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Doordash deserves it's fate (poptalk.scrubbles.tech)
submitted 2 years ago* by to c/mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
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2 pizzas, a small order of breadsticks, and wanted to splurge and get cinnamon sticks.

Pizzas are a "Buy one get one deal!" at 13 bucks a pizza. Figured what the hell, I'll splurge on desert then with the deal. Get to checkout... hold on a minute.... 50 dollars for pizza?! Wait a minute 80 dollars after fees and taxes?!

Usually I only use Doordash for finding something, then I order direct from the store. I just saw the sweet "buy one get one" deal and thought eh, fine I'm here. Right, that's why I stopped using door dash. I'm not spending 80 dollars on freaking pizza. I'll just go pick it up and spend a quarter of that price.

At least I would have saved the $3 dollar delivery fee. Phew. Thanks DoorDash.

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[–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

If the goal is to steal the cars then all it takes is to order them to go somewhere while disabling (perhaps via DDoS) the logging and other telemetry servers that allow them to track the vehicles. Once they’re stopped where the criminals want them they can break in and disable the power supply to shut them down completely, then tow/push them into shipping containers to send overseas for modification and resale.

There already exist international criminal gangs who do this sort of thing (edit: for regular, not self driving cars). Think of the resources of an organization the size of the Gulf Cartel. They operate their own cell phone network in Mexico. They’ve got hundreds of engineers. They absolutely could do an operation like this.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why would the onboard software ever allow (or even support the ability) to disable connectivity?

    The tracking doesn't even need to happen on the vehicle itself, given that they're likely to use cellular connections the tracking from the cell company can locate it.

    My point is that there's no benefit to stealing a self-driving car over a regular car, so why would these gangs switch? None of the self-driving features will work when it can't connect to the network, and none of the extra parts have any sort of resale value separate from their intended use. They may as well continue stealing regular cars.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Who said anything about software? Cut the wires to the battery! That will power down any car no matter what.

    The benefit to stealing a self driving car is that it’s a self driving car! What’s the retail price of self driving cars? $100k? More? The whole premise of the self-driving taxi and delivery companies is that the cars are too expensive for the consumer market so they operate on a rental basis instead. If self-driving cars became a mass market commodity like regular cars then thieves would just steal them the old fashioned way.

    Of course the self-driving features work without the network. GPS works without a cell network. It’s a receive-only protocol. The only thing that won’t work is the remote command and control dispatch. That would have to be hacked around.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Cutting the wires will work, but it's already recorded it's location and transmitted that data by the point you get to that point.

    There's no way that the self-driving car companies won't require regular check ins on the network to function in self-driving mode. You can't even play many single player video games these days without an internet connection.

    Essentially it won't be a self-driving car once you've stolen it, and it may not even be a regular car either because some of the proposed models don't even have steering wheels or pedals. Even if you did crack the software, it's not going to be loaded with any sort of relevant self-driving functionality for <insert 3rd world country where they don't check vehicle registration here>, it won't have maps, it won't be trained on the local signs, traffic lights, road markings, etc. it may not even operate on the correct side of the road.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    It’s transmitted that data but the gang has blocked the server from receiving it. I mentioned that earlier. This whole operation doesn’t go down unless you take out the eyes and ears of the company.

    All that other stuff can be replaced. It’s still a car with a $15,000 battery in it and drivetrain and all the sensors and electronics.

    And if the hackers can break in and steal data, they can steal the source code. Then they have all the keys to the kingdom.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Then 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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.

    Fundamentally, the reason self-driving cars are a bigger target than regular cars is that they leave no witnesses if you can disable the surveillance/logging. You don’t have to disable the cell towers for that, just the real time surveillance (just the company servers). Once the car goes dark it can no longer be tracked.

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