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Comment by donkarma | Hacker News Reader

is this the future of self driving cars?

I think you are right. I think the unknowns are, how tiny will the script be that commands all the cars into a lake and will it be a cloud hack or a local broadcast hack?

How about just driving you by billboards on, or for, Alphabet controlled properties?

I feel like they're already heading towards manipulating routes to favor advertisers.

They do it the way around, personalise the billboard content to the people near it.

First, a command to download updated GPS maps that says "There's now a bridge over that lake"...

Yep, I've had Google Maps direct me to drive into a wall or an empty field more than a couple times over the years. It's not uncommon for people to get stranded or even killed by blindly following bad GPS directions. The maps are often quite bad in less traveled areas. And these are the non-malicious cases!

Sorry, this bugged me enough to try and find some data:

> It's not uncommon for people to get stranded or even killed by blindly following bad GPS directions.

Google took me to Wikipedia[0], which took me to a conference paper[1]:

In a corpus of about 400 news articles from 2010 onwards (via Lexus Nexus search), they found 52 deaths related to navigation technologies, which accounted for about 25% of the incidents they recorded.

57% of the incidents were collisions; someone running into something due to GPS giving bad directions.

20% total involved being stranded.

That's over ~6 years of US, UK, Canadian & Austrailian news reports.

It may not be uncommon for GPS to kinda suck, but it is _very_ rare for GPS to kill people.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312936003_Understan...

I haven't done any deep research on the topic but know of several specific fatal cases off the top of my head. It's not like someone dies every day, but for every reported case there are probably many that don't get reported as such.

The much more common case is getting stuck and needing a rescue. Google maps is absolutely terrible at dirt roads. It will confidently give you directions that make absolutley no sense once you get away from pavement. It never got me stuck anywhere, but easily could have many times if I had been less cautious. Nowadays I know to ignore those directions in less developed areas.

I think the broader point is that driving navigation tech is getting fairly good at happy path cases but is woefully underdeveloped outside of that.

Better question is, will they be able to outlaw t-shirts with 20km/h speed limit signs on the back or people walking on the sidewalk wearing them.

Pfft. I’ve already got my collection of t shirts ready:

-1km/h

NULL km/h

false km/h

don't forget 50/0 mph

:-D don't forget "undefined"!

    ; DROP table traffic_signs;

is this the future of self driving cars?

My prediction: Ransomware hits self-driving cars.

You're locked in the car until you Venmo the bad guys some credits.

To encourage compliance, the stereo starts playing the sound of running water.

One would hope your car would be more secure than your venmo account.

And the future of the planned 6-th generation unmanned combat aircraft ...

there were already such bugs before, and my analysis is that even the older ECU cars before the 2000s had such bugs, just nobody bothers to look for them (also ECUs have been causing deaths from bugs but they just assume its the driver's fault). self driving cars will be the next order of magnitude of problems. ECU 1x, smart 10x, self driving 100x.

> In July 2015, IT security researchers announced a severe security flaw assumed to affect every Chrysler vehicle with Uconnect produced from late 2013 to early 2015.[120] It allows hackers to gain access to the car over the Internet, and in the case of a Jeep Cherokee was demonstrated to enable an attacker to take control not just of the radio, A/C, and windshield wipers, but also of the car's steering, brakes and transmission.[120] Chrysler published a patch that car owners can download and install via a USB stick, or have a car dealer install for them.[120]

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler#Chrysler_Uconnect

:O I would put the number of drivers who downloaded and installed the patch somewhere between 5-10.

It's ok, those cars probably lost or will lose connectivity as 3g goes away.

Yeah but probably all vehicles have the same types of vulnerabilities.

Not the future, it did already happen, albeit on a smaller scale with Cruise: https://www.thedrive.com/news/a-swarm-of-self-driving-cruise...

The worst part is they were never really transparent about what the issue was.

I’ve had this worry for years of a state level attack via network connected FSD cars. But I’m hardly alone, it was shown in a Fast and Furious movie, so people are thinking of it.

oh yeah that was the first thing I thought of when I saw this

First mention of using driverless vehicles as weapons I recall was Daemon by Daniel Suarez.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series)

Don't forget the eighth 'The Fast and the Furious' movie.

IRobot (the film) predates that and uses the idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot_(film)

I forgot if any of the IRobot short stories used the concept - if they do they would predate the movie.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_(short_story)

First mention of self driving cars becoming sentient and turning on humans I’m aware of, from 1953!

Maybe one day I'll re-read Daemon. A book not so far ahead of its time.

Might feel a little too close to home to re-read.

I'll never forget the gig worker assembly scene.

Beep beep, motherfucker!

Self driving cars are not needed for this. It happens on The Jetsons all the time.

No, the future is to command all self driving cars to immediately accelerate to 100 mph and do not stop for whatever reason no matter what. Pure remote code execution.

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