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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.
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
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.
You can think the IRS for that kind of crap. The company will get taxed on the value of the spare parts in inventory at the end of the year.
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.
Why? Because they don't know the words?
Have gnu, will travel.
Save a penny, lose a million. That is what MBAs do best. No understanding of anything and "normal operation" as the only optimization target. As a result, no survivability. While cleaning up after the results of such incompetence is a major part of my work and is actually often quite interesting (and I am expensive enough that nobody tries to micro-manage me or such idiocy), the sheer amount of stupidity at work in modern corporate cultures and management approaches is staggering and it seems to be getting worse. In many large corporations, they do not even recognize clear existential threats anymore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
We must generate best-of-breed web-readiness to be able to scale ubiquitous e-commerce to utilize proactive systems to deliver frictionless deliverables for the innovate B2C web services.
aaaaaaa
I see you don't understand how the U.S. tax system works. The people in Congress determine the tax laws and what can and cannot be taxed. The IRS is merely the middleman with little discretion and even that is subject to judicial review.