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Man's car warns of AIR RAID OVER LONDON

Reg reader narrowly escapes Kensington-Chiswick warzone

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Pic Reg reader Graham Schofield was this morning offered perhaps the most sensational reason for being late to work we've ever seen: an air raid affecting the A4 in west London.

Mercifully for Graham, his Audi's satnav flagged up the conflagration before he got caught in the crossfire resulting from what we assume is a serious breakdown in relations between Kensington and Chiswick:

Satnav display warning of air raid on the A4 in West London this morning

Graham tells us he threw an email at Audi to find out just what's going on, but hasn't yet received a reply. The fact that the German car manufacturer's satnav systems have an air raid warning option points to the possibility that Angela Merkel intends to resolve the eurozone crisis in the time-honoured local tradition.

Vorsprung durch Technik indeed. ®

Bootnote

[We would draw our readers' attention to our previous coverage showing how easy it is to send spoof radio data transmissions which will be picked up by car navigation systems and cause them to display all kinds of notifications, from the humdrum traffic jam to bomb alerts (code 1516) or plane crashes (978) to air raids (1481), bullfights (1456) etc. Full details (pdf) were published by security researchers in 2007 - Ed.]

SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had

Thanks for the Friday grin

" Angela Merkel intends to resolve the eurozone crisis in the time-honoured local tradition."

Very funny, top marks from me for the quote of the week

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Bullfights?

There's a numeric code for every possible event that could affect the road, including air raids and bullfights? Oh man, that must've been a FUN meeting! I'm picturing a dozen drunk engineers, shouting things like "asteroid impact!", "pit trap!" and "mysterious force field!"

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Re: Bullfights?

Some of the less well known ones...

Zombies (4387)

Gordon Brown streaking (113)

Lorry full of kittens shed its load (2120)

Impromptu illegal jungle/drum n bass rave in carriageway (1085)

Road closed due to flooding caused by football hooligans urinating en-mass (775)

Diversions due to a young couple making love atop a keep left bollard (4569)

They thought of almost everything!

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