Wednesday, July 26, 2017

How Terrorists might reprogram self driving cars and trucks in the future

If you notice that Tesla receives downloads pretty regularly. However, these dowloads usually take place when the vehicle is stationary while recharging and not while moving. This makes sense because it is better that it is not operating when downloading new software patches. This way the software can make sure to itself that everything is working properly with each download before people's lives could be threatened by a bad patch or bad download like all of us have experienced on smartphones by now where our smartphone cannot work anymore and you have to take it in and get a new one because the download killed the one you were using.

However, likely because Tesla has established this type of download while recharging, it is likely that this will become the industry standard. So, this is likely the point at which a terrorist hacker of self driving vehicles would attack the system to run 1 or 1000 vehicles at the same time doing something.

Or it would take that one vehicle and do something spectacular with it while really doing something else with the other 1000 vehicles which may or may not be presently occupied with innocent civilians at the time.

So, the types of programs likely would be specific as to the location or locations they would be sent to. The program might say something like: "Disregard all moving objects at a certain point and don't worry about them". This would be a way to bypass the software that prevents walking or running humans  being hit. One way to counteract this kind of programming might be to stand still like a light post  or fire hydrant would (with this one specific kind of programming).

However, you wouldn't necessarily know that this is what the programming was doing at this time. It might be moving according to other parameters (millions of different ones) potentially worldwide where a "sleeper car or truck" taken over by terrorists might just take pictures and wire them back to whoever anywhere on earth to gain reconnaissance anywhere on earth of literally anything they were interested in.

So, regarding terrorists Self driving cars, trucks, planes, boats and ships might be the biggest bonanza of all time for them in the long run.

Which is one of the reasons why having millions of self driving cars, trucks and planes might be suicidal for the human race and governments worldwide in the long run.

Because anything with a CPU that receives downloads through WIFI of any kind can be hacked. There is really no exception to this rule. Because it is only a matter of time and how bad someone wants to hack whatever it is.

Just like "There are no safes that can't be cracked either on earth".

I suppose an alternative might be not having a radio or wifi or telephone signal downloading software to self driving cars.

But, even then hackers who are terrorists would instead just steal the cars and put in their programs manually at this point.

So, even then self driving vehicles would not be safe either.

Which is why I don't want to own a Tesla or other Self driving vehicle because I don't want to be killed by terrorists or hackers when I least expected it.

For me, this is just logical. For others without any technical or software or electronics or electrical background they might just jump into a self driving vehicle and be completely happy: "Until they died unexpectedly one day either from a software error, dust in the CPU, or a hacker who might just be an angry 9 year old somewhere on earth whose mother spanked him that day and he wanted revenge."

No comments: