted CarPlay support to mine via an upgrade Mazda offered a couple years after I got the car and I think that closed off access to tweaking, but I forget. I’m generally happy with the UI but I wish it booted faster. It’s a good 1-2 minutes after starting the car before it’s responsive.)

sdoering• 4 years ago

I did the same. Wouldn't want to miss it on my 2018 model.

Edit: By the way. Thanks for reminding me. I looked at the site and they now have support for wireless Android Auto. So I might just be able to ditch the somewhat unreliable connection with the cable.

koz10006• 4 years ago

The UI is developed by a U.S. company and I think is JavaScript based

The IVI from that era is an iMX6 hardware platform developed by Johnson Controls and was written in JavaScript running on the Opera browser.

JCI sold that business to Visteon in 2014.

heywire• 4 years ago

If you have a navigation SD card inserted (that you likely don’t use due to the CarPlay), try removing it. It sped up my boot times significantly. I also have a usb full of music that I plug in sometimes, and I notice it is slower to boot with that inserted as well.

awiesenhofer• 4 years ago

Sounds like fsck running at boot time

LambdaComplex• 4 years ago

I also drive a 2016 Mazda, and I can confirm that I had the same problem with the same fix

js22• 4 years ago

Thanks for this idea. Made a big difference.

neogodless5• 4 years ago

My 3 is a 2015. Got it used in 2017 and after a few months, I loaded Android Auto on it using Mazda AIO Tweaks.

Notably, the UI was sluggish and unstable before (and after) I installed Android Auto.

With Android Auto installed, I got a good two and a half years out of moderately reliable use, but just as the pandemic started in March 2020, Android Auto got remarkably unstable. It might run OK for a few songs if I only did one thing, i.e. Pandora OR Google Maps, but doing both almost always caused a freeze within seconds, required the three button salute to reboot the system.

I thought it might be due to the phone (Pixel 3), but I tried a different phone since with the same result (OnePlus 7 Pro). I suspect something changed on the Android side, but Android 9 was six months earlier and Android 10 was six months later. The updated Android Auto design had been out for several months (summer 2019) before I started having issues. Since I haven't driven much since the pandemic started, I still haven't tried to fix it. (I suspect maybe an updated install from Mazda AIO Tweaks might help.)

decafninja2• 4 years ago

IIRC Tesla's touchscreen UI is running React Native?

coder5432• 4 years ago

Tesla uses Qt.

Ford is using an HTML-based interface in the Mach-E (and vehicles which get infotainment systems derived from that new generation of infotainment system). I've seen rumors that Ford is using React to power that interface, but I wasn't able to pin down any real sources.

This explains to some degree how Tesla is able to have such a buttery smooth UI on such terrible Intel Atom hardware (until recently.. they're switching to much better hardware now). At the same time, the Mach-E interface is not very smooth at all, but it is functionally pretty good. I think Ford should have a leg up on rapidly improving their infotainment interface, given that I would expect React to make some things easier than Qt... but Ford has so far failed to demonstrate that they can effectively distribute OTA updates, regardless of early promises. Hopefully they get that figured out soon.

sircastor4• 4 years ago

I got to meet with some guys who worked on that system at my last job. At the time, they were called OpenCar, and the system was recognizable as what ended up in the Mazda. I do recall that in spite of the name, nothing they were doing was open source.

donatj2• 4 years ago

My radio in my 2005 Chrysler Crossfire has a weird bug where if I set it to 92.5 KQRS it works fine for about a minute and then suddenly changes station to some country station ~105 that I don’t have as any sort of preset. It’s done this since I bought the car in 2010 and never had a similar behavior with any other stations. It’s really bizarre.

silverlyra• 4 years ago

Might be a bug involving the station's broadcast of and/or the stereo's support for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_frequency

donatj2• 4 years ago

Interesting… I wonder if maybe they are wrongly broadcasting an alternate frequency. I wonder if there’s an easy way to inspect the radio stations “metadata”.

I have done some basic fiddling with SDR but am not at all competent.

can16358p3• 4 years ago

I have a Ford Ranger 2020 and I never listen to radio, always listen on Bluetooth. For some reason it switches to an AM station (that I never listen to) from my Bluetooth and shows a TA icon (even when TA is toggled off, and it's not even used in my country, and the AM station has nothing to do with TA).

After reading this I started to wonder if it might be something similar/related.

