ELD vs Real life scenarios

There ya go Tall. that was a 24 hour period this was after the third stop in the third city, of course it was dead of winter last February. I'm 51.

I'm with you. I think these e-logs are for schnooks. I've never had a problem with bear.

Oh, and proper trip planning. I delivered this third stop at 1630 on Friday afternoon. The fourth stop was 560 miles up the highway. Now if I didn't drop this Friday, then had to wait until Monday morning, instead of having a 34 and sitting in the dock of the fourth drop Monday morning.
Won $10 too, cause my cousin said I wouldn't get the drop off.

Yea e-logs, can't hardly wait.

 

If the company people can edit a log more fully than I can as a agent of the company on the job at the wheel in real time, then forget it. If the driver is not a true professional who knows how to make sure the log is accurate as it happened then there is no point in a company manager 2000 miles away to edit the #### thing the next day after the fact.

The only benefit to the computer is to dispose of the yelling and BS. If you have to be somewhere in 6 hours 300 miles away and you only have 4 left then you park. And that's that.

In the old days they fire you for that. But not before threatening you.

 

Most companies set the ELDs for 2 miles before it will automatically log you on to driving. When the logs are edited they show the original and the edit. Depending on the company you have Personal Conveyance use. I ran out of hours at shipper and they said no parking. I just drove to nearest truck stop and parked and put that in the remarks. The log Dept said that what you have to do.

I think hacking them would be difficult because Qualcomm and PeopleNet both send the log book data back to the company computers maybes every 10 minutes, not sure. Someone would have to hack the ELD in the truck and also have to hack or change the data already sent to the company computers.

 

It's not strictly about money. It's also the relationship between authority, control, responsibility, and respect. It's about disproportionate scrutiny, being unnecessarily penalized by hindsight, and granting people who bear no responsibility for what happens on the truck, the power of law to force drivers to accept, validate, and be responsible and liable for the not-responsible person's version of events.

Today, I called up our tech support lady to discuss some problems that the new company ELD implementation is creating for me. It's in beta, so it isn't how my logs actually work, and probably won't be, for more than a year. We'll be using GeoTab, and the tablets spontaneously reboot. We have no capacity to edit our logs, and no personal conveyance exception - I have a three-hour layover, during which I often drop my trailer and go get dinner. GeoTab, according to their website, is a software development kit for interfacing to hardware such as ECM port dongles and GPS location devices. So presumably, the application that we're using is still being developed.

I asked several respectfully-phrased, but pointedly direct questions about the issues, and where we were in the development of the application, and she was coy with me about the answers. I gave her an overview of the problems that I was having, and she was dismissive. I have degrees in software engineering and radio frequency electronics. I've worked in both fields, in the commercial sector, in the military, and for the federal DoT. I don't need some 20-something with a community college degree in Communications talking down to me about a tool that I am going to need working correctly, in order to stay within the law. Too often, the people that are put in the position of authority over the driver, on the subject of logs, are woefully unqualified to be there. Being someone's relative or girlfriend, and attending a two-week seminar, is not adequate.

When the log goes from paper to electronic, computers begin to scrutinize every detail. Now, they could do this as the log is created, and tell the driver where there are apparent problems - and let the driver fix them.

Instead, logs are often audited for errors by a log department which then imposes disciplinary measures. Some, if not all, editing capability is given to the log department, along with the ability to override driver log entries, giving these non-driving (and usually non-CDL-licensed) people the authority to retroactively create log violations for which they also mete out discipline, and in so doing, place the driver in violation of the law. I've had one wipe out my 10-hour break, hours later, and create two egregious violations, by putting me on the drive line - a line that I cannot edit - and then force me to sign off on this unauthorized change, because I cannot legally drive until I signed the previous days' log. It's *my* log. Nobody knows what was going on in the truck better than I do. No one should have the ability to edit my log, except me, and I should be able to edit all of it, until it's right. And no one should have any capacity to influence me to digitally sign a log that I know to be false.

