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

What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

blog.koenvh.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 525 posts

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#371

Post by Spooky23 »

cogman10 wrote: post #355
TeMPOraL wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Luddites haven't been criticizing cars for anything, given how they came and went 50 years before a first proper car was built. And, if anything, the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were anti-being fucked over by capitalists . The problem they rose up against wasn't the automatic looms, it was the way they were deployed - to replace skilled workers instead of augmenting them, depressing salaries and elimi…

Yup, the parallel is the dream of a lot of the AI companies "Hey look, this LLM can maybe come in and do 80% of the work, so maybe you don't need 80% of your staff? Certainly you don't need the most expensive members". That's effectively the scenario that Luddites found themselves in. Looms came in and decimated previously well paying jobs and the owners of the looms basically told the skilled workers to pound sand.

The luddites were smart.

I listen to the dev guys at work gush about how they are like 40% productive with LLMs, and look at their budget asks. Hmm.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#372

Post by Spooky23 »

rglullis wrote: post #263
KineticLensman wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural southern England here. Public transport is non existant where I live. You need a car if you want a life. I lost my driving license for medical reasons and have spent two years without driving. I am really conscious of what a car means in terms of having a social life, working, etc. If I was younger, I would have had to relocate

Tell that to the Amish. Car dependency is something that we've learned, not the natural state of things.

I think a modern life is better than farming with draft animals and handiwork. Especially if I were a woman.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#373

Post by jncfhnb »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #370
dghlsakjg wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It comes down to intention. The charitable read is that they are notifying you of the possibility that the car’s data collection may unintentionally include sexual activity. E.g. your car was recorded as having a rocking motion while parked. The other read is that they are intentionally collecting sexual activity data for nefarious purposes. The first is the lawyer drafting the release being overcautious. The se…

> The first is the lawyer drafting the release being overcautious. The second is a corporation being evil. How was the hypothetical overcautious lawyer able to independently come up with such a specific scenario, which would require intimate technical knowledge? I believe your are missing a third option, which is a synthesis of both. This is that the engineers reported that their sensor data could be used to collect…

Seems more likely that a lawyer simply made it up without engineering justification

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#374

Post by Forgeties79 »

myself248 wrote: post #369
brookst wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it matters. Or at least it matters whether the claims you make are true, and there is a difference between “had a right to” and “did”. Have I told you about my neighbor who uses a leaf blower nonstop from 7am until 8pm? Well, he doesn’t actually, be he has a right to, and it’s splitting hairs whether he actually does or not.

On the other hand, do we have any means of finding out whether they did? It's one thing if you can say "No, they definitely don't, here's what's actually sent and here's how it's used and here's the contracts limiting what's gathered". Otherwise we're all just speculating. But in the absence of solid proof, I think the history of the last several decades of surveillance shows that it's completely reasonable to assume…

Yeah at this point in my life I just immediately assume if I give a company a right to do something, they’re going to do it. It’s an assumption everyone should operate under.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#375

Post by malfist »

_huayra_ wrote: post #330
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year Mozilla did a study on the privacy of modern cars. Every car they tested showed terrible privacy problems. Privacy Nightmare on Wheels: Every Car Brand Reviewed by Mozilla https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443644 ( edit I see I'm not the first to link this in this thread)

FYI for anyone who owns a Subaru: you can opt out of 3rd-party data sharing here https://www.subaru.com/support/consumer-privacy.html If you don't live in one of the states mentioned in the first paragraph, expect this to take a very long time. For me it took 6 months.

You can also opt out of Ford too. They default enable sharing with third party for features, default disable for sharing with data brokers like LexisNexis. It requires you to put in your driver pin to enable that

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#376

Post by Spooky23 »

ddingus wrote: post #266
brailsafe wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A car realistically just sits around doing nothing 80% of the time A bit besides the point, but isn't it wild how inherently wasteful personal cars are? Every time the thought crosses my mind to get another one, if I don't stop at the cost, I stop at the fact that I'll have this giant chunk of metal sitting idle on the street or somewhere else nearly all the time. It'd be useful in an extreme minority of cases (for…

That depends doesn't it? I keep my cars for a long time. 200k miles is the usual, and that has held true buying used a little ways north of 100k miles already on the board. If we designed for very long car life, the waste equation would look different. Toyota does, and there are a small number of people planning on half a million miles. Recently there is evidence Toyota is either struggling on this metric. Quality pr…

Honda is similar without the Toyota attitude. I’d never buy a Toyota, ever.

All of the newer safety doo-dads are less reliable. Where I live, the road salt effectively caps effective lifespan of a car to 180-220k miles. The exhaust and suspension maintenance started to approach or exceed the cars value.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#377

Post by xp84 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #351
djbusby wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bild your own electric in an old style body? Fun, if nothing else.

I’m honestly amazed there are not more conversion kits. Pull the IC powertrain and gas tank, replace with battery and electric motor. It’s obviously way harder than it seems or I think a lot of folks would be doing it.

They actually even make cars exactly like that. They’re pretty compromised cars though. An E-Golf for instance is just what it sounds like: they took the existing Golf and made it an EV.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#378

Post by brookst »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #362
brookst wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it matters. Or at least it matters whether the claims you make are true, and there is a difference between “had a right to” and “did”. Have I told you about my neighbor who uses a leaf blower nonstop from 7am until 8pm? Well, he doesn’t actually, be he has a right to, and it’s splitting hairs whether he actually does or not.

Ok, give me remote access to your computer. I’ll send a contract saying I can sell what I find, but I haven’t done it so it’s cool and it shouldn’t be cause for alarm.

It’s for sure cause for alarm, but it is a different alarm than if you gad broken into my computer.

I’m not a fan of the “they did something bad, so we might as well pretend they did something worse” line of argument. It strikes me as dishonest.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#379

Post by LimeLimestone »

After looking at the photo, and before actually reading the post, I was sure it was a switch for retrofitted fog lights - they are not required in the US and you must to have them in Europe in order to pass MOT.

I have an almost identical looking switch in my Mustang (which I imported from America) and it does exactly that - turns the fog lights on and off :)

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#380

Post by prirun »

afh1 wrote: post #25

The scary part is not the GPS installed by the fleet company that previously owned the car, which in all likelihood was just forgotten there, but the GPS and eSIM that comes with most (all?) new cars and that in most (all?) new cars cannot be disabled. Apart from privacy concerns of your data being used or sold by the car vendor, government outreach is also a concern. There was a bill announced in the US for all new…

> Anyway, I'm staying with my old gas Honda until it dies which is probably never with proper maintenance and eventually restoration.

I would have stuck with my 2003 Honda Accord too, except that some woman, probably talking or texting on her cell, slammed into me while I was stopped at a light, totaling my car and damaging 3 others. I got $8K for my car after arguing with the insurance company, and paid $28K for a 3 y/o replacement.

The fine for texting while driving in Kentucky is $25.

Post reply on HN