I even thought of removing the antenna as I never use radio anyway. Have you done anything about your issue that you can recommend?

pzduniak• 4 years ago

I'm certain the TA toggle is broken in my 2019 Hyundai i30N. Disabled every radio-related setting, somehow an FM station managed to force the system to switch to it from Android Auto every 5 minutes. TA is also not used in my country. Infuriating.

jhoechtl4• 4 years ago

Sounds like an RDSB issue where the station is broadcasting an alternate frequency AF and the radio is switching to, because the field strength of that AF is stronger than the one you are coming from. There are three fixes:

* You enable "LOCAL" mode, this should ignore those AFs broadcasted by stations which would switch to another station broadcasting a different program (it's actually more complicated, for brevity simplified). Not all head units HU offer this setting.

* You disable the AF-feature of your HU.

* KQRS should stop broadcasting this AF

donkarma• 4 years ago

where did you learn this?

steelegbr• 4 years ago

To add another bit of anecdata, if either station has their PI mis-configured, you can get handoff without being in the AF list. 1st and 3rd character matching rings a bell.

Seen it happen in the UK with RDS and head units tuning to the higher powered (mis-configured) station.

ChuckNorris89• 4 years ago

then suddenly changes station to some country station

My God, the horror.

mdoms• 4 years ago

I have to ask, why do Americans always refer to radio stations with a 4-letter code? Most places are just the frequency and the station name (94.2 The Rock, 98.8 Radio Hauraki, etc) but I'm pretty sure every single time I have seen an American refer to a radio station they say something like "KUOW 94.9".

alexb_3• 4 years ago

The FCC mandates that stations have either a 4 or 3 letter call sign. Ones on the west coast start with K, east of that is W. Since they all have to identify themselves to the FCC with these call signs, it's convenient to advertise the channel with that name as well. Not every station does this, some like to not talk about the call sign at all in their name, but most advertise with it for simplicity.

sbierwagen• 4 years ago

Since they all have to identify themselves to the FCC with these call signs, it's convenient to advertise the channel with that name as well

Not just that, it's required by federal law to announce the callsign once an hour, in both radio and OTA television. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_identification#United_... (If you watch sports broadcasts on OTA TV you might notice a subtle overlay pop over the content at the top of the hour)

Made more sense in the analog era, when tuning was done by twiddling a potentiometer and you never quite knew exactly what frequency you were on.

oblio4• 4 years ago

east of that is W

Because of course it is. Facepalm moment right there.

seszett• 4 years ago

In many places you can't even use the frequency as a reference because it changes depending on region. On my regular 100-km drive in Belgium Classic21 gets three different frequency. But it's just Classic21, it doesn't have a code name.

billatq• 4 years ago

Not all American stations have names aside from their call sign. In the Seattle Area, KUOW is just KUOW. The dance station at 89.5 calls itself C89.5, and almost nobody uses their call sign of KNHC.

On the other hand, the dance station in the Miami area calls itself "Revolution 93.5". It really depends upon the station and the market.

ale422• 4 years ago

The page reads "A few weeks ago cellphone companies — and KUOW — switched to a 5G signal." What's the link between 5G and an FM radio station, anyone has an idea?

wickedsickeune• 4 years ago

None they are extremely different frequencies, plus FM radio is not even digital.

srj2• 4 years ago

In this case it's an HD radio broadcast, which is digital.

jweather• 4 years ago

Per the geekwire article linked above, one of the local Mazda dealerships blamed 5G for causing the issue. Apparently that's the popular thing to do these days.

Tangentially related, an old ham radio operator related his advice for putting up an antenna on your house: "Put the antenna up, but don't connect it to anything for a few weeks. Don't even run the cable yet. When people complain about it making their fillings vibrate or garage door open or whatever, you can show them that it isn't even connected to anything. This helps filter out the people who have nothing better to do than to complain."

ale422• 4 years ago

Indeed 5G had nothing to do: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/02/radio-station-snafu-in-...

Btw nice advice for the antenna... I'll try to remember it the day I'll finally manage to have an antenna again ;-)

jbirer• 4 years ago

This is really needed for me who is a channel change maniac.

jll29• 4 years ago

We're already in the dystopian world of Brazil - modulo the 27B-6 and Harvey Tuttle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosrujtjJHA

oasisbob2• 4 years ago

Interesting, see 3.4.2 Data Inputs.

NRSC-5 In-band/on-channel Digital Radio Broadcasting Standard:

https://www.nrscstandards.org/standards-and-guidelines/docum...

lightwords• 4 years ago

There is one amusing bug which might be related to this in Mazda 2018. If you add the same station twice to your favourites(easy to accidentally do) and then you click the station lower in the list the UI kicks you up and down in the list endlessly. This is because on each render it checks your station state and just pick the station with the same name randomly in the list.

foobarbecue• 4 years ago

Wait, people are using the cell network for car radio now?

