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The whole car metaphor is a bit unfortunate. Most people who want to drive securely from A to B would be pretty freaked out by a bunch of strangers quietly upgr

The whole car metaphor is a bit unfortunate. Most people who want to drive securely from A to B would be pretty freaked out by a bunch of strangers quietly upgrading their car's brakes in the middle of the night. And they would definitely be pissed off if their car suddenly refused to accelerate beyond 25 mph on a clear, straight, empty stretch of dry road in broad daylight just because the speed limit happens to be 25 mph there. It's a matter of perception and ignorance. We've been trained, for lack of a better word, to perceive the execution of software on the hardware we own as something completely orthogonal to our ownership of that hardware.

therealmarv 9y ago
This argument can be also made positive. Imagine a new update (to be on your example, the new brakes) made the car safer and the saved your life because an accident could be avoided entirely. Otherwise you would be dead. It's not only negative... Btw. when thinking of Tesla cars.. they auto update their software remotely ;)
- marssaxman 9y ago
  > when thinking of Tesla cars.. they auto update their software remotely That is one reason I will never buy one.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    You are not alone. I drive a car that is relatively old now, but well maintained and in good working order. I have no interest in buying anything in the current generation of half-baked "connected cars", where critical systems are now connected to systems that are remotely accessible, but assumptions from another time underlie the architecture and security is bolted on as an afterthought if you're lucky. It's not as if the danger here is hypothetical. Leaving aside the immaturity of technologies like autonomous vehicles, I've seen way too many cars being compromised in more mundane ways, from theft because the remote unlocking mechanism was laughably easy to crack, right up to literally stranding a vehicle in the middle of a high speed road using a laptop that is somewhere else entirely. The consequences the first time someone compromises one of these remote systems and decides that every <some popular model> in the city should turn hard left or accelerate to 100mph or slam on the brakes are horrifying. Get back to me when we have the same level of scrutiny of these modern vehicles as we see in air travel, and when not getting security right poses an existential threat to the manufacturer's business, and then we can talk...
    - cesarb 9y ago
      > where critical systems are now connected to systems that are remotely accessible This reminds me of the first Jurassic Park movie, where IIRC everything was controlled by a single mainframe, from the PABX to the electric fences of the dinosaur pens, and a disgruntled programmer pretending to fix the former disabled the later. We seem to be steadily moving towards that kind of world.
- CodeMage 9y ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there are no positive consequences of automatic updates. Rather, I was trying to point out the difference in perception of ownership between things like cars and our hardware. Regardless of benefits and drawbacks of automatic updates themselves, I regard that difference in perception as dangerous and damaging. To illustrate my point in terms of your analogy, if people could get free upgrades for their brakes that make the car safer, I like to think that they would still prefer to be given control over it, because they see it as "my car" and not "my car, but with brakes licensed from someone else". And I also like to think that they would object to arbitrary changes to the insides of their car with vague explanations of how the new insides are better.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Strawman. "Imagine that the actual horrible experience you actually witnessed was instead wonderful." Except that it wasn't, isn't, and by all evidence won't be.
- crpatino 9y ago
  Your rhetoric is not quite honest. Best case != Average case. Of course the one-in-a-billion guy whose life got saved by a timely update will be singing your praises. Not so much the hundreds that got in a sublethal crash because of a freshly introduced defect in that same update. But in the big scheme of things, the real issue are the millions that were unable to get on time to whereever they were going, because their fucking car became unresponsive for the fucking 30 minutes that it takes to download your fucking update.

therealmarv 9y ago

This argument can be also made positive. Imagine a new update (to be on your example, the new brakes) made the car safer and the saved your life because an accident could be avoided entirely. Otherwise you would be dead. It's not only negative... Btw. when thinking of Tesla cars.. they auto update their software remotely ;)

marssaxman 9y ago
> when thinking of Tesla cars.. they auto update their software remotely That is one reason I will never buy one.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  You are not alone. I drive a car that is relatively old now, but well maintained and in good working order. I have no interest in buying anything in the current generation of half-baked "connected cars", where critical systems are now connected to systems that are remotely accessible, but assumptions from another time underlie the architecture and security is bolted on as an afterthought if you're lucky. It's not as if the danger here is hypothetical. Leaving aside the immaturity of technologies like autonomous vehicles, I've seen way too many cars being compromised in more mundane ways, from theft because the remote unlocking mechanism was laughably easy to crack, right up to literally stranding a vehicle in the middle of a high speed road using a laptop that is somewhere else entirely. The consequences the first time someone compromises one of these remote systems and decides that every <some popular model> in the city should turn hard left or accelerate to 100mph or slam on the brakes are horrifying. Get back to me when we have the same level of scrutiny of these modern vehicles as we see in air travel, and when not getting security right poses an existential threat to the manufacturer's business, and then we can talk...
  - cesarb 9y ago
    > where critical systems are now connected to systems that are remotely accessible This reminds me of the first Jurassic Park movie, where IIRC everything was controlled by a single mainframe, from the PABX to the electric fences of the dinosaur pens, and a disgruntled programmer pretending to fix the former disabled the later. We seem to be steadily moving towards that kind of world.
CodeMage 9y ago
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there are no positive consequences of automatic updates. Rather, I was trying to point out the difference in perception of ownership between things like cars and our hardware. Regardless of benefits and drawbacks of automatic updates themselves, I regard that difference in perception as dangerous and damaging. To illustrate my point in terms of your analogy, if people could get free upgrades for their brakes that make the car safer, I like to think that they would still prefer to be given control over it, because they see it as "my car" and not "my car, but with brakes licensed from someone else". And I also like to think that they would object to arbitrary changes to the insides of their car with vague explanations of how the new insides are better.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Strawman. "Imagine that the actual horrible experience you actually witnessed was instead wonderful." Except that it wasn't, isn't, and by all evidence won't be.
crpatino 9y ago
Your rhetoric is not quite honest. Best case != Average case. Of course the one-in-a-billion guy whose life got saved by a timely update will be singing your praises. Not so much the hundreds that got in a sublethal crash because of a freshly introduced defect in that same update. But in the big scheme of things, the real issue are the millions that were unable to get on time to whereever they were going, because their fucking car became unresponsive for the fucking 30 minutes that it takes to download your fucking update.