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> Researchers who find at least one valid “rooting” vulnerability will receive a permanent SSH certificate for their own car It feels like this is something yo
by jordanb 7mo ago
> Researchers who find at least one valid “rooting” vulnerability will receive a permanent SSH certificate for their own car
It feels like this is something you should get by being owner of the car, and not have to do free speculative research for the manufacturer to get it.
- CalRobert 7mo agoAs much as I tend to agree philosophically, could it not result in people making changes that endanger other road users?
- jazzyjackson 7mo agoI don’t think that’s the reason, seeing as a car is already endangering everyone around it by existing. More likely about keeping the tooling to diagnose issues proprietary and expensive.
- auggierose 7mo agoObviously, they are both very good reasons. Just because you don't like one of them, doesn't mean the other one doesn't suddenly exist anymore.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo agoYou could screenshot this and put it under the definition of “perfect being the enemy of good”
- chneu 7mo agoNo, one can do that anyway. There is basically no real way to stop folks from modifying their cars. It can be made more difficult, sure. This is about selling tools and access. It's another profit pipeline for car OEMs.
- dr_kiszonka 7mo agoPerhaps it is also about liability. Otherwise, we would have people installing OpenClaw on their Teslas.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoThen why wasn't it a problem before? People have always been able to install aftermarket or possibly even hacked together physical parts. If there was liability you'd expect some sort of shield blocking access to, for example, the hydraulic system for the brakes. As it turns out though blatant irresponsibility is quite rare (depending on your definition anyway) since people have a strong self interest in not endangering their own lives or wallets. It's similar for homeowners - many states explicitly carve out a requirement that insurance companies cover DIY modifications that are within reason and this generally works out since you have a strong vested interest in not destroying your own house regardless of any insurance policy.
- lmm 7mo ago> Then why wasn't it a problem before? It is. Thousands of people have died because of aftermarket headlights. Harder to assess, but probably much larger, is the number of excess deaths from nitrous oxide etc. emitted by modified cars.
- pastage 7mo agoThere are about 3000 deaths per year in Sweden attributed to position from cars, and 300 physical accidents. So it is a really big issue, but it is almost impossible to make people understand that their car use and modification mains people. Modified cars can release 1000x more polution, on streets with 800 daily cars that will have an affect.
- mrguyorama 7mo agoYou can ban modifying your car to pollute more (which we do) without banning modifying your car. This isn't complicated FFS. The difficulty against this in the US is the unfortunate reality that the people coming to these shops to enable their stupid trucks to roll coal are the people who should technically be raiding and shutting down these companies. This can be fixed. Physically, you can already modify your car to be controlled by a stupid program and that has been possible since at least the 90s. You can do the supposed harm by not being aware of damage to your exhaust system. The solution to exhaust harms of ICE engines is electric cars, not a reduction in consumer rights.
- stephen_g 7mo agoThat kind of thing is always the stated justification but never the real reason. Almost invariably when that excuse is trotted out, there are are usually many things that are much more common that are also far more dangerous. For example, texting while driving or driving with bald tires in the wet are both 100x more dangerous than anything almost anybody would do by modifying the car's software.
- RockRobotRock 7mo agoFour 9/11s worth of people die every year from drunk driving. If we can't even get that under control, I don't see why being able to modify your own car is a big deal.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo agoIt doesn’t have to be a “big deal” for the powers that be to resolve that you shouldn’t have root access to your iPad on wheels, dude.
- CalRobert 7mo agoWe could do both… Disabling alertness sensors might worsen drunk driving actually.
- mrguyorama 7mo agoIsn't this largely a US problem? Enforcement is abysmal for stupid reasons. Courts are reluctant to remove the ability for people to drive because America purposely made itself dependent on cars, and cops are reluctant to actually arrest a lot of people for drunk driving because they tend to be buddies, or worse. You can find plentiful examples of off duty officers trying to get out of drunk driving simply by being a cop. This is what you get when you can vote on the sheriff and judges who insist they are "Tough on crime" because they sentence a dude smoking a joint to years in the joint while ignoring real problems like, you know, murder and theft and violence and all the shit their buddies are doing. The "Tough on crime" people are the ones drunk driving often enough.
- RockRobotRock 7mo agoI think it was pretty clear I was talking about the United States.
- jazzyjackson 7mo agoYou can feel that way, but plenty of car configuration has always been locked away and walled off, and manufacturers make a tidy profit selling software licenses to dealers and mechanics to perform basic diagnostics. Proprietary software is big business what can you do.
- franga2000 7mo agoDefinitely not always. It used to be that a mechanic or a skilled owner could tune, modify, repair or replace absolutely anything in your car. That was basically since the invention of the car, up to somewhere in the 2000s. And even then, various hackers and pirates made sure almost anyone could get their hands on the software. In fact, many mechanics these days use 3rd party software because the manufacturer refuses to sell them their version or even that version doesn't have all the features.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoThat is the recent (and gradually worsening) situation but it is not in and of itself a justification. Effectively you're saying "it's currently this way therefore it's okay for it to be this way". Manufacturers have increasingly restricted control over products as they've gradually been digitized. Prior to the digital era anyone could do anything to personal property (regulations notwithstanding ofc); more expensive items typically came with circuit diagrams for the purpose of repairing them.
