Toyota Black Box Data Is More Closed Than Others'

wjr writes "Many cars these days contain black boxes that record information (speed, accelerator position, etc) and can preserve information in the case of an accident. Ford and Chrysler say that they use 'open systems' so anyone can read out the data; General Motors has licensed Bosch to produce a device capable of reading its cars' black boxes. On the other hand, Toyota has only a single laptop in the US capable of reading its cars' black boxes, and generally won't allow the data to be read without a court order. Honda seems to have a similar policy. This is emerging as an issue in the investigation into unintended acceleration."

Comments

A challenge...

[plover]

Wouldn't it be grand if the guys who hacked Ubisoft's latest game took on this challenge instead?

And it would be covered in extra-special awesomesauce to see the code posted to SourceForge.

Re:A challenge...

[ColdWetDog]

Unless the data is encrypted (and it appears that their first line of defense is security by obscurity) it would seem to be a doable thing. Grab a used Toyota (good prices these days), track the various potential variables and look at the data. Maybe delve into how the other recorders do things - it's unlikely that Toyota would completely re invent the thing.

Sell it to a couple of attorneys.

Profit...

Re:A challenge...

[binarylarry]

Toyota's systems have over a 100 million lines of code: http://news.discovery.com/tech/toyota-recall-software-code.html

Not exactly a trivial app to just run strings on.

Re:A challenge...

[jamesh]

Wouldn't it be grand if the guys who hacked Ubisoft's latest game [slashdot.org] took on this challenge instead?

It would be nice, but it's impossible. They'd have to be some sort of elite uber-hacker to even attempt such a challenge.

Absolutely impossible.

Not a hope in hell.

Can't be done.

Re:A challenge...

[El_Muerte_TDS]

"100 million lines of code" doesn't say anything. I can write "hello world" in 2 lines of code, or 200 lines of code.

Re:A challenge...

[ipquickly]

their first line of defense is security by obscurity

I think their first line of defense is knaji, hiragana, and katakana.
That leaves over 97% of the world out of the loop.

Re:A challenge...

[Idiomatick]

Thats stupid, they would just be hacking a few outputs. Simply the interface. If they can do it for WoW they can do it for a car. Way WAY simpler.

Re:A challenge...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only hack I'm interested in is one that disables the system. I consider these "black boxes" a massive invasion of privacy and in no way benefit me personally. Yes I know the argument would be what if I'm the victim in an accident wouldn't I want the courts to access the other guy's black box? The same argument can be made for recording phone calls and other invasions of privacy. You'd have to accept all privacy is bad. I don't wish to live under a microscope. I'm tired of people giving away my freedom because they think it makes them safer. all it does is make you less free. I should be able to drive to the store without a record of it being kept in my car. Already most of my purchases are tracked so now my location is tracked as well? I know so far the information is hard to access but the government is pushing for more and more access to the information. Eventually the info will be provided for things like divorce court. Do I have something to hide? That isn't the point the point is do we all want to live where we have to second guess how our actions will be interpreted later?

Re:A challenge...

[Idiomatick]

I don't think a hacker really gives a shit if a variable is named "carSpeed" or named " " ... well, unless the hackers are the same people that made /.

Re:A challenge...

[phantomfive]

In all honesty it is significantly more difficult. Hacking the game was probably as simple as changing some line to always return 'true.'

Whereas a complicated protocol or file format can be nearly impossible to decipher. Live data systems can send out megabytes of data at a time, so it is a lot to figure out. Each part of the datastream represents something different, and sometimes the only way to figure out what it represents is by isolating the system (in this case the car), and changing one piece at a time to see how the recorded data changes. In something that is used to record the evidence of car crashes, this can get expensive quickly.

It can be further complicated by weirdness like fields that are 21 or 22 bits long. You can't even reliably know where one datum starts and another ends unless you know the protocol. The worst thing I've seen like that was a 5 bit signed integer stored in an 8 bit field. Messy. If you don't have the documentation, it can take a long time to figure stuff out.

Even something as relatively ubiquitous as NTFS took years to figure out reliably.

Re:A challenge...

[Z00L00K]

Just wait - soon it will be a legal requirement to log a lot of parameters in a format that can be read.

Re:A challenge...

[Nutria]

Wouldn't it be grand if the guys who hacked Ubisoft's latest game took on this challenge instead?

If Alberto Gonzales' Justice Dept were trying to prosecute accused terrorists, most of /. (and, for that matter, the EFF and Huffington Post) would be applauding Toyota for respecting people's privacy.

Hypocritical bastards.

Re:A challenge...

[fyrewulff]

Car black boxes cannot be used to track where you've been. Not only do they not record positional data, they also only record a buffer of about 10-15 seconds. By the time you pull off the highway and get to your house, everything you've done prior in the day (or since you've gotten on the highway) has already been pushed off the stack.

Not only that, the actual scene data (skidmarks, etc) are much more valuable to accident reconstruction and investigation than the black box. It's only a small bit of data they can use, it can't be the sole one. Especially if for example, the car gets rolled over - even if it happened at 40mph, the free spinning wheels would show that the car suddenly went from 40mph to 80mph..

Re:A challenge...

[MichaelSmith]

I was impressed that Andrew Tridgell was able to reverse engineer the bitkeeper line protocol to develop sourcepuller. Especially since he claims to have done it without access to a client. The story is he polled the server to get samples of the protocol.

I have seen many binary line protocols reverse engineered over the years. If you have enough data quite a bit is possible.

Re:A challenge...

[wiredlogic]

Toyota's systems have over a 100 million lines of code:

Frankly, that statistic doesn't make much sense. In the article it's just a BS number that shouldn't have been quoted by the hack writer and it isn't even referring to Toyota. The rank and file microcontrollers that do most of the work in a modern car can't possibly have that much source code in them. The only place where a large amount of source code could be involved is for advanced accessory functions like entertainment, communication, and navigation systems. Those should all be properly isolated from the critical systems needed to operate the car safely. The Mercedes is stated to have 20M LOC and I'd bet the farm that 90% of that is in non-critical components. It's even less likely that a generic Toyota like the Camry has anywhere near that much code in its computers. Come on mods. If you can't even follow the links at least use your brains.

Re:A challenge...

[aussie_a]

Would that result in free games for the hackers? No. Well too bad. They'd rather spend their time playing pirated games then actually contributing to society.

Re:A challenge...

[phantomfive]

In all honesty, while I have the utmost respect for Andrew Tridgell, bitkeeper was not the most difficult reverse engineering he's ever done. The protocol was basically in English, and had a help menu. Quite friendly of it.

I'm going to once again say that the difficulty here, with Toyota, is going to be collecting the data and correlating it with real events. Figuring out the basic packet structure, and maybe the timestamps, will be easy, but beyond that, even if you manage to figure out that a certain data field is X bytes long, you still have to figure out the human meaning of that field. And that is essentially impossible unless you can correlate it with real events that happened in the real world. Some events will be easy to figure out, like 'pressing the break,' but other events will be significantly harder to figure out, like 'airbag expands.'

It's not impossible, but it is significantly harder than cracking the Ubisoft DRM.

Re:A challenge...

[zmollusc]

That's put my mind at rest. Good job computer memory only gets more expensive and reduces in capacity over time or else it would be possible to use the acceleration forces to make a map of your route and overlay this on a real map to find out where and when. And god forbid global positioning hardware or mobile phone technology gets built into cars.

Re:A challenge...

[timmarhy]

what makes you think it's simple? there would be literally 100's of sensors connected to inputs/outputs on multiple logic boards throughout the car, all these sending encrypted/obfuscated data to the blackbox. the data itself could well be so complex you wouldn't know real data from the obfuscated data.

i've done software that reads outputs from lab insturments and from onboard computers on haul trucks before, and it can be very very hard even with the manual to the instrument, let alone someone actively trying to prevent anyone decoding the data.

Re:A challenge...

[wiredlogic]

Since you can't follow the link either:

Alfred Katzenbach, the director of information technology management at Daimler, has reportedly said that the radio and navigation system in the current S-class Mercedes-Benz requires over 20 million lines of code alone and that the car contains nearly as many ECUs as the new Airbus A380 (excluding the plane's in-flight entertainment system).

No deduction necessary. I would tend to give some credence to Mr. Katzenbach's statements about the makeup of Daimler's products.

Re:A challenge...

[profplump]

A) There's not reason to believe the data is any more obfuscated than simply "undocumented". It would be extra work to intentionally hide the data, and it's not clear that Toyota is doing that, or what they would gain from it if they did. All we know is they aren't going to any extra effort to allow other people to read it, and speculation into possible obfuscation is poorly founded.

And I'm just going to pretend that you didn't say encrypted, because even people who well motivated often screw up encryption, so it's incredibly unlikely that Toyota has a correctly-implemented encryption system (which includes things like making sure not all cars have the same key, which would be exceedingly difficult to do correctly).

B) Reverse engineering isn't trivial, but it's not incredible difficult either. "100s of sensors" is not a huge amount, particularly when you can tell what most if not all of those sensors or measuring, and get the analog/digital readings directly from the sensor package to correlate with the output even. You could even take the sensor network and computer out of the car, rig it up to allow a computer to generate billions of different input combinations, and then use automated statistical analysis to find correlated input and output parameters.

Re:A challenge...

[Dr_Barnowl]

There is some legal impetus to do this. In the states, they are following the commercial route by having insurers offer premium reductions in exchange for fitting these systems.

In the EU and the UK, they are pretending that these systems would be used to implement "road pricing" ; a sort of variable road tax which charges more for driving on roads that are heavily congested (as if that wasn't it's own penalty in the first place). If that was the real aim, you could produce a system with the same functional equivalence with mandatory RFID number plates and pickup loops on these "congested" roads... instead they want a system that can track your whereabouts everywhere, logs it to a black box, and uploads it periodically via a cellular modem, which would be at least an order of magnitude or 2 more expensive to implement and maintain. Applying the razor of Dr Occam.. road pricing is not what they really want it for.

Re:A challenge...

[Nutria]

Only if this were www.glennbeck.com.

Re:A challenge...

[tehcyder]

4) Debtors prison?

Re:A challenge...

[tehcyder]

That's put my mind at rest. Good job computer memory only gets more expensive and reduces in capacity over time or else it would be possible to use the acceleration forces to make a map of your route and overlay this on a real map to find out where and when. And god forbid global positioning hardware or mobile phone technology gets built into cars.

Simple solution, buy a bike.

Re:A challenge...

[caluml]

I wrote such a system many years ago. You can see it here.

I'll be driving at 12:30 UK time ( 3 hours), so you can watch me move.

Re:A challenge...

[ortholattice]

Not only that, the actual scene data (skidmarks, etc) are much more valuable to accident reconstruction and investigation than the black box. It's only a small bit of data they can use, it can't be the sole one. Especially if for example, the car gets rolled over - even if it happened at 40mph, the free spinning wheels would show that the car suddenly went from 40mph to 80mph..

I don't disagree actual scene data isn't essential, but the example you picked is a highly useful supplement to that data. If the speed suddenly increases from 40 to 80, obviously that happened at the instant the tire lifted off the road, since it is physically impossible for the car to accelerate from 40 to 80 suddenly.

So, from the black box data we now have a record of exactly when the tire left the road, plus we have the speed of the car just before the accident happened (which would be more accurate than a skid mark estimate, esp. if the road was icy or slippery), and we have the fact that the driver's foot (or in Toyota's case possibly the computer) was pressing the accelerator since otherwise it wouldn't have sped up to 80. So what was the driver trying to do at the instant of the accident, and why were both the brake (skid mark) and accelerator (sudden tire speed up) being pressed simultaneously, etc.?