Paper logs place control where it belongs - in the hands of the driver, who is also responsible for the accuracy of those logs, digital or paper. If a log department wants to exert authority, they have to go through the logs the same way that the driver does - manually - which gives them a measure of humility and respect for the work that the driver puts into their maintenance. It isn't monkey work, but computerized auditing reduces it to that, because any monkey can push the button on the computer, Monday morning, over coffee, that finds the mistakes that drivers made after being on the road for a week in the snow, eating fast food when they could eat at all, and sleeping in a cloud of diesel and pig flop fumes when sleeping was possible, freezing because of some no-idling rule, and not being able to shower, poop indoors, or wash their hands with running water. Oh sure, he made a mistake - brow-beat him for it, instead of helping him to fix it.

If you don't understand why drivers don't want to be second-guessed by people hiding behind computers, then you haven't been in the truck, lately.

 

Hacking absolutely is an option. I don't have time, right now, to get too deep into it, but some of these systems use Bluetooth, for example, to deliver ECM port data to the device. Bluetooth is a radio format that is vulnerable to jamming. So that's one possibility, under limited conditions...

It's worth noting that there are likely to be severe penalties for being caught doing things that might be interpreted as "hacking" the ELD system.

 

I cannot stand people like that 20 something coy answers you spoke of. It's disrespectful all around. What about her higher? Speak to higher and you might get the answers you seek.

I was given QC training in orientation based on how to send a message back and forth, no more. They happened to have a manual of the system next to it and I read that all week soaking it in. I forget half of it now but one particular interest was a 8 digit number that is displayed when a customer or user of the system is actively tracking the truck. That little bit of knowledge came in handy a few times.

I was taught a lesson once years ago when I was in IT college and learning more, enough to be a loose cannon because I knew nothing. Talking to apache crewmen at the airshow one of them mentioned that they could pass target data back and forth without unnecessary yak yak on the radio. I said network right? and pointed to one of the antennas that looked suitable for that work between apaches. Boy did they zip up.

I apologized if i offended them and one whispered that there are things secret that no one talks about ever and I should find something else to talk about or go away. SO endeth the lesson. They brightened up when I asked why they carried so much glass around the crew area on the thing. That was something they had no problem talking about.

I know enough about things and have a burning curiosity to learn and thus I should just not be involved in things of a classified nature.

As far as QC, I find nothing within the system that is classifable. And certainly with QC HQ involved that transfer the information between truck, satellites and to your dispatch or shippers and recievers allowed into the system it's pretty difficult to hack. I developed the theory that people who speak about hacking has a excessive fear due to lack of knowledge. I advise them to learn.

I don't know everything thankfully but I can always learn.

 

I generally only find it necessary to hack things, when I am unable to get the support that I need from the people who are supposed to provide it. Invariably, when the support staff get coy and condescending, they become just as coy about referring you to their supervisor/s and/or higher-level support staff. They also hate being referred to as "support staff" - they almost always have titles like "log manager" or "director of compliance", as though it was their role to give orders and dispense discipline to drivers, rather than provide support and assistance. Have you noticed that everyone in the office thinks that they are your boss? Dispatchers are now "driver managers". Salespeople are "account executives". Everybody's in charge except the ship's captain and crew; the driver. Everyone who isn't available or qualified to help when the job needs doing, or decisions need making - they're all right there to second-guess you in hindsight, and impose discipline and penalties.

The reason why so many carriers put locked doors between drivers and office staff, is to ensure that drivers must go through the front-line people, to get access to the next higher levels of authority. It gives the office staff an opportunity to enrage the driver with bureaucracy, deny access to the path for appeals, and gives the office staff an opportunity to prejudice the argument to their superiors, before the driver even has a chance to present his position. Open-door policy is meaningless, if the driver can't get to the door in question... And if your carrier finds it necessary to place security guards in the terminal, or bullet-proof glass, then consider changing carriers. How angry do they have to be making their drivers, before the cost of those barriers becomes justifiable?

On a side note, Qualcomm seems to have a command line interface - a remnant of Windows - at least on some implementation file systems. It's something to look for... you know, if you're on a Qualcomm ELD implementation. Just about everything can be hacked to one extent or another, in some manner or other. It just takes a little creative thought, and the inclination to try...

Just how does your ELD react to an inability to communicate with the servers? When it fails, do you fall back to paper logs? If paper logs are what you prefer, then how hard is it to create failure conditions, for the ELD?