In order to park a car for a stopover, for example at a rural bathing lake, users of the carsharing cars usually need cell phone reception. This is due to the fact that most of the vendors' cars no longer have a key, but can only be opened and locked via the app.
A few weeks ago I was able to experience that this can make a spontaneous trip to the lake much more complicated because I simply couldn't lock the car at the parking lot by the lake using the app. Instead of jumping into the lake, I had to quickly drive back towards the city and better network coverage because the reception was insufficient.
So I started my next trip to the surrounding area better prepared and made sure that we had cell phones with O2 and telecom networks. When parking, I actually had sufficiently strong reception on my cell phone. But a new problem arose: Because of course the car must also have network reception, in this case from Vodafone - which was not available anywhere.
The car eventually had to be towed
The trip ended with the car towing and we took the train back to town. The car had activated the immobilizer, which could only have been deactivated with cell phone reception. When the provider promised that longer trips to the surrounding area were possible with his cars, the issue of network coverage had apparently not been given sufficient consideration.
But planning is apparently half the battle even on a summer excursion: For my weekend trip to the low mountain range, I simply studied the publicly available network coverage maps of the three mobile phone companies and found a parking space with sufficient reception for my car and cell phone.
Unfortunately, the next parking lot, where the network coverage seemed stable enough to me, was on a hill about ten kilometers from our hotel in the valley. So I loaded my bike in the trunk and then drove ten kilometers from the parking lot through the Funklochtal until I finally got to the hotel. It's actually quite simple, the matter of spontaneous mobility in Germany in 2020.
Strange digital world: half-hearted IT support
"No, unfortunately I can't print anything at the moment," says my mother on the phone, since the printer has had a problem since yesterday. It is late in the evening and the point is to quickly print out a ticket for the next day. And I don't know what kind of printer my mother uses, nor what the problem is.
"Turn it off and on again," I suggest half-heartedly and am immediately ashamed of having seriously brought the cheeky "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" If someone mumbled this sentence at an IT hotline, I like to hang up, offended or indignant, and complain somewhere about the outrageous question. My mother is completely different: with a big hurray, she realizes that suddenly everything is working perfectly. She prints out the card and thanks her very much for the help. Well, you like to help half-heartedly.
External links: three tips from other media
"747-400 Walk through From a Hacker's Perspective" (English, YouTube video, 25 minutes): In this YouTube video for the Defcon hacker conference, the two IT security researchers Ken Munro and Alex Lomas guide through a discarded Boeing 747. Munro and Lomas climb into hidden areas, follow cables across the plane and show exciting details of the gadgets - such as outdated floppy disks and a cockpit printer - on board the Boeing machine.
"Apple stumbled into a war with the gaming industry and the future of iOS is at stake" (English, 18 minutes): After the "Fortnite" makers Epic Games publicly approached the Apple group because of the levy on app revenue, The question arises what the conflict means for the future of the AppStore, which is so important for Apple. The tech magazine "The Verge" sees the antitrust problem as well as the risk that Apple could lose a whole generation of gaming fans.
"Inside the Courthouse Break-In Spree That Landed Two White-Hat Hackers in Jail" (English, 35 minutes reading time): The world of penetration testers, who officially examine companies and authorities for security gaps, is usually a secret one. But because a test for security flaws in the US state of Iowa failed in an adventurous way, this cinematic reconstruction of the "Wired" magazine gives exciting insights into an important but little-known job - one that carries the risk of ending up in prison.
I wish you a good summer week.
Max Hoppenstedt