Live data from Hacker News

Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

badcyber.com

291–300 of 309 posts

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... sort of. Past a certain level of complexity you get into trouble with just PLC programmers alone. Don't get me wrong. tend to also have electrical skills and some are pretty good at their jobs, and you can learn a lot from them! But ... they're not programmer programmers. It's a different skill-set with only so much overlap.

The ladder paradigm has its place, as does function block diagrams, as does what the plc vendors call ‘structured text’. controlling physical processes like oil refineries, power generation, or sawmills is different from most computer programs as are the consequences of bugs or errors so it makes sense that it takes different people with different interests and skills.

I can't do the nuances justice here for sure. But to make a long story short:

PLCs replace relay circuits for Industrial Electrical technicians (hence: Ladder). And make no mistake: relay circuits are important, and is something they are very adept at!

However, this doesn't imply that they are automatically able to write or debug regular Python or C code or what have you.

-----

PS. If you let a PLC programmer at any language, they'll find a way to do ladder logic. Illustrative example (combining some features I've seen in textbooks and IRL, formatting included):

  if Tank_Level_Reached == True and EF132121 == False and Ready_To_Start == True and Finished == False and Belt == Not_Ready and Stage == 5 and Position_Left_Arm == Up :
    move_left = True
    move_right = False

   if Tank_Level_Reached == True and EF132121 == False and Ready_To_Start == True and Finished == False and Belt == Not_Ready and Stage == 5 and Position_Left_Arm == Down:
   move_left = False
   move_right = True

   if Tank_Level_Reached == True and EF132121 == False and Ready_To_Start == False and Finished == False and Belt == Not_Ready and Stage == 5 and (Position_Left_Arm == Down or Position_Left_Arm == Up):
    move_left = False
    move_right = False
etc ...

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason I'm afraid to check if that website exists :)

Yes, a real website. I actually bothered to check.

I think I owe you an explanation, as I was referring to the fact that in Poland "Januszex" is a meme.

Back in the 90s, when market economy started here, many many businesses' names had the "-ex" suffix, as apparently it sounded western.

And Janusz is a popular first name, which became a meme for a specific type of a businessman, I suspect that because years ago when the meme started, many of those businessman actually had that name (i.e. it was very popular in that generation).

Now, when you open januszex.com, what's there is a meme of "Janusz Alfa" [1] (I think it should be self-explicable), and a related long-nosed monkey meme (I guess they could be thought of as "Janusz Beta" ot sth like that).

EDIT: [1] The real person from the photo is a Polish politician. I couldn't find if he somehow "triggered" the whole meme situation, so I guess it was just a coincidence--someone stumbled upon his photo, used it, and the rest is history.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe the Polish judicial systems has experience in dealing with corporate crime, especially of the tech-related kind. I'm a bit afraid of disappointment here.

Wait, what? You don’t think a country with a population of 41M has experience with corporate crime?

The country does I'm sure but my guess would be that the judiciary probably doesn't because the judicial tools to deal with are quite likely absent or quite recently enacted and because there have been few prosecutions.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldnt be so sure, one can think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate as an example of a little bit of "bricking"

While I don't think Apple handled that well, the intent is clearly different. In fact, the situations are so different, that I have to wonder if you are a troll. In battery gate, 1-2 year old devices were starting to reboot at low state-of-charge (typically My feeling is that Apple owed customers like me some compensation. But, it is clear that the performance throttling was not just an arbitrary "fuck you". Rather,…

> it was a misguided attempt to save the cost of warranty battery replacements in a way they thought customers wouldn't notice.

