The 2015 "Jeep Hack" (affected a huge number of Fiat Chrysler cars) was actually one of the coolest moments of hope & inspiration for me. Ok, so the embedded OS

The 2015 "Jeep Hack" (affected a huge number of Fiat Chrysler cars) was actually one of the coolest moments of hope & inspiration for me. Ok, so the embedded OS isn't linux, but it still runs good old FreeDesktop D-Bus? You can just RPC to the window & tell it to roll down? You can just RPC to the head unit & adjust the volume? Nice. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig... I'd assumed everything was some terrible impenetrably dense proprietary cruft, but oh, the whole system runs some standard well known protocols that would be super super super great & convenient to use, if we had network access to the car? Yeah, nice. Wouldn't it be so great if someday things actually got better. The "Hack" was, oh, you can engage the parking break if you get network access. Oh no! So the response is that now we for sure will never be empowered useful-to-ourselves consumers again. It sucks that the low-trust society keeps dominating, that it keeps overshadowing the can-do is-possible universe, that making possible is forever dwarfed by Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. The one really bright spot of the past, in my view, was Webinos, which was a super cool IoT system that had some automotive interest. Notably, unlike most systems, it kept users sovereign, let devices (like cars, or car windows/stereos) expose themselves up to user-specified gateways, securely without intermediaries. Didn't make it, but I have yet to see anyone with 1/5th the promise, with anywhere near as low-ickiness as modern devices.