Combining black box data with the scene data could provide a far more accurate reconstruction of the accident than scene data alone. Of course it doesn't replace the accident scene data - no one is saying that the scene data should be ignored, as your straw man argument seems to imply. .

Re:A challenge...

[Anonymous Coward]

And when they tote up the "100 million lines of code", they're probably counting the operating system and packaged apps they bought to play media. If the dash panel entertainment display computer is running Windows Mobile I bet that gets you to 100 MSLOC right there. I find it hard to believe there's more than a million lines in the application level code written custom for the car, and hopefully under 100K or even 10K for the microcontrollers running the critical systems. More than that would be impossible to verify to reasonable safety standards, and the cars would be doing crazy things like accelerating for no rea- oh, wait.

Re:A challenge...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give a run for insightful: you can experiment with cars in a basement.

Re:A challenge...

[blackraven14250]

Of course, on the Airbus, they take out the non-critical component's LOC count!

Re:A challenge...

[Artifex]

Now we know that you slashdot while inside your girlfriend's privacy zone. Heh. :)

Re:A challenge...

[ras]

No, no. That is not the relevant quote. This is:

some Mercedes drivers found that their seats moved if they pushed a certain button; the problem was that the button was supposed to operate the navigation system.

If the systems aren't isolated, it doesn't matter what the code is supposed to control. For example, if the internal light control just sends control signals across a CAN bus which is also connected to the ECU, the software (say via a memory overflow error) could write the wrong address onto the bus and send throttle information by mistake.

Jesus. That scares the shit out of me.

Re:A challenge...

[u38cg]

What the driver was doing at that point is essentially irrelevant; the vehicle was already dead meat, there was just some physical formalities to go through. The black box isn't going to show that the driver sat up all night trying to cyber on IRC and then decided to drive several hundred miles in heavy traffic.

A typical accident starts to happen physically a good 20-30 seconds before anyone involved realises, and in reality an awful lot sooner than that, because the majority of accidents are down to at least one stupid driver.

Re:A challenge...

[ZeroExistenZ]

I don't think a hacker really gives a shit if a variable is named "carSpeed" or named " "

You can ignore the spaces in code, those aren't variables...

I'm really curious to see an analysis and some code samples from you where you planned and implemented space variables...

Re:A challenge...

[JamesP]

so it's probably written karuSpeedu or something...

Re:A challenge...

[zlel]

I have seen code from various Japanese projects, and while comments are written in Japanese, variable names are inevitably alphabetical. Depending on the company's practices, variable names may range from Jinglish to romanized Japanese, in which case is as meaningful as i, j, and k to non-Japanese speakers. No, programmer's don't generally run their variable names through dictionaries to make sure words are spelt correctly or that they really mean what they think they mean.

Re:A challenge...

[brufleth]

As someone who works on embed systems (aircraft) I can tell you that it isn't difficult to avoid what you're describing. The engine ECU can easily be isolated from all the silly accessory crap. Even if there is an interface it is pretty easy to design, test, and implement, measures to prevent what you're describing. These are embedded ECUs. Not web servers.

Re:A challenge...

[brufleth]

The data is probably just standard unencrypted hex in the NVM. All you really need is to line up the data with the parameters. Assuming four byte values you could run the car through known cycles instrumented up and then start looking to line things up like RPM, temp, torque, etc. Not something most people could do in their garage but certainly not impossible.

Re:A challenge...

[brufleth]

You are drastically over-complicating the issue. The data is almost certainly unencoded hex in the standard NVM location for fault logging. All you have to do is get a data dump of that and then line up the data with a parameter list. I wouldn't say this is trivial but it'd be doable for someone with the right tools and facility. It wouldn't require a team of uber hackers.

Re:A challenge...

[brufleth]

What does the number of lines of code have to do with reading the fault log out of non volatile memory?

Re:A challenge...

[brufleth]

Your plan is pretty much spot on except that the difficulty isn't as high as the person you responded to implied. There are not hundreds of sensors. More like tens of sensors.

Re:A challenge...

[Idbar]

I have mixed feelings here. Since black boxes are a reality in every car, for the sake of privacy, I rather have one the it's not that much open to anyone

Re:A challenge...

[jacksdl]

I don't know about the motives of the parent AC, but a lot of people worry about privacy because they have something to hide. In this case they don't want their vehicle to rat them out with hard facts about how they were driving in the seconds before their air bags deployed.

If this evidence was easily available, we might realize that our big problem with traffic accidents, injuries and deaths aren't hardware or software -- it's the driver, stupid.

Re:A challenge...

[ras]

As it happens, I do embedded work too. And yes, it could be isolated. That is not the point. The point is it wasn't.

Re:A challenge...

[kbg]

Car black boxes cannot be used to track where you've been

And how can you be sure of this if you can't examine the data yourself?

Re:A challenge...

[drinkypoo]

Some events will be easy to figure out, like 'pressing the break,' but other events will be significantly harder to figure out, like 'airbag expands.'

Airbag fired is only harder to figure out because it only happens once. That might make it easier or harder depending on how and where it's encoded.

Re:A challenge...

[rapiddescent]

nice application, however I noticed that you were doing 32mph through Pensford at 1307Hrs (it's a 30mph limit). that's a 3-point penalty and GBP 60 fine.

fuck. now you're going 41mph out of Belluton and just hit 51mph on bristol road (40mph limit)

Re:A challenge...

[Mashdar]

Physically tapping wires is MUCH more time consuming than some script kiddie tracking registers for a video game. And considering they are probably using SMT BGA/CGA chips, you will probably have to start soldering to leads on the board without really knowing what pins they are connecting to (unless you have a sweet X-Ray machine like they use for QA & solder rework applications). AND NONE OF THIS GETS YOU ANY CLOSER TO READING THE EVENT LOG FROM THE CHIP, so who cares if you can read the sensors? (Unless you want to design an observer unit to monitor future activity)

There is no good way of getting log information out if the company (presumably) does not want you to get it out. You could open of the IC storing the information and start modding, but this is an extremely specialized task requiring a very expensive lab and years of experience. Good luck.

Re:A challenge...

[Anpheus]

Whoosh! Slashdot can't display unicode.

Re:A challenge...

[forand]

Symmetric key encryption without knowing the algorithm or the data format can be quite effective. Reconstructing documentation is non trivial and requires detailed knowledge of the system. In this situation you have a undocumented data storage format which will contain undocumented codes. Seems pretty effective to me.

Re:A challenge...

[ranulf]

get the analog/digital readings directly from the sensor package to correlate with the output

Not gonna happen, I'm afraid. Almost everything on a car in the last 10 years is done over a CANbus. You don't have hundreds of wires going into an ECU or a dial any more, you have a couple of buses, each connected to a load of devices.

Re:A challenge...

[cnaumann]

You can't possible know this. How much does 16G of Flash cost? How much space does it take up? How many seconds of data would that record? If it is a closed black box, you have NO CLUE how much data it is storing.

Re:A challenge...

[flowsnake]

The program is obviously written in the Whitespace Language.

Re:A challenge...

[rotor]

Forget EU and the UK. They're piloting the road pricing thing here in Maine. They ran commercials for a few months last fall on the radio asking for people to sign up for this pilot for some small amount of money. In exchange you get a GPS or something similar installed in your car that tracks your in-state driving and informs the government so they can tax you properly.

I say, "No thanks."

Re:A challenge...

[jimbolauski]

All you're going after is the black box, once you are able to pull the data from it the rest becomes pretty easy. Simply put the car on a lift then vary the inputs like throttle position, brake position, speed, rpm, blinker placement, open doors, ... Yes there will be variables in there that will be unknown but if I can change how many lives, score, ammo ... in a video game by doing comparative searches in the ram how is this any different, hell some games even try to make doing this harder by making those values derivatives but it still can be done very easily.

Re:A challenge...

[datapharmer]

This really isn't an issue - you must remember that components are sharing the bus, not the memory! Also, in many systems the commands are sent in triplicate with a check sum so that if there is electrical interference or a bad connection the data doesn't match and therefore isn't executed.

Re:A challenge...

[destroyer661]

the director of information technology management

With that title, I'd be hard pressed to believe he even knows how many computers are in his own branch of offices, let alone how many lines of working code/sensors are inside of a production car. Also, I'm pretty certain that an aircraft of that size would be monitoring/controlling hundreds more inputs/outputs than a car strolling down the road.

Re:A challenge...

[DerekLyons]

Good job computer memory only gets more expensive and reduces in capacity over time or else it would be possible to use the acceleration forces to make a map of your route and overlay this on a real map to find out where and when

Assuming of course the accelerometers are pretty damn accurate - almost inertial guidance grade. But even inertial grade sensors are pretty useless without heading and horizon references. (I.E. I don't find this a very likely scenario at all.)
 
OTOH GPS chips on the other hand are getting cheaper and more ubiquitous every year.

Re:A challenge...

[jimbolauski]

So knowing that the brake and acceerator are both engauged 5 seconds before the accident is irrelevent, what about a car that suddenly accelerated forward just before the front airbags went off being able to decisivly tell that a person was crashed into and forced into another car may not be obvoius expecially if the people are in critical condition. A black box won't give the whole picture but if gives investiagotors more pieces and can help give them a clear picture.

Re:A challenge...

[mcgrew]

"100 million lines of code" doesn't say anything. I can write "hello world" in 2 lines of code, or 200 lines of code.

You can't write "hello world" in two lines of code in assembly, which may be where the "100 million lines of code" come from. That "100 million lines" may actually be 100 million instructions output from a compiler. Considering that we're talking about separate "computers" that are orders of magnatide more primitive than a PC, it actually makes the job easier.

Re:A challenge...

[ZeroExistenZ]

The program is obviously written in the Whitespace Language.

That was way beyond my expectations... Brilliant!

Re:A challenge...

[Andy Dodd]

No they don't. Some dumbass SPECULATES that it "probably" has over 100 million lines of code, with absolutely no information with which to back up his claim.

Also, this large amount of code doesn't run in a single CPU - it consists of multiple microprocessors, most of which probably have less than 128k of program memory. Many have only 2k-8k. (See, for example, Atmel's automotive microcontroller product lines.)

"Even low-end cars now have 30 to 50 ECUs embedded in the body, doors, dash, roof, trunk, seats and just about anywhere else the car’s designers can think to put them. That means that most new cars are executing tens of million of lines of software code"...

OK, so, taking some relatively conservative numbers (50 ECUs, 10M SLOC), that's claiming that they are fitting an average of 200K SLOC per ECU.

Really, how are you fitting 200K SLOC into 128 kilobytes or less of program memory?

In reality, you have a bunch of independently testable modules each running a very simple program, and then the total SLOC count for the car probably goes up 10x-100x when you throw in a satellite navigation/entertainment system. That system is pretty highly decoupled from the rest of the vehicle, and at most has a few speed/steering angle inputs to support dead reckoning with no outputs to critical control systems.

Re:A challenge...

[mcgrew]

Frankly, that statistic doesn't make much sense. In the article it's just a BS number that shouldn't have been quoted by the hack writer and it isn't even referring to Toyota.

This car runs on code.

The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010, will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems. And Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in 2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and onboard support systems.

