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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I know things change over time, but the old advice on hackers was that most of them are not as malicious as they seem. For instance, many viruses have been accidentally more damaging than the creator intended.

Hacking a car to kill people is a lot different than kicking someone out of a video game. Even people who SWAT don't anticipate their rival/victim being killed.

They want the person to be miserable, not dead. It's cruel and vindictive, but it's not homicidal. Or at least not most of the time.

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There's been a number of suspicious reporter deaths with vehicles malfunctions, possibly due to hack (https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=suspicious%20rep...).

The most recent high profile one being Michael Hastings(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)#...)

Could be paranoid nonsense. But white hat researchers have demonstrated a disturbing number of attack vectors that could be used for this sort of thing.

State actors have a myriad of options.

I was simply trying to answer the question of why this isn't happening all the time.

If it is happening all the time (a point I won't dispute) then the question is wrong.

Do we know that it isn't happening all the time? We are already so conditioned to driving being one of the most dangerous things yet we absolutely take it for granted. It would be easy enough for it to more or less blend in. Especially as I'd assume the current traffic investigation work force in the field isn't going to have the chops to do this kind of work.

This may be happening, and just being written off as user error like all the rest of the massive number auto accidents we live with everyday.

Alan Turing was doing statistical modeling to make sure we didn’t blow up more U boats than could be mistaken for bad luck. That was more than seventy years ago so who knows.

> Hacking a car to kill people is a lot different than kicking someone out of a video game. Even people who SWAT don't anticipate their rival/victim being killed.

Sounds like you've never been to 4chan.

> I know things change over time, but the old advice on hackers was that most of them are not as malicious as they seem. For instance, many viruses have been accidentally more damaging than the creator intended.

That hasn't been true in a while. Most malware these days is about money or political goals.

The world isn't short of homicidal maniacs. All that is needed is a perverse ideological motivation and a single person could, theoretically, cause unprecedented harm.

That's, indeed, old advice. It's not 2000 any more (and how I wish it were!).

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