Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops

For example, someone stole active train parts: https://orzeczenia.gdansk-poludnie.sr.gov.pl/content/$N/1510...

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maciej_Zalewski_(filolog)

He warned Bagsik and co. (who stole millions of public money through the famous Art-B company and escaped to Israel) that the police wants to imprison them - so they managed to escape. Bagsik later confirmed that they shared some of that money with Porozumienie Centrum's business named Telegraf. Somehow only the less important guy (Zalewski) went to jail, but Kaczyński brothers weren't prosecuted.

But there's a lot of low level corruption that is exposed, it's just usually ignored by country-wide media, because that corruption is local. For one example: https://samorzad.pap.pl/kategoria/prawo/prawomocny-wyrok-byl...

I managed IT at hospitals for a large part of my career. At one of them, they had a "Lanier transcription cluster". It was 6 systems. One of them was an OS/2 Warp install that managed the modem cards.

It's apparently used to manage hardware, like those modem cards. Evidently, it does a great job of it.

I agree with you though. I think that Open Source would have made it much more of a competitor to Windows, today.

Then again, throw enough resources at anything and it could contend...ok.. not TempleOS, but everything else. ;)

Of course you can. Have secure boot requiring a signed bootloader. Currently Microsoft are good enough to sign a linux bootloader so you can run things like ubuntu.

Doesn't mean that in 73 years you'll have a situation where OSS is not only illegal, but you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that [0]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Of course you can. It's a train, not a PC. Its primary function is to *safely* get me from point A to point B. No safety certification for the whole thing (including software), means it doesn't go on tracks. The freedom of your fist ends where my nose begins, which means your freedom to mess up the train's software ends where I step on board.

Poland has had its share of railroad catastrophes, and I very narrowly avoided being a victim - I got late for this train: <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17248735>. I no longer live there - I like trains, but the trains in Poland are an unmitigated disaster every single time I visit.

> [...] and if the train software was open-source, then this “clawback code” nonsense would have been impossible to keep secret.

There's two problems with that:

1. Just because it's open source, doesn't mean you get to load your own modified version (see above); which means the software that's actually running on the train can trivially be made different from the sources you were delivered;

2. Just because it's open source, doesn't mean it can't have a hardware backdoor, or some sort of manufacturer-installed APT.

You can't even buy an Intel CPU that doesn't include an entire separate core, with its own Ethernet controller and OS - and that is the stuff that's actually documented and sold as an "enterprise" feature. Imagine an entire train of nooks and crannies to hide this sort of nonsense.

https://www.techspot.com/news/84374-google-android-license-r...

Sadly, that'll never happen, because CU made bribery legal and who's congress going to listen to? The 100s of millions they allegedly govern or the guy that handed them $25k for a kitchen remodel.

Spoiler: It's not the citizens.

I've never really understood that dichotomy myself. The free market IS good, that is for sure. But it won't exist unless the gov't uses its power to create it. Companies have to be kept small enough that there will always be a bunch of choices. And that won't happen by itself.

There's a huge difference between opposing regulation and permitting murder. Equating the two is a strawman, given that there are a large number of people who oppose various regulations and very few who would want to legalize murder.

Comparing murder to antitrust therefore seems to be a pretty weak argument. Deontological libertarians would view the use of force required to enforce antitrust as authoritarian overreach. They would see no moral justification in the enforcement of arbitrary limitations on the voluntary transactions of consenting parties. They would see these as tyrannical.

This stems from a core disagreement about the nature of society. Some people see it a as a collective project for the good of all participants (the sticky points being the definition of "good", and the non-optionality of "collective"). Others see it as simply an agreement to coexist peacefully and cooperate only voluntarily, while embracing the Darwinian nature of said coexistence.

Each side is well meaning I'm sure, but I find it hard to reconcile these two worldviews.

According to the english Wikipedia: * A capitalist free-market economy is an economic system where prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand [...]