These are impressive amounts of software, yet if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, "it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code," says Manfred Broy, a professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich, and a leading expert on software in cars. All that software executes on 70 to 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of your car.

Re:A challenge...

[zmollusc]

I reckon if you had enough info from the accelerometers to identify turns, combined with timing, you could do a 'best-fit' over a road map and get a damn good idea of the route taken.

Re:A challenge...

[fast turtle]

Actually the black box data includes the engine rpm, transmission gear, clutch-brake and throttle pedal position plus headlights/wipers being active and any directional information from the multiple acellerometers (stability system) that most cars don't have active even though the hardware is already there from the last 30 seconds. As to the data standard, that's already regulated by the feds (NTHSA/DOT) standards though nothing says the data extraction tool has to be less then 50+k in cost. If that data isn't recoverable it's because the box isn't surviving the crashes and because those vehicles have exceeded the 30s recording period. What this means is that the feds are now going to require a 30m recording period and a beefing up of the black boxes to survive as well as flight data recorders do.

Re:A challenge...

[moosesocks]

Did the Therac incidents teach us nothing?

Critical and non-critical systems should not be allowed to talk to each other unless absolutely necessary.

Even then, there should be no scenario in which pressing the brake pedal does not stop the car. No electrical signal or command should ever be able to override this action. Furthermore, given that the components are already networked, Toyota should have added a few lines of code to automatically stall the engine if the computer detects simultaneous inputs on the brake and gas pedals.

Re:A challenge...

[sskinnider]

It should already be!

Re:A challenge...

[DerekLyons]

Turns will confuse such a system, as will hills. I forgot to mention that you'll also need a decent clock too...

But with this kind of problem, you can't really get a 'damm good idea', you'll either be right on or way off. Once you start diverging, you'll tend to continue diverging.

Re:A challenge...

[Maxo-Texas]

Okay... but you also have a car... and the chip... and the brake in the car... and the accelerator in the car.

And you probably even have much access to the inputs to the chip unless the car is networked.

Re:A challenge...

[greed]

I can do a CBM/PET/VIC/C64-type helloworld subroutine in 3 lines of assembly:

LDX #STRBUFFER
JMP STROUT
STRBUFFER: .data "HELLO WORLD\0"

But are strings "code"? If they're not, then that's your two lines.

And if you say assuming a "STROUT" routine is present is cheating (there's something in the BASIC ROM you can use to do that, the KERNAL ROM only has CHROUT at $FFD2 I wish I could forget that), then you'd better make sure you count LOC in your compiler, assembler, linker, runtime libraries, and so on to make your higher-level 2-liner program run.

Which is all just to help point out how truly bogus such LOC counts are when talking about system complexity. Throw in microcoded processors and PLCs and DSPs, and where do you switch from "counting code" back to "counting transistors"?

LOCs are vaguely useless when measuring output of a programming team. For system complexity, you need a proper definition of "system" for it to make sense, and even then, comparing the complexity of two systems by "LOC" is almost certainly useless.

Re:A challenge...

[NormalVisual]

what makes you think it's simple?

Perhaps the fact that Superchips, Bully Dog, and other performance tool vendors do exactly this on a regular basis armed with not much more than the appropriate OBD-II interface. It's not simple, and you'll almost certainly brick a number of ECUs in the process, but it's far from impossible.

Re:A challenge...

[holmstar]

This isn't a banking system... it's a car. Toyota isn't going to go out of their way to hide the logging data. The method of reading it just isn't disclosed. That's all.

Re:A challenge...

[Lumpy]

Have any info on how you integrated it all? A basic writeup as it were? are you simply passing your GPS X,Y to Google maps?

Also is your app symbian signed? I'd like to play with it on a S60 phone like the 5800

Very cool BTW.

Re:A challenge...

[u38cg]

Such a situation would be pretty easy to diagnose because you would have one squished car in between two other cars. Genius is not required to assess what happened here. In general, it's pretty easy to figure out what caused an accident most of the time. Cars aren't like airplanes, they don't spread themselves over the landscape to such an extent that you can't figure out the basics of what happened (and most of the time the answer is someone was being stupid and/or going to fast).

Re:A challenge...

[holmstar]

My car has a GPS system that uses accelerometers to estimate my location/heading when it doesn't have a clear view of the sky, such as in a parking ramp. But in my experience, if you spend too much time out of sight of the GPS satellites, it gets really confused, and thinks that you are a few blocks away from your actual location (even after going back out into the open) It has always corrected itself eventually, but sometimes it takes 15-20 minutes to give up on where it though I was and just use the GPS coordinates.

Re:A challenge...

[Buelldozer]

With more and more new vehicles coming equipped with satellite navigation systems I believe that it is only fair to say that car black boxes perhaps do not record positional data _yet_.

Also, since you can't see what the Toyota box is recording how can you say with certainty that it is not recoding this data _already_?

Re:A challenge...

[conureman]

I always figured the RFID chips would be implanted in the Legal Residents. I guess the car's occupants (and B.A.C.) will be logged into the black box as well.

Re:A challenge...

[jimbolauski]

How would you know if the center car struck the front first or if the rear car caused the accident. Such a thing would be very difficult to decern.

Re:A challenge...

[Zerth]

I've got this CISC chip, has just 2 instructions: PHW and CLS.

Technically, I can do it in one line, but I like a tidy screen.

Re:A challenge...

[mcgrew]

OK, you got me. It's been a long, long time since I codes anything in assembly.

Re:A challenge...

[Sulphur]

They have had problems with corrosion. If you lose ground, then you lose the electronics.

(We interrupt this post to bring you the following sig)

--

If you add hams to TurDucHen, then you get hamsterduckhen.

(ducks)

Re:A challenge...

[wideBlueSkies]

$_ and the like aren't obscure enough, so I think that Larry and the boys are planning space variables for Perl 6. :P

Re:A challenge...

[phantomfive]

There is no standard NVM location for fault logging. I don't know why you would think that.

Re:A challenge...

[mzs]

I think you have not scene many car accident scenes. It is often hard to tell what could have happened based on where the cars are after the accident. There does tend to be a lot of chaotic behavior.

Re:A challenge...

[zmollusc]

Are you trying to plot your position on a map as you go along, like inertial navigation? Think more of plotting the path you think you followed on a clear sheet then place that sheet over a map to the same scale and stretch the clear sheet around to make the route fit over the possible roads on the map. Maybe in an american urban grid you would struggle, but here in the uk you would be able to recognise many routes and eliminate many others.

Re:A challenge...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Melodramatic much? Let's look for a moment at what the company says:

When Toyota was asked by the AP to explain what exactly its recorders do collect, a company statement said Thursday that the devices record data from five seconds before until two seconds after an air bag is deployed in a crash. The statement said information is captured about vehicle speed, the accelerator's angle, gear shift position, whether the seat belt was used and the angle of the driver's seat.

I understand that a large part of the real issue here is the fact that the data is *not* open -- we do presently have to take this information on trust, which is not acceptable.

Taking them at face value, your complaints about privacy are irrelevant. As a software developer, my ability to debug a critical system failure FAR outweighs your self-righteous indignation over having a five second snapshot of your driving taken for any given point in time. And it's got nothing to do with your trips to Hank's Triple-X After Hours Club -- it's to do with my work, my product, and my livelihood. You're just a casualty of unfortunate code at this point.

Re:A challenge...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

A similar comparison would be saying your privacy is being "given away' because an application writes a rolling activity log that you can supply to the developer when something crashes. (FYI, BBSSH - in my sig - writes any exceptions, error conditions, and successful connections to the device log - is that a violation of privacy too?)

Re:A challenge...

[Idiomatick]

No, the level of complexity isn't comparable. WoW for example could have several hundred characters on a screen, each with many characteristics and equipment. Map data, position, chat, rules about various areas, so on and so on.

In addition WoW was made to prevent people from getting access to the information. They have a customer base of millions and a large chunk of those are hackers. So wow obviously was obfuscated and encrypted to avoid getting hacked. And wow has a budget much larger than toyota's coders. So what makes you think toyota would spend a large large amount of money on securing the data which they don't even really have a duty to do so?

Crackers have done way harder cracks as well: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10625082&pnum=0 for example. The level of difficulty likely 1000s of times harder. Probably another few orders of magnitude on top of that. Seriously, likely ALL game crackers out there currently putting out releases could defeat toyota's obfuscation in a few hours, days tops. Ask a group like Razor1911 or Skid-row to do it, give them a car and it'd be done.

Re:A challenge...

[Idiomatick]

*speaks japanese* 'kaa supido' (pronounced caw sue-pee-doh) would be acceptable and understood by most everyone. Ty, I think that fills my pedantic quota for the day.

Re:A challenge...

[CompMD]

I take it you've never seen code generated by Matlab and Simulink. I certainly believe the number is possible. Modeling a poorly designed control system and machine generating code to operate it can result in HUGE programs.

Re:A challenge...

[CompMD]

The problem described with the Mercedes seats has nothing to do with the CAN bus on a car. CAN is considered a safety critical bus and is designed as such. Seat buttons are directly wired analog controls or are on some serial data line, not CAN. Its not possible to send a command over the bus and have it do something in the wrong place.

Re:A challenge...

[shiftless]

Yes, we're talking like a 512k flash ROM chip here at the largest. It should not be any more difficult to decode the black box recording functions that it would be to hack into the ECU in general. (It's not difficult to hack into more automotive ECUs with the right hardware, software, and knowledge.)

Dude!

[oldhack]

The Japanese are protecting our privacy!!! What are you, thick?!

Hehehe.

I knew that and is MAIN reason I bought Toyota

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew that and is MAIN reason I bought Toyota.

Toyota still has to comply with inserting RFID radio emitting 128 bit GUIDs from devices hidden in passenger and truck tires sold on cars in USA though, and these are used forensically when recorded on major interstates using wires grooved into the pavement by the FBI. The T.R.E.A.D. act.

The usa does enforce police , insurance company and EMS (any authority really) blackboxes on trucks, even toyota trucks, so this article is misleading. Passenger fleet is immune from big brother chips that record and only stop recording if airbag deployed.

Corvettes have 4 backup snitch chips, with 2 embedded DEEP in foam of dashboard, impossible to cut out with a knife and if wires snipped nothing runs.

We can all blame Audi cars in the 1980s. They lurched into intersections from females who drive with TWO feet, one on brake, one on accelerator. This female habit reuslted in many intersection lurch accidents. Drivers blames the car engines. Ironically no audis lurched forward into traffic when at rest when driven by males. Nevertheless, that is motivation when spy blackbox chips started getting inserted.

My last car was SPECIFICALLY selected as toyota because of their privacy rules on recording recent top speed, and max speed to chip for accident investigation or criminal charges.

Re:I knew that and is MAIN reason I bought Toyota

[retchdog]

I'd love to see some conclusive evidence on these rumors (the black box stuff, not the bullshit "women can't drive" part). Do you have any links handy? Would be greatly appreciated, kthx.

Re:I knew that and is MAIN reason I bought Toyota

[LBt1st]

Interesting stuff. Is there a website that details what cars have what in terms of chips and such?

Re:I knew that and is MAIN reason I bought Toyota

[jhoegl]

Yes its at www.holyshitthegovernmentsistryingtostealmybrainkeys.com

Re:I knew that and is MAIN reason I bought Toyota

[srussia]

Is there a website that details what cars have what in terms of chips and such?

The answer is none. None more black.

