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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

So a rogue corporate exec ordered an unauthorized op against a ronin hacker who Robin Hood'ed the underhood of his electric car.

We are living in cyberpunk times.

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So a rogue corporate exec ordered an unauthorized op against a ronin hacker who Robin Hood'ed the underhood of his electric car.

We are living in cyberpunk times.

I remember when cyberpunk was fresh and new, before it was a codified collection of cliches. Mind you, this was also a time when an author could write, "His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn't taking calls," and think this sounded futuristic and criminally lucrative.

That reminds me, I was as a public service going to make an auto-updating epub of Neuromancer which simply incremented the units as needed to sound duly impressive.

"His buyer for the three petabytes of hot RAM..." etc...

Better off making something up. Flebibytes or something. Gibson should've done that in the original.

Flebibytes? That's a crazy amount.

On the street, sure.

In academe anything under ten mangabytes is noise these days tho and I imagine the dark economy is two factors beyond anything we have access to. :/

That's why Star Trek used things like kiloquads. Unless and until you know what a "quad" is, it's just a number in mid-air.

Or being deliberately nonspecific. Three memory modules, going cheap if no questions asked. That's why Snow Crash still reads so well, it skirts the quantitative and focuses on the qualitative.

It depends on what the three megabytes consists of. It could be quite lucrative.

What defined "golden age" cyberpunk that set it apart from ordinary science fiction? My modern mind associates the term with movies and video games that boil down to knock offs of Blade Runner and Deus Ex.

There's a fairly good analogy between SF and music. 70s music (and SF) was fat and bloated and slow. High concept stuff about galactic empires and gatefold sleeves and Serious Issues - Vietnam and the nature of reality.

And suddenly this fast, spiky thing appears, that's all nihilism and dystopia and edge and noir and anti-heroes and technology abuse, and instead of looking ahead a billion years it's looking ahead about 15 minutes, and instead of sounding like an orchestra it sounds like the wind over tensioned steel cables, and it wears sunglasses at night and it thinks technology is power and its just so gosh-darned cool...

Yeah, that's pretty much what it was like. Ok, it's all cliches now, but so's a modern punk band.

People forget that there was a reason for the "punk" in cyberpunk, and it wasn't mohawks and leather jackets.

Or perhaps the car detected its firmware had been tampered with, and auto-reverted to a backup image.

Not enough evidence to say for sure, so Occam's razor applies.

Wouldn't that be worse security wise? Say if there is an exploit in the wild. The customer upgrades it to the latest version. Now all the bad guy has to do is to mess around with the firmware enough to trick the system into downgrading to the exploitable version.

If you have enough access to tamper with the firmware, you don't need a more exploitable version.

A car that has an app, a car that can be remotely updated, and a car that has all communication running through the same BUS, may be susceptible to remote break in without requiring any sort of physical access. Now the firmware may require signature verification to be patched, however in this case all we need is to corrupt the existing firmware or atleast make it seem like we had access to it in order to trigger an auto-downgrade.

Regardless, even under your logic an auto-downgrade without a user's input is completely unwarranted for.

The "Occam's razor" choice is frequently whatever one guy claims it is.

I think it's often a result of Occam's razor being mixed up with Hanlon's razor, or something similar: they claim that an argument for accident, forces of nature, or incompetence is more convincing than an argument for malice or willful intent, and that the former requires less assumptions than the latter.

I think this is often true, but definitely not always.

Or it comes down to the fact that Occam's Razor is just a cheap rhetorical device that's employed to lend a luster of legitimately onto what is otherwise just a subjective intuition. Fully comprehending how many assumptions are involved in a given line of reasoning probably takes a lot more time and thought than some guy on the internet is devoting to his HN comment.

You convinced me not to try to understand this argument...

Well, don't be too convinced. I didn't spend much time on that comment.

Maybe you just came up with the simplest possible refutation of Occam's razor. Maybe not :-)

I think this is because "simpler" is so subjective. Witness the Occam's Razor argument for theism - what's more likely, all of this crazy complicated quantum physics mumbo jumbo, or 'a wizard did it'? The latter only requires one assumption... until you start asking pesky questions about what, exactly, was the 'it' that the wizard did, and how was 'it' managed.

http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/63905-Tesla-s-...

If Tesla employees can address individual cars with no oversight or audit trail or "2+ man rule" in place, that's a huge lapse of professional responsibility.

We need something like Certificate Transparency to log ACL hits for all these "connected, but proprietary" things in our lives.

Do we have any guarantees a rogue tesla employee can't just tell your car to drive off a bridge while you're inside it?

Uber got busted for allowing general access to a "god mode" that let employees tail passengers. Musk may have brought more appropriate practices from PayPal though.

http://nypost.com/2016/01/06/uber-will-no-longer-allow-creep...

It's all in framing. "person in control of software pushed an update to said software" would be just as accurate without sensationalization.

a car company founded by a guy that created a bank in cyberspace shows that he has the power to push software to your car at will, though this time he choose not to, but do not care when his underlings do the same.

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