YesThatTom2• 4 years ago

Mazda’s entertainment system has had interesting bugs before. Like… it used to crash if your song title accidentally looks like a printf statement

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/brh8jm

CSSer9• 4 years ago

It's interesting because this is all over this thread, but it's not actually a string interpolation issue. It's an issue with percent encoding[0]. They talk about it likely being an interpolation issue at first but end up ruling it out.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-2.1

PaulRobinson• 4 years ago

From a press release geekwire got:

    “Between 1/24-1/31, a radio station in the Seattle area sent image files with no extension, which caused an issue on some 2014-2017 Mazda vehicles with older software,” the Mazda statement said. “Mazda North American Operations (MNAO) has distributed service alerts advising dealers of the issue.”

    The statement goes on to say that “dealers are currently experiencing parts delays due to shipping constraints” and that MNAO plans to “support impacted customers with replacement parts. These customers should contact their local Mazda dealer who can submit a goodwill request to the Mazda Warranty department on their behalf, order the parts, and schedule a free repair when the parts arrive.”

    The Mazda representative did not reply to GeekWire’s follow-up questions about what actually malfunctioned in these vehicles and what parts would need to be replaced.

driverdan• 4 years ago

What does that mean? Sent image files where? How did those image files impact car radios?

jlack• 4 years ago

HD radio can broadcast images for the radio station, etc. that is displayed when you are tuned to that channel.

tcskeptic• 4 years ago

I suspect they are talking about this:

https://radiodns.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Guidelines-o...

Essentially small images sent OTA that allow stations to "Brand" themselves on automotive receivers.

dgrin91• 4 years ago

How does a radio station even send an image file? What does that mean? What is suppose to happen when a radio station sends an image file?

Humdeee• 4 years ago

I imagine this could be anything like song album art, station icon, etc. for any car that has more than the scrolling led type radio display

wfleming• 4 years ago

I don't know the technical details of how it's encoded, but digital radio stations can embed metadata in their signal that the car radio can display. That includes text, like the station name, and also images, like a logo, that's usually shown next to the station name. I believe it's part of HD Radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio.

hedora4• 4 years ago

Wait. They're not fixing this with a firmware update?

So, any radio station intern will be able to take out a city's worth of Mazdas moving forward?

Nice.

meshaneian• 4 years ago

Risk was already there. Have you seen the way interns drive?

Cd00d• 4 years ago

I think "take out" is unnecessarily hyperbolic language. It seems they're stuck on a radio station, not inoperable or dangerous.

Aperocky2• 4 years ago

So, any radio station intern will be able to take out a city's worth of Mazdas moving forward?

Well if the server exploded because someone passed a wrong get parameter I'm not blaming whoever that did it.

asveikau• 4 years ago

I've never seen a car stereo get a firmware update. Manufacturers seem to treat these as throwaway components. They're made once and forever sealed. Kind of crappy from the perspective of consumers and the environment.

I guess what I've heard about eg. Tesla is a counterexample.

xattt2• 4 years ago

It doesn’t even have to be an intern. You could set up a pirate radio station with a DAB/HD Radio transmitter on a frequently-listened station at an overpass and see what happens.

dale_glass• 4 years ago

Apparently a normal firmware update isn't possible for anyone who already got hit by this, because it gets stuck in a reboot loop which prevents the firmware from being updated.

snarkerson• 4 years ago

The same issue occurred in th Boston area 2 years ago. A borked image file caused the system to go into a boot loop.

Had to get the unit replaced at the dealership.

emiliosic2• 4 years ago

When I had a 2016 Mazda, I regularly downloaded their firmware, which at some point came fairly frequently. Like other manufacturers, their dealer portal posts firmware upgrades along with other service bulletins, and occasionally the firmware leaks out from some of their dealers, so enthusiast would go on upgrade it by themselves.

dncornholio• 4 years ago

Most car software is rubbish.

So far, everything that my car replaces with a touchscreen that used to be a physical switch is a complete downgrade.

My car features a D-pad on the wheel that also works if you swipe over it, resulting in bad inputs and causing all kinds of frustration. It's my first new car and I'm feeling like I want my old car back. I seriously hate touchscreen controls and my only physical input is faulty

the_snooze3• 4 years ago

It's probably reasonable to assume that car touchscreens are designed more to "look cool" at the time of sale than to actually be usable over the life of a vehicle. Car salesmen get to show off all sorts of high-tech bells and whistles, and that's more immediately impressive to buyers than the long-term practicality of physical knobs and switches.

