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Don't worry, it's probably hackable as well. Give it 6 months and someone will have modified these signs. Probably in a crude, old Nokia phone cabled to the ba

Don't worry, it's probably hackable as well. Give it 6 months and someone will have modified these signs. Probably in a crude, old Nokia phone cabled to the back of the sign, method. Hopefully it will be seen as a useful signpost (no pun intended) for the ongoing challenge of distributing digital info to an, on average, trusting public. Don't be surprised if you see some unlimited parking in Sydney next April 1st.

bradjohnson 11y ago
I feel like that would require about as much effort as going out and replacing a non-hackable sign with a convincing homemade one.
- allendoerfer 11y ago
  I think parking signs are a rather low risk target. Insecure traffic lights could be potentially dangerous, especially combined with other attacks. Rule of thumb: If there is no Hollywood film where a terrorist attacks your target, probably neither will a real terrorist. Also obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- mprovost 11y ago
  Someone famously did this in LA: http://jalopnik.com/5516635/the-secret-of-las-10-year-old-fake-freeway-sign http://jalopnik.com/5516635/the-secret-of-las-10-year-old-fa...
  - bradjohnson 11y ago
    A little less of a public service than your example, but I live in Vancouver and I was thinking of this when I said that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude_Chilling_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude_Chilling_Park
- marssaxman 11y ago
  I know a guy who fixed a long-standing traffic congestion problem in his city by replacing some complicated parking signs on a busy thoroughfare with simple, MUTCD-compliant "no parking any time" signs (which are cheaply available from a variety of manufacturers and can easily be ordered online). They've been up for ages, nobody has touched them, and it's not clear whether the city doesn't mind or simply hasn't noticed.
ryan-allen 11y ago
These will be vandalised before they are hacked. I would think that they'll last only a few months before the council get sick of replacing them.
some1else 11y ago
Very uninformed speculation. Visionect's previous products came with a water-tight, tamper-proof enclosure & a number of software based security measures, because one of their tablets interfaced with Point of Sale systems. This is a bit more complex than a regular micro-controlled LCD. There are a number of ways you can drive an e-ink display. Then there are a number of ways you can choose to control such a display remotely. Last but not least, a sizeable chunk of the stack powering these displays is proprietary technology, and has been in development for more than 3 years. Almost everything is hackable when you have physical access to the system. That's why such systems should detect and report tampering. Something regular traffic signs never did in the first place.
- groby_b 11y ago
  And why is "proprietary technology" a good thing? Limited visibility into the code really doesn't improve anything. Ask Chrysler about their Jeeps being hacked, how much that proprietary thing helped. And "more than three years". Oooh. OpenSSL was in development for what, 16 years, and heartbleed happened anyways. I have no doubt it's a little bit harder than a few weeks with a USB cable and a traffic sign, but assuming they will not be tampered with at some point is not born out by any facts we know about software.

bradjohnson 11y ago

I feel like that would require about as much effort as going out and replacing a non-hackable sign with a convincing homemade one.

allendoerfer 11y ago
I think parking signs are a rather low risk target. Insecure traffic lights could be potentially dangerous, especially combined with other attacks. Rule of thumb: If there is no Hollywood film where a terrorist attacks your target, probably neither will a real terrorist. Also obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
mprovost 11y ago
Someone famously did this in LA: http://jalopnik.com/5516635/the-secret-of-las-10-year-old-fake-freeway-sign http://jalopnik.com/5516635/the-secret-of-las-10-year-old-fa...
- bradjohnson 11y ago
  A little less of a public service than your example, but I live in Vancouver and I was thinking of this when I said that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude_Chilling_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude_Chilling_Park
marssaxman 11y ago
I know a guy who fixed a long-standing traffic congestion problem in his city by replacing some complicated parking signs on a busy thoroughfare with simple, MUTCD-compliant "no parking any time" signs (which are cheaply available from a variety of manufacturers and can easily be ordered online). They've been up for ages, nobody has touched them, and it's not clear whether the city doesn't mind or simply hasn't noticed.

ryan-allen 11y ago

These will be vandalised before they are hacked. I would think that they'll last only a few months before the council get sick of replacing them.

some1else 11y ago

Very uninformed speculation. Visionect's previous products came with a water-tight, tamper-proof enclosure & a number of software based security measures, because one of their tablets interfaced with Point of Sale systems. This is a bit more complex than a regular micro-controlled LCD. There are a number of ways you can drive an e-ink display. Then there are a number of ways you can choose to control such a display remotely. Last but not least, a sizeable chunk of the stack powering these displays is proprietary technology, and has been in development for more than 3 years. Almost everything is hackable when you have physical access to the system. That's why such systems should detect and report tampering. Something regular traffic signs never did in the first place.

groby_b 11y ago
And why is "proprietary technology" a good thing? Limited visibility into the code really doesn't improve anything. Ask Chrysler about their Jeeps being hacked, how much that proprietary thing helped. And "more than three years". Oooh. OpenSSL was in development for what, 16 years, and heartbleed happened anyways. I have no doubt it's a little bit harder than a few weeks with a USB cable and a traffic sign, but assuming they will not be tampered with at some point is not born out by any facts we know about software.