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Comment by dm2 | Hacker News Reader

Autonomous vehicles offer far more benefits than they have drawbacks.

This article is mainly focused on the situation where the criminals will have both hands free. It ignores the fact that the vehicles would just stop if anything was blocking the path. Plus, the vehicles could certainly be turned off remotely during an emergency. And nothing stops law-enforcement from having autonomous vehicles that could be set to follow another vehicle with near perfect accuracy.

This is similar to the Tesla stolen vehicle. WHY would the police engage in a high-speed pursuit, risking the lives of numerous people, to catch a vehicle that has GPS in the car and can probably be shut down remotely. Law-enforcement should be partially responsible for the people injured in that situation, in my opinion.

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They can possibly be remotely controlled to lock the doors and drive to a police compound.

The BBC article fails to link to the report. The few details in the BBC report make me want to say "so much derp", because it really does sound dumb. But then maybe the full report is a lot better?

All the police probably have to do to stop an autonomous vehicle is to turn on their lights. Autonomous vehicles have to follow all traffic laws, which would include stopping for emergency vehicles.

Not if you override that bit of logic in the system. Cars are reprogrammed all the freaking time - for performance reasons.

It's not very far fetched to do the same for other nefarious reasons.

That's actually a grey area. Following incidences of police impersonation, it was recommended that concerned people should turn on their blinker to acknowledge the police and safely drive to the nearest populated area before pulling over.

Having your car automatically and uncontrollably pull over every time red & blue lights are observed could lead to traps being set up on any backwoods road.

Edit: I really wish the news article would link to the actual source report so I could confirm it, but I bet that the above scenario is included in the FBI's hypotheticals.

If it's really a concern, (real) emergency vehicles could stick in a wireless beacon with an API the driverless cars could query, that would respond with a {currently_an_emergency: true} signed by a government-CA-issued TLS cert. Then you'd only have to worry about officially sanctioned creepy cops pulling you over on deserted roads.

Is it required that you stop for emergency vehicles? I have always been under the impression that moving out of the way was sufficient. Cops would have no reason to pull over autonomous vehicles unless they were stolen or unsafely damaged.

The vehicles could limit themselves to only drive X miles on a public highway after the registration expires before it alerts the DMV and you receive a ticket.

I just realized something, when the majority of vehicles become autonomous, we will need less police patrolling the streets. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Your post seems to ignore the very real possibility that criminals will prepare their cars by customizing the programming prior to the crime. Does your car have a remote disable switch? Hack the car and turn it off. If you have arbitrary physical access to the car, then it will be very difficult to stop you from doing this.

As others have commented, you really do have to take into account the worst-case scenarios. Even if automated cars are a win in 99.9% of the cases, the 0.1% of failures (intentional or not) may be devastating.

Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8049671

Also, what's to stop it from happening now?

Remember the guy that stole the tank? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AcVSEY2DP0

Remember the guy that built an armored vehicle out of a bulldozer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4nlcmmt8X0

Semi-trucks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3NKlzZmgl0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loUWmQdj70w

You'd have to equip it with run-flat tires to stand a chance.

Even an armed drone or helicopter would probably be publicly acceptable to stop it.

It does happen, as is the point of your post. You even left out one of the bigger attacks, 9/11, which deeply impacted the US. You can argue about why, but you can't dispute the fact that they do in fact happen.

The main difference is (and/or will be) that with better automation, an intelligent hacker can execute such an attack remotely, with minimal risk to their person. Just as is the situation today with malware on the internet, we'll be enabling an entirely new class of remote attacks which have the potential to affect many people. We've learned enough from malware to know that this turns into a cat and mouse game with arbitrary depth. The issue is not whether this situation will get away from us, but when and how.

Well, without physical access to the vehicle it seems unlikely that malware could allow unlimited control of a vehicle. Ensuring firmware is genuine and that certain rules are stored on a read-only part of the memory would be helpful, such as don't hit people, turn off vehicle if issued a certain command.

It is good to think about these situations to enable safeguards to be preemptively put in place.

Autonomous vehicles aren't necessarily able to be remotely controlled, the computers and guidance systems are built into the vehicle, waypoints that would be located on roads would be used, which would be unable to cause damage other than the goods not being delivered and the truck being in the wrong place.

Even after 9/11 planes are still somewhat of a threat if the attacker is determined enough. Spend years becoming a pilot or flight crew and you'd have access to the cockpit, after that there's not much limit to how much damage you could cause. There is some protection at certain spots though, the White House is fairly safe: http://cryptome.org/eyeball/wh-missile/pict0.jpg

Security researchers have already had some degree of success performing remote attacks of cars already on the market through OnStar/Bluetooth.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/07/24/hackers...

The exploits in the article you linked to requires physical access and modification.

This is about bluetooth and CD sound hacks, hopefully those have been locked down on future models since it's been known a while. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/business/10hack.html

I think we might be violently agreeing here. :)

The article I linked to links to the article you linked to about halfway down.

> Even if automated cars are a win in 99.9% of the cases, the 0.1% of failures (intentional or not) may be devastating.

9/11 proves that we are incapable of handling the 0.01% failure case without going to extremes. Very disheartening.

You are ignoring the very low-tech possibility that criminals may just hire a good driver. Cheaper and more reliable than hacking a very complex system.

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