https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-americ...
https://hackaday.com/2018/02/11/will-john-deere-finally-get-...
“Repair of motorized land vehicles (including tractors) by modifying the software is now legal. Importantly, this includes access to telematic diagnostic data—which was a major point of contention.”
Along with this flabbergasting detail:
“You may find this hard to believe, but one major point of discussion at the hearing was whether letting people repair cars and tractors would allow them to pirate music and movies using the vehicle’s entertainment systems. In their 2015 filing, John Deere speculated that farmers might pirate Taylor Swift music using their equipment. Fortunately, the Copyright Office saw through that argument.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2qbjw2/requ... though I recommend reading more into it and doing your own math.
All I can do is remind myself there’s a mechanical interlock to keep the car from free-falling.
The lifts had no buttons inside the car, your security tag would program in the floor, so you had to get in the right one otherwise you’d be stuffed.
There was a restaurant open to the public at the top, so in the evening the lifts would be full of forlorn diners trying to find their way out.
The computer would often crash and reboot mid journey - the lift would stop, the lights would go out and the screen would run through a boot sequence, before starting up again.
I once saw a technician tinker the system and he genuinely had a bunch of five inch floppy disks.
For the longest time Zara used an MS-DOS based POS system, and hey, it worked.
But to your point you can basically go back to the archives of the 90s internet and go on a shopping spree of vulnerabilities for dos looking at Trojan/virus code.
I'm terrified somebody will think their tweak is 'obviously safe' and share it online and before we know it a combine will run through an elementary school.
Using your line of reasoning, we should close down repair shops altogether. How can we trust people without engineering degrees work on something like brakes? Before we know it, we'll see buses full of schoolchildren on fire or something.
The fearmongering aspect of "combine running through an elementary school" aside (although perhaps the fact that schools aren't usually located in corn fields and have walls could warrant a reminder), I personally find the general approach of "I am afraid of X, so let's make/keep X illegal" terrifying.
I won't respond any more, since I'm pretty sure that's trolling.
People are generally pretty good at not putting questionable, critical parts into vehicles. Hopefully that holds for the software "part" as well. Maybe if software engineering moves towards better testing practices, we'd have reliable methods to test whether firmware was safe or not.
Many states already require vehicle safety inspections to address concerns such as yours. I could see states requiring manufactures work with the state to provide a way to inspect the firmware for safety, (not just checking the hash against the manufacturer code).
Most of the internal and data stuff is pretty solid but never saw any of the systems stuff from the machines themselves so unsure how messy that might be.
They've always been big on contractors so it wouldn't surprise me on the readability of some of that stuff.