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

U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

macdailynews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 381 posts

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#361

Post by vel0city »

pembrook wrote: post #275
mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the wikipedia page downplays how often it's used to try to hurt or annoy cyclists, pedestrians, or anyone who looks liberal/foreign. It's not just anti environmentalists who do it, it's a general MAGA thing.

I’m sorry, but while I’m sure there’s a few people on earth who have intentionally done this…to imagine its happening around you all the time vs people being just lazy about issues on their vehicle…is quite frankly lunacy. It’s always fascinating to run across the MAGA-style conspiracy theories on the far left, they’re ironically very similar. “I get coal rolled every time in step on my bike!”

I see people rolling coal every day of my life here in North Texas. Often multiple different people on a 20+ minute drive.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#362

Post by vel0city »

hedora wrote: post #355
triceratops wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Traditional Libertarians: No organization (government or otherwise) should be large enough or powerful enough to infringe on anyone's liberties. But how?

One easy way: Limit the size of organizations + governments, and ban border control. Don't like San Francisco? Move to LA or Sac, and you get a completely different government. Don't like Meta or Fox News? No worries, they would have been broken up at 1% their current size.

But one or two people and petty cash can be enough to infringe on the rights of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#363

Post by vel0city »

pattrn wrote: post #213
rectang wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand correctly, the trucker was set up to roll coal on other people, and only made an exception for this specific kid on a bike. It's not "unhinged" to stand up for others who have been targeted even while you were spared — it's just common decency.

Is there some way of knowing a truck is set up to "roll coal"? If not, then this could just be the OP thinking poorly of someone just trying to drive carefully around a family. It would be jumping to a very pessimistic conclusion without evidence.

> Is there some way of knowing a truck is set up to "roll coal"?

The vehicle is modified considerably from its stock configurations. Its plainly evident to see based on the very public improper function of the emissions of the vehicle.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#364

Post by Tangurena2 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #230
kube-system wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vehicle regulation in the US is piss poor. Here's the full list of states that require all passenger vehicles to be inspected for safety and emissions every year: * New York * Massachussets * Vermont

Why should that be required? Let people do as they will and impose penalties for problematic behavior (including negligence). I lived in a state with safety inspections and AFAICT it was little more than yet another disproportionate speed bump for the poor and a complete waste of time for society at large. I do see the merit of inspecting larger trailers (such as for boats) once a year given the combined increased li…

> For emissions, again who cares.

Most cars do indeed meet emissions regulations. From the essay Million Dollar Murray [0]:

> In Denver, five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution.

> Stedman is a chemist and automobile emissions specialist at the University of Denver. His laboratory put up the sign on Speer Avenue. “Obviously, the older a car is the more likely it is to become broken. It’s the same as human beings. And by broken we mean any number of mechanical malfunctions—the computer’s not working anymore, fuel injection is stuck open, the catalyst died. It’s not unusual that these failure modes result in high emissions. We have at least one car in our database which was emitting seventy grams of hydrocarbon per mile, which means that you could almost drive a Honda Civic on the exhaust fumes from that car. It’s not just old cars. It’s new cars with high mileage, like taxis. One of the most successful and least publicized control measures was done by a district attorney in L.A. back in the nineties. He went to LAX and discovered that all of the Bell Cabs were gross emitters. One of those cabs emitted more than its own weight of pollution every year.”

When I moved to Denver, there were inspections (I think annually). Later, they were eliminated and now there are remote sensors set up along side various onramps. The main sensor is on one side, a box about the size of a suitcase, and the other side is a mirror, since the sensor aims a laser and measures the absorption lines of what comes out of the exhaust (and takes a photo of your license plate). If your car is a gross polluter, you get a letter from the DMV telling you to get it checked.

Anecdotally, I used to have a late 80s Geo Spectrum. When it failed emissions, after attempting to repair it, it turned out that the reason the oxygen sensor failed was due to a crack in the exhaust manifold. The way the engine was arranged, if left untreated, the crack in the manifold would direct exhaust gases into the radiator which is why there were so many engine fires (resulting in a total loss of the vehicle).

Notes:

0 - Written by Malcolm Gladwell, this essay is about "power law distributions", where a few percent produce wildly different results:

https://housingmatterssc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Mill...