Re:I knew that and is MAIN reason I bought Toyota

[bickerdyke]

By now you should know how this routine usually goes.

No, there aren't any websites like this. All Sites that had lists and pictures of disected dashboards that showed those chips have been pulled off the net. That alone should be proof that those rumours are true, for what other reasons would someone be intrested in covering it.

Re:I knew that and is MAIN reason I bought Toyota

[Teun]

I congratulate Toyota on insisting on a court order.

Hopefully some enlightened (EU?) legislator will outlaw the use of such data unless it has been obtained through a court order.

Re:I knew that and is MAIN reason I bought Toyota

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Interesting stuff. Is there a website that details what cars have what in terms of chips and such?

Just google "T.R.E.A.D. act" and "RFID".

Here is an example of what you will find (its an article in a business rag extolling a manufacturers "success" in embedding the RFID chips and their "readiness" to help others to be complaint with the act - for a fee of course).

Ostensibly the act is intended to prevent accidents related to tires, but once you have unique RFID chips in tires that are all federally registered (which is required by the act) an inexpensive reader can be used (and or placed) anywhere by any government agency, for pretty much any purpose. Take into account recent government encroachments on freedom and privacy across the board, realize that the databases under government control can easily cross-correlate the TREAD manufacturer registry with VIN number registry and ownership records ... and it does not take multiple readings of 1984 to figure out where this is going.

Re:I knew that and is MAIN reason I bought Toyota

[conureman]

Wow. What an amazing Troll.
Okay, I'll bite, insofar as to refute that two-footed driving is a feminine trait. (My girlfriend refuses to do it, and we've had several fights as a result.) I, of course, came up with the technique independently, then subsequently learned that the C.H.P. teaches it to the trainees at the Academy. Always drive with your left foot hovering over the brake pedal, and learn to use the brake into and through turns, whilst mashing down the throttle towards the exit to help straighten out the car. I was handcuffed in the back of a C.H.P. cruiser going west on U.S. 50 into Placerville one afternoon, and the Officer gratuitously tried to impress me with his skill. (I could take him.) What impressed me was how closely his method mimicked my own, except I figured he never rode motorcycles because he didn't use his throttle to steer. It's important to maintain throttle pressure during tricky maneuvers, and smooth transitions prevent stunt-driving situations from occurring at all.

Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[CuteSteveJobs]

This is proving to be an ongoing public relations disaster for Toyota. If they don't take meaningful action, vastly exceeding the expectations of the public, a well-respected brand name's reputation for safety/reliability is going to end up in the trash. Releasing the interface to read the black boxes contents (in read only mode) would be a good start. I don't say this as a geek who has a fetish for tabulating acceleration data, but as a nervous driver.

Yes, Toyota could be sued, but it's going to be sued anyway. Evasion won't change the outcome of the law suits, but it will go a long way to restoring their brand's reputation.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Why would it be a good idea? I thought slashdot was all gung-ho about protecting people's privacy?

If there really was a case of an accident caused by unintended acceleration then a court order would be piece of cake to get.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not entirely clear on how not having access to one of the computers in a piece of my property, or even knowing exactly what it does, protects my privacy...

Some sort of scheme for compulsory(or even many flavors of "optional") collection of black box data would, indeed, be a huge privacy violation; but that isn't the proposal.

This is a system embedded in the car, to which you need physical access to connect. Anybody who could get to that box could plant a GPS+accelerometer bug on your car considerably more easily. Documentation for reading the black box would give the owner of the system more control and information(and, who knows, maybe even let third party mechanics break the dealer grip on certain services) without notable privacy implications.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[dcollins]

"Why would it be a good idea? I thought slashdot was all gung-ho about protecting people's privacy?"

Arguing that corporations are not people since 1886.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Arguing that corporations are not people since 1886.

You think that is Toyota being protected when a cop tries to 'prove' you were a reckless driver with blackbox data for hitting that drunk guy walking out on the road? Especially when the data is from 5 minutes earlier when you were going slightly above speed limits on a clear road but has no connection to how you were driving at that moment?

A court might not let the prosecution retrieve that information, but won't help you much if they already got it through an usb interface in the dashboard of your car.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[pipingguy]

I'm still not convinced that this latest scare of unintended acceleration is not due to operator error.

The increased complaints may simply be due to hysteria.

Apparently some people are not aware of brakes and when confronted with odd car behaviour, panic.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[theycallmeB]

Well according to AP version of this story (from the NYTimes here), getting a court order is a piece of cake, getting Toyota to cooperate is another matter entirely.

Complaints against Toyota include "Has frequently refused to provide key information sought by crash victims and survivors." and "In some lawsuits, when pressed to provide recorder information Toyota either settled or provided printouts with the key columns blank."

So it would seem that something is going on here, possibly as simple as cost cutting, but it has nothing to do with protecting drivers' privacy.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[Nutria]

I'm not entirely clear on how not having access to one of the computers in a piece of my property, or even knowing exactly what it does, protects my privacy...

You ninny. If it's easy for anyone to get at the black box info, it's easy for the government to track your movements.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[berzerke]

...A court might not let the prosecution retrieve that information, but won't help you much if they already got it through an usb interface in the dashboard of your car.

Courts can and have dis-allowed information to be used. Just because they have it doesn't guarantee it can be used. It has to be obtained legally...in theory at least - there are judges that shouldn't be judges.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[houghi]

I'm not entirely clear on how not having access to one of the computers in a piece of my property, or even knowing exactly what it does, protects my privacy...

For one your insurance company can't just say at random dates: Give me the data. The police can not do that. Nobody can do that UNLESSS there is a cour order.
It is the same as with your browsing habbits, your phonenumbers you called, the books you take out of the library and the money you spend with your credit card.

And the fact that there are illigal ways around it does not make it OK to just drop the protection of your privacy.

For further information, look up any discussion about "If you have nothing to hide, please show everything to us."

I am more concerned however that "The Man" has apparently indoctrinated you so much that you think random access to yor data isn't a violation of your privacy. (Unless you ARE "The Man" and try to indoctrinate us.)

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[Splab]

Must be nice to believe in the system...

What is far more likely is the police officer will get you into an interview room, show you the data and tell you speeding will add x years, but you can do a plea bargin for x-y years - that bypasses court and sends you straight to prison.

Or if you live for instance in Denmark, any evidence obtained, illegal og legal can be used against you, done something wrong you get your day in court. (This sounds bad, but police here is generally pretty nice and the court system works as intended)

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[houghi]

Releasing the interface to read the black boxes contents (in read only mode) would be a good start.

In the current situation people can not randomly ask for your data. You will need a court order. If there was an accident AND there is a dispute, then a court order can ask for your data.

In the situation where you open it for all, you will get sooner or later in a situation where the insurance company demands for your data and decides not to pay for your cardiac bypass as you stopped at McDs too often to their liking.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[tehcyder]

Apparently some people are not aware of brakes and when confronted with odd car behaviour, panic.

I know people say the driving test is too easy in the US, but come on...

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[blackraven14250]

To get the black box info, of which there's about 15 seconds of readings (kinda useless for tracking you anywhere before you were on your block), they'd have to get inside the car to hook up the connector. To plant a GPS device, they'd have to be outside your car and stick their hand under the bumper.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[blackraven14250]

There are also verdicts that get appealed, for this very reason.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[digitalchinky]

You should try the driving test in the Philippines :-)

Not only does the examiner helpfully highlight the correct answers on the test paper for you in advance, but the actual driving component involves moving a vehicle forward 2 meters and then reversing back the same distance - without going outside white painted lines about 4 meters away on either side of the car. I thought it would be physically impossible for anyone to fail this test, but watching others - I was pleasantly surprised!

Now don't get me wrong, even with the bar set to these lofty heights, people still complain that the testing is too hard - others, well, they resort to the good old paper handshake to save themselves the stress.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[moeinvt]

"Nobody can do that UNLESSS there is a cour order. It is the same as with your browsing habbits, your phonenumbers you called, the books you take out of the library and the money you spend with your credit card."

Your post states that a COURT ORDER is needed to look at these things, but then you reference the Patriot Act in your sig? In addition to the gag order provision you refer to, one of the most hideous elements of the PA was the "National Security Letter".

http://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-liberty/national-security-letters

"Through NSLs the FBI can ... obtain sensitive information such as the web sites a person visits, a list of e-mail addresses with which a person has corresponded, or even unmask the identity of a person who has posted anonymous speech on a political website."

The link shows details about several specific cases in which the NSLs (which do NOT require judicial approval) were used to obtain exactly the sort of information you're describing. In 2001, our civil liberties took a 200 year leap backward and we returned to the days when cops could write their own search warrants with no judicial oversight.

Aside: Our fearless leaders recently found the noble spirit of bipartisanship in renewing several parts of the Patriot Act which were set to expire on Feb 28. The house version was buried in a bill related to Medicare reimbursement, the Senate approved it on a voice vote, and the President signed it. More hope and change.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[Attila Dimedici]

Yes, but if it is trivial to retrieve the information, the courts are significantly more likely to admit it then if they have to get a court order to obtain it.
I find it funny that people on slashdot are talking about how bad it is that Toyota makes it hard to get this information when a year or so ago there was a discussion here on slashdot about how much of a privacy violation black boxes on cars.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[stabiesoft]

The yahoo article cites

"In the 2004 crash in Evansville, Ind., that killed 77-year-old Juanita Grossman, attorneys for her family say a Toyota technician traveled from the company's U.S. headquarters in Torrance, Calif., to examine her 2003 Camry.

Before she died, the 5-foot-2, 125-pound woman told relatives she was practically standing with both feet on the brake pedal but could not stop the car from slamming into a building. Records confirm that emergency personnel found Grossman with both feet on the brake pedal."

While not conclusive that the woman had her feet on the brakes, it sure seems probable. I don't see how her feet would end up in that position if she was not trying to break, especially since the EMS substantiated her recollection. If toyota kept the info on brake and throttle position and they made it available, we would know. Since toyota will not even divulge what info is kept and keeps the info they do divulge under wraps, we will probably never know.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[pipingguy]

But still, wouldn't standing on the brakes overcome the engine? I just don't get it.

Re:Mr Toyota-san, Tear down this Interface!

[stabiesoft]

Not necessarily. Power brakes get their power from the vacuum of the engine manifold. If the engine is running WOT, the vacuum is small to non-existent, so the power brakes require even more effort than normal manual brakes. As an experiment, go to a parking lot, or someplace deserted, get going maybe 20 mph, shut off the engine, pump the brakes a couple of times to bleed the vacuum, and see how hard you have to hit the brakes to stop. Its pretty amazing. Please don;t hit anything, I disclaim any responsibility if you do...

Heh

[Airdorn]

Lol @ the recent mysterious deluge against Toyota.

Re:Heh

[retchdog]

Yes, it is suspicious and makes one wonder about the extent of the "pro-America" propaganda machine.

Re:Heh

[jhoegl]

Yes, because no one shops at Walmart, even though 50% of Americans think that WalMart is a very American store (well, this was said on the news once and although I hope USA citizens are smart, this is possible)

Re:Heh

[afidel]

Uh, there's been quite a bit of coverage of the issue in Japan and europe as well, to the point where Toyota Japan in a fairly unprecedented move for a Japanese consumer complaint response agreed to an open investigation by the governments consumer protection arm. The norm is to offer a deep apology and for the followup to be completed behind closed doors.