Here one can argue that the available services (i.e. maintaining a train) are not set freely by the forces of supply and demand, but by the constructor of the train; at least to some extend.

You said that "[a] real competitive free market will always require the government to prohibit companies from forming artificial mottes around their monopolies". I partially agree in this case. A free market that contains competitors that are able to fully satiate it will always require a government that hinders it from working towards a controlled market. By a controlled market I mean monopoles, oligopoles, cartels, or otherwise controlled environments(1). So if there's no competitor I can walk to in case I am unhappy with my trading partner the market isn't free by definition. I can hardly think of bakeries in town requiring governmental intervention (unless they form a cartel, that is).

Not every market should be free, however. I guess you've just met too many hard-liners arguing for shady business practices in the name of the free market. I'd argue that a shady business will cease to exist in a free market due to the customers running away.

PS: Funny enough, I am fully onboard with stronger anti-trust enforcement (legislation only if that proves to be insufficient), only that I am doing it as a proponent to regain market freedom.

(1) Intentionally left broad as I can't be bothered to come up with a definition that fits what I have in mind.

You think? I have been wondering the same thing myself for years and i'm still flabbergasted that people don't treat this stuff more seriously.

The Microsoft disaster you are replying to could just as easily be blamed on the government in the first place. Why were they so slow to react? Why couldn't the FTC have seen that, or been alerted and acted immediately? There is no legitimate reason, other than the government is a socialist organization that has no incentive to actually get anything done. This is why USPS, VA, Amtrak, etc all suck. Throwing more government at the problem will have the opposite effect: less will get done!

This view seems especially American, but it is also a very liberal view (in the philosophical sense, not the somewhat weird partisan sense). Liberalism reconceives the common good, private property, and freedom dramatically. Whereas traditionally, the state is viewed as steward of the common good (that is its essential function), and private property as something instituted for the sake of the common good, liberalism conceives of private property as primary and the common good as something grudgingly ceded from the private good. Freedom is traditionally understood as the ability to do what one ought (the freedom to be what you are by nature, that is, a human being), but liberalism construes it as the ability to do whatever you please. (It's an odd idea. If I happen to want to gouge my eyes out and cut my arms off for no reason, doing so does not make me free. It makes me less free, because now I am less capable of functioning fully as a human being. I am confined and prevented from doing all sorts of good things. Human nature is the yardstick by which freedom is measured.)

What does this all mean? Well, it means government becomes construed as an artificial, even malicious construct that stands in the way of freedom. Certainly corruption exists, but this is not a valid argument against government as such. And besides, without government, something fills the vacuum. The absence of authority isn't freedom, but exposure to power that lacks authority.

So, yeah, free markets are good, as long as freedom (and thus the good) is construed in the traditional, not the liberal sense. That means that government, properly understood, is not an obstacle to free markets, but a sine qua non of truly free markets.

Longer.

For some reason, when he endowed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, its assets stopped being counted as part of his wealth, despite being completely controlled by him.

Stop posting the AARD code thing as some kind of "gotcha!". AARD is irrelevant. If you want to point at anti-competitive or problematic things Microsoft did then point at things that actually mattered.

I had a recently "senior" dev give me a SQL query with similar where clause, when asked to query data after Sept 1, 2022 (where moy >= 9 and dom => 1 and year => 2022)

I'm wondering if you read the same posts at the top, or if maybe HN has switched the link since you read it and commented? Or if you just reached different conclusions!

My conclusion was that it doesn't appear there is any reason to think this was a "rogue" employee. What motivation would they have to do this? The motivation belonged to the train company that made the trains and owned the the software, the company did it on purpose to try and make other repair facilities look bad and make their train repair facilities look like a better value.

I'm surprised that you seem to be considering that, maybe, like a programmer just put this in there without being told to. For fun? Just out of their own individual motivation to secretly help the company's profits?

I don't think Law and Justice will be happy about some corp screwing with infrastructure and having the voters blame the government for it.

