It is enshittification and it’s how they make money. But my point is that fixing enshittification doesn’t fix daring apps in the long term.

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I’m not against safety nets. I’m against bureaucracies and mass data collection. A social safety that features mass surveillance (means testing) is another tool for social control. A simple safety net via a negative income tax doesn’t leave any cookies in the jar for Musk and his goons to plunder.

Good fences make good neighbours. The government I trust most is the one with the least power to hurt me. When you vote for a new bureaucracy with broad powers over people’s lives you’re setting a time bomb that’s waiting to explode the moment the bad guy wins an election.

Never forget that it was the power of the bureaucracy that allowed the Nazis to be so ruthlessly efficient at rounding up all the Jews. The lesson of history was not “only the good guys should be allowed to win”, it’s “we shouldn’t be leaving so many loaded guns laying around the house.”

The problem with police is that they are “others.” If they were members of their communities and they knew the people they worked with (say, by walking a beat on foot and talking to people like a friendly mail carrier) then we wouldn’t have these issues.

Not sure what you’re trying to say here. I’m against mass surveillance! I’m against big powerful government in general. All the fear people had with the Republicans coming to power would not have happened if there was no power for them to come to in the first place.

As for crime, that’s the job of a small, local, effective, community police force to deal with. Not a militarized thug squad that we have now!

A government large enough to supply all your needs is a government powerful enough to take everything from you.

I can’t blame enshittification on this one. The dating app model doesn’t work, period. Even in the case of a completely free, non-profit app, you still have the problem that as people pair off they leave the dating pool.

The fundamental problem is that there’s a nonzero subpopulation of people who either have no interest in or are incapable of forming a stable long term relationship. As the dating pool filters over time, these folks get more and more concentrated in the population. This leads to the experience getting worse and worse for people who are interested and capable because they keep matching up with the wrong people.

The issue is if those new singles enter the rough zone (full of people who have not had much success) they’re going to have a very bad experience. Probably the best experience is for then to pair off against other new singles and depart. Some will end up doing that but others will end up stuck in the mud like everyone else.

I mean who knows. Maybe they just steal whatever valuable parts they can carry and dump the rest.

The model has to be stored in the car for it to work. I mean can you imagine the car driving along and a network interruption causes the self-driving system to be unresponsive for a second? That could cause a crash immediately!

So then if the model is stored in the car itself it can be stolen and sold to a rival self-driving car company in Russia or what have you. And in that case they could definitely repurpose the entire stolen car itself. They just need to replace the client code with their own so that the car connects to their servers.

Besides, the model isn’t going to have maps or server connection stuff built into it. The maps are external and part of the GPS navigation, so those can be replaced. And all the command and control stuff is just conventionally programmed client software that can be redirected to another server or even a server hosted locally within the car itself for autonomous driving.

Fundamentally, the reason self-driving cars are a bigger target than regular cars is that they leave no witnesses if you can disable the surveillance/logging. You don’t have to disable the cell towers for that, just the real time surveillance (just the company servers). Once the car goes dark it can no longer be tracked.

And that’s the point. When it works, they lose 2 customers forever.

It’s a filtering process that removes all the diamonds in the rough. All that’s left is the rough.

And how much do you use dating apps now?

It’s transmitted that data but the gang has blocked the server from receiving it. I mentioned that earlier. This whole operation doesn’t go down unless you take out the eyes and ears of the company.

All that other stuff can be replaced. It’s still a car with a $15,000 battery in it and drivetrain and all the sensors and electronics.

And if the hackers can break in and steal data, they can steal the source code. Then they have all the keys to the kingdom.

Who said anything about software? Cut the wires to the battery! That will power down any car no matter what.

The benefit to stealing a self driving car is that it’s a self driving car! What’s the retail price of self driving cars? $100k? More? The whole premise of the self-driving taxi and delivery companies is that the cars are too expensive for the consumer market so they operate on a rental basis instead. If self-driving cars became a mass market commodity like regular cars then thieves would just steal them the old fashioned way.

Of course the self-driving features work without the network. GPS works without a cell network. It’s a receive-only protocol. The only thing that won’t work is the remote command and control dispatch. That would have to be hacked around.

More like a brothel for sex addicts.

If the goal is to steal the cars then all it takes is to order them to go somewhere while disabling (perhaps via DDoS) the logging and other telemetry servers that allow them to track the vehicles. Once they’re stopped where the criminals want them they can break in and disable the power supply to shut them down completely, then tow/push them into shipping containers to send overseas for modification and resale.

There already exist international criminal gangs who do this sort of thing (edit: for regular, not self driving cars). Think of the resources of an organization the size of the Gulf Cartel. They operate their own cell phone network in Mexico. They’ve got hundreds of engineers. They absolutely could do an operation like this.

They are taking over Internet accounts though. They hack people’s social media profiles, Netflix accounts, Amazon accounts etc. They also take down websites via DDoS attacks.

Here’s the thing with fleets of self-driving rental cars: unlike power plants or manufacturing robots, these cars will be on the public Internet. They cannot be airgapped on a private LAN the way a fixed robot in a factory can.

So all it takes to control these things is to hack into the authentication system and steal the credentials for the master control account for the cars. Then they’ll be able to connect to the cara remotely and issue commands to control them, just as the company would for say, ordering them to return to base to recharge, get cleaned up, or be repaired.

That’s the vulnerability. And even if they put all the cars on a VPN it’ll still exist because hackers can and do steal VPN credentials just like any other credential.

By the way, there has been at least one high profile hack of manufacturing robots: the Stuxnet worm which targeted Iran’s nuclear program. Since a fleet of self-driving cars is going to have millions and millions of dollars in value (tens of thousands of cars on the road) it’s going to be an extremely high value target for criminal gangs. While their resources might not be as extreme as the probable Stuxnet creators, they will be very large (and might even gain state actor support from unfriendly countries).

Most security workers at companies overestimate hackers abilities. That’s why all these companies are hacked all the time and there are tons and tons of data breaches.

The thing very few people understand about hackers is that they can code and they share their hacks as tools with each other on the black market. This means you’re essentially up against the combined effort of all hackers on the black market. When one succeeds, they all succeed. When one piece of server software is hacked, all companies who use that software get hacked.

You only get to do that if you’re the founder and leader of a project. If you join other people’s projects then you play by their rules, not your own.

It’s brigading to go on social media platforms and complain about the people you work with in order to exert outside pressure on them. You’re bypassing the formal processes of discussion and consensus-building and trying to leverage informal power you have. This tends to make people very angry and reluctant to work with you no matter what.

Linux is an open source project, not a democracy. If you want to contribute you have to follow their rules.

Gangs of criminals are hacking big companies all the time and stealing or extorting millions of dollars. If they can hack into Amazon or Target they can hack into Uber and steal fleets of self driving vehicles. Just turn off all the data logging and have them drive to a chop shop or even down to the local port and right into a shipping container.