Comment on Doordash deserves it's fate
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 week agoThen the gang is going to have to take out both the self-driving car company AND the cellphone company at the same time. It’s not just one getting the data, and again it’s going to get noticed immediately if cars start going missing and data is being blocked. They may get ahold of a few dozen cars if they try to do it quickly, but they won’t get even hundreds.
The battery may worth something, but it’s a lot of effort to steal a car just to get a $15k battery. Criminal gangs aren’t stealing 5 year old Kia Niros for resale across the globe, they generally target vehicles worth 3-10x that much.
There’s no “source code” for self driving cars in the sense that a video game has source code. The cars have some normal code yes, but the self-driving portion is a trained machine learning model that is essentially a black box. It takes millions of compute hours on high end graphics cards along with millions of hours of driving data to generate a new version of that model. Stealing the existing driving model still won’t make it work in West Africa or the Middle East. Stealing the training data wouldn’t help get it driving there either, they’d have to collect millions of hours of local training data for each destination.
It would be easier for these gangs to start their own self-driving company.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I mean who knows. Maybe they just steal whatever valuable parts they can carry and dump the rest.
The model has to be stored in the car for it to work. I mean can you imagine the car driving along and a network interruption causes the self-driving system to be unresponsive for a second? That could cause a crash immediately!
So then if the model is stored in the car itself it can be stolen and sold to a rival self-driving car company in Russia or what have you. And in that case they could definitely repurpose the entire stolen car itself. They just need to replace the client code with their own so that the car connects to their servers.
Besides, the model isn’t going to have maps or server connection stuff built into it. The maps are external and part of the GPS navigation, so those can be replaced. And all the command and control stuff is just conventionally programmed client software that can be redirected to another server or even a server hosted locally within the car itself for autonomous driving.