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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

The thing that has always bothered me about stuff like this is that there must be some incredbly skilled software and hardware engineers out there who can put this sort of thing together, and they basically decide to use their skills to steal peoples cars(or well, enable others to do that). On one hand I get it, on the other I really don't. I would love to read an interview with any of them and see what drives them.

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As opposed to the incredibly skilled engineers who... steal your personal data (or enable others to do that)?

I would love to read an interview with someone who applied to work for, say, Facebook. After all the news about their complicity in trying to set the world on fire - what drives them?

Money (and a chance to apply what he learned at a much larger scale)? It pays very well and you can FIRE in less than 10 years. Especially when FB is much more legal than say stealing cars.

I don't think critics of Facebook have even decided what they want their critique of Facebook to be.

My opinion is most of the negative reaction that people have to Facebook is intrinsic to websites where lots of people socialize online.

Why stop there? On HN you no doubt have engineers whose line of work is in mass death.

Could you be more specific?

Military industrial complex?

Bingo! But there are plenty of other harmful industries that exist today that are on the wrong side of history, but depend on skilled engineering to wreak the havoc they do on our people and our planet.

Most of these lines of reasoning assume the people involved have the same amount of agency as any other developer/engineer, and I'm sure they're right in many cases-- plenty of talented American software developers have worked at companies making scummy malware even having other options. But I'll bet that a big chunk of it is difficulty getting legitimate work if you've already been convicted of a felony.

I'm not making excuses; there are plenty of ways that someone with these skills could make money legally with a felony conviction, like online freelance work. But, life choices so often come down to the path of least resistance, and if you add in a language fluency barrier, intermittent or slow internet access, or some other resistance, I'll bet it's a lot easier to say "Screw it. I've already got a record-- what do I have to lose?"

If I were to guess, money. Good scratch to be made selling these tools, or even just working for a contractor and never be found making the tools themselves - just a one-off sell of information on how to build a device like these.

But yeah, morals are flexible, a lot of people don't care what their work is used for (whether they're directly aware or not). I mean personally I've worked for investment banking and the tobacco industry (websites/shops for e-smoking products), I've heard of others that have worked for gambling or "adult entertainment", and how many of you here work on either crypto or Amazon?

What's morally right, wrong and justifiable is flexible, is all I'm saying.

Could you link to a job post or something that would be willing to hire for these skills and pay decently? Because even expert-level embedded software engineers don't actually get paid that much, and the guys who designed this may not be able to pass a typical interview (unlike the job, building this car theft tool doesn't require expertise in anything - mere logic, trial and error and learning as you go will get you there).

> building this car theft tool doesn't require expertise in anything - mere logic, trial and error and learning as you go will get you there

Are you joking? This involves expertise, maybe just not certified through formally-mediated channels.

You effectively get unlimited trial & error attempts, and nobody judges you on how you got to the end result (as long as the end result is working). Compare that to an interview (which sets a baseline level of knowledge necessary, not to mention trick questions and/or leetcode) and then the actual job (where you are under time pressures that may not allow unlimited time for a non-expert to get there by trial and error, and there are certain code quality standards to follow).

I just find it hard to believe that someone could do this and not do other involved tasks.

Sure it’s technically _possible_ someone who is terrible at other tasks and isn’t very bright put this together…but I doubt it.

It goes like this - in eastern europe and other funny places there was no dealer network for cars and so no service. If you lost a key or similar someone needed to fix it. At first it was quite simple. Read eeprom, change eeprom etc. This industry developed over a number of years as did the skills. If you have no other option for being employed as an electrical engineer this is probably quite ok. Later as markets opened up and the internet became a thing the tools found an international outlet. First auto locksmiths, then thieves stealing to ship abroad (africa etc) and then drug dealers who had and would pay big money to access cars that are used for hits and other work. So it continues. The latest high end cars have real encryption onboard with unique keys. Taking them is much harder...

This doesn’t look particularly sophisticated. It takes understanding of basic circuit design and embedded programming. The genius bit is leveraging a Bluetooth speaker. That’s a clever choice.

In many countries, engineering (especially hardware) don’t get paid a lot. I could imagine the pull of illicit sources of income being strong.

I have an opinion that dealing with non-FOSS creates an ability to do this. And the ability creates the market. This is a cycle of stupidity where a client (most of it) does not want to learn anything and a vendor happily supplies shit. Appearing of that kind of "skilled engineers" reminds me water-and-dum supremacy where water is a kind of opportunist actor and dam is a shitty security software. A dam made of shit will fall in a matter of time.

> what drives them

Don't know. A stolen car presumably?

Subversive itch man. Its not about the money. Its about being above the rules.

Disclaimer: I've personally not stolen a car.

Maybe they have felony convictions, dubious immigration status or personality problems that make traditional legal employment difficult or impossible for them. Or maybe it just pays well.

Money ? (and a low bar of ethics) They sell the device 5000$, and it costs them almost nothing (a cheap bluetooth speaker, and a few $ of components).

The whole supply chain of exporting stolen vehicles (and any other large scale illicit activity) is probably filled with people with great talent and skill: sales, logistics, banking, HR, information security, ... Someone in one of the importing countries might even get hired to develop the system for export to the US.

Imagine if you were someone with specific knowledge that was not remunerated and someone else with ill intent noticed. https://xkcd.com/2347/

> see what drives them

Failure of the establishment is their primary driver. It's the free market in action, crime pays.

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