VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles • Hacker News Board

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#311

Post by surajrmal » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 3:03 PM UTC

hulitu wrote: post #269

surajrmal wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I can defend all choices various vendors make, but there are plenty of signals that are helpful. Precise gps coordinates seem unnecessary, but some sort of region based information can help correlate whether there is a particular problem that might happen at far higher rates in hilly terrain or specific humidity levels. Users also often use products in a way that doesn't line up with how the product owne…

> some sort of region based information can help correlate whether there is a particular problem that might happen at far higher rates in hilly terrain or specific humidity levels. You know what will help in those situations ? Testing. It is expensive, i know. Why not skip it and just analyse the KPIs from the telemetry. /s

Testing is not really an economically viable option in all cases. Ecosystems are simply to diverse and products are so complex that covering every case is not really possible. There is likely no software you use today short of projects like sqlite which don't leverage user reported bugs or telemetry to improve the software.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#312

Post by surajrmal » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

effdee wrote: post #255

surajrmal wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty much industry standard for all consumer products to deliver metrics back to home base. Honestly there are many good reasons to do so and it does result in finding real problems and solving them. While I understand the argument that we did fine in these products for decades without them, the complexity of the products was also a lot less back then. Finding issues via metrics from the production fleet is an…

> I'd rather focus on standardizing a transparent and privacy safe way to gather these metrics. Consumers would know what metrics are collected and there would be guarantees that privacy is kept. I'd rather see laws to have it disabled by default. People who don't mind can then opt-in again.

If we do that the relative cost of software will increase and reliability will overall decrease. This doesn't sound like a great outcome for end users who will end up dealing with both of these things.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

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Post by surajrmal » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 3:10 PM UTC

carra wrote: post #260

surajrmal wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty much industry standard for all consumer products to deliver metrics back to home base. Honestly there are many good reasons to do so and it does result in finding real problems and solving them. While I understand the argument that we did fine in these products for decades without them, the complexity of the products was also a lot less back then. Finding issues via metrics from the production fleet is an…

Defending this because "it's industry standard" is no better than justifying any wrong practice because "it's always been done this way".

My point is that it's done this way for a reason beyond the nefarious ones that people in hn always seem to assume. Engineers want this data because it helps them do their job, bit because some product person wants to use it to sell it or use it to train an ML model. There is certainly extraneous data collected because the incremental cost of doing so once you've established the pipeline is small and eventually someone does make a bad decision, but that's where we should focus our energy. Otherwise you're just making a lot of folks jobs harder because their software runs doesn't run in the cloud. An unintended consequence of this might be to push even more software into the cloud which would otherwise run on client side.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

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Post by shakna » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 12:02 PM UTC

IanCal wrote: post #310

shakna wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a question of ownership. If I see fit to modify something I own, as has always been done, why am I not free to utilise a particular piece of my purchase? If I'm not free to do so - then do I actually still own my own product? Or is it now a lease? Why should the era of rebuilding your car simply end? There are already safety regs you need to comply with. The average hotrod modifies a considerable proportion of t…

I think you're talking about something related but not discussed here, which would be making car modifications illegal. Let's say BMW make heated seats an optional extra, which it already is. What if they also install them in every car because it's cheaper to have one build, and subsequently are able to sell them more competitively - none of that would require making it illegal for you to get the seats working yourse…

Not illegal, in so far as I don't believe it's been tested in court - but it is an explicit breach of the giant terms and conditions contract that they require you to sign, when purchasing the vehicle. There is an attempt to prevent you from doing so.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

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Post by CatWChainsaw » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #300

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because that's comparable to a modern data-slurping EV, thank you for the useless comment.

You're skeptical a car can work without an app, I provided an example of why that isn't the case.

You're being deliberately obtuse and that kind of contrarianism is 100% correlated with douchebaggery IMPE. Be better.

Unless you somehow aren't kidding, in which I'll clarify: I'm skeptical that a modern electric vehicle that goes to the trouble of being a computer on wheels can work without an app. And I'll even clarify "can" - the car manufacturer allows you to operate the car without using its app.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

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Post by spike021 » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

steelframe wrote: post #304

spike021 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

heh I have the same car. was thinking of doing the same.. but like mentioned earlier I want that valet setting feature and stuff. tough choice.

I'll never trust some rando working at a valet to treat my GRC right. I've seen too many dashcam horror videos of even people working at dealerships failing at manual and safe rev temps.

oh i’m not saying i’d use valet mode for literal valets.. but even when the car is at a shop for work.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

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Post by anonandy42 » Sun, Jan 05, 2025, 2:08 AM UTC

vaindil wrote: post #191

cozzyd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait.... "Your hammer has reached its monthly nail limit. Please upgrade to the pro plan to unlock an additional 60 nails"

I'm having a really fun time imagining how a hammer would physically prevent you from hammering a nail based on a subscription.

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