Cxckers• 4 years ago

Hopefully, those same customers will know better when coming to buy their next car after that, therefore reducing desire for touchscreen controls and hopefully, their extensive usage

dfxm123• 4 years ago

I think this is part of it, "iPhones are cool, and this is like a giant iPhone!", but I think a larger part of it is that it's easier to design/program for and actually possible to update after the fact if that's required. There's probably something here for using the same parts across a whole line of cars, too vs testing and fitting buttons.

JohnBooty7• 4 years ago

Either that, or cost-savings.

One off-the-shelf touchscreen... vs. lots of little custom-molded and printed analog parts that have to be assembled by costly robots or costlier humans. Big savings, I think.

Whatever the case, it sure isn't because people like touch controls in their cars. Holy shit, what a universally reviled "feature."

jliptzin• 4 years ago

I think touchscreen controls are fine as long as the car also has voice commands that work well so you don’t even have to look anywhere else while driving much less touch the console

Nextgrid• 4 years ago

I won't trust someone to get voice recognition right when they can't even get an on-screen UI right.

yojo2• 4 years ago

When I bought my last car (Honda Fit), I was stuck with the base model because it was the only one without a touch a screen.

I test drove the upgraded trim package. It was nicer in every way but the damn touch screen, which was a non-starter. I had to wait three months for a cheaper car to come in, instead of buying the upgraded package on the spot.

At some point a manufacturer will get wise and start selling manual controls as an upgrade.

dfxm123• 4 years ago

That's the same reason I bought the base model of my last car. Besides the steering wheel, you end up interacting with the center console the most. It really should be one of the top considerations in buying a car vs fancy wheels, a cool spoiler or a turbocharger, etc. After all, a lot of body components & engine modifications can be added after market. You're going to have a much harder time "fixing" that center console...

delusional5• 4 years ago

Mazda already wised up and removed the touchscreen in their newer models, everything in the infotainment is operated by a little rotary/dpad-thing located near the gearshift. I think it's quite nice, input wise.

Software wise it's a complete mess. The software itself is actually pretty OK, the navigation is just very verbose and it's strange that I can't just update it myself. The startup is also quite annoying. It's an embedded computer in a car, it should be instant.

Android auto support is a trashfire. It occasionally (when i drive for more than an hour) crashes the entire infotainment system, forcing it to reboot (a 1 minute process). Thankfully it resumes from where it left off after the reboot.

throw10920• 4 years ago

At some point a manufacturer will get wise and start selling manual controls as an upgrade.

Will they really?

Most consumers invest very little effort in researching most of their purchases, and are remarkably tolerant to specific kinds of annoyances. I wish that they invested more effort, but based on my observations of my friends and family (who will spend e.g. about 20 minutes researching their $600 phone purchase), they won't, with a few outliers.

An imperfect comparison might be the amount of effort that the average techie spends on purchasing a MicroSD card or USB drive (usually on Amazon). How many people, even programmers, will spend time looking for durability or third-party performance benchmarking numbers? How many will look for child/slave labor in the manufacturing of the device, or rare earth materials sourced from areas in conflict?

I, personally, know that I should do the above, but I don't - partially because Google is so incredibly bad at finding the information, but also because I know that because most other people don't care, a lot of the above information might not exist at all.

dgemm• 4 years ago

Similar thing with the touch bar on macbooks. I would pay extra to "upgrade" to one with physical F-keys instead.

melony• 4 years ago

Ironically Mazda got rid of their touch screen for their new cars.

ramesh31• 4 years ago

Most car software is rubbish.

Why is this? You'd think these massive corporations could afford the best SWE's in the world. And yet, the average infotainment system in a new car today is literally worse than an iPad from 2010.

burnoutgal• 4 years ago

Car companies do a lot of revenue, but margins are slim. When you actually have to build something out of metal and glass you have to be fixated on cost cutting.

TedDoesntTalk• 4 years ago

It is not their core competency.

sircastor4• 4 years ago

I worked in infotainment for an Automaker. The engineers are fine. The hardware is often limited (because of expense or contacts), and the development timeline is 2-3 years.

Also, infotainment is not a make-or-break feature of the car. It might nudge people a little, but it’s not the thing, so it’s not as high a priority.

I will say for my former employer that I could get a better salary at almost any software company than there. The work was interesting though.

decafninja2• 4 years ago

Probably the cost center vs. profit center thing.

SWEs working at these companies are probably hamstrung in what they can do.

From cheap economobiles to six figure luxury cars, I've yet to see an infotainment system that works better than CarPlay.

