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Comment by kamjam | Hacker News Reader

Woah. The scene of that accident looks straight out of a movie scene, looks too unreal to be a normal car accident!

Michael Hasting's friend was just interviewed on TV:

"His friends and family that know him, everyone says he drives like a grandma, so that right there doesn't seem like something he'd be doing, there's no way that he'd be acting erratic like that and driving out of control"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEIjna7672Q

There seems to be some evidence directly contradicting this statement.

People are speculating that the controls in his car may have been compromised. [e.g. [1]]

I'm not saying this is true; just that it is what people are speculating. Frankly I don't know whether or not it's possible to remotely take over that particular car's steering/acceleration mechanisms.

[1] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/24/michael-hastings-ca...

Do people who drive like grandmas spend bread on a 200 hp Mercedes coupe?

According to this article [1], Hastings describes himself as a "a recovering drunk/addict/screw-up." In another True/Slant piece, he says, "I have smoked crack." He crashed a car in a drunk-driving accident at 19.

It's funny how geeks, who pride themselves on rationality, throw Occam's Razor out the window at the drop of a hat.

[1] http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/06/21/LA-Weekly...

>Do people who drive like grandmas spend bread on a 200 hp Mercedes coupe?

I know a guy with at least a dozen cars, including a McLaren F1, drives way more cautiously than most grandmothers I know.

FWIW, 200 HP is not a lot and is, as far as I can tell, Mercedes' least powerful engine (201 HP 4-cylinder). In a 3,500 lb. car, it will not be especially fast.

(I used to have a 3,500 lb. coupe, a Pontiac GTO. Now that was fast. It had a 400 HP V8.)

In point of fact, my grandma drives a Mercedes coupe. So the answer to your question is yes.

Yes, it's a common frustration in the US that when you see a 911, Ferrari, Dodge Viper or whatever it's usually being driven slightly below the speed limit by some (presumably rich) old man.

And P.S. Occam's Razor is just a guide line. Many things happen every day that violate it. The US government has murdered people before and tried to cover it up, so it's not beyond the realm of believably or possibility.

Sigh.

No, that car hit that tree. It wasn't dropped off by a flatbed truck or something. And yes, cars can catch fire during high-speed collisions.

Not to toot my own horn, but... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5936521

who said that NSA is limiting themselves only to reading your emails.

"Bush advisor: Hastings crash ‘consistent with a car cyberattack’"

http://rt.com/usa/michael-hastings-cyber-car-218/

I am not denying the possibility that there was fowl play. I am denying that "the wreck looks like something from a movie" is evidence of anything at all. Keen difference there.

I am not denying the possibility that there was fowl play.

So you think chicken sabotage is a possibility then?

Ha! In fact, I find it rather likely that birds were involved.

I remember, years ago when I was working for BMW, reports that security researchers had been able to gain control over a vehicle by compromising the wifi that the Tire Pressure Sensors used to communicate with the central onboard computer. If a few security researchers could develop that capability, I'd be stunned if intelligence organizations weren't doing the same.

Please don't use Wifi. Wifi doesn't refer to all radio communications, Wifi specifically refers to IEEE standard 802.11.

The TPMS systems do not use Wifi, nor do they generally transmit in the 2.4 GHz band. The system from the paper you mention sits at 315 MHz.

The paper is available here: http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~Gruteser/papers/xu_tpms10.pdf

It's not an important distinction, but I still appreciate the clarification.

You do realize that RT is a directly funded by the Russian Government don't you? There is a great incentive for them to paint the US in a bad light.

Here you go: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/24/michael-hastings-ca...

I'm not trying to say that its impossible, not by any means, but the RT article presents the statement as something that is assumed to be true, whereas the HuffPo article presents it among a large list of conspiracy theories. The RT article is clearly written to act a propaganda, and the article from the post gives a more objective view, where there is a slim possibility that the car was hacked, but it is just as unlikely as any other.

That doesn't make it all false. The best propaganda is also true.

But it also doesn't make it true

That property exists for all news media.

sorry, man, just grabbed a link about Clarke.

Describing Richard Clarke as a "Bush advisor" is a case of technically true, but sort of an unusual label for the man and somewhat misleading in the impression it might give of who he is.

His counter-terror position was a holdover from the Clinton administration, and he eventually left the Bush administration on very bitter terms; I've seen the term "character assassination" used to describe the way he was treated by the administration on numerous ocassions.

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