Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 325 posts

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#81

Post by simcop2387 »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #54
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you detect these changes in a licensed system if you are allowed to modify the vehicle? If you do behavior based testing - the person will just hide the features behind a backdoor so the testing looks normal. If you do some type of checksum based testing, you have defacto made modification illegal, and it is bypassed by doing a "factory reset" prior to the licensing check, and loading the modified software…

I don't think it is really that complicated. On boot, a piece of embedded software (that can't be overwritten) does a checksum of the current software installed. If the checksum doesn't match the original, then it sets an internal bit to 1 to mark that the software has been changed. That internal bit can't be set back to 0, so the car is essentially marked as non-licensed and now can't be legally driven on the road.…

This wouldn't solve that problem either. The way around it would be to make a look-alike module that replaces the current driving system entirely (hardware and all) and lets you swap them around during license checks. It'd also impede legitimate updates from the manufacturer, and violate laws that many states have that require that cars be fixable by non-dealer mechanics.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#82

Post by rando3826 »

mikeash wrote: post #46
rando3826 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. Not at all. One programmer is going to make choices that affect ~ a billion vehicles one day, so something that doesn't happen 99.9999% per hour will happen 100 times per hour. And it's going to be more mundane things, like programming the speed limit 1 mph slower results in 500 less deaths per year, or using drm/copyright to stop poor people from getting driving s…

"Per hour" is rather ridiculous. I'm talking about per crash . There are a couple million vehicle crashes in the US each year, so if it really is 99.9999%, that's two or three ethical crises per year here. Among a billion vehicles it would be maybe ten per year. And honestly I'd be surprised if it's that many. When have you ever heard of a crash where there was any kind of ethical dilemma in the response? People keep…

> I'm talking about the car's ethical choices in crashes, not the ethics of the programmers.

There is no practical difference. Computers do what we tell them to do, whether what I tell it to do has a conditional in code (the computer chooses), or instead always chooses one option because I left that condition out is a completely irrelevant distinction.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#83

Post by Houshalter »

mikeash wrote: post #19
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

I think this whole open source and right to repair/modify will be very interesting with self-driving cars, because of their interaction with the commons. Here are some issues. There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for the…

I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. The odds of being in a situation where there's any sort of ethical choice to make are so remote as to not really be worth considering. 99.9999% of the time, the correct choice when faced with an impending crash will be to brake as hard as the driving surface allows and steer to avoid obstacles as much as possible. In any case, tinkering and commons already intersect…

I don't think it's overblown at all. There would be large advantages to programming your car to be more aggressive and risky.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#84

Post by cwkoss »

foota wrote: post #70
mikeash wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Per hour" is rather ridiculous. I'm talking about per crash . There are a couple million vehicle crashes in the US each year, so if it really is 99.9999%, that's two or three ethical crises per year here. Among a billion vehicles it would be maybe ten per year. And honestly I'd be surprised if it's that many. When have you ever heard of a crash where there was any kind of ethical dilemma in the response? People keep…

I'm actually familiar with a situation like this, the person was on a highway at night and came around a corner to see a deer lying in the road and a crowd right behind the deer. There was a couple of people off to either side. They couldn't brake in time to stop and not harm the people on the other side of the deer.

Are you saying the correct response is to swerve in to the group with the fewest people?

I don't think human drivers have the reaction time to make these decisions, not sure why so many expect computers to be able to.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#85

Post by dragonwriter »

mikeash wrote: post #46
rando3826 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. Not at all. One programmer is going to make choices that affect ~ a billion vehicles one day, so something that doesn't happen 99.9999% per hour will happen 100 times per hour. And it's going to be more mundane things, like programming the speed limit 1 mph slower results in 500 less deaths per year, or using drm/copyright to stop poor people from getting driving s…

"Per hour" is rather ridiculous. I'm talking about per crash . There are a couple million vehicle crashes in the US each year, so if it really is 99.9999%, that's two or three ethical crises per year here. Among a billion vehicles it would be maybe ten per year. And honestly I'd be surprised if it's that many. When have you ever heard of a crash where there was any kind of ethical dilemma in the response? People keep…

> I'm talking about the car's ethical choices in crashes, not the ethics of the programmers.

Cars are not entities to which ethics can be ascribed; the humans building, designing, and programming them are.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#86

Post by patrickmay »

kybernetikos wrote: post #64
rando3826 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. Not at all. One programmer is going to make choices that affect ~ a billion vehicles one day, so something that doesn't happen 99.9999% per hour will happen 100 times per hour. And it's going to be more mundane things, like programming the speed limit 1 mph slower results in 500 less deaths per year, or using drm/copyright to stop poor people from getting driving s…

To me the question is relatively uninteresting because it seems obvious. As long as cars belong to individuals they have the responsibility to favor the interests of those individuals as far as law permits. Where and how much the community is to be preferred over the individual, the community should specify in laws. People running code that breaks those laws should be liable for that codes actions. (I could imagine a…

> As long as cars belong to individuals they have the responsibility to favor the interests of those individuals as far as law permits.

Well put. I would not buy a car that wasn't designed to protect its occupants first and foremost. My family is more important to me than abstract, unlikely to occur ethical dilemmas.

Having that choice programmed in actually makes it easier for self-driving cars to predict the behavior of other cars on the road. It's simple and probably at least a near-global maxima for optimal car fitness.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#87

Post by zerohp »

twblalock wrote: post #68
mindslight wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but to be consistent you have to argue for getting rid of copyrights and patents as well. It makes no sense to regard these devices as "creative works", yet then deny that the end user has been sold an instance of this abstract structure.

How exactly did you derive this from my argument? I see no logical connection.

Patent and copyright are an external force created by a bureaucracy that prevents a free market for these products.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#88

Post by wildmusings »

CaptSpify wrote: post #77

I used to do after-market repair medical equipment (MRI's, CT's, X-Ray, etc). One of the biggest frustrations was: $manufacturer wants $5000 to repair a CT. We'd charge $1000. We'd repair the CT, and it would pass all the built-in diagnostic tests. But then when the customer went to make a scan, a pop-up would appear saying "Unauthorized Repair! Call $manufacturer to fix!". $manufacturer repair tech would come in, pl…

>$manufacturer repair tech would come in, plug in a usb-key, type a code, and charge $1000. They didn't run any of the diagnostics, and were basically paid to keep the usb-key available.

How is that legal? I sincerely hope that would not survive a civil suit. Though it could be that hospitals are weary of suing their suppliers for various reasons.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#89

Post by Karunamon »

saidajigumi wrote: post #76
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

I think this whole open source and right to repair/modify will be very interesting with self-driving cars, because of their interaction with the commons. Here are some issues. There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for the…

Why on earth should society allow (i.e. license) a randomly-modified software agent to operate a motor vehicle? The idea that any "hacker" has the right to arbitrarily change vehicular self-control software and deploy that on a public roadway is laughable.

Like the steering wheel that's deployed on all public roadways right now?

I'm struggling to see the substantial difference between "self driving car with modified software should be disallowed because safety" and "manually driven car should be disallowed because safety".

The former is still strictly safer.

Post reply on HN