Re:Heh

[retchdog]

I was not aware of this, thank you for the information. There is some concern in certain circles, that the US government response is influenced by the domestic auto bailout. I will recalibrate my opinion based on the baseline response outside the US.

Re:Heh

[retchdog]

Wal*mart is a very American store. America thrives on a vigorous and unresolved conflict between popular socialist movements and rather-popular big business movements. Wal*mart's affiliation is obvious.

As for the rest of your reply, I find it incomprehensible.

Re:Heh

[TheLink]

Even if they aren't at fault (not saying they aren't) they have to do that apology thing etc.

It's a lose-lose.

If they deny it, they get in trouble - which driver is going to say he/she screwed up? If they say it's their fault, they get in trouble.

Re:Heh

[brufleth]

Are you trying to tell a joke? The US military bases in Japan are there because Japan is only allowed to have a "peace keeping force" due to the rules put down after WWII. This basically leaves foreign countries responsible for keeping Japan from getting obliterated by North Korean wackos. The military bases in Japanese territory are strategic for the US of course but their existence is at least as critical to the security of Japan.

Re:Heh

[Ogive17]

You mean Government Motors up in Detroit?

Personally, I think Toyota handled this very poorly and deserve some heat over it. But the highway safety advistory board accepted Toyota's flootmat fix, so they need to share some of the blame.

Some of our congressmen really embarassed me, as an American, during the hearing with Mr. Toyoda last week. I don't know who it was, but one of them actually told the President of Toyota Motor that they should put Americans on the board of directors for Toyota Motor.... I think congress is lucky the Japanese are typically more timid, because I would've called them all a bunch of clueless, blowhard assholes who are only at the hearing to listen to themselves talk and get face time on the camera so their constiuants thought they were doing something constructive for once.

Re:Heh

[nxtw]

Yes, it is suspicious and makes one wonder about the extent of the "pro-America" propaganda machine.

Wonder if Honda or Hyundai will be similarly targeted in the future..

Good Technology I suppose...

[louiech21]

I prefer having breaks, steering, and not having an accelerator stick to the floor.

Re:Good Technology I suppose...

[MrEricSir]

That's ridiculous. Breaks, steering, and non-sticky accelerators are so last decade. Now days it's all about DRM.

Re:Good Technology I suppose...

[bennomatic]

"Breaks" is the problem. I prefer brakes.

Re:Good Technology I suppose...

[u38cg]

Actually, most accidents are caused by insufficiently alert drivers. More breaks would be a good thing.

Time must have changed.

[sumdumass]

It seems like it was only yesterday when people were complaining that the black box data was there in the first place. Then came along the complaints on how it was being used against people in courts and in accident investigations. Then the complaint was that only certain people could get the information and you couldn't get it to clear your name or anything- even in one case where I believe the prosecutor got the information and decided it was worthless and tossed it (may be wrong on that).

Now, it seems that everything happening that would have caused a complaint is good and those not allowing it to happen is bad. Go figure.

Re:Time must have changed.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The status quo is a powerful thing. Once something Just Is people start treating it as a baseline.

More specifically, though, is complaining about information asymmetry at all unreasonable? If the black box is present, why shouldn't I object to the fact that I, the owner of the vehicle, have no access to its contents; but those who have more power than I do do? There are substantial virtues to privacy and substantial virtues to transparency(in certain contexts); but asymmetric transparency is basically the worst of both worlds.

Re:Time must have changed.

[Weirsbaski]

It's not as inconsistent as you'd think- if the owner of car wants the blackbox data, she should get it, no problem. If anybody else wants the data, let 'em either ask the owner to voluntarily go along with it, or ask a judge for a court order (with appropriate legal conditionals so the judge can't just rubberstamp it).

Re:Time must have changed.

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Well, if they have to get a court order to retrieve the data then Toyota will have a copy of it (prosecution can't 'lose' it) and it will have been retrieved under a court order (so the prosecution can't throw it away since it was 'useless').

Seems most people are reacting to FUD and not realizing Toyota are the _GOOD_ guys here.

Re:Time must have changed.

[tehcyder]

If the black box is present, why shouldn't I object to the fact that I, the owner of the vehicle, have no access to its contents; but those who have more power than I do do?

You don't "own" the data in the black box. Remember, information wants to be free.

Re:Time must have changed.

[Registered Coward v2]

It seems like it was only yesterday when people were complaining that the black box data was there in the first place. Then came along the complaints on how it was being used against people in courts and in accident investigations. Then the complaint was that only certain people could get the information and you couldn't get it to clear your name or anything- even in one case where I believe the prosecutor got the information and decided it was worthless and tossed it (may be wrong on that).

Now, it seems that everything happening that would have caused a complaint is good and those not allowing it to happen is bad. Go figure.

IANAL, but isn't it the case, in the US at least, that a prosecutor has to provide the defense with all the evidence pertaining to the case in their possession? They then would have to provide any black box data they had; otherwise they'd be withholding evidence.

In a civil case you'd probably be able to get it through discovery.

As a side note; I wonder if Toyota could build a small device to plug in like on OBDC Code Reader,and let it record reams of data, say 3 months worth; that can then be used to troubleshoot the problem? Offer owners a deal - such a s a free oil change every time they bring in the car to get the device swapped? That way, they'd have real world data to analyze.

Re:Time must have changed.

[xtal]

If there's user access to clear, I'll be printing up a batch of electronics for a "clear" button in the car.

IIRC there is no legal requirement to perserve the contents of a such a box, and in almost all cases it is a liability.

It's a short step from there to a government locked GPS recorder box in the car..

Re:Time must have changed.

[Attila Dimedici]

Yes, the prosecution must provide the defense with all of the evidence "pertaining to the case" in their possession. As described by the OP, the prosecution decided the black box evidence did not pertain to the case and discarded it. I know that similar things have happened in other cases with other evidence, sometimes this has been a legitimate mistake on the prosecutions part (the evidence was not exculpatory on its own, it only helped the defense in combination with facts unknown to the prosecution at the time) and sometimes it is an attempt by the prosecution to bury evidence that hurts its case. In both types of cases appeals courts have overturned convictions, but there are probably some that the defense never learns about.

Uh huh

[TheSpoom]

Toyota sees only loss potentials in making an open access EDR, since more data provided in crashes means more potential liability. Therefore, they encrypt it and make it only available by court order.

Pure business (you know, excluding the human factor as usual).

Re:Uh huh

[Ethanol-fueled]

Yup. Same goes with medical equipment and everything else: encrypt the firmware uploading apparatus so that the only people who see the firmware instructions are the engineers who create it. Technicians and the public remain ignorant, and fixes are released as "new features" before the public figures out that their gadget is a fire hazard.

But I doubt all that would stop a team of determined reverse-engineers familiar with the microcontrollers used. Enter the DMCA.

Re:Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. And most of these accidents and screaming crisis victims are idiots who hit the wrong pedal. for the most part, attempts to show these cars are flying away out of control have failed. Yes, even with the pedal and mat recalls. Toyota screwed up in not using Japanese Denso pedals in all their cars. The US Pedal manufacturer was well outside spec. This shit happens when you make stuff in China or the USA.

And a cornered animal is a dangerous animal. Toyota is a worldwide automaker that is profitable most of the time. They can weather this, but know for long term benefit, they have to aggressively fight for US customers now. Zero % financing for 5 years takes away a ton of profit, and GM has been forced to match that offer. Unlike toyota, GM is unable to afford that kind of profit loss.

This single incident is going to add at least ten, probably far more, years to how long it will take GM to pay back her debts. Democrat regulators and congressmen who smirk as they grind Toyota for shit GM does day in day out (they had a huge recall in February too!) are being idiots. They have forced Toyota to make their cars much more affordable. Even at 9% lower sales volume last month, they will probably sell MORE cars this quarter, and GM fewer. And those cars GM sells will have far less profit.

GMAC was the primary moneymaker for GM. Toyota just took that off the table. Chrysler will probably have to match that or suffer even worse sales. There are no good reactions, except for Toyota to take a big hit now in the USA that is easily absorbed by their growth in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Oh, and I am happy with a car that some plaintiff, cop, or government bureaucrat can't take my data from. I will probably never read my black box. I don't want anyone else too. I don't even have an ugly ass toyota, but I appreciate their self interest matching my own here. What's funny is that I think Chevies are the most stylish, but am so turned off by this crisis witchhunt that I'll probably buy a Honda.

Re:Uh huh

[phantomfive]

Your analysis of the car industry might have been more convincing if it hadn't left out the biggest competitors to Toyota. Most of the lost sales from Toyota have gone to Honda or Hyundai, and Ford has beaten GM in sales recently. There is more to the auto world than just Toyota and GM.

Re:Uh huh

[tehcyder]

Toyota sees only loss potentials in making an open access EDR, since more data provided in crashes means more potential liability. Therefore, they encrypt it and make it only available by court order.

So you think that this information should be freely available?

As the information is only for use in a court case, it seems perfectly sensible to require a court order to access it.

Re:Uh huh

[tepples]

Most of the lost sales from Toyota have gone to Honda or Hyundai

Has Nissan been doing any better?

In free countries, how did the powerful become powerful? Have they done something you couldn't do (honorably)?

1. By having rich parents. 2. By having been born at least three decades before the market became saturated.

Re:Uh huh

[Ogive17]

Actually you're analysis really isn't that good either. Ford's big jump in sales was mostly due to fleet sales this past month. That won't be sustained. Honda and the Korean makers didn't take much from Toyota's struggles, especially with the Detroit propaganda machine trying to link all Asian auto makers to Toyota. Case in point, Honda had a recall of 400-500k Fits and City small cars, and it was linked to Toyota in every instance. Ford just recalled over 1 million vehicles last week and that's already out of the news. Toyota's sales did take a big drop, most people believe that most Toyota customers are just delaying their purchases to see how this situation pans out.

Re:Uh huh

[phantomfive]

heh....

1. By having rich parents.

If you were born in the US, you by default have rich parents.

2. By having been born at least three decades before the market became saturated.

Everyone was born at least three decades before the market became saturated, because new markets are opening all the time. You'll have to think of a better excuse. :)

Re:Uh huh

[tepples]

If you were born in the US, you by default have rich parents.

The parents of, say, Paris Hilton are still orders of magnitude richer than my parents.

Everyone was born at least three decades before the market became saturated, because new markets are opening all the time.

Let me swing it back to cars for a moment: Some of Ford's success with the Model T was Henry Ford's ingenuity in assembly methods; the rest was being in the right place at the right time. I can think of no honorable way to guarantee the latter.

Re:Uh huh

[phantomfive]

The parents of, say, Paris Hilton are still orders of magnitude richer than my parents.

And yet, Chris Gardner's parents were probably much poorer than your parents. Come on, a little research should be all it takes to realize that having poor parents is in no way a limit on what a person can accomplish. Try to have intellectual honesty in your debating techniques.

being in the right place at the right time. I can think of no honorable way to guarantee the latter.

This is an interesting point, and it is true that a lot of people are successful by little more than being in the right place at the right time. Are you really trying to say that the only way to make a lot of money is to be a t the right place at the right time?

Re:Uh huh

[TheSpoom]

So you think that this information should be freely available?

As the information is only for use in a court case, it seems perfectly sensible to require a court order to access it.

In that the information should only be stored and accessible when the airbags deploy, yes.

What privacy are you worried about protecting when you're in a crash, anyway, that the EDR would infringe? I'm one of the biggest supporters of the right to privacy, but these EDRs only record 10 to 15 seconds of data and it only becomes available when the airbags deploy, as I understand it.

Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely *no* car manufacturer has your best interest at heart. Not Toyota, not Ford, not GM, not a single one of them.

Who made the SUVs that literally jumped off their tires and turtled at so much as a harsh look? Who made trucks and thought it was a brilliant idea to mount the gas tanks *outside* of the frame? Who made cars that exploded when they were nudged at the backend? Which car manufacturer computes the costs of killing some of their customers vs. spending a bit more to make each vehicle safe?

It's not just Toyota. But, today, with the US government being the largest shareholder in GM, I would bet that life for Toyota is going to get really bad.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[Airdorn]

Let's be more general here. No one at all has your best interest at heart. Except, err.. maybe your mother. Having said that, Toyota has been a pretty good, reliable car for millions for decades. I'm a little confused about the recent slam against Toyota in recent days, especially since GM became "Government Motors".. but that's neither here nor there. None of the car companies computed the cost of killing people vs. savings for safety features. That's alarmist propaganda. Rather, after accidents happen, they're like.. "WTF! Wow, guess we didn't think that one through." A bunch of that stuff is hind-sight cry-babying.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[jhoegl]

You know what? When all these "sudden recalls" came out from Toyota once their acceleration issue came to light in the media, it indicates to me one thing.
Toyota has been holding back a lot of recalls at the expense of customer safety.
So champion Toyota all you want, and come up with a conspiracy theory that the USA gov is behind this whole thing.
It indicates to me Toyota was playing with fire and now they got burned. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[Ethanol-fueled]

"WTF! Wow, guess we didn't think that one through." A bunch of that stuff is hind-sight cry-babying.

Crocodile tears.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[Lehk228]

those failing tires? were made by bridgestone/firestone, a japanese company.

and the pinto?

However, a 1991 law review paper by Gary Schwartz[17] claimed the case against the Pinto was less clear-cut than commonly supposed. The number who died in Pinto rear-impact fires, according to Schwartz, was well below the hundreds cited in contemporary news reports and closer to the twenty-seven recorded by a limited National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database. Given the Pinto's production figures (over 2 million built), this was not substantially worse than typical for the time. Schwartz argued that the car was no more fire-prone than other cars of the time, that its fatality rates were lower than comparably sized imported automobiles, and that the supposed "smoking gun" document that plaintiffs claimed showed Ford's callousness in designing the Pinto was actually a document based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations about the value of a human life rather than a document containing an assessment of Ford's potential tort liability.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[DigiShaman]

with the US government being the largest shareholder in GM, I would bet that life for Toyota is going to get really bad.

Toyota screwed up big time, for sure. But make no mistake about it. These hearings on Toyota were aimed at one thing and one thing only. To make them look bad so our Federal Gov can continue to capture the UAW votes by bolstering GM sales.

Now you tell me? How fucked up is that?!

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[serbanp]

None of the car companies computed the cost of killing people vs. savings for safety features.

Except Ford, with their famous Pinto. Google for "Ford Pinto Memo" if you want to understand who invented the cost-benefits computation in the case of vehicular maiming/killing.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[jhoegl]

Actually, for a company that banks on their "quality" it is a HUGE cost to their image and people who champion their product look a fool.
You have heard Toyota say in all press releases "we are still the safest car out there" have you not?

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[KillaBeave]

[sarcasm]The government NEVER would call the domestic automakers to the carpet for a public flogging! NEVER! SURELY Mr. Toyoda didn't take a private jet to Washington![/sarcasm]

This IS (at least at it's heart) about public saftey, and good will come of it. Cars will be safer after this as companies will be less likely to cover up problems. An electronic throttle override will likely be mandated in all cars ... which is a good idea regardless of if it caused this issue or not.

However, the current overreaction is probably a ploy to distract from the many other failings of the US gov't.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[mcgrew]

Not just the Pinto, more recently Ford incinerated a bunch of cops in Grand Victorias, although from the wikipedia account, the cops themselves were more to blame than Ford. Also, I don't think that with the Crown Vics there was a "cost to life" ratio or any coverup.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[TubeSteak]

Toyota has been holding back a lot of recalls at the expense of customer safety.

http://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/problems/recalls/recallmonthlyreports.cfm
I can't wait to see the February report.

Car companies have been issuing/expanding recalls (~500K vehicles) recently and mostly counting on the fact that since Toyota is in the news, they won't be.

I also love how Chevrolet/Chrysler/Dodge seem to be buying Ads on Google related to the keyword "recall".
/I also never realized how many recalls there are for motorcycles.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[swordgeek]

Even more than we generally realise, since the UAW builds Toyotas, Hondas, Nissans, and so forth in the US--but still demonize them as 'foreign devil' cars.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[nxtw]

Firestone was purchased by Bridgestone only in 1988, two years before the Explorer was sold. Before that, Firestone was American.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[mcgrew]

Nice antiamerican, antiunion rant there, buddy, but UAW workers work for Toyota. From the supplied link:

The Toyota Corolla, for example, is made in the United States by UAW members, but the Canadian model is made in a nonunion plant and other models are imported from a third country. To be sure you have a union-made vehicle, buy one of the vehicles on this list.

Toyota workers unionized because they were being screwed over by Toyota, which is the only reason to unionize. You can thank unions for the five day work week, paid vacations, eight hour days, and absence of sweatshops.

I'm not in the UAW, but I am a card-carrying member of a labor union. The stockholders of my employer's company bargain collectively, why shouldn't I? The company that bargains with you for a contract has lawyers, and it's not feasable for every employee to hire a lawyer to look over the cotract. With numbers come strength. You alone are no match for an army of stockholders who employ an army of lawyers.

If you have an asshole boss (luckily I have a good boss) you REALLY need a union.

BTW, I'm eligible for a pension in a couple of years, thanks to my union. Anybody who works for a living who is anti-union* is insane.

* Unless they are a member of the Teamsters; that union is worse than useless.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[DigiShaman]

You can thank unions for the five day work week, paid vacations, eight hour days, and absence of sweatshops.

On that same token, I can also thank them for the increased cost of a vehicle to cover for those expenditures.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[mcgrew]

Then join or organize a union so you'll be paid a decent wage and can afford one. Management is going to sell the car for as much as the market will bear regardles sof the cost of manufacture.

Re:Let's nip this Toyota bashing in the bud

[CompMD]

Mr. Toyoda himself testified in front of Congress that Toyota sacrificed safety in the name of corporate growth. Can't get more authoritative than that.

It could be that Toyota is just being responsible

[OrwellianLurker]

Toyota ... generally won't allow the data to be read without a court order.

All it takes is a court order. So essentially the only thing slowing the investigations would be an unwilling Federal government.

This..

[countertrolling]

is their new jingle..

Chill out

[KamuZ]

Chill out, they only need a court order and seems the USA Federal Government is always good at giving these ones away.

No need to "hack" the box or anything like it.

Re:Chill out

[fatalwall]

unless you as an owner personally want to see the data.. then hacking is the only route... unless you think its not a giant pain in the butt for the owner to have to get a court order

Japanese Grammer Nazi

[Black Gold Alchemist]

kyuteSetebbeJiobs-san, Ohayoo Gozaimasu.

It's just "toyota-san," not "Mr. Toyota-san." Saying "Mr. Toyota-san" is like saying "Mr. Mr. Toyota." Of course, we might have a lot to learn from Toyota-san, so we might want to call him/her/it Toyota-sensee.

Arigato,
Nihongo no grammer nazi

P.S. this is intended as a joke and not designed to offend.

Re:Japanese Grammer Nazi

[93 Escort Wagon]

Not meaning to pick on the Japanese Grammar Nazi in particular, but - I can't believe we've gotten this far into the story without anyone picking up on the fact that the company president's name is TOYODA not TOYOTA (yeah I realize it's not really spelled using our alphabet). For the car company name they intentionally changed the name slightly because the T-ish symbol was considered luckier than the D-ish one.

So frankly, calling him "Toyota-san" or -dono or whatever would probably be considered a bit rude.

Re:Japanese Grammer Nazi

[Black Gold Alchemist]

Arigato. I did not know that (I'm an American student learning japanese).

"voluntary" == gun to head

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah. In most cases "voluntary" means doing something with a gun to your head.
Want insurance (which you're required to have)? Better "voluntarily" open up that black box data.
Want to not be arrested? Better "voluntarily" open up that black box data.
Want to get your emissions checked? Better "voluntarily" open up that black box data.
Want to get a license for that car? Better "voluntarily" open up that black box data and let us connect it to an auto-ticketing device.

And so on....

The problem is a lot of "voluntary" things quickly become non-voluntary (i.e. forcibly waived) if you are to get standard services.

Exactly correct.

[Futurepower(R)]

MOD PARENT UP. Thanks for saying that.

I was talking to an acquaintance at Daimler who heads a programming project for Daimler trucks. The number of processors and lines of code in a Toyota is wildly exaggerated. The actual figure is somewhat the same as in Mercedes-Benz automobiles.

Re:Exactly correct.

[e2d2]

I think people are missing the point about the lines of code. Regardless of how many lines of code are in the system no one can claim that the system is "simple". When you combine all of the processed logic, in both software _and_ hardware, you have a complex system. This is the fact they want to highlight, they just do it with an abstract figure that is astronomical to a layman so they can draw readership, etc. It comes from misunderstanding. But the point is still true - the system is very complex and as we add more and more "fly by wire" controls to vehicles the more we'll see these issues. That can be mathematically proven and should be considered a fact.

Sink-the-company advertising for Toyota

[Futurepower(R)]

Another thought: I'm guessing that this one Slashdot story will cost Toyota at least $10,000,000.

Multiply that by the hundreds of stories in other publications.

I guess we could keep that property, but get more

[r00t]

Here's how it could work:

1. Using an Ethernet jack provided by the car, you use HTTP to grab an encrypted blob. This contains the data, including a timestamp and the VIN.

2. Upload the blob to Toyota's web site. They decrypt it and store it forever.

3. Download the decrypted blob.

Download can be limited to the uploader by default, with other people only able to see that it exists. If you want a copy and you didn't perform the upload, simply get a court order.

Are Flight Data Recorders mandatory?

[jayveekay]

I'm guessing that Flight Data Recorders are mandated by law for commercial aircraft. I would say that the information that they have provided over the years has been very helpful in improving the safety of air travel.

How many people were killed last year in aircraft accidents? Hundreds would be my guesstimate. How many in car accidents? Tens of thousands would be my guess. If there are a lot of people being injured in car accidents then it would seem very useful (from an economic retrun on investment perspective) to start making data recorders both mandatory and have them record specific information in a published standard format, with the goal being to better understand accident causes and improve auto safety.

Re:Are Flight Data Recorders mandatory?

[Albanach]

How many people were killed last year in aircraft accidents? Hundreds would be my guesstimate. How many in car accidents? Tens of thousands would be my guess.

The wiki reckons you are off by an order of magnitude. There's been over 40,000 auto deaths every year for the past decade. About 115 per day. And that's only in the United States.

Given only a small fraction of motor accidents are fatal, I'd guess the overall number of accidents is well into the millions. More quick googling suggests about 6.5 million auto accidents in the US each year and almost 3 million injuries as a result.

Re:Are Flight Data Recorders mandatory?

[blueg3]

40000 is the same order of magnitude as "tens of thousands".

Re:Are Flight Data Recorders mandatory?

