CB HI

Now the self-driving craze gets really interesting:

I-Like-To-Bike

Especially useful on April Fool's Day. Or only on that day; but then again some people will believe any gee-whiz puffery released by Google.

I suppose the kids's balloons will lift them up into the seats and carry them out, all of course controlled/programmed by Mom at home with her smartphone while drinking tea.

Ninety5rpm

genec

Yeah, but it wasn't, and no one is building such drones...although no doubt the next Hollywood adventure will feature such Frankenstein like derivations.

Terminator much?

squirtdad

hacking of AV vehicles is a serious concern, not just theoretical. it would be safe to say that all companies working on AV are also working on anti hacking.....but as real life shows hackers are just as smart as the engineers building things. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6...ving-vehicles/

Ninety5rpm

So much hand wringing.

Anyone willing to go to the trouble of hacking an AV to wreak havoc on humanity already has a myriad of options at their disposal, including parking a vehicle loaded with explosives and a timer or remote detonation device in any vulnerable area.

avole

Really? Tell me, where do you buy your explosives? The corner store?

Sadly, in the real world, it is far easier to hire a truck and slam into a crowd than either option.

tyrion

The hand wringing is deserved. Hacking a single AV might be considered a relatively minor threat, but if they could be hacked en masse it could be catastrophic. This kind of attack would have a much greater return on investment than conventional terrorist tactics.

squirtdad

not hand wringing at all.....just dealing with reality, unlike some.

it is part of the technical challenges facing AV

but thinking about it, perhaps the bigger issue is the the sociological challenge that potential hacking brings. All it would take is few instances of hacking, especially involving injuries to riders and/or multiple vehicles at once to make people question the safety and reliability of AV vehicles, which would cause adoption to be much slower. It wouldn't even take injuries. If all vehicles in fleet just stopped, stranding people, but no injuries, that alone would reduce adoption (at least for the that technology platform)

Ninety5rpm

Let's use Tesla as an example because they have this ability to automatically update the firmware in Teslas.

Supposedly, according to Musk, Teslas have all the hardware required to be fully autonomous, they just need to have their firmware updated with firmware that makes them Level 4 or 5. Some are dubious about this, because they lack Lidar. We'll see.

But, in theory, suppose it's true. And someone hacks into Teslas downloading system such that they are able to download their own firmware into all Teslas, and control all of them remotely.

It's important to understand that this would not involve mere hacking, like what they do to steal private personal credit information, but to develop and test the remote control firmware and develop the devices necessary to control these diabolically-refreshed Teslas. I mean, just to tell them to drive to the nearest freeway, get on an offramp and drive 120 mph against the flow of traffic would be a tremendous undertaking probably involving millions in development.

Almost certainly someone inside Tesla would have to be involved. Not only to crack into the downloading, but to get at the source code - much easier to hack the existing source than start from scratch. Reverse engineering the machine code is also theoretically possible, but the complexity involved in these machines makes that practically unlikely. These are not washing machines, and those are hard enough to reverse engineer.

But even if hackers have the source code, much of AV behavior is based on neural network data built up from on-the-road learning. You can just create this stuff manually. So now you have to actually have a Tesla, get it in learning mode, teach it to do the bad things you want to do, and then figure out how to get all this new learning downloaded to all the other Teslas. It's crazy.

What he have here folks, is security through complexity.

tyrion

Utter nonsense. Any security resulting from complexity would be miniscule.

Ninety5rpm

And yet, of the countless hacking cases there have been, where and when have hackers ever modified code once they got access?

Any cases of anyone breaking into a bank or securities firm and sending themselves billions of dollars? That would be much simpler, not requiring any coding.

Heck, cars have had firmware for over a decade, much simpler than AI firmware would be, and other than a few table mods to improve performance, what have they done?

If the security would be minuscule, describe what exactly see them possibly doing, and how they might do it.

tyrion

I don't know. But code injection and code modification are common hacking methods. Complexity doesn't prevent it.

Ninety5rpm

Sure, if a buffer overflow bug (or similar exploitation opportunity) is found then code can be cleverly injected to give someone control... to THAT machine. But that's a vulnerability any drive-by-wire car has, regardless of whether it's autonomous, and without exploiting any bugs. I mean, if you have access to the car, you hook up a laptop to it, etc. This vulnerability not specific to autonomous cars.

What would be different is gaining access to multitudes of AVs without even first getting physical access to them. That's what would be far more complex. far more. Probably enough complexity to keep it from being a viable thing for anyone to do.

tyrion

No it won't. If the AVs can be remotely controlled, they can be remotely hacked.

350htrr

Why would any AV be remotely controlled...? I thought the whole idea was to have each vehicle do it's own thing, according to a set of rules/values it should follow...

tyrion

AV taxis would be called remotely, but even private AVs would be capable of being remotely called. For instance, they when you go shopping or to the movies or whatever, you wouldn't need to walk to your parked car, the car would come to you.

350htrr

Yes, that is a given... But once the AV is there to pick you up how is one going to tell it to drive into a crowd of people which it was programed not to do... ? Meaning hacking it to do something it was not meant to do... ?

Ninety5rpm

Calling one remotely is not controlling one remotely.

Ninety5rpm

One of the points underlying my prediction of self-driving cars dominating traffic by the end of 2022 in metro areas is that hailed AVs will be much cheaper than human-driven taxis (and hailed cars). This point has been challenged, by @genec ("they won't lower their fares") and others.

This was said under oath by Ex-Uber CEO Kalanick:
It's an existential threat - meaning Uber will cease to exist if it is not among the first with self-driving ride-hailing cars. That's a huge impetus pushing this technology. Billiion$.

Waymo-Uber trial: Kalanick testifies about his efforts to hire Waymo engineer

tyrion

Yes it is. Instructions, whether general or specific, are coming from an external source.

350htrr

Really.? I thought we were talking about remotely hacked. Calling one and it comes because it was already programed to, is not the same as making it do something it was not programed to do, it's two TOTALLY different things...

tyrion

Correct.

genec

Those "reduced costs" simply mean higher profits for the company, not lower fares for the users.

Maelochs

Except that various suppliers will try to undercut one another to increase net by increasing volume.