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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Janet Evanovich's Motor Mouth: Auto (and Truck Carrier) Theft and Disabling GPS?


Janet Evanovich, Motor Mouth. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. pp.30-31.

Mouth Mouth is Janet Evanovich's entertaining but forgettable story of sex (what do you expect!), cheating on the NASCAR circuit, theft, and the detection of a microchip that is at the heart of a high tech traction control system. After a race is lost under suspicious circumstances, the central character in the novel, Barnaby, a woman mechanic who loves pink and was once the lover to driver Hooker, decides that something was not right with the sinning car and perpetrates a "boost" of a hauler with two cars -- and incidentally a dead body packed in ice. But a GPS system has to be disabled, and Barnaby does that rather simply:
"Yeah, right. I could almost live with that. See if you can disable the GPS. I'm going to try to rip some of this shrink-wrap off the outside so we're not so recognizable."
I was able to squeeze my arm far enough to reach a ball of aluminum foil sitting on the kitchenette counter. I ripped a couple of chunks off the roll, swung out of the hauler, and climbed onto the back to the cab. The antenna had been placed in the usual location between the exhaust pipes. I wrapped the antenna in aluminum foil and jumped off. Turns out it's pretty easy to screw up a GPS system.
Is that all there is to disabling a GPS system? Find the antenna and wrap it in foil? Can you do this with OnStar?

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