"If you're paranoid, it might be a good idea to stop using your car remotes."
That was the whole setup. A friend sent me a news story about researchers cracking the security system used in millions of remote car keys. The subject line was even broader: "Why All security should be open source."
I was exactly the sort of person he would send that to.
Linux and open-source software were already central to how I worked. At Beatport, open systems gave us room to understand the machinery, change it, and build around it. That did not mean every open-source project was automatically secure. It meant the design and the code could be examined instead of security depending entirely on secrecy.
Car remotes made the argument more entertaining. Push a button, unlock a car, and assume the little radio exchange is safe because you cannot see it. Then researchers take the system apart and find out what the assumption was worth.
The surviving email does not include my reply. It does not prove I agreed with every claim in the article. It does show the kind of technical conversation that moved through my friend group. Somebody found a story about cryptography and car keys, thought of me, and sent it over with one blunt sentence.
This was also the period when my modified Audi was being simplified and sold in pieces. Car hardware and computer security were already overlapping in my inbox before connected vehicles became an ordinary product category.
Mostly, I liked knowing how things worked. Servers, storage arrays, websites, key fobs. If a system made a promise, I wanted to know what was actually enforcing it.
The link is gone now. The subject line survived.