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Comment by tenthirtyam | Hacker News Reader

In most cases I agree with this, but maybe not for potentially dangerous things like cars? What if someone roots into their car and disables some essential safety feature - maybe even a legally mandated safety feature?

More concretely, the expertise-required-to-access-root is in a different field to the expertise-required-to-make-wise-changes. i.e. you might know how to hack a car, but that doesn't mean you know how cars operate.

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People have been modifying their cars since cars have existed, an electric car shouldn’t be anything new.

Given electric cars are responsible for much bigger responsibilities than combustion cars (avoid driving into that bicyclist), there are new concerns here which beg extra consideration.

I actually think we should be asking more of safety regulations here with regards to the design of electric/computerized cars.

Think of it this way: every concern you have about a teenager having root on their electric car is the same as any sociopath hacker (AI enabled for modern nightmare fuel) who finds a root vulnerability and decides to not be a good person with it. If a teenager can mess with the collision avoidance, e.g. Israel can modify it to murder anyone who talks shit about Israel in the car. Or the CIA could turn it into a weapon. Or one day some dev could push a bad OTA update. Et cetera. Our safety regulations should mandate design features to prevent a malfunctioning computer from posing any greater safety risk than any other modified part in the car.

Up until v recently cars were not remotely accessible and part of a command-and-control network which Teslas are (perhaps other modern cars are too, I only know Tesla because I have one).

I know that the car reports practically all user events to Tesla in real time over the cell network (eg, open door), and I know it has root access. I don't know if that root is available remotely and I don't know if foundational commands like steering, acceleration and brake are accessible via the CLI (they are computer controlled actions locally)

THUS I would not want to drive a Tesla if there was the possibility of all cars being rooted and remotely controlled by an unauthorized actor.

Not intentionally, but some cars have been vulnerable to remote control/hijacking since at least 2015.

https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

People have been killing each other with weapons for as long as they've been around, nuclear weapons shouldn't be anything new.

No one should have nuclear weapons, we aught to have robust policy, institutions, and vigilance to prevent their proliferation and use.

Computerized vehicles aught to be strictly regulated in terms of how computers may affect the physical operation of the car, such that a reasonable standard of safety can be ensured outside the usual risk one takes when hopping in a motor vehicle. The fact that a hacker can possibly kill people by rooting an infotainment system is a symptom of the general disregard for security in design, and we continue to ignore it for engineering expediency.

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