[hcdejong]

Because there are so many of them, car crashes are by now pretty well understood. Enough of them have been thoroughly investigated that the root cause of a car crash rarely remains a mystery.

For a car crash, there's lots of easily accessible evidence at the scene of the accident (skid marks, debris trails, etc.), often including eyewitnesses. After the crash, the cars involved don't move much (compared to plummeting down from altitude).

Flight data recorders are used because air crashes are rare and expensive. Every single accident is analyzed on a cost-no-object basis because the accident costs in the region of $10^9. The results are fed back into everything from airplane design to pilot and ATC procedures. For car crashes, this is done in aggregate only.

The 'flight data' you want for a car accident is limited to finding out who caused it: something like 95% of car crashes are due to driver error, with no technical causes.

Speed and direction are the only technical parameters you need, and both can usually be derived from the available evidence already. So what you're really interested in is driver behavior. Your black box would need to be a video recorder, showing both the driver and the surroundings of the car. Even then you'd only get confirmation of what the available evidence already shows: that someone wasn't paying attention/made an error in judgement/filtered out the wrong information. It doesn't help very much to have more data available for every car accident.

Re:Are Flight Data Recorders mandatory?

[b4dc0d3r]

I agreed with you initially. Then I realized that air travel is a completely different problem, requiring a different solution. Try to justify your position and you'll see what I mean. Here's what I came up with, basically it would be an edge case, return on investment is going to be negative, that's why it's not already a law.

A 1985 study by K. Rumar, using British and American crash reports as data, found that 57% of crashes were due solely to driver factors, 27% to combined roadway and driver factors, 6% to combined vehicle and driver factors, 3% solely to roadway factors, 3% to combined roadway, driver, and vehicle factors, 2% solely to vehicle factors and 1% to combined roadway and vehicle factors.... A 1985 report based on British and American crash data found driver error, intoxication and other human factors contribute wholly or partly to about 93% of crashes

If 57% of the accidents in airplanes were caused by the passengers, we would not have even thought about black box recorders. Roughly 10% of accidents (not deaths) have the vehicle as a factor, and only a portion of those are fatalities.

Given that lots of people have problems with GPS and SpeedPass systems, how would you explain your desire to log everything a vehicle did just to catch a few data points in the off chance it's helpful? When a plane goes down, you don't have options like pulling over to the side of the air, or pointing towards an uphill slope to slow you down, or moving it into neutral, or other tricks - you can only hope you're near water. The people are likely to die, leaving no explanation of what happened. Driver deaths are much less likely due to safety features of the car, and the car generally not leaving the ground, so you usually have someone who can describe what went wrong. That's really where this idea falls apart - air incidents are very rare, but much more likely to result in total loss of anyone who can intelligently report on the event, proving the need for data recorders.

It's not the number of deaths which is important - the question is, how many of those could be prevented with additional logging? Evidence points to a much smaller number than you might think. Going with the other replies, 40,000 every year at 10% gives roughly 4,000 events where the vehicle is part of the problem. How many of those are mechanical vs. electronic? I'm going with a small percent, simply because of things like tire underinflation, or other maintenance issues which could also be rectified.

So you'd have to analyze the logs of every car crash, to see if anything strange happened or identify trends. Who's going to do that? Otherwise you let the logs die with the car, and wait until a mystery pattern like this emerges. We might see a problem faster, and identify the cause faster, but all of this time and money and effort prevents how many crashes? GM just did a recall for around 10 crashes with 1 fatality. All of this *might* have saved one person's life for that particular issue. What's the return on investment there?

In short, your proposal is the equivalent of the proctologist giving you an oral exam - it's good information to have, but useless in almost every case.

Re:Are Flight Data Recorders mandatory?

[Albanach]

Looks to me like he was right on the money, while you need to learn some reading comprehension skills.

I guess Geography wasn't your strong point at school. Here, let me tell you a secret. There are real people over those borders, not just dragons.

Re:Are Flight Data Recorders mandatory?

[bkaul01]

How many people were killed last year in aircraft accidents? Hundreds would be my guesstimate. How many in car accidents? Tens of thousands would be my guess.

The wiki reckons you are off by an order of magnitude. There's been over 40,000 auto deaths every year for the past decade.

... Off by an order of magnitude? His guess was right on the money for the US, though worldwide numbers there are on the order of a million per year. His guess on aircraft crash fatalities was probably a bit high for the US, though about right worldwide - hundreds up to around a thousand per year.

Re:Are Flight Data Recorders mandatory?

[Z00L00K]

The most important thing is WHY an accident occurs, not the blame for who is responsible.

If you can figure out WHY you can take preventive action.

As for traffic deaths - in 2008 the US had about 143 deaths per million while Sweden had 33 per million citizens. And you may say that the countries are different, but in reality they aren't that much different to say that you can't compare figures.

Re:Are Flight Data Recorders mandatory?

[david_thornley]

There are real people over those borders, not just slashdotters.

FTFY

Re:Are Flight Data Recorders mandatory?

[CompMD]

"I'm guessing that Flight Data Recorders are mandated by law for commercial aircraft."

I believe what you are looking for is 14 CFR FAR 91.609.

FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we stop with the boring Toyota FUD articles and get back to being Slashdot? This is getting annoying. Thanks!

And the other challenge...

[BrokenHalo]

...namely that million-dollar reward for finding the cause of unwanted acceleration is probably fairly safe if nobody will reveal their source code.

It would be interesting if this flushed a few Real Programmers out of the woodwork, but most of them are in retirement, fly-fishing for salmon by now.

Re:And the other challenge...

[acklenx]

"Real Programmers" good read - thanks

Anyone

[G4Cube]

got a crashed Prius to hack? If we can break DRM in a day.....

Surprising

[theArtificial]

Will Toyota stop at nothing?!

DMCA Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

So now Toyoa is being "accused" for using propietary software. It wasn't a long time ago when I read about some US association to declare open software "communism" and "hazardous to capitalism".

I would love to see a court case where Toyota will sue National Highway Traffic Safety Administration due violating DMCA when trying to pry the data out from the Toyota black boxes.

That'd be irony.

BTW: My sympathies are on victims' and their families' side. I am sorry for their loss.

BTW2: And in my opinion there should be an international law for making black boxes both obligatory and open format (not even tied to single company solutions like Bosch).

Plain text data

[flyingfsck]

Actually, the Toyota data is not encrypted at all. It is simply saved in plain text Hiragana...

Why should the owner get the data?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a recording device in the car intended for accident diagnosis, nothing else. Like the cockpit voice recorder in an airplane. If the car was equipped with a required-by-law voice recorder, and my spouse or teenager drives the car, I wouldn't be entitled to listen to their recorded conversations after the fact. This telemetry recording thing doesn't record conversations but it's still considered private data. It's accessible through a court order if necessary, and that's good enough.

Re:It could be that Toyota is just being responsib

[indytx]

All it takes is a court order. So essentially the only thing slowing the investigations would be an unwilling Federal government.

You're obviously new to how a "court order" works. If I'm in a lawsuit involving my Toyota, and I want data from my Toyota, I can get a court order for my Toyota. However, if in that same lawsuit I try to get a court order for every Toyota, Toyota the corporation is going to appeal any discovery order that it turn over all of the data from all of its cars, or even all of one model from one model year. It will appeal, and it will win. If you disagree with me on this, go sue your insurance company for a denied claim and then try to get access for all of its records of similar claims. It's simply not going to happen. As a practical matter, assuming that you could get an order for all of the EDR data, that doesn't mean much. If Toyota only has had only one laptop in the U.S.A. capable of reading the data and Toyota will only read the data with a court order, then for all practical purposes the data from most Toyota crashes is never recorded. It's just gone because there has been no physical way to record all of that data.

"There's only one laptop in the entire U.S.A. capable of reading the data" sounds like some very good lawyering to me. Toyota should have a company-wide "Hug Your Lawyer Day."

That's interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's interesting. Perhaps openness is related to quality... When Toyota's quality was high (back in the '90's, they used industry standard computer interfaces). Back then, Ford and GM were both pretty shoddy and they used proprietary software. Now, Toyota's quality definitely has dropped off (I saw it back in 2002 when a friend bought a new Celica and my decade older MR2 was higher quality) and they've gone proprietary. Ford and GM quality has definitely improved, and they've gone open... Hmmm. Coincedence, perhaps...

Re:That's interesting.

[mzs]

Huh? Back in the early '80s to mid '90s Toyota was all STAR, extremely proprietary. At the same time GM was simple which became OBD. Ford was all analog (think +/-10V and ADCs) and then went to a simple multiplexed scheme. The only 'standard' was the European makes that used BOSCH as the OEM, since they were all similar (even the connectors).

No the downfall of quality of Toyota was simply this. Up until the '70s they were not very good quality. They decided to improve this. Back then the paragon of quality was Mercedes. So Toyota bought a number of W116 chassis models and tore them apart. Then they ridiculously over engineered everything in the same style.

Now they wanted to become the sales leader in the world. They started letting their suppliers do more of the design and bought off the shelf. You could see the beginning of the end when the multicolored bolts disappeared and low quality cheap ones took their place in the late '90s.

Good

[pydev]

I'm happy that Toyota is taking data security and privacy seriously.

Language Barrier.....

[IHC Navistar]

I believe that Toyota's obstinence to providing such information to the concerned parties in the light of such serious safety issues is the result of a serious language barrier between Japanese and American English. Someone should provide the Japs with an accurate explaination of the following important sayings and terminology:

1) "We will screw you to the wall in a court of law",

2) "Gorilla Lawyer assrape",

3) "Pound me in the ass prison",

4) "Contempt Of Court",

5) "There is another nuke headed your way, in the form of a lawsuit",

6) "You don't have a choice",

7) "We're not in Japan",

8) "Supoena",

9) "De-listing"

and last, but certainly not least,

10) "North Korean Menace".

I believe that the clarification and explanation of the aforementioned terms would lead to the speedy resolution of the problems that are currently occurring with the Toyota Motor Corporation and it's products.

Ridiculous. Force auto makers to open source it!

[rcb1974]

Back in the old days, pretty much everything was mechanical, so you could feasibly dissect your car and see how everything worked. Now with computers, machine code, and embedded systems handling so many critical operations in your car, this has changed. Computers are much harder and practically impossible for engineers (who don't have huge budgets and laboratories) to dissect and reverse engineer. If the code were exposed, then it would be orders of magnitude easier for people who don't work at Toyota to figure out what is going on with unintended acceleration. It should be clear to lawmakers that:

1) All the code used in an automobiles or other system that can potentially threaten public safety should be required to be open source. All companies need to be subject to this law, not just Toyota. That way the code can be reviewed and studied by anyone who is interested in knowing how the systems work that they trust their lives with work. The law should apply to software driven (or hardware like microcontrollers and FPGAs that is flashed with software) medical devices or any code whose development is funded by taxpayer dollars. There should be some exceptions, such as software used in military applications. Don't want the enemy to have that. Bottom line in this case: we need to pass laws to force all automakers to publish all their code online so it can be peer reviewed by the people who use it.

2) The interface to automobile computers should be a widely used standard such as USB, not some proprietary interface that only 1 laptop in the USA can use. I should be able to just insert a USB stick in my car, wait for my car to download all the black box data, engine diagnostic codes, etc onto my USB stick in CSV (or other easily readable) files. Then once a light on my dashboard turns off, I'll know its safe to remove my USB stick so I can open up the files on my computer.