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#365

Post by MobiusHorizons »

diroussel wrote: post #344
Spooky23 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s definitely debatable, and is unlikely to be a primary factor in a significant number of events. It’s also hard to measure because the data is pretty bad. As an example, your tire could blow out and cause you to hit a drunk pedestrian. It would be flagged as an alcohol related crash. Police are mostly interested in violations and liability, and you are responsible. Unless it’s a fatality, nobody will even ask if…

Yeah and those stats show a big difference. In the UK there are 2.6 fatalities per 100,000 population on average per year. And in the USA it’s 14.2 That’s five times higher! For those that don’t know these are all the checks done yearly to every passenger car over 3 years old. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/car-parts-checked... Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

The UK also has much stricter training requirements prior to being granted a license, among other differences. I don't think we can pin all the differences on the yearly MOT.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#366

Post by toss1 »

riversflow wrote: post #184
toss1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I also absolutely loath the coal-rollers and everything about what they do, and if I could snap my fingers and have them lose both their trucks and their licenses to drive with no other consequences beyond their frustration, I'd do it. Nevertheless, we cannot allow this good reason for which be both agree to be used as a wedge to let the state just wholesale collect data for whatever reason they want. Very soon,…

Collecting crime data is already in their purview. Thats literally what this is. If this was an app that primarily facilitated contract murder, this would be obviously justifiable. Seems to me you and many others here just don’t actually believe in the states regulatory authority of digital things, like the computer in your car.

>>the states regulatory authority of digital things, like the computer in your car

Umm, I most definitely agree with you to the extent the state can regulate automobiles, as in the present example for emissions, the state can regulate the computers that control those emissions.

This is a question of a dragnet of all data from a seller of generic modification capability with reportedly far broader application than merely coal-rolling.

If the app was just "One-Click-Coal-Roller!", I'd agree — they should have access to every user name, address, etc., at least for their state.

Plus, even for a broader-use app, if the state had even a bit more specificity, even going after say, only users who connected the app to vehicles where this is the most common illegal modification (or if they have records of modified data, then data on changing emissions settings for pickup trucks), I'd allow it.

But wholesale data dragnets are just out of bounds in any reasonable democracy.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#367

Post by hedora »

vel0city wrote: post #362
hedora wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One easy way: Limit the size of organizations + governments, and ban border control. Don't like San Francisco? Move to LA or Sac, and you get a completely different government. Don't like Meta or Fox News? No worries, they would have been broken up at 1% their current size.

But one or two people and petty cash can be enough to infringe on the rights of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people.

That's 3-7 orders of magnitude less than what the current resident of the white house has achieved, depending on how you count.

Also, in your scenario, a half dozen or so people could probably take care of the one or two problematic people. There's also a lot of common law around what "cannot infringe on others rights" means, going back 100's of years. My right to infringe on your rights is not included in the set of rights that phrases like that refer to.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#368

Post by vel0city »

hedora wrote: post #367
vel0city wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But one or two people and petty cash can be enough to infringe on the rights of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people.

That's 3-7 orders of magnitude less than what the current resident of the white house has achieved, depending on how you count. Also, in your scenario, a half dozen or so people could probably take care of the one or two problematic people. There's also a lot of common law around what "cannot infringe on others rights" means, going back 100's of years. My right to infringe on your rights is not included in the set of…

> That's 3-7 orders of magnitude less than what the current resident of the white house has achieved, depending on how you count.

I agree with this.

However, the standard was:

> No organization (government or otherwise) should be large enough or powerful enough to infringe on anyone's liberties

No organization should be big enough to trample on anyone's rights.

You said that's an easy standard to meet. Seems downright impossible to me.

> a half dozen or so people could probably take care of the one or two problematic people

Cool, vigilante justice.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#369

Post by forshaper »

Gigachad wrote: post #280
forshaper wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I got hit so many times as a cyclist in TX and GA. It took me awhile to realize that in GA, it was sometimes intentional. I hadn't realized how much bicyclists were disliked.

There’s something about driving cars, particularly larger ones which induces extreme violence in people. These same people wouldn’t kill you in a fist fight but would do it with their cars without a thought.

Yeah, I notice something with the size of the vehicle that does this. Shout out to much of Oregon and the much of the non-desert-WA inland PNW for being very nice to pedestrians & cyclists though.

Re: U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app

#370

Post by JCattheATM »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #150
legitster wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still don't understand why this should even be relevant in cases like this. The thing is basically a generic OBD dongle, right? The same thing every DIY and shade tree mechanic uses to read codes and run service procedures. The difference is this company provides a bunch of cloud services to roll out specific tunes at scale. From the original filing: > "EZ Lynk worked with/previewed the EZ Lynk System for at leas…

That doesn't address the issue at all. Why should the damages depend on what third parties do? On top of that, wow, if you're familiar with how humans think and how prosecutors write indictments, that's some weak sauce. Look at this: > EZ Lynk worked with/previewed the EZ Lynk System for at least two delete tune creators during development and before launching the EZ Lynk System. Those creators later disseminated del…

Your attempts at dismissals of supporting points don't hold up. The company was enabling illegal behavior, knowingly. It would be like if Cox was helping people use the pirate bay.
Post reply on HN