- unglaublich 7mo agoYou can translate that to corresponding car-purchases, i.e. vote with your wallet.
- Yaggo 7mo agoReally? Which car manufacturer officially provides you a root access to your vehicle?
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo agoIt’s almost like there’s no market for this because it’s a silly thing that practically nobody actually wants enough to vote with their wallet. That, or no company wants to assume liability. In which case, go whine to your local representative. That’ll be hilarious for all involved.
- bluGill 7mo agoEven as a well trained software engineer who works on transportation software including ECUs (heavy equipment not cars), I'm not sure there is much I could do with root. IF I had full source code to my car's radio I might try to add android-auto back in (it has android-automotive so I know it can do it), but if that isn't easy I'd probably give up. Without source code and a lot of time doing anything is impossible - as anyone else who works on complex software knows.
- Yaggo 7mo agoMaybe 0.1% of consumers even know what "root access" means.
- aaron695 7mo ago[dead]
- AbanoubRodolf 7mo ago[flagged]
- karlosvomacka 7mo agoown the software means access to source code, not being able to modify your car.
- gspr 7mo ago> The underlying tension is that "you own the car" means something very different from "you own the software running the car." How is this different from the 2000s, or the 90s, or even before, when the normal thing to do with commercial software was to purchase a license to use said software and a physical medium containing a copy? You'd also then not "own the software", but you owned the right to install a copy on your own computer and use it. That worked without having to hand over the keys to your own computer. Sure, the physical delivery medium is gone, but that's just a detail. Why do we now think that just because we license software for use, we can't be in ultimate charge of our own devices?
- cucumber3732842 7mo agoIn 1990 Ford couldn't turn off your Mustang because you plugged a TwEECer into the J3 port and screwed around with the tune. Best they could do was void your warranty and deny you further upgrades (i.e. tunes flashed as part of a recall or TSB). These days unauthorized access tends to lose you effective use of the hardware you bought because the hardware requires software features to work and that software often unnecessarily phones home so if the OEM toggles a field in a DB somewhere you lose access to back up assist or whatever other fancy tech features that you a) paid for b) don't strictly need to have dependencies that phone home to work but do "because reasons".
- bluGill 7mo agoHave a lawyer look up the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act for you if that happens. What Ford can do is legally limited.
- trvz 7mo agoNormies get scammed on Discord into pasting commands into their browser console. As a pedestrian I prefer for most people to not have root access to their multi-ton fast-moving killing machine.
- pastage 7mo agoAgrred, but it is remote root access is the danger, they already have root access to the physical dangerous things.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo agoThat is blatant whataboutism. Stop performing mental gymnastics and accept that what you personally want is not what’s good for society as a whole.
- fluoridation 7mo agoIt's not whataboutism, it's a legitimate question. How does it increase safety on the road to reject local SSH connections by a dumb user, when that same user can mess with the car physically?
- Thews 7mo agoHow does adding another way to cause safety issues affect safety? Give me root access so i can install openclaw.
- zeagle 7mo agoSimplest example: a driver could probably disable attentive driving checks by pasting a script in from a web search in a few minutes. Nothing like an inattentive 3750 lbs weapon.
- fluoridation 7mo agoA driver could also install a little machine that turns the wheel slightly at regular intervals, to the same effect.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago[flagged]
- tenthirtyam 7mo agoIn most cases I agree with this, but maybe not for potentially dangerous things like cars? What if someone roots into their car and disables some essential safety feature - maybe even a legally mandated safety feature? More concretely, the expertise-required-to-access-root is in a different field to the expertise-required-to-make-wise-changes. i.e. you might know how to hack a car, but that doesn't mean you know how cars operate.
- malwrar 7mo agoPeople have been modifying their cars since cars have existed, an electric car shouldn’t be anything new.
- mikegreenberg 7mo agoGiven electric cars are responsible for much bigger responsibilities than combustion cars (avoid driving into that bicyclist), there are new concerns here which beg extra consideration.
- malwrar 7mo agoI actually think we should be asking more of safety regulations here with regards to the design of electric/computerized cars. Think of it this way: every concern you have about a teenager having root on their electric car is the same as any sociopath hacker (AI enabled for modern nightmare fuel) who finds a root vulnerability and decides to not be a good person with it. If a teenager can mess with the collision avoidance, e.g. Israel can modify it to murder anyone who talks shit about Israel in the car. Or the CIA could turn it into a weapon. Or one day some dev could push a bad OTA update. Et cetera. Our safety regulations should mandate design features to prevent a malfunctioning computer from posing any greater safety risk than any other modified part in the car.
- jmalicki 7mo agoPeople have been killing each other with weapons for as long as they've been around, nuclear weapons shouldn't be anything new.