The last bastion for factory infotainment systems is that CarPlay/Android Auto doesn't integrate with factory HUD or instrument panel displays (whether the instrument panel is a big LCD itself, or a small one nestled between the gauges). But I hear even this is changing in some recent models. Once that revolution is finished, then I don't see why I'd ever use the factory infotainment software ever again instead of just CarPlay.

stadium• 4 years ago

It's also on a 5 year supply chain cycle. That brand new touch screen was spec'd and designed 5 years before the finished car was made.

JohnBooty7• 4 years ago

My wife has a 2019 Subaru Crosstrek that gets this exactly right, IMO.

There is a touchscreen. IMO, you want that for Apple CarPlay / Android Auto. Mostly for nav.

But for everything else, there are big grippy analog controls. There are also analog volume and prev/next controls for the touchscreen. I believe the interior was designed with the concept of, "everything should be operable, even if the driver is wearing gloves."

pcdoyle• 4 years ago

Yeah this is how my Hyundai Kona (2020) works and I think it's a good bridge between both. Touchscreen for CarPlay navigation, knobs on the dashboard, and additional buttons on the steering wheel (volume up/down, skip, mute, answer call).

munificent• 4 years ago

There is a touchscreen. IMO, you want that for Apple CarPlay / Android Auto. Mostly for nav.

More importantly, federal law requires that new cars must have back-up cameras. Car manufacturers are doing the obvious analysis of, if we need to have a screen in there anyway, may as well make it a touchscreen. And if we're going to make it a touchscreen, may as well save some money by eliminating a bunch of physical controls.

I don't like it—I plan to drive my 2002 Tacoma into the ground specifically to avoid getting a car with a huge touchscreen UI—but I kind of understand it.

NoSorryCannot• 4 years ago

Mazdas don't have touchscreens, incidentally. It's one of their design constraints.

comrh• 4 years ago

Mine from 2014 does, did they remove them? It also has the navigation nob in the center console that I love.

duxup3• 4 years ago

I wish I could just mirror my phone screen on my car screen.

That's all I need, my phone apps and interface update just fine and are pretty good at doing the things I want.

Tagbert3• 4 years ago

That is essentially what Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are. The phone generates a secondary screen with a simplified UI and projects that to the car. The car displays it as a video and returns touch events to the phone.

vgeek2• 4 years ago

The biggest disappointment was manufacturers moving away from the DIN standard. Companies like Pioneer and Alpine (even defunct companies like Eclipse) have had highly functional and usable touchscreen DVD/stereo/GPS units since at least ~2005. Things like GPS, bluetooth and voice control all seem to work without fail on the units I've had (my only issue has been a folder limit on USB drives). They also focus on sound quality, so you can get higher quality audio from the unit via RCA jacks to an amplifier. All of this for <$500 with GPS, <$200 without GPS. If the car companies want tight integrations (things like OBDII tying into display, climate controls) an OEM developed touchscreen makes sense, but as a consumer, using a 20 year old OEM touchscreen is painful. Modularity (the DIN standard) solved this, by allowing easy upgrades, but I guess that doesn't help move newer cars.

rampant_ai• 4 years ago

Infotainment systems are one of the biggest selling points if you've seen any car ad lately. Why let the customer upgrade the unit and keep that same car for a decade, when you can make that impossible and then entice them with the latest infotainment system so they buy a new car every few years.

jyrkesh2• 4 years ago

I drive a 2005 stick shift that sits on a Toyota Corolla block. It has a dumb radio with real buttons, and no power windows or power locks.

It's amazing. Maintenance is cheap, stuff works. I have a Bluetooth FM radio dongle, and the audio quality is less than ideal, but my speakers are crap too, so who cares. I threw on a dash mount for my phone to do navigation and music, and it's wayyyy better than even decks with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto (particularly since most of that stuff, until very recently, required you to plug in a cable).

I'm going to drive the thing into the ground. Really not looking forward to the idea of buying a car full of computers to replace it.

That being said, fuel economy isn't _great_. If the odometer is to be trusted I get around 25 mpg, but I don't drive all that much, and I just don't think a hybrid or electric vehicle is worth the price, both upfront (particularly in this market) and maintenance (for the hybrids only, electrics seem to be maintenance-free).

userbinator• 4 years ago

25mpg definitely doesn't sound right for a Corolla. That's roughly what I can get in my fullsize car if I try not to "stretch its legs" too much ...and it's got a big V8.

762236• 4 years ago

I keep wondering why the car reviews don't mention how bad the software can be (like having to wait ages for the system to boot).

brokenmachine4• 4 years ago

Just like any reviewer, they're dependent on the car companies continuing to give them cars to review.