Nothing New Here

[gryf]

Until very recently it seems no manufacturer let the public into the 'black box' without a court order of some variety. In California, it was/is a legal requirement.

A few states are joining the debate. A California law that went into effect in July 2004 requires manufacturers to provide customers with information on black boxes in cars and states that the data cannot be obtained without a court order or the owner's permission.

See this old CNET story Rocky road for car 'black boxes'.

Toyota's lack of openess about data that imperils individual privacy is no skin off of my back. If Government Motors wants to penalize Toyota for it, perhaps it should be mentioned that mandating car electronics more accessible is a bad idea. Look at how Google got hacked by China.

Why fly by wire?

[soupforare]

How much is really being saved by not having linkages to the throttle body? How many more models and manufacturers are going to be affected by funky electronic throttle controllers? What the hell happens when the pots get dirty?

Re:Why fly by wire?

[Walter White]

I'm quite certain that they save enough to cover the cost of the system. Otherwise they would not do it. That's just a business fact.

Being able to control throttle transitions provides additional opportunities to reduce emissions. It also eliminates the need for extraneous parts to provide extra air/fuel mix on cold startup. The only additional parts needed for cruise control are the buttons to control it. Rev limiter can be implemented in the throttle control vs. cutting ignition. (Cars with fly by wire throttles just level off at max revs rather than bouncing off the rev limiter.) I'm sure there are other benefits like matching revs for smoother shifting, traction control, hill assist and so on.

Pots? That's mid 20th century technology. I'd be very surprised if they didn't use optical encoders.

Re:Why fly by wire?

[SagSaw]

Pots? That's mid 20th century technology. I'd be very surprised if they didn't use optical encoders.

May throttle-by-wire systems do, in fact, use potentiometers. Others use hall effect or inductive sensors to avoid the wear-out issues pots can suffer from (think noisy volume controls). IIRC, the CTS pedals involved in the recent Toyota recalls are in inductive sensor design. I'm not aware of any vehicle which uses an encoder (optical or mechanical) to sense pedal position.

US vs global

[1800maxim]

I think he meant worldwide, in which case he would be an order of magnitude off.

Re:US vs global

[Albanach]

Thank you, I guess I should have clarified that for those who think the world stops at the US border. I looked some more after posting. I found these figures from 1998. Numbers today are probably higher because of massively increased car use in the developing world.

REGION DEATHS
Africa 170,000
Americas 126,000
China 179,000
Eastern Med 71,000
Europe 107,000
India 217,000
SE Asia 118,000
W. Pacific 41,000
TOTAL 1,029,000

Let me turn my black box off

[davidwr]

However, if it is on I want to be able to read the data.

The only reason I should not be allowed to turn it off is if:

1) if I'm not the owner
2) if my insurance company has offered me a choice: Pay $FAIRANDREASONABLE and turn it off or pay $SOMEWHATLESS but leave it on and I take the discount. This is similar to my choice to use an anti-theft device.

I would also make an exception that I could not legally defeat any tamper-evident technology - if I have it on, it should be tamper-evident to prevent fraud. I could turn it off, I could tamper with it, I could load my own software, etc. but if I did, it would no longer be "certified" or usable in court.

After market chips

[griffinme]

Maybe I am confused. Hasn't this already been done by the after market chip makers?

  http://www.performancechipsdirect.com/ Just one of many makers I found.

Car nuts have been hacking cars much longer then hackers have been hacking software.

Both sides are true?

[Futurepower(R)]

I think both opposite opinions are true.

Vehicle computer systems are complex, yes.

However, the systems are sensibly divided. There are maybe 15 in a top-of-the-line vehicle, each with its own processors, sensors, devices, and code. Raising or lowering the windows can have no effect on the fuel delivery system.

Each system is kept as simple as possible. It's not difficult to understand the needs. It's not difficult to write vehicle code that is easy to understand.

Re:Both sides are true?

[e2d2]

Agreed. Systems will be isolated. When you combine systems you may get unexpected behavior but the lines of code number was a boogeyman used to show complexity. Not sure why the author didn't just say "the system is complex". Geeks like myself see that type of statement and discard everything because we see a possible error, hence all of their statements might be incorrect. In a technical crowd your statements will come back to haunt you, so one should shoot for accuracy. The author didn't see that.

Also to further add to your point - most of the systems that these cars are built on have been very throughly tested. So sure some low level system outside of their control might be to blame. But much more likely is it's their code that runs on these proven systems that is failing.

Simple fix, No need for Hacking/Cracking...

[s0litaire]

1) Learn to drive "Stick" / "Manual Clutch"
2) Toyota starts a free "Kamikaze" exchange program
3) Bring in your faulty Automatic Gearbox car for a nice new Stick-shift one.
4) No more runaway cards with sticking Gas peddles!!!
5) ???
6) Profit (Well live till you get home anyway)

Problem solved :D

re: black boxes and privacy

[King_TJ]

Initially, these automobile black boxes weren't even intended for use as "accident scene reconstruction aids". They started out as equipment the auto makers installed for their own internal use. (It makes a useful tool for their engineers and quality people to examine post-crash data. EG. The speed a car was traveling at time of impact, to see if their "5MPH bumper" was really holding up as intended at the rated speed.) Like most things though, as soon as people figured out they were able to collect and store this data, their eyes lit up and they all wanted a piece of it for their own purposes (government, lawyers, car insurance companies, etc.).

Now, I'm pretty sure this will pan out in the end with a federal govt. mandated "standard" for black boxes for ALL cars and trucks sold in the country, with a list of required data they must keep and a length of time they must snapshot all of it. (And given today's government, I think it's safe to say they'll throw in a new law, for good measure, that makes it a serious crime to tamper with the box or disable it.)

To be honest, yes, I think Toyota was hiding some information in some of these past court cases. They've said too many inconsistent things about the data they supposedly do or don't collect for me to believe their black boxes were changed around that often, or failed to collect obviously relevant data they claimed they weren't collecting at that time.) But like the O.P. said, all of this is just "smoke and mirrors" over the REAL issue of consumer privacy.

Reality is, folks: No matter WHAT some hidden recorder box captures in your vehicle as you drive, if the car has a serious design flaw and something goes wrong, people get injured or DIE. No black box in a car has EVER saved a person's life in an accident.

It's a military thing.

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> But, today, with the US government being the largest shareholder in GM, I would bet that life for Toyota is going to get really bad.

Let's be honest. The elephant in the room during the GM buyout was the production capacity. The United States cannot afford to lose the production capacity of GM, because in the event of a full scale sustained conventional war we would need its production capacity. The government buyout wasn't only about keeping money in Detroit or helping other GM stockholders or even the fact that the government often buys GM--it was absolutely necessary from the standpoint of defense. That it was done without bringing GM into the military-industrial complex is a good thing.

On a related issue, we should be treating Detroit like it got hit with Katrina. It's probably in worse shape than New Orleans at this point.

Regulation

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

They'll make it open as soon as we properly regulate it and require them to. And we should properly regulate it and require them to--a certain set of black box information should be publicly available for every car crash in the United States, and possibly the world, in order to identify common factors and trends. Yes, it's giving up a little privacy in exchange for an increased level of safety that there is even a black box in the car. But (1) the black box isn't going away any time soon short of a finding of a violation of Constitutional Law, and (2) the public interest in preventing accidents is more important than my interest in hiding my reckless driving. The only particularly bad thing is that insurance companies might use it to deny claims on illegal but safe driving, if the government lets them.

Re:Good for the criminals

[Shadyman]

I came here to say THIS. Open systems allow for the free flow of data, and as it applies to this case, if you caused a crash, you SHOULD get owned by the insurance companies. Considering how few times the NTSA/State police do accident reconstruction, this shouldn't be a worry for most people. The only time they do it is where there are severe injuries or death.

Also, for those commenters talking about modchips, etc... the "black box" is NOT the ECU. It is typically positioned in the middle of the car, under the center console. The ECU can be destroyed fairly easily, all things considered. An accident which destroys the black box in the middle of the car is a little harder.

Testify

[not_hylas( )]

You realize, I hope, that your car will testify against you in court.
Don't piss it off - it WILL Rick-roll your ass.

See: On Star

http://www.onstar.com/us_english/jsp/equip_vehicles/current_vehicles.jsp

Y'all like that commercial where On Star shuts your motor off and allow the Police to have their way with the driver?
(it's in the context of a stolen car)
Can't wait for the first person mistakenly tazed to death for blowing by a cruiser.
Misuse of this will soon be news.

Re:It could be that Toyota is just being responsib

[OrwellianLurker]

Yes, they could appeal, and yes, it could take a long time-- but that's how our legal system works. Long, heated debates ending in a hopefully lawful verdict. Are you trying to tell me the Federal government can't order Toyota to reveal the data on all the cars they are investigating?

Re:Ridiculous. Force auto makers to open source it

[CompMD]

"Bottom line in this case: we need to pass laws to force all automakers to publish all their code online so it can be peer reviewed by the people who use it."

No, because (to paraphrase Clarkson) you'll end up with some guy named Keith who watches Eastenders who will decide that he knows what he's looking at and will say something is completely wrong, wasting the community's collective time.

"The interface to automobile computers should be a widely used standard such as USB"

Ask yourself this question: "Do I trust my life to a USB cable?" We have CAN, it is a fault tolerant, safety critical bus. Connecting and disconnecting devices from a CAN bus is more complicated than USB. Safety critical systems do not touch non-critical systems, you're suggesting violating one of the fundamental rules of control theory.

Re:Ridiculous. Force auto makers to open source it

[rcb1974]

Blah. My sons insulin pump has a USB cable. That pump could easily kill him if it decided to pump too much insulin in him. Lots of life support systems have USB ports. Nothing new about that. Cars should too. If it is designed properly, then no signal on the USB port would put the driver in danger. The car's computer wouldn't read files off the USB drive, it would only write some plain text files onto it. They could even electrically isolate the circuitry that talks to the thumb drive with an optical link. That way if you put 10000V on the usb thumb drive, the main car computer is unharmed.

Re:I guess we could keep that property, but get mo

[scdeimos]

It's more likely retrievable through the OBD-II connector, which is required to be fitted in all new vehicles sold in the US.

Re:It could be that Toyota is just being responsib

[Radio_active_cgb]

I don't think so. With just one laptop (and likely its operator) covering the the US (North America?), it would take a day or two to bring the laptop to the vehicle. Multiply by the (likely increasing) number of court orders, and now you're dealing with delays just getting the data read out. This assumes the the data was even stored for later retrieval (and I suspect it wasn't).

The way the story initially broke, I think they've been aware of their unintended acceleration problems for a while, and was trying to resolve them quietly. They were successful until one of their executives blundered by admitting that they had a problem, then it blew up in their face. Now they're being forced into allocating more resources to deal with existing engineering problems, and additional public relations issues.

I think Toyota just didn't see the potential need for greater post-development support, or they would have been better prepared.

s/w used on public roads...

[airdrummer]

_must_ be publicly reviewable, allowing many eyeballs to easily (& legally;-) discover errors.

i remember when any s/w installed on classified systems _had_ to have a source code walkthru...now they've succumbed to microserfdum:-( and i understand that most cars' lans run an industrial (n/c) version on windoze:-P

the open source concept is the solution to nhtsa's problem: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/02/23/2022204/NHTSA-Has-No-Software-Engineers-To-Analyze-Toyota

now is the time for hackers to assume their civic duty & demand access to all s/w that operates in public;-)