It’s transmitted that data but the gang has blocked the server from receiving it. I mentioned that earlier. This whole operation doesn’t go down unless you take out the eyes and ears of the company.
All that other stuff can be replaced. It’s still a car with a $15,000 battery in it and drivetrain and all the sensors and electronics.
And if the hackers can break in and steal data, they can steal the source code. Then they have all the keys to the kingdom.
Who said anything about software? Cut the wires to the battery! That will power down any car no matter what.
The benefit to stealing a self driving car is that it’s a self driving car! What’s the retail price of self driving cars? $100k? More? The whole premise of the self-driving taxi and delivery companies is that the cars are too expensive for the consumer market so they operate on a rental basis instead. If self-driving cars became a mass market commodity like regular cars then thieves would just steal them the old fashioned way.
Of course the self-driving features work without the network. GPS works without a cell network. It’s a receive-only protocol. The only thing that won’t work is the remote command and control dispatch. That would have to be hacked around.
If the goal is to steal the cars then all it takes is to order them to go somewhere while disabling (perhaps via DDoS) the logging and other telemetry servers that allow them to track the vehicles. Once they’re stopped where the criminals want them they can break in and disable the power supply to shut them down completely, then tow/push them into shipping containers to send overseas for modification and resale.
There already exist international criminal gangs who do this sort of thing (edit: for regular, not self driving cars). Think of the resources of an organization the size of the Gulf Cartel. They operate their own cell phone network in Mexico. They’ve got hundreds of engineers. They absolutely could do an operation like this.
They are taking over Internet accounts though. They hack people’s social media profiles, Netflix accounts, Amazon accounts etc. They also take down websites via DDoS attacks.
Here’s the thing with fleets of self-driving rental cars: unlike power plants or manufacturing robots, these cars will be on the public Internet. They cannot be airgapped on a private LAN the way a fixed robot in a factory can.
So all it takes to control these things is to hack into the authentication system and steal the credentials for the master control account for the cars. Then they’ll be able to connect to the cara remotely and issue commands to control them, just as the company would for say, ordering them to return to base to recharge, get cleaned up, or be repaired.
That’s the vulnerability. And even if they put all the cars on a VPN it’ll still exist because hackers can and do steal VPN credentials just like any other credential.
By the way, there has been at least one high profile hack of manufacturing robots: the Stuxnet worm which targeted Iran’s nuclear program. Since a fleet of self-driving cars is going to have millions and millions of dollars in value (tens of thousands of cars on the road) it’s going to be an extremely high value target for criminal gangs. While their resources might not be as extreme as the probable Stuxnet creators, they will be very large (and might even gain state actor support from unfriendly countries).
Most security workers at companies overestimate hackers abilities. That’s why all these companies are hacked all the time and there are tons and tons of data breaches.
The thing very few people understand about hackers is that they can code and they share their hacks as tools with each other on the black market. This means you’re essentially up against the combined effort of all hackers on the black market. When one succeeds, they all succeed. When one piece of server software is hacked, all companies who use that software get hacked.
No, a kilogram of bell peppers is about 3-4 peppers. These things are massive! 5.30€ is about $7.80 Canadian. A bit cheaper but not much.
I don’t know if you have a lot of greenhouses in Europe. Here in Canada we have some but nowhere near enough to feed the country. We import a lot of vegetables from California and Mexico. Can’t always grow locally when there’s a metre of snow on the ground and the air is -10C or colder for 6 months.
Fresh vegetables are way more expensive than that where I live. A package of lettuce (good for 3 days) costs $4. A package of bell peppers (3 peppers) costs $8-10.
Allocating $1.50 (CAD, about equal to 1€) to vegetables might get me a head of lettuce and a bit of carrot and onion. Enough to make a basic garden salad. Nowhere near enough to make something nice like a rich vegetable soup!
Gangs of criminals are hacking big companies all the time and stealing or extorting millions of dollars. If they can hack into Amazon or Target they can hack into Uber and steal fleets of self driving vehicles. Just turn off all the data logging and have them drive to a chop shop or even down to the local port and right into a shipping container.
How does the self driving car deliver to an apartment on the 6th floor?
My dad drives for Uber Eats and Skip the Dishes. He basically makes all his money in shitty weather. During the summer, when it’s gorgeous out, nobody places any orders. He ends up sitting in the car for hours doing nothing!
Where’s the vegetables? Fresh lettuce or spinach? Onions, carrots, celery, broccoli, kale, cucumber, fresh peas, peppers, egg plants….
You’re just eating canned tomatoes and pasta. People get more balanced diet than that at the food bank!
Rowan Atkinson’s been in a lot of other stuff, for example Blackadder (multiple series). He’s also played Mr Bean in lots of movies.
A childhood favourite of mine, The Witches, featured Rowan Atkinson as the hotel manager. Apparently during filming (which took place in a real hotel, not a sound stage) Rowan was in his room when the crew noticed water pouring out from under his door. They opened the door and found him sleeping in bed with the water running! The sets outside were flooded and a bunch of equipment was damaged by water!
Arrr matey, t’was never immoral! Subscriptions only be for landlubbers!
Prepare to make sail! Ahoy!
It’s always going to depend on what you’re searching for. I just tried searching for home coffee roasting on Swiss Cows and all of the results were legit, no crappy spam sites.
Marginalia is great for finding obscure sites but many normal sites don’t show up there. Million Short is a similar idea but with a different approach to achieving it.
The problem of search is actually extremely hard because there are millions of scam and spam sites out there that are full of ads and either AI slop or literally stolen content from other popular sites. Somehow these sites need to be blocked in order to give good results. It’s a never-ending, always-evolving battle, just like blocking spam in email (I still have to check my spam folder all the time because legit emails end up flagged as spam).
I still use web search all the time, I just don’t use Google. There are great alternatives:
Thanks! You too!
Cheers! I’m in the exact same boat! Perhaps we’re the vanguard of the AI-jobpocalypse…
I do make real meals all the time. I love cooking. The whole point of my comments is to show how crappy and low value these meals are.
Read the label on the package. The enchiladas are already full of rice and beans.
Trump might be insane but Putin is far from it. He’s been locked in a battle for the survival of his regime (and by extension his life) for decades. He’s extremely savvy at playing the political game in Russia.
Trump basically shoots from the hip all the time and thinks only his relationships with people and his deal-making matter. He’s a sitting duck for a manipulator like Putin.