Yep. > A disgruntled former employee of Texas Auto Center chose a creative way to get back at the Austin-based dealership: He hacked into the company's compute

Yep. > A disgruntled former employee of Texas Auto Center chose a creative way to get back at the Austin-based dealership: He hacked into the company's computers and remotely activated the vehicle-immobilization system, which triggered the horn and disabled the ignition system in more than 100 of the vehicles. The dealership had installed the system in its cars as a way to deal with customers who fell behind on their payments. I'm not going to get into the benefits of open source for consumer appliances, just that there is quite a bit of research into internal communication within the vehicle's operational systems and it's quite poor. Giving all cars a 3G connection to the world and having shitty security means we're going to have a bad time. I had hopes with Google showing interest in getting Android into cars, but it's just for "infotainment" which in all likelihood means offloading the development of those shitty DVD players. Updating the firmware of the various ECUs within your car involves bringing it to a dealership/repair shop, which probably means they're never going to get updated. Let that sink in for a moment -- imagine a plethora of Windows XP boxes having 3G connections and rarely getting updated even by the end-user. [1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229919/Car_hacking_Remote_access_and_other_security_issues http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229919/Car_hacking_R...