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Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

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Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#91
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

low pain outcomes All your customers thinking your app isn't secure any more isn't "low pain".

That's got nothing to do with what we're talking about. The first comment didn't say they should have spent more time on security, it said they should have spent time creating a system to detect if too many taxis were in one spot. I think we can all agree that security is valuable and should be prioritized, but spending time worrying about how to stop who is already in your system from sending all the cabs to the wro…

It is hard to make a solid argument about perceptions. Is it possible that non-technical people would perceive the ability to send all the drivers to one location as a big security problem, even though it doesn't really require any conventional security issues? Maaayybeeee. "Hacks" that intrude into the real world do have a bit of an over-inflated appearance of importance after all.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#92
post #3

is this the future of self driving cars?

there were already such bugs before, and my analysis is that even the older ECU cars before the 2000s had such bugs, just nobody bothers to look for them (also ECUs have been causing deaths from bugs but they just assume its the driver's fault). self driving cars will be the next order of magnitude of problems. ECU 1x, smart 10x, self driving 100x. > In July 2015, IT security researchers announced a severe security f…

:O I would put the number of drivers who downloaded and installed the patch somewhere between 5-10.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#94
post #57

Back in the day (1960s?) two relatives of mine had a prank battle going on. One of them posted an add in the local newspaper offering to buy old Christmas trees, at the address of their adversary. Half the city showed up, were told trees were not in fact being bought, and everybody dumped the trees at their door.

It reminds me of a newspaper ad I saw 20 years ago which read "Free monkey and 10 pounds of monkey food. call 555-555-5555". Well the gentleman that answered did not have a monkey for sale, and was quite rude about it.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#95

this is also something that's oddly absent from the self-driving debates. Mass deployment of the same models or apis in automated systems is very brittle because it means errors are highly correlated. it's like a form of central planning. individual drivers or individual taxi firms in a market due to their decentralization are much more robust to any kind of individual failure. People often ask "is the car smarter th…

Yes. Additionally, this is a commonly cited win of cars in cars v. public transport. You can take your car anywhere in the zombie apocalypse*, whereas any system that requires central planning (trains) are more likely to break. Making cars (human or machine driven) depend on a centralized service basically takes away that advantage. * assuming you have enough fuel/battery

Typically in apocalyptic settings the roads are quickly clogged with abandoned vehicles.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#96
post #42

This reminds me of a classic (non-internet powered) version of this where every business in London was sent to some unsupecting resident's address in order to win a bet, clogging the streets in the process: The Berners Street Hoax of 1810. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners_Street_hoax

What I love about this is that it's a textbook example of a reflection DoS attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack#Refle...) - you send a message with a spoofed reply-to address, such that the message you sent (in this case, a letter) is much cheaper than the response eventually sent to the victim (in this case, tradespeople / goods / dignitaries).

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#97
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, a command to download updated GPS maps that says "There's now a bridge over that lake"...

Yep, I've had Google Maps direct me to drive into a wall or an empty field more than a couple times over the years. It's not uncommon for people to get stranded or even killed by blindly following bad GPS directions. The maps are often quite bad in less traveled areas. And these are the non-malicious cases!

Sorry, this bugged me enough to try and find some data:

> It's not uncommon for people to get stranded or even killed by blindly following bad GPS directions.

Google took me to Wikipedia[0], which took me to a conference paper[1]:

In a corpus of about 400 news articles from 2010 onwards (via Lexus Nexus search), they found 52 deaths related to navigation technologies, which accounted for about 25% of the incidents they recorded.

57% of the incidents were collisions; someone running into something due to GPS giving bad directions.

20% total involved being stranded.

That's over ~6 years of US, UK, Canadian & Austrailian news reports.

It may not be uncommon for GPS to kinda suck, but it is _very_ rare for GPS to kill people.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312936003_Understan...

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#98
post #65
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a great way to stock up your firewood supply for the next winter, if you manage to target it in a way that doesn't cause half the city to show up, but maybe a little less than that?

Pine is really smokey and burns fast

Here in Sweden at least, christmas trees are not pines but spruce.

These small ones with lots of branches - probably not worth the work effort unless you are desperate. And you'll get a lot of residue branches. You also want them to dry for a season before you burn them.

Other than that, they burn just like any other log. Maybe a bit less energy per log. Maybe more smokey than some, but smoke should go out the chimney not in the room.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#99
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pine is really smokey and burns fast

Here in Sweden at least, christmas trees are not pines but spruce. These small ones with lots of branches - probably not worth the work effort unless you are desperate. And you'll get a lot of residue branches. You also want them to dry for a season before you burn them. Other than that, they burn just like any other log. Maybe a bit less energy per log. Maybe more smokey than some, but smoke should go out the chimne…

In the US we use firs and spruce as well but often "pine" means some kind of conifer...

Occasionally you might see some white pine sold at Christmas tree lots.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#100
post #57

Back in the day (1960s?) two relatives of mine had a prank battle going on. One of them posted an add in the local newspaper offering to buy old Christmas trees, at the address of their adversary. Half the city showed up, were told trees were not in fact being bought, and everybody dumped the trees at their door.

This is a great way to get free firewood
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