If they shit on them too much then they risk getting banned.

partiallypro• 4 years ago

I imagine this is why Apple is wanting to get into the car game, it sees this opporunity.

munk-a2• 4 years ago

To reduce all inputs to a single button that you tap in different patterns to trigger different functionality or to remove all physical ports (including the fuel tank inflow) with wireless equivalent that only work with approved hardware? The folks I want to get into the car game are mechanics from the 90s that believe a switch with a nice deep "click" for feedback is the best thing ever invented.

spywaregorilla• 4 years ago

Siri, brake.

tomhunters• 4 years ago

Are all of our Mazda cars are sluggish?

mey• 4 years ago

I wonder if the FCC is going to get involved.

47 CFR § 2.1(c): Harmful Interference. Interference which endangers the functioning of a radionavigation service or of other safety services or seriously degrades, obstructs, or repeatedly interrupts a radiocommunication service operating in accordance with [the ITU] Radio Regulations.

maerF0x0• 4 years ago

It's not the signal that's causing the issue, but the crap software interpreting it.

Beta-72• 4 years ago

If something like this was present on a web app it would have 10 different tests so it wouldn't happen. How come the car/infotainment system isn't subject to the same requirements like other softwares? Is there something obvious i am missing?

jakear• 4 years ago

This is the first time I’ve seen “a web app” used as a shining beacon of stability.

In short, you can’t test a negative. It’s easy to test “when the car receives a transmission in X format, Y happens”, but not “there does not exist a transmission format X such that when the car receives it, Y happens”.

Memory safe languages can help here, as would fuzzing. But the only true test would be a formal verification, which is a real pain (and even then you’re only testing against a single Y).

What you really want is “there does not exist any transmission that could result in any bad behavior”, which can only really be tested in that large scale fuzzer we call Production.

Beta-72• 4 years ago

Fair enough, what i meant by "web app" was a project with a 100th of the budget of a car company.

danrocks• 4 years ago

Mazda MX-5 Miata. Best card I've ever had.

jlkuester7• 4 years ago

Talk about a captive audience....

gtirloni• 4 years ago

A few weeks ago cellphone companies — and KUOW — switched to a 5G signal. But many cars are still only equipped with 3G and glitch when faced with the newer 5G

Sorry but what? FM radio station switched to 5G phone standard? And supposedly the 3G receiver in the car is affected? shakes head

nonfamous• 4 years ago

It’s not what happened in this situation, but it’s not hard to imagine one that might. Perhaps the receiver software requires a regular data update via the 3G network, and when 3G shuts down the receiver doesn’t work anymore?

kevinventullo2• 4 years ago

I recently went car shopping and the only aspect of the software I was interested in was how hard it was to activate Apple CarPlay. My assumption is that Apple/Google will have infinitely higher software quality standards than any car manufacturer, so I’ll outsource to them as early as possible.

delusional5• 4 years ago

Seeing the quality of android auto, I'm not sure you're right.

kevinventullo2• 4 years ago

Fair enough, I’ve only used Apple CarPlay and assumed Android Auto was comparable.

yellow_postit• 4 years ago

Apple CarPlay had a recent bug for a few months that broke wireless connection unless you did a full reset (recently patched). Great when it works though.

geephroh• 4 years ago

And more info from the Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/thanks-to-a-glitch...

sircastor4• 4 years ago

I read a lot of people in these sorts of threads mention how they hate their car infotainment systems, and how they just wish it were Android Auto or CarPlay. I wanted to offer a little insight into it. I worked for an Auto Manufacturer for 7 years.

Infotainment systems are developed as a partnership (usually) between a vendor and the auto company. The hardware is often developed by a different company, I like to think of them as old-school stereo manufacturers: Bosch, Pioneer, etc. The development cycle is somewhere between 12-36 months, and that's still quite a bit before the vehicle actually rolls off the assembly line.

Many customers like CarPlay or Android Auto. Both represent a cost to the manufacturer, and require ceding the design space to another company which is very visible to the customer. Brand is a big deal for car makers, and giving that space up is hard.

CSSer9• 4 years ago

are developed as a partnership (usually) between a vendor and the auto company.

Depending on the manufacturer this is true for most of the car nowadays, right? I watched an engineering teardown of the new all-electric Mustang Mach E recently and they even used different vendors (which produced parts of vastly different calibers of quality) for the rear and front motors[0].

Point taken about ceding the branding power to the vendor, especially when that vendor is big and scary like Apple or Google.

[0] https://youtu.be/jWOPMtejm_Y?t=768

sircastor4• 4 years ago

Depending on the manufacturer this is true for most of the car nowadays, right?

