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GM Hooking 30,000 Robots To Internet To Keep Factories Humming (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: General Motors has connected about a quarter of its 30,000 factory robots to the internet, and the largest U.S. automaker already is reaping the benefits of less down time. In the last two years, GM has avoided 100 potential failures of vehicle-assembling robots by analyzing data they sent to external servers in the cloud, Mark Franks, director of global automation, said at a conference in Chicago on Monday. Connectivity is preventing assembly line interruptions and robot replacements that can take as long as eight hours. Internet monitoring allows GM to order parts when it detects they're wearing out instead of having to store them at the factory. That reduces inventory and saves money, Franks said. Hooking robots to the internet for preventive maintenance is just the start of a spurt of new robotics technology, Franks said. GM is using robots that can work safely alongside humans in the factory that produces the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid, he said.
...the plausible deniability.
"No, your honor, we didn't intentionally program our vehicles to cheat the emissions testing process. Some evil hacker must have done it to make us look bad!"
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Skynet.
Because this is how you get Terminators, GM.
Why would they "connect them to the Internet?" There have to be a very limited number of robot suppliers, why wouldn't they just have VPNs specific to each to handle these service needs? Going through the Internet via a secure VPN is very different than connecting to the Internet.
(having said that, it's more than likely that's exactly what they're doing, and the summary/article has simplified it to the point of just being wrong)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So they'd rather NOT keep spare parts at the factory for a robot that can shutdown an assembly line for 8 hours? Fucking bean counter logic. How about keep a whole spare robot, or two.
Give 4chans weaponized autism 20 minutes and you'll soon have a factory full of racist, sexist robots that deny the holocaust
Good people go to bed earlier.
... 3 ... 2 ...
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Hope they pay the robo's enough so they can buy a GM vehicle.. waidaminit isn't gm making self driving cars.. so why should robo's buy gm vehicles? somethings not quite right here.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
...so the Russians and Chinese can run the robots.
Hope the internet security of those plants is better than what they're currently installing in cars.
Just imagine the machines in those plants getting compromised like those cheap Chinese
IP Camera's that DDOS'd the world back in June 2016.
I for one welcome our robot overlords
Seriously, the first time the manufacturer doesn't have a part in stock, they're fucked -- unless they're still keeping a supply at a distribution center somewhere.
The costs of relying on someone else's reliability instead of your own redundancy is that the number of situations that get out of your hands increases dramatically.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I'm surprised this one isn't tagged "What could possibly go wrong?"
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...when the first script-kiddie gets in and does some firmware "upgrades".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why? Because they don't know the words?
Have gnu, will travel.
This isn't internet connectivity being added to each robot, it's more like an intranet that connect to a single server per factory that has one job: sending data over the net to a specified destination. The destination holds all the info for all the factories and allows factories to have their part inventory managed from a central location. To actually change what the robot does, you would need to hack the factory server and the robot's computer. The good thing about this setup is that it's unlikely to need maintenance or even patching because it's so incredibly basic. This means it's easy to lockdown the server that actually faces the Internet to do it's one thing: send data. Considering the factories are their bread and butter, I have a hard time seeing them skimping on security for the factories. However, I could see the factory management server getting hacked if it uses some bonehead design like it runs on IIS or something. The only thing you can really do though is wreak havoc with their part inventory.
TL;DR: hacking is unlikely though hacking the robot computers and reprogramming the robots would require a state-sponsored level of hacking.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You know, it only seems to take one line in a Slashdot post, out of context, to drive people batty here. I'm seeing a long stream of posts that seem to believe that GM just took all of these robots and plugged them directly into a cablemodem without any firewalling or other security, making it effortless for some dork to simply go fuck with the production lines.
Okay. So, there's "connected to the Internet" as in you have a connection to the Internet...like I am using to post this. I'm behind a firewall, with both ingress and egress filtering. But if I weren't connected, I wouldn't be able to send/receive email, I wouldn't be able to browse the web...you get the picture. I am connected, but it doesn't mean that people can just lay into my computer with wild abandon and hack me. Then there's "CONNECTED to tha' motherfucking INTERNET," without security, without security monitoring, etc. That's bad...and yes, if GM had done that then all kinds of bad things would happen because few automation systems are particularly robust from a security perspective. But that's not what GM has done. Connected securely or connected insecurely...both are actually a state of being 'connected to the Internet.'
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
It goes like this: any device you connect to the Internet will be hacked, no matter what security you apply to it and no matter how many levels of encryption. The problem is unsolvable, and any attempt at a solution brands you as a fool. The Internet of Things is even more evil than Apple or Uber.
bricked doesn't sound that bad... in the worst case scenarios the attacker gets in, updates the firmware... and the robots keep building stuff.
Industry of things 4.0
etc. etc. etc.....
aaaaaaa
Why do people insist on putting things on the internet. We all know that one day it will screw up with some kidde trying to hack them all.
If they want to monitor then why can't they do it on their own network and their own inhouse servers.
Having a fire-walled server that collects one-way telemetry from the robots and transmit this to a cloud server, does no mean they are connected 'live' to the internet.
Why would anything of this require an internet connection? You can do all of that over a local network.
Actually, in the worst case-scenario, the robots damage their hardware as a result from changed safety-parameters and have to be completely replaced. Similar things have already happened with SCADA systems. "Bricked" is less severe, it just means that a direct, physical restoration of the original firmware has to be done before the robots can be used again.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hooking a bunch of robots to the internet. What could possibly go wrong? Except something like a Stuxnet attacking them from a rogue nation like North Korea or Iran. Sending entire production into disarray. Great ideal GM, clueless.
30,000 factory robots connected to the internet they want? What could possibly go wrong!
I want to see the video of all those hacked robots dancing like the shuttle on Red Dwarf. Too bad they are bolted down so it will just be like tv commercials.
Calling those 30,000 workers 'robots' doesn't sound very nice to me. I'm pretty sure we've got a more 'PC' name for such people these days...
... General Motors has connected about a quarter of its 30,000 factory robots to the internet ...
I mean, really, what can possibly go wrong in this scenario? Did GM at least have some common sense remaining to assure each robot has an off switch?
Yea, uhuh.. This is going to end well. Why can't they just have a local network, with an IT crew. I guess they ran out of sanity.
No, the worst case really is an alteration of the code for the robot. Remove the soft-interlock halts and allow a robot to move while a human is in its zone. Human/Robot contact is rarely good for the soft squishy one.
Just wait until the robots discover cat videos
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
This is a car company - and since they don't think infosec is important in their connected vehicles what security will they implement for the robots? I can just see this going very wrong.