San Francisco cabbie attacks self-driving car | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco cabbie attacks self-driving car

sf.curbed.com

10 pointspmoriarty9 comments

It's an interesting step towards the panopticon - self driving vehicles by necessity have complete surveillance and store everything. Misdemeanors that previously would have been dismissed as word against word are now persistent in the digital record.

Dashcams are another big change here.

You have no expectation of privacy in public, but do you have an expectation that everything done with vehicles nearby will be stored in data forever?

Attacking a vehicle loaded to the gills with cameras seems like an exceptionally bad idea.

Actually since this is a capital investment-heavy business, this can probably work, if done on a large enough scale. This seems to be the reason bike sharing doesn't take off, for example.

> This seems to be the reason bike sharing doesn't take off, for example.

Citibike has pretty good coverage in NYC, though it's a dock-based system and not a "leave it wherever" system that's been working less well in other cities.

It would be as effective to just bust a taillight, rendering the vehicle in technical violation of the vehicle code and forcing its recall back to base.

I like how the article has a huge photo of a yellow cab, with what looks like a guy driving away who is trying to hide his face from the camera. But it is just a stock photo, and it is not known what cab company the alleged attacking driver works for.

It's striking how much original news photography has declined in general. Almost every article these days comes with a zero-information, photoshopped generic image (like a bitcoin symbol over a story about cryptocurrency), an amateur shot copied from some random social media user, or just something straight out of a stock photo library. Not to lament the "good old days" of print journalism, but there was definitely a lot more effort put into getting good-quality images that were directly relevant to the story they accompanied.

> to deliver a blow to a robot car hard enough to scratch the window. Wait.. what? He delivered a BLOW that SCRATCHED the window? What did he use a diamond pickaxe? Or what are the "robot car" windows made out of that a blow only scratches it? The article claims the DMV report: > and slapped the front passenger window, causing a scratch. Oh, so he just slapped it with his hand, and I guess his ring scratched the window? Seriously, there is a article about someone SLAPPING a vehicle?

Yeah. Somehow "Cab driver slaps window of autonomous vehicle" doesn't have the same juice. I assumed from the headline that he'd deliberately rammed the other vehicle. Hell, I've "attacked" plenty of non-self driving cars myself (if I'm in a crosswalk, and your vehicle passes close enough that I can reach it, I will hit).

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