On 11/25/21 17:11, Steve Litt wrote:
[snip]
> Imagine if they made a car with the engine compartment welded shut, and
> gave you a little cockpit in the passenger compartment to control a
> robot inside the engine compartment that would do maintenance and
> repairs.

That's not too far off from new cars as they are today. They are lousy
with sensors and everything is tied directly or indirectly to the
dealer, either through proprietary programs + proprietary protocols or
service contracts or both. You can't change your own oil though I think
changing the wiper blades on your own is still allowed. And by "you" I
mean the ostensible owner or an independent repair shop.

The cars are not recognized as computer systems, but as Cory Doctorow
pointed out they are a computer you put your body into. I have only a
weak grasp of the situation, having kept my head in the sand as long as
I could, but I think two non-excusive approaches to solving the car
software / protocol problem might be through software liability (as
outlined by Geer and Kamp [1]) and through the ongoing attempts to
restore the "right to repair" as led by Rossmann [2], in particular the
latter which is picking momentum in regards to heavy farm equipment.

/Lars

[1] Transcript, "Cybersecurity as Realpolitik", Dan Geer:
     http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt

     Video:
     https://youtu.be/nT-TGvYOBpI

     "The Software Industry IS STILL the Problem: The time
     is (also) way overdue for IT professional liability"
     Poul-Henning Kamp (2021)
     https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3487019.3489045

     "The Software Industry IS the Problem:
     The time has come for software liability laws."
     Poul-Henning Kamp (2011)
     https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2030258

[2] https://www.fighttorepair.org/