The Internet of Criminal Things

by rvense • 11 years ago

134 65 11 years ago

frozenport2• 11 years ago

Okay you make the software open source, then the cheating will take place in hardware. At the heart of the emission testing problem lies a poorly designed emissions test. We need better test coverage.

angelbob• 11 years ago

That would at least be more expensive. Moving the cheating to harder and harder chunks of the entire system is a fine start.

You can't have perfect security. You can have security that makes bad actors pay more for the privilege of being bad actors.

frozenport2• 11 years ago

How about testing them on the road? Worst that could happen is requiring the car maker to revert to those sub-optimal settings.

Spivak2• 11 years ago

But this is just a band-aid fix. Personally, I would just put the user in control. Let the user decide whether they want to run their car in high mileage low emissions mode or high performance mode. Now automakers can "cheat" all they want and it makes everyone better off.

zby• 11 years ago

And also it would require more people in on the conspiracy.

lordnacho2• 11 years ago

I think the problem with the emissions test is it tries to be precise. The authorities seem to think that if we lock down all the variables, we get a good guess as to the actual figures. Which wouldn't be a bad way to do things if you were doing a science experiment.

If we're trying to avoid gaming the system, wouldn't it be better to drive around a bunch of cars, using the natural variability of the conditions to defeat the cheaters? Sure, it's not as precise, but you get better accuracy because people can't trick the system.

kardos2• 11 years ago

How will you handle all of the "its not fair" complaints that claim competitors were tested under better conditions?

And also, how will you ensure that certain manufacturers aren't actually given better conditions?

SideburnsOfDoom• 11 years ago

The need for testing is the problem, and the realisation that car makers - all of them - are working on the test score over everything else, and that the test scores (which should represent emissions and air quality) have been getting "better" to the extent that that they are increasingly diverging from the real world.

I suspect that in a few decades time this will be regarded as a heavy blow to the internal combustion engine - or at least against Diesel. It is an inflection point at which a scandal pushes into public conciousness and mass media the mounting evidence against Diesel engines and the health effects of smog, and the insufficient actual progress fixing it. Meanwhile electric cars are gaining fast.

The politicians are in "something must be done" mode, which is the usual reaction to a problem that has been ignored for a while and now is in the news.

e.g.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/france-consider-phasing-diesel-tax...

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/10/03/uk-volkswagen-emiss...

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/01/uk-governmen...

conradev• 11 years ago

I don't understand why people talk about open-source as means of guaranteeing software integrity.

For most software projects these days, it's impossible to verify that a binary blob came from a given set of source code.

It's possible to do, though. Bitcoin, tor and a large number of Debian packages build reproducibly:

https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/About

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-part-t...

vilhelm_s• 11 years ago

The article explicitly mentions reproducible builds.

lifeisstillgood7• 11 years ago

Open source is the only means to guarantee software integrity. What surprises me is the fear that not enough eyeballs will look. But for VW, the scrutinising eyeballs will be employed by GM, Toyota etc. The incentive to catch your competition in cheating and thus collapse their business is enormous.

We should encourage more of it. Maybe give the competitors a factory each.

roymurdock• 11 years ago

Or they will collude, as they probably did with the emissions testing. There's no way GM and Toyota saw VW's numbers and just blindly believed they were plausible. They were probably scared of calling VW out because it would bring an industry-wide crackdown, which it is. Now things are going to be more expensive for all auto manufacturers.

drdaeman• 11 years ago

To be precise the first half of Freedom One [1] is the requirement (and not a guarantee), not "Open Source" or "Free Software". And the requisites for that requirement are decriminalization of research including sharing results of those, and possibility of said research, i.e. absence of technical measures that prevent access to the software.

This may work with politicians. I fear, persuading them to grant users other freedoms (like a freedom to change program or distribute your changes) is very unlikely to happen.

[1]: "The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish"

noonespecial• 11 years ago

I'm not so sure that governments are too concerned with the 11 million cheating cars so long as they have a nice easy target to blame, fine, and play politics with. I have a feeling they'd much rather have one company and 11 million violations than 10,000 backyard mechanics helping themselves to 15 extra horsepower after reading an article on Hackaday.

Politically, DRM is still a feature not a bug.

lifeisstillgood7• 11 years ago

I see nothing whatsoever incompatible with hardware refusing to run anything other than a small list of signed binaries, and publishing the source code and makefiles (etc) to create said binaries.

Hackers turning their / your car into a socially offensive mechanism should be treated similarly to putting firing pins back in decommissioned handguns.

tormeh3• 11 years ago

Let's keep, or at least not further erode, respect for guns. There are few things civilians will ever touch that deserve more respect than guns, and I suggest we don't cloud that message.

Hey downvoters, why don't you take that attitude to the army and see how they react? Professional gun-handlers tend to have a lot more respect for guns than you have. That ought to make you pause for thought.

mindslight11• 11 years ago

hardware refusing to run anything other than a small list of signed binaries

Other than that the owner should have complete control over the thing they own. I'd rather suffer the occasional hick "rolling coal" than be restricted in what I can read and write.

turning ... your car into a socially offensive mechanism should be [illegal]

Sure, but police the violation - not the mere ability to violate.

shaftoe• 11 years ago

As someone who has built homemade firearms, I'm amused by your example.

It seems like municipalities with emissions testing requirements could easily catch these "socially offensive hackers" if they use the older hook-it-up-to-the-tailpipe testing technology. Then we wouldn't have to get permission from our betters to alter our own property.

mindslight11• 11 years ago

This is a tough truth.

Any entity only perceives things it can measure and control. It will therefore never work to reduce its control, even when doing so would further its mission.

tbrownaw• 11 years ago

Which is why nobody "perceives" history, or anything outside our solar system, or the laws of physics, or anything else it's not possible for us to have any effect on.

The Internet of Criminal Things

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