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Comment by bmohlenhoff | Hacker News Reader

Neat idea, I like the idea of a somewhat intelligent "traffic swarm", but the article doesn't address what effects a malicious player could induce on the scheme. What's to stop people from randomly broadcasting "Traffic Jam Ahead" signals to cause slowdowns, or maybe even "Traffic Jam Behind" to cause the vehicles to suddenly accelerate? Considering that, I think it would be possible to come up with an aftermarket module to regulate the behavior of the traffic swarm such that the user would reach his destination faster at the expense of slowing the rest of the swarm down. Any traffic swarming scheme needs to take this type of behavior into account, or else I don't think it would work out very well in practice.

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What's to stop someone from spoofing your bank site while you're on the free wifi at Starbucks? I can imagine an aftermarket module designed to do just that, so free wifi is clearly not viable.

In practice, they'll implement encryption and authentication, then make it a federal crime to mess with it.

This is already possible with traffic lights. Emergency Vehicles are equipped to switch traffic lights in their path to green. It's called Traffic Signal Preemption. Of course, the criminal penalties for abusing the system are pretty stiff...

As a child, I used to dream of such a device as I sat impatiently at traffic lights in the car (naturally asking my parents "are we there yet" every 5 seconds). I was pretty excited to learn that it is a real thing!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_signal_preemption

I thought the article was just saying that the cars will broadcast their speed. In this way cars will know if they are slowing down ahead of them, and it will be built in, so it won't be easily hackable like you described.

Things like this could possibly save Millons of hours a year. Quite powerful.

If it can be hacked, it will be hacked. Just because it's built in means nothing. In fact, I bet it makes it a bigger target.

Ya I know. I meant hacked as in regular drivers randomly broadcasting signals saying traffic jam ahead. Obviously it can be hacked, but it will have to be a lot more sophisticated then that.

in my opinion it is far more important to guard against the actions of the stupid and helpless than the malicious. there are far more stupid people on the road than malicious people, so ...

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