The original 'researcher' (because they did something so horrendously unsafe on public roads) mentioned that there are at least 2 car manufacturers who have devices on the CAN bus to watch traffic and detect when a device is issuing commands that it shouldn't be so the tampering can be detected (and assumedly shut the infotainment system off).
You can't control for other bad drivers' reactions to your vehicle becoming an obstacle on the highway. Swerve and change lanes? Sure, in an ideal world that always happens. In the real world, accidents can happen instead.
Let's say there is a low chance of death from doing this: 1:10:000.
Arguably that's about the same as sending someone to jail for 1:10,000th their life. Which is about 2 and 1/2 days which is not ‘horrific’. Still, I would hope sending a random person to prison for a few days to stage a story seems unacceptable.
On the other hand vaccinations are both lower risks and a higher benefit so it’s not really comparable.
You are unqualified to determine the level of risk that was imposed on the other drivers. You have no idea how many zeros to add or remove to how likely an accident was to result from this. I'm not sure there exists a person that could give an accurate representation beyond generalities, so please don't present yourself as this person.
The point, the only point, really, that people have with their actions is that they endangered other people on purpose and without their consent. I wouldn't defend someone weaving between cars in traffic and leaving inches between bumpers doing so (I'm sure many of us have seen this) for the exact same reason. There are far too many variables to accurately account for, so they are raising the risk to all the people around them. Even an expert driver can't claim to know how every other driver on the road will react.
That the researchers did this for what I'm sure most of us believe is a good reason is irrelevant, given there were alternatives. They made a judgement call, and now we are all upset at their poor judgement.
> Add four or five more zeros and you'll be in the ballpark.
So the 1:10,000 should be between 1:100,000,000 and 1:1,000,000,000? You're saying that, on average, between one hundred million and one billion vehicles would need to pass a stopped vehicle on the highway before causing an accident? Sorry, but if your arguments previously strained credibility this takes the cake.
That a mild slowing of the vehicle ahead would cause a fatal collision that wouldn't have happened otherwise, yeah.
This called for the same reaction as would adjusting speed to match any car that took their foot off the accelerator; the Jeep didn't even brake! Driving is a continual process of these slow interactions and that's not the part that causes accidents, and considering relative speed they would also tend to be non-fatal accidents if they did happen.
That just makes it more dangerous - there was no brake light to clearly indicate the car was slowing. Since we know drivers rear-end cars quite often we know the risk of accident was increased here.
Increasing the risk of accident is not acceptable unless all participants have given informed consent (they didn't).
That's fine if you're behind the vehicle right when it starts slowing down. I agree with you that a fatal accident is highly improbable there. But it didn't just slow down a bit and then resume speed. If you watched the video you saw that the vehicle came to a complete stop. The vehicles that saw it mildly slowing down have already driven by, leaving only incoming vehicles going 70mph unprepared for a vehicle ahead at a total standstill. Hopefully those unprepared drivers are sufficiently conscious, alert, and otherwise not distracted to react in time to prevent a crash. As the clips I posted above demonstrate, I wouldn't bet my or anyone else's life that that is the case.
A fatal collision can kill more than one person. Also, more than one car was impacted by the slowdown so you need to look at the overall odds per person not per car and then sum then to find the collective risk of death.
It's not easy to find the actual odds, but stopped cars on the freeway kill people every year with much higher risks in high speed low density high speed traffic as traffic jams tend to be safe it's unexpected stopped cars that's the problem.
Rough guess there is probably a 1:100 chance per year a car will stop in the middle of a free way for no apparent reason. There ~100,000,000 cars on the road. So, ~1:1,000,000 cars stop per year which is probably low but let's say they cause 10 deaths out of the 20,000+ auto deaths per year. Well that's ~1:10,000. Now, sure you
can play with the odds but there much higher than 1:1,000,000.
They sent known commands to a known vehicle, they weren't live-fuzzing an unknown system.
The experiment seems less dangerous than not following decent tire-rotation policy, etc.
It's not that there's finite extra risk, it's what it is in relation to the baseline risk. Without that these comments are just useless scaremongering.
The problem is there were other drivers around who may not have been expecting the situation.
Further, since they weren't in the vehicle, if something happened ahead of it and the Wired journalist NEEDED to make a sudden maneuver to avoid an accident he might not have been able to. Asking them over the radio to turn X back on could have taken too long causing a serious accident when without their intervention one could have been easily avoided.
It's not scaremongering. There is a reason you don't interfere with a driver on a public road at high speed. It was extremely irresponsible. There were plenty of ways they could have done the test in controlled circumstances (ask the cops for help, race track, auto test facility, large empty parking lot, etc.).
They took unnecessary risks with possibly fatal consequences. It was irresponsible.
But the unnecessary risk is so close to 0 that it's obviously just manufactured outrage. If you read about this and came here to comment and that's all you can talk about you might as well be trolling.
It's harmful. You're going to make some politician think that's where they should spend their time instead of figuring out why the car company sat on this for so long. Our whole society will lose.
So look, it is not obvious to me that this is all "manufactured outrage", and I (a) know one of these researchers, (b) have spent my career mostly in vuln research, and (c) have wasted some brain cycles thinking about this issue.
I think I mostly agree with Robert Graham's take on this:
Robert Graham thinks mostly the same thing you think, but because he doesn't evoke "anti-vaxx" and "trolling" and say things like "obviously manufactured", he's (1) persuasive and (2) not setting fire to a comment thread by picking fights with people.
You can write whatever you'd like to write. But if you keep writing like this, most people here won't care what you have to say, and in short order they won't be able to see it either, because you're going to get flagged off HN.
It would be helpful to have more people arguing the other side of the conventional wisdom on Miller and Valesek's demo --- more people, that is, arguing the thing you're trying to argue, that the risk was minimal and the upside significant. Please make that argument carefully, and don't caricature it.
'fineman, you have my sympathies. I wonder if some people commenting on this issue have ever driven a vehicle. If they have, they must be the same yokels I see who never change lanes or even deviate from their lane ever, even on multilane roads: not to pass a cyclist, not because the car in front of them is stopping to turn right into a narrow drive, not to give the flag dude a little more room, never!!!
