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> How come these things are not secured against at the LCD controller side? Why would a general purpose controller ne designed to accept e.g. too high voltage l
by ajsnigrutin 4y ago
> How come these things are not secured against at the LCD controller side? Why would a general purpose controller ne designed to accept e.g. too high voltage levels?
Why would they be secured there? The device doesn't allow setting any of the dangerous settings, so noone will break their displays this way.
Look at cars for example... pretty much cars have systems in place not to overheat (thermostatic valves, fans, etc.). Most even have code to go into limp mode and turn off if they overheat. Now imagine someone taking the ECU out of the car, installing gentoo on it, putting it back in, and forget to write a script to check the temperature and turn on the fans when needed... the car would probably work ok when driving high airflow) but when stopped, it would heat, overheat and eventually something would break down. Do we need some kind of a hardware system in our cars to turn on the fans, or something that turns off the main relay, because someone decided to hack the software and forgot to implement sotware limits and checks?
- hulitu 4y agoCars are mostly immune to such things. Mostly due to previous experience which has showed that SW alone will not protect hardware.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoSo, what exactly stops the car when it gets too hot? Or when there's no oil? (except the eventual engine failure)
- tremon 4y agoThe driver.
- hulitu 4y agoThe car is _designed_ so that it doesn't get to hot. If, despite this, it gets hot it will be stopped. Now, those are the requirements and some suppliers might disregard them with the prize of their liability.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoThe car has mechanisms, some of them implemented in software (eg turning on cooling fans) to not get hot. So does a switch. Someone installing gentoo on a cars ECU, and not implementing the feature to turn the fans on will easily overheat and destroy the car... the same is happening here with the lcd controller (and yes, the switch is designed so that the user can never go above some brightness level... unless the user hacks the switch and installs some random linux on it).
- xani_ 4y agoThe car won't shut off because that would be a dangerous thing to do in traffic. The car will alert the driver than something is wrong and should stop as soon as it is safe. Because stopping engine abruptly in middle of highway could be very dangerous. A lot of cars also have so-called "limp mode" where some failures cause car to limit engine power and other stuff, basically to get to the next point the car can be stopped and towed to shop
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoSo you're saying a car has software features in the ECU preventing the user from destroying a car. So does the switch in its software (OS). We're talking about someone taking a device, hacking it, installing some random software (whatever hacked version of linux runs on switch), and that software does not have the feature of limiting the max brightness at an accaptable (non-damaging level). So the same as if you took an ecu of a car, put linux on it, didn't implement the limp mode feature and then blame the hardware for overheating.