I believe so. I was thinking specifically of the OS work and how it would be contracted out to a provider, and the hardware for the Infotainment would go out to another.

I watched an engineering teardown of the new all-electric Mustang Mach E recently and they even used different vendors (which produced parts of vastly different calibers of quality) for the rear and front motors[0].

One of the interesting things about EVs is that a lot of traditional OEMs don't have the expertise in-house, so things like motors (which would normally be something in-house) end up being designed and manufactured by someone else.

Aperocky2• 4 years ago

I don't understand why car infotainment system is a thing honestly.

If you really need a touchscreen that badly, just buy an ipad and tape it to the dash, would probably offer way more feature and flexibility.

My truck had dials and audio jacks, what else do you really need? The car navigation systems I've seen are universally worse than google map.

massysett• 4 years ago

My car has CarPlay and I've found it to be very disappointing, so much so that mainly I now do as you suggest and simply use the iPhone with a dash mount. I get the audio over Bluetooth, which seems to work well enough - it seems the Bluetooth implementation is older and better debugged.

The car's Bluetooth is satisfactory for taking calls.

Part of the problem is the car's unit, as it's Android and it crashes a lot when it's running CarPlay.

astrea• 4 years ago

I'm constantly surprised by comments on a tech-savvy site such as HN by people who'd rather live in a slide rule world. I enjoy infotainment systems because I can listen to Spotify and podcasts and easily call/text people safely while driving on long haul drives, which I often find myself on. I have zero complaints about my system other than not having the level of customizability a nerd such was myself desires.

dredmorbius2• 4 years ago

My most recent auto purchase is approaching 20 years ago. At the time, a dealer option was to have a GPS installed. That would have cost well north of $1,000 and occupied most of the available glovebox space.

My reasoning in rejecting the option was:

- That's a lot of money, and a lot of maps.

- External hardware (a smartphone, laptop, or tablet) is far more likely to provide both that functionality and be independently upgradable.

Instead I opted for a standard mains electrical outlet, which has proved its worth in recharging (or powering) any electrical device, even before USB charging became prevalent.

I feel much the same way with entertainment systems.

A tuner by itself is compatible with an external device having a small FM transmitter dongle. With 3.5mm or 6.35mm audio connector, any line-in device can feed the audio system, with controls on that device used. Bluetooth pairing is somewhat more complex though mostly works. It's about the extreme level of intelligence I'd want, and I'd avoid it if at all possible.

The present level of complexity is a major regression.

aksss4• 4 years ago

Manufacturer custom infotainment systems are like the system on smart TV's: Crappy UX, buggy, abandoned (no updates) after a few years. Just like we all use Roku, Apple TV, or Fire, CarPlay and AA are preferred to a built-in infotainment sysem - better UX, loosely coupled to the car, etc. Discrete manufacturers should not try to become domain experts in this area. Get the basics done, let the user BYOD.

UncleOxidant• 4 years ago

If your car radio ends up stuck on an FM station you could do a lot worse than having it get stuck on KUOW.

grej• 4 years ago

I would have loved to hear the Car Talk guys chat about this one. Rest in Peace Tom Magliozzi.

gigel82• 4 years ago

We own a 2014 CX-5 near Seattle, and it doesn't appear to have been affected. Perhaps you needed to be tuned to that station in that time-frame to get the bug.

wvenable• 4 years ago

The 2014 model has an older infotainment unit. It's a completely different implementation from later models.

josephd79• 4 years ago

perfect way to drive up listeners, sell more ads.

thebeardisred• 4 years ago

My initial bet would be that something is causing a kernel panic in the control plane side of the radio. This is then leading to the UI not being able to pass any messages before the system locks up. Watchdog timer expires and resets everything.

This is based on the line "...causing radios to reboot when they connect to KUOW’s 94.9 FM signal."

dopamean• 4 years ago

i wonder if they can send a new image that fixes the problem

novaurora• 4 years ago

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oR79ja1u-o

xwz7611• 4 years ago

My Mazda3 2019 now shows an mpg at about 15, yet with a full tank of gas I can still drive about 300 miles.

robertlagrant• 4 years ago

This headline is just the best.

neallindsay• 4 years ago

The Ars Technica story has more useful info: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/02/radio-station-snafu-in-...

Apparently the radio evaluates image files based on the extension on their name, and not by looking at the image headers. If you send a radio station logo with no file extension it gets stuck in a permanent reboot loop. :-(

8bitsrule• 4 years ago

Yet another of the disadvantages of switching from analog to digital ;->

minusSeven• 4 years ago

So could this be because of 5G because if I remember right the latest 5G roll out caused a lot of problems for airlines?

glonq• 4 years ago

I had a 2014 mazda with this system; it's my son's car now.