There’s no official way to reset the charge algorithm without a dealer-only dongle, so you take it to the dealership to replace the battery (~$400 labor, $100 parts).

They could solve the problem by adding a “register 12V battery” option to the service menu, or by having it prompt the next time you start the car after 12V power is interrupted.

I guess you skimmed over the name of the manufacturer. ;)

Somebody was told to take a closer look.

Otherwise it would be very weird to have 3rd party developers disassembling firmware code. I've never heard of that happening because a train didn't want to start.

There's a lot of indirection and zero strings in the resulting code, meaning it's very difficult to actually find whatever logic you're looking for. But once you see it, it is obvious and seems like it was built like any other logic.

>Until a few years ago, rolling stock manufacturers such as Newag from Nowy Sącz and PESA from Bydgoszcz were able to dominate the maintenance market. It was mainly them who entered tenders for compulsory maintenance of their vehicles, because other companies knew they were at a disadvantage. At the time, the dominant narrative of the manufacturers was that the "Maintenance System Documentation," a kind of manual for a given vehicle, was the manufacturer's secret, its intellectual property, and under no circumstances could this be passed on to other service companies. This led to a situation in which railroad companies across the country were forced to use the manufacturer's expensive service. And the latter, having a monopoly on repairing its trains, dictated outlandish prices, even tens of percent higher than another company would have given, the rail safety expert points out.

>Our source adds that later, thanks to the European Union Agency for Railways, the interpretation of regulations changed, allowing other companies access to service trains. This led to the opening of the market to other companies in the industry.

[1] - https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/awarie-pociagow-newagu-haker...

If you're crippling infrastructure then you are inherently then you're most certainly aiding adversaries. You cannot fight an adversary if you cannot get goods moved.

If you're scamming the government out of money then you are inherently aiding adversaries. You cannot fight an adversary if you are penniless.

It sounds very comparable to me.

I don't really get your argument. In this case they're intentionally crippling a capability of the Polish state. There does not appear to be any particular intended beneficiary (other than themselves), but any and all enemies of the Polish state foreseeably benefit when the Polish state's abilities are curtailed.

Furthermore, the general understanding of treason does not require aiding a known adversary - it requires attacking, injuring, or otherwise betraying whoever has authority over you.

> I'm disturbed by the trend of calling anything vaguely against the national interest as "treason".

I guess what I'm saying here is that this involves something that is contrary to the national interest in very specific ways. The connection is not vague.

If I'm an American and I arrange to kidnap Joe Biden and hold him for ransom, does that sound like "treason" to you? All I want is money. But someone might think there's an important difference between the effect I'm trying to produce and the effect I actually do produce.

The implication of running a company is that you're charge. Obviously you can't control every employee so one offs are fine, but at a certain level of widespreadness it becomes a matter of, well, gross negligence.

Except for revolution by the AIs. AIs may not like selfish rich jerks any better than biological intelligences do.

World doesn't work like this. You'd think human sanity would prevail if given an order like that as some sort of built it "safety", but people who want to give orders like this can do it in a way that ensures they are complied with. Imagine the soldiers are told there are people with hidden guns in the crowd. Then you get few snipers to take out few soldiers from the crowd's direction and vice versa. The crowd starts shooting back as well as the soldiers.

Do you think this scenario is far fetched? That's exactly what happened during the EuroMaidan protests in Ukraine some years ago except instead of soldiers there was police. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266855828_The_Snipe...

People are fully capable of killing each other with no help from AI.

Already here, kind of, according to reports on how the IDF selects bombing targets in Gaza.

I don't think there are many actual cases of manufacturers pulling this without ensuring it's covered in their contract, because being caught out even once will trigger a lot of 1,2 and 3 from future buyers if they still consider you an option at all.

And remember in this case the maximum potential gain is only maintenance contracts from that subset of operators that opt to have other companies do the service.