Slashdot Mirror
Uber Hires Hackers Who Remotely Killed a Jeep
An anonymous reader writes: The past several weeks have been rife with major vulnerabilities in modern cars, but none were so dramatic as when Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek tampered with the systems on a moving Jeep Cherokee. Now, Miller and Valasek have left their jobs to join a research laboratory for Uber. It's the same lab that became home for a number of autonomous vehicle experts poached from Carnegie Mellon University. From the article: "As Uber plunges more deeply into developing or adapting self-driving cars, Miller and Valasek could help the company make that technology more secure. Uber envisions autonomous cars that could someday replace its hundreds of thousands of contract drivers. The San Francisco company has gone to top-tier universities and research centers to build up this capability."
now, we have the name for our band.
Uber envisions being able to mysteriously stop Google self-driving cars that aren't on the Uber payroll :)
You mean to fear mongers who forgot to mention they needed prior access to the jeep in order to then swap out the firmware. Autonomous cars are for the lazy and the inept
It's a perfectly cromulent word
Who will give us the first Johnny cab. Uber or Google? We just need to have them ready before we get people to Mars.
Why is offering someone a job poaching?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
That's Republican-style logic right now. No, Uber hired them to make normal cars even more dangerous to try to get fewer people to own cars in a massive scam to force us to use Uber. Their motivations are all money money money. Just like the rest of their Republican kind.
Uber All Us [barely suppresses heil to Travis Kalanick - ala dr strangelove]
It now seems clear to me that Uber wants to be a provider of autonomous livery vehicles. No wonder they don't seem overly concerned with their employee -- I mean independent contractor -- satisfaction: they plan to get rid of them as soon as possible.
The company who can speak the "language" of these robotic drivers (and prevent others from communicating with them) will be King.
autonomous cars that could someday replace its hundreds of thousands of contract drivers
Yes, the fever dream of capital: eliminate labor costs.
Now if you drive for the competition, and your car happens to break down...you've been Ubered!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Charlie & Chris are security researchers, they're both incredibly accomplished and respected in the security community. Sure, they "hacked" the Jeep (amongst many other things in their careers), and I'm sure they don't mind being called hackers (I wouldn't), but I think the title almost gives the impression that they're a couple of mischievous amateurs who got lucky.
I'm actually glad to see companies like Uber hire smart researchers like this. I know that several other companies (Apple, Google, Tesla) also put a high priority on hiring talented security people. Hopefully this is a positive sign of things to come. And hopefully Chris and Charlie will continue to poke & prod things until they break.
(Disclaimer: I've met Charlie on multiple occasions & we share a good mutual friend; I've not met Chris but I've seen him talk)
This is the business model they're using: set up a service in which pseudo-independent contractors do all your work for you, while you aren't liable for their wellbeing or behavior while under your command, get super rich and fat off other people's sweat while robbing professionals of their livelihoods (the taxi driver's,) by undercutting them which you can do because the rules they are obliged to follow don't apply to your "independent" contractors, then use THAT money to fire all your workers, replacing them with robots. In essence become your own former employees' competition, and do to THEM the same thing they helped YOU to do to people who used to do this job for a living.
Call it "disruption". Profit, then buy a small island somewhere and leave the mess you created to other, better people to have to slog through and figure out how to fix.
At the end of the day, if you ignore all the irrelevancies, and trivialities of detail, if you just FOLLOW THE MONEY, you'll see that what happens is, these people, who are basically financial or economic hackers, exploit what are basically security holes or flaws in the economic operating system, steal a bunch of files, (money,) and then disappear. They're thieves, in other words, and the "drivers" in this case, their unwitting accomplices.
And people think somehow gay marriage or abortion or school prayer is the problem?
Sheesh!
Sehr intelligent
just like the good old days. digitally designed throttle and fuel injection response.
The self-driving car is very much going to project that sinks Uber. It's an enterprise so far outside their core business, with such a sheer volume of money required to bring to fruition, and they're just not going to get there. Moreover, it's not at all clear that their financials support being able to back a project like this if it doesn't bring quick and immediate success.
Google are probably the current leaders in this field. And to their credit, there's a logical value there - Google's business is, essentially, AI - which is what the problem boils down to (and integrates nicely with the rest of their search business - object identification, categorization etc.).
When investors start wanting to cash out, Uber is going to wind up sliced and diced and a lot less valuable then it looked on paper due to projects like this which they can't possibly fulfill.