The infotainment system is not great. Lots of little bugs and quirks and uglies, so I'm not surprised that it suffered this glitch.

coleca• 4 years ago

As someone who just traded in their 2019 Mazda CX-5, this doesn't surprise me at all. I couldn't wait for my lease to end. The car was great, but the infotainment system was horrible. It would take 5+ minutes to boot up from a cold start during which time you couldn't change the volume, mute the radio, change inputs, or even change the station. I learned quickly to always change the station off Howard Stern when exiting the car in case my daughter was a passenger on the next trip. On long trips you would have to three finger reset the head-unit because it would just stop responding, play at full volume, only play out of one channel after a GPS announcement, and other random oddities. I brought it back to the dealer multiple times to get firmware updates only to be told "Yeah that's how it was designed".

zucked• 4 years ago

Sounds like an excellent time to do a pledge drive with NO ESCAPE.

AdamN• 4 years ago

KUOW ftw!

w0mbat• 4 years ago

A remember a problem in the past where use of % in metadata would bork some car radios due to an unescaped string being passed to printf.

The Sirius menus on my wife’s Subaru have been broken for years due to some problem with the guide format changing. Sirius don’t care because you can still tune to any of their stations with the dial, but there are hundreds.

wlesieutre• 4 years ago

That was also Mazda. It caused some trouble for 99% Invisible listeners: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-...

Zigurd• 4 years ago

This is an example of how Tesla gambled and won in developing an integrated information display. One might think making an electric car is challenging enough that not relying on an outside supplier for the entertainment system is foolishly enlarging the problem. Instead it was legacy car makers with many separate systems with separate hardware and software that ended up victims of a chip shortage and lack up OTA upgrades.

rejor121• 4 years ago

Just give me back my old radio with a volume and seek knob. Seriously, these are problems created by tech and we don’t need them.

emiliosic2• 4 years ago

The 5G twist is pure BS. These cars (Circa 2016) have no modem that connects directly to the head-unit, and if they do are a separate module that's 3G only.

My theory is that the radio station sent some unicode characters on their RDS feed that crashes the system, it probably cached it (These head-units run on Linux, and is well known in some hacker circles), so now it's in some kind of loop. It won't be the first time that RDS feeds with some unusual combinations crash the head-units. If Mazda has a new firmware, these can be upgraded via the USB ports by booting into a recovery mode.

jimmaswell• 4 years ago

Do modern car radios use solid state storage so this can't be fixed by removing the battery?

dillondoyle• 4 years ago

I love reading about all these parsing image 'hacks' or I guess here passing empty or null values.

Just imagine a smart car + NSO software. Could turn it into a moving surveillance machine.

Or if can control it maybe cause some 'accidental deaths' looks like a single car fatality.

I would hate to see electronic warfare break out it seems like everything will just be totally bricked.

minimilian• 4 years ago

Do all new cars have software?

ljp_206• 4 years ago

KUOW with no KEXP is a tough fate in Seattle, but not the worst, though, that's ignoring losing all other functions of your stereo.

Interesting that this essentially seems to brick the unit and no reset can fix it.

betimsl2• 4 years ago

I don't see this as a problem. Most of Mazda customers listen to NPR anyways.

avgDev• 4 years ago

Source?

betimsl2• 4 years ago

Oh come on, it was more as a joke. But there are certain kind of people who buy Mazdas, usually upper middle class that appreciate the quality Mazda provides. Their cars are reliable and most ergonomic of all. It's not hard to see that most of these people listen to NPR. No?

Yes2020• 4 years ago

Honda Ridge lines ( older style) navigation system's clocks went out to lunch in January, 2022 and will not show correct time until GPS satellites do some sort of time sync in August. No fix until that happens.

parasense• 4 years ago

Folks are saying the radio station transmitted side-band data that resulted in the effective bricking. Others are saying that's not the issue, it's the software/firmware in the radios.

So looking at the specification here:

https://www.nrscstandards.org/standards-and-guidelines/docum...

...

On page 20, We see that images need not have an extension, because the transport stream is required to specify a mime-type. If one can prove that somehow that mime-type was not set, then perhaps the radio station and/or the technology provider for their broadcast transmission equipment could be held liable. I'm not sure how the process of discovery would look for something like that.

Seems more likely Mazda could be in the position to sustain significant warranty claims in court if their hardware is found to be defective, or their testing & QE procedures to be lacking.

Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station

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