
U.S. Signals Backing for Self-Driving Cars - jonbaer
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/technology/self-driving-cars-guidelines.html?mtrref=undefined&gwh=4078EEECC2FAD049805A8A8ADD231C84&gwt=pay
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pazra
One thing I find surprising is that most geeks seem to be all for Self-Driving
cars, yet are heavily against government surveillance. Yet self-driving cars
are not only going to offer up much more surveillance data, but also offer a
potential 'kill switch' backdoor that would allow nefarious agencies to drive
you into a brick wall at 80mph and make it look like an accident.

Once manual cars go away completely, you will not only loose control of your
data, but also the certainty that your motor vehicle isn't going to act
against you.

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s_q_b
If the security services target you, and truly wish to kill you, current
methods will more than suffice.

The Israelis like magnetic mines, the Russians polonium, the Yanks... Well to
be perfectly honest I'm not sure, but it almost certainly involves some
combination of clandestine airpower, special forces operations, OCO, and
morbid obesity.

Right now, the chain of devices that can track and kill you is enormous, from
your router to your standard ICE Jeep. You're most likely already being
tracked on traffic camera, the electronic toll system, cellular towers,
passing Wifi, and the endless set of embedded Linux devices that you don't
even consider.

If you are targeted, there may be many obstacles to your removable from the
board, including political, economic, or legal ramifications.

But technical means will not be one of them.

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hx87
> the Yanks... Well to be perfectly honest I'm not sure,

I'm not sure either, but setting up a traffic accident wouldn't attract too
much scrutiny today.

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s_q_b
I fully agree. The crux of my argument is that self-driving cars aren't
inherently any more hackable or trackable than existing vehicles with existing
available data connections through cell, emergency communications, OTA
updates, or usb if local.

One could, in theory, use the fly-by-wire steering, traction control, or ABS
systems to simulate a pretty convincing crash. It would be fairly
straightforward electronically through the onboard processors in existing
cars, and would be practically untraceable.

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pbreit
Yes, I would say a car that can do anything from centrally provided
instructions is inherently more hackable than a car that is disconnected from
everything and can't do much more than keep its speed on the highway.

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s_q_b
That's beside the point. The question of centrally distributed updates is
orthogonal to that of self-driving cars.

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pbreit
I'd be surprised if any of the self-driving cars are not "online".

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s_q_b
That's fair. But what I see is that the car fleet will head towards OTA no
matter what we do.

Forgive me for my cynicism. If you've ever worked with embedded systems...
Well the state of consumer security is so bad I'd be shocked if someone hadn't
already been killed in this way.

The Bluetooth alone is a nightmarish enough vector already. And local
installation is very possible.

After all, all cars do need servicing...

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imglorp
This is a hard problem because driving software is so complicated with many
special cases. Life and safety code in general is hard.

Do you want to mandate they apply aerospace coding technology? Like the other
guy said, this could set them back 20 years. Mandate a traceability culture
like ISO9000? How about third party audits? Escrow the code and mandate
telemetry for NTSB to examine after an incident?

Even if there are a few bugs, they'll still be safer than humans. Google's up
to 1.5 million miles driven with no fatalities. The human metric to beat will
be 1.2 fatalities per 100M miles.

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paganel
> Google's up to 1.5 million miles driven with no fatalities.

Has the Google car driven on a Bulgarian road late at night, rain pouring
down, with no road-markups, with lorries coming your way and blinding you
every couple of minutes? I did that yesterday, and after those moments when I
was trying to guess "what is the actual road?" I was thinking that there's no
way in hell a computer program would be able to manage that unless full-AI
becomes a thing.

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ams6110
I did that last night in the USA. Well it wasn't raining -- but an unpaved,
washboarded road with no lane markings of any kind, blind hill crests and
turns, and just barely wide enough for two cars to pass.

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seanot
"The instructions signaled to motorists that automated vehicles would not be a
Wild West where companies can try anything without oversight, but were also
vague enough that automakers and technology companies would not fear
overregulation."

That ought to set back automated car evolution by twenty years. It's always
fun to watch lawyers trying to write rules for industries in which the
technologies change before the ink dries in the federal register.

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rayiner
For example?

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jacquesm
The internet comes to mind.

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rayiner
Government regulation of the Internet has been sparse and technologically-
neutral. The CDMA Safe Harbor comes to mind. Not to mention the fact that
Congress has gone to great lengths to deregulate any part of the Internet that
changes rapidly. Is there an example you're thinking of?

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Shivetya
Maybe we will end up with the highways portrayed in tek war and other scifi,
where you don't do the driving on limited access roadways but can or have to
do it on side streets.

it certainly would be easier to mark visually and electronically limited
access routes like interstates. that in turn would make it simpler to create
safe self driving cars.

still I am not impressed as to where the tech as implemented on roads with
current cars is today. they only work in ideal situations, the exact opposite
of most safety equipment. its obvious they cannot rely on visual acquisition
of objects, Tesla's system failed spectacularly in that area, so what will win
out? RADAR? Laser? Combination of both?

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callesgg
What are the uber self driving system based on? What are the regulations
regarding their safety?

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bertil
The presence of a licensed driver in the car. That the driver is not touching
the wheel is a little out-of-bound in that context.