Sounds like fuck you to me.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#296
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this software is not made by software engineers, it's made by plc programmers, electric circuit designers and whoever did drift into the field. Except for beckhoff to tc3 they haven't made it to object orientation yet, so the field is stuck as a whole in the blue screen mines of yore. Managing complexity with thin standard docs, no version control while the machines grow ever more complex sensor and actuator…

I'm not sure if you've ever used modern software. It's sometimes amazing just how unreliable it is. Web browsers crash every few weeks, windows is known for regularly needing a reboot, evince regularly crashes on me, you can't call 911 with some of cell phones, ... . This reminds me of https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/ . The clearest example of the difference of reliability is looking at public digital signage…

> I'm not sure if you've ever used modern software. It's sometimes amazing just how unreliable it is. Web browsers crash every few weeks, windows is known for regularly needing a reboot

I'm not sure if you remember older software properly. The idea that an entire desktop computer, much less a web browser, could even run for weeks without a reboot would blow the mind of '90s me.

Netscape Navigator was the direct cause of at least 80% of the Mac OS 8/9 crashes I've experienced in my life. It was less common for the browser to entirely take down a Windows system in that era but I sure do remember seeing a lot of those application crash dialogs until the modern era of tabbed browsing made people care more about stability.

Prior to Windows 7 becoming mainstream I never had to check uptime when diagnosing weird behavior on end user computers because they just naturally got rebooted regularly. Now there are a lot of computers that only reboot when they receive updates that require one, and depending on the user might not get those updates very often. I see systems that haven't been rebooted in the better part of a year and some times longer every few weeks. Even more now with Windows 10+ "Fast Start" where "Shut Down" actually means hibernate so users who think they're shutting down every night actually haven't had a fresh boot in months.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#297
post #28

My impression is that the quality of train firmware is generally not very good, and I hope that this scandal will lead to greater scrutiny. 3 years ago, Deutsche Bahn publicly complained of "grotesque" software problems with newly delivered Bombardier trains. For example, when train drivers changed the direction of travel, the train software would crash. It then took 1 hour to boot the train up again [0]. Switzerland…

Oh, the 243..

You know? Shortly after German reunification they appeared in NRW in front of, or behind (pushing them/'Wendetraktion') the Regional-Expresses, S-Bahn, doing the heavy lifting of mass-transportation there, on all or at least most important relations in the Rhine-Ruhr-Area. Not that much later we got DOSTOS there, but brand-new ones.

I remember wondering why that was at the times, and that they couldn't be bad at all, because otherwise they'd break down more often, leading to delays. Which I rarely experienced at the times, as almost daily user.

Die verdammte Scheissbahn war da noch in Ordnung!

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the 90s, you could just power it on and it would show image near-instantly. Warm-up time and channel switch time were all firmly under one second. With the exception of cable TV set-top boxes, which were separate devices and first to include the ridiculous boot times and delays, that still would seem blazingly fast compared to what we have today...

Go back in time a little more and there was definitely "warm up" time for electonics. Tubes had to get up to operating temp, etc. When I was a kid I remember turning on the TV about ten minutes before my dad got home so it would be warmed up and ready for him to watch the evening news.

Let's just say the 70ies to 80ies were peak of consumer electronics, then? With the exception of digital photography, computers, mobiles...

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#299
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The west is the least corrupt part of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index#/...

perception != reality

But for the average person, perception does influence how likely they are themselves to take part in corruption, and that in turn does influence the total amount of corruption in a country. Actual corruption is very hard to measure, so perception of corruption is a reasonable thing to research since it is in many ways "the best you can do" to get some measure of actual corruption.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back in time a little more and there was definitely "warm up" time for electonics. Tubes had to get up to operating temp, etc. When I was a kid I remember turning on the TV about ten minutes before my dad got home so it would be warmed up and ready for him to watch the evening news.

Let's just say the 70ies to 80ies were peak of consumer electronics, then? With the exception of digital photography, computers, mobiles...

Well, that sounds accurate. Especially when it comes to heavier hardware, such as car, trucks, farm equipment... Digital photography, computers and mobiles are young, but arguably, in 2023, they're past their peak.

My take is this: the peak is at the point when a given product category existed long enough to be thoroughly developed, but short enough that value engineering didn't kick in yet to ruin it.

Post reply on HN