XKCD: It's more than a comic

I used NoScript before Firefox 57, but at that version they broke it. Then I switched to ScriptSafe, which is even better than the original NoScript was.

edited 16th Feb '18 7:43:24 AM by petersohn

Funny thing, I've recently started seeing ads for what appears to be a Muslim dating site on youtube. Why google thinks I'm in the target audience for that, I have no idea.

2018 CVE List.

Hilarious. As someone who works a lot with x86 assembly, I found the one about having too many x86 instructions to be quite true.

I particularly enjoyed the running, escalating gag of things Apple products are vulnerable to.

While I liked them all, my personal favorite is

edited 19th Feb '18 3:39:44 PM by Zyffyr

Self-Driving Issues.

Reminds me of discussions I sometimes have with my co-workers on how easy it would be to commit an act of terrorism despite the various security measures that were put in place after the Paris shootings. The conclusion is usually that we are lucky there are not more terrorists, and that the ones we have are not cleverer.

Our society functions largely on the premise that most people, in normal circumstances, do not try to murder each other. We have moral agency and a shared value system that allows us to, say, cross the street in front of a car knowing that the driver most likely won't run us down.

The problem with a self-driving car is that it has no morality. It's just following programmed instructions. The moral responsibility is shifted to a much more vague and nebulous position. If we step into the street in front of such a car, we know that it's programmed not to hit us, but we can't count on its moral value system to reinforce that instruction.

Frankly, self-driving cars will still be ten times (or more) safer than human drivers, but it's hard to get over that psychological barrier. And what if some yahoo paints weird lines on the road, or drops a cutout of a pedestrian onto a highway?

edited 21st Feb '18 4:22:28 AM by Fighteer

As it is, one of the major issues with self-driving cars is that they're too safe. Parked cars are still a major issue, for example. As humans, we see a parked car and generally assume that it will not swerve into the road because we pick up on a dozen different indicators such as no driver in the seat, no taillights illuminated, etc. Current autonomous cars, which largely operate on radar and similar techniques, don't get those cues, so a self-driving car will slow down, or even stop, if it thinks there's a chance that car could swerve onto the road. Supposedly, that's part of why the people who operate these autonomous vehicles get to claim that none of the accidents are their fault. Their car is being safe. It's the car behind them who plowed into them because they suddenly stopped for fear of a parked car.

As for general programmed vehicles, I usually fear a bit for malicious programming (someone tweaking the code so that, for example, an autonomous car stops considering pedestrians as obstacles for stopping, but rather something that will slow it) but more for mistaken programming (anything from someone leaving off a decimal point or a negator to simply not considering all of the cases), resulting in the car following its programming exactly and causing tragedy. And yes, humans can do that too. The Milgram experiment shows humans will follow instructions even after they know that it's wrong.

Oh, I GUARANTEE that someday, there will be a malicious virus that will cause a horrible self-driving car pileup. Its just a matter of time.

To this day I have no idea what the mass hack allowing you to literally do that with every car in the vicinity (even parked ones) in Watch_Dogs 2 is good for.

Or maybe it's because I believe hitting people with a remote controlled car is supposed to be a finely controlled thing.

It's supposed to sow delightful, cathartic chaos. Worth noting is that the cars in Watch_Dogs 2 aren't self-driving per se, or at least they all seem to require driver attention to operate. It's just that they apparently have the capability to be autonomous, even though that's not used in day-to-day operations. The logic for this is just a tad flimsy.

Well, Burnout Paradise had an entire city without any humans to be found, including in the cars, which seemed to be self driving for the sake of it.

In Fate of the Furious, the villain hacks into a bunch of cars in a parking garage and has them cause chaos.

It's very weird because those cars aren't self-driving, and even if they were hacked the emergency brake would physically prevent them from moving. The F&F movies are deliberately ridiculous, of course, but that point about the emergency brake was the one thing my suspension of disbelief couldn't get past.

Honestly, I could give the brakes a pass as well. Most people I know with Automatics only set the emergency brake on hills.

I, for one, have never ever set my emergency brake in a parking garage. I've only done it on one particular hill, or by accident.

Regardless, the worst you could do by hacking the electronics in my car (while I'm not operating it) is drain my battery. Despite being an "automatic" transmission, the gear shift is a physical device controlled by a physical stick. The car is not gonna move unless it leaves park.

While I'm driving though, I don't know enough about power steering or power braking to know if a theoretical technomancer could get me in a wreck. That is if you controlled every piece of electronics. I can reasonably assume that neither system has a wifi-accessible override.

edited 21st Feb '18 4:50:55 PM by Brickman

Side note, we should set parking brakes more often to ensure they're available when we need them.

Well, I was wondering during the movie if New Yorkers just didn't set parking brakes, so I guess that answers that question.

I grew up in a hilly city and consider putting the parking break on as second nature, despite rarely driving.

edited 21st Feb '18 5:37:27 PM by Galadriel

Quite a few new cars on sale these days come with electronic parking brakes, but I certainly don't know if those are connected to the ECU. And I think they are newer than those featured in Fate of the Furious as well.

Plus pressing a button is way less satisfying than pulling the lever.

The "stomp" style emergency brakes as with the Volkswagen Vanagons were pretty cool too.

Wait, you don't put on the parking brake most of the time? Sounds like asking for trouble. A several tonne car on the loose is a dangerous thing.

The "park" setting on an automatic transmission will hold the car stationary under almost any circumstance. If it fails, then yeah, there'll be a problem, but no more or less so than if the parking brake also fails.

The point of it, I suppose, is to have redundant systems, but the failure of either one is so rare that most people would never encounter it in the course of their lives.

If you're parking on a steep hill, then setting the brake is probably a good idea, of course.

edited 22nd Feb '18 4:24:04 AM by Fighteer

I have never used a manual parking brake, in several decades of driving. Of course, I live in a relatively flat area.

Ditto. I don't think I've ever parked on a hill steep enough to warrant a parking brake.

Is everyone on this thread from Kansas or something?

I'm from Indiana. 'S flat.

The closest I've come to feeling claustrophobic was when I was driving through Tennessee and realized that when I wasn't looking, the horizon had jumped up half a mile in the air and I had walls of rock on all sides of me.

I now live in central Texas, and it's annoyingly hilly, but mostly not insane, except for all the parking lots that sit on a level two feet above road level and have entrances so steep that I always scrape one end of my car or the other.