cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55598715
‘Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed By Mozilla — Including Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota — Flunks Privacy Test
Originally found on [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55598715
‘Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed By Mozilla — Including Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota — Flunks Privacy Test
Originally found on [email protected]
Ah, but this is a different discussion. You want to be able to run modified software in a vehicle.
Then the question becomes an architectural one. Which Software components do you actually want to modify and still be street legal? In theory a modular structure can be build where all homologation and safety relevant limits are fixed and monitor the other non critical components. These non critical components could be changed without needing new homologation (you know, like „apps“).
You could also make the other ones modifiable with the limitation of losing street legality. So you could only run it on closed tracks or private land. Just like manufacturers do today.
What good would be an open source community EV (that is what the title speaks of) if there is no way for a single person or the community itself to modify and install the code on the EV? You would have no way of knowing that the version running in the car is identical to the source code provided, so having the code would be moot from a security and privacy standpoint.
Yes, you could put everything concerning street legality into a closed and signed hardware black box, more or less how it is done with the mobile communication hardware in smartphones, but street legality touches so many systems and functions that most of the cars software would be closed. So we are back where we are now.
For most persons who think about open source they have in mind that they are able to freely install the open source software on their devices, and yes I know that this is not part of the open source definition as written for example in https://opensource.org/osd but IMHO it should be added to it.
Signed software does not equal blackbox. You can still verify that the software in the vehicle is the same as the provided one (download the software from the vehicle and compare checksums for example).
Again, there must be software parts that must pass homologation to be allowed to run on public roads. The same is true for a lot of things, your laptop for example has lots of firmware blocks that you are not allowed to change because of regulations (emc and emi for example).
And that is a good thing. Trust me, you don’t want untested software on the street, risking lives. That’s why vehicle testing is done first on closed roads.
You can’t just download the software from the device and compare checksums, because the software downloaded would have to be signed and that would change the checksum. Oh and you could not be sure that the software downloaded even is the software the runs at all and not only a decoy supplied by the interface used to download the software from the car. All you could compare would the signed binary blob you downloaded from the car with the signed binary blob you downloaded from the homepage. Even if both of them would be identical you could not validate that they are identical to a binary build from the source code.
And I never said I want untested software on the streets, I have said nothing at all about my stance regarding the regulation and certification of car electronics, because my arguments have nothing to do at all with my personal positions on that matter.
All I said is that you can’t have an true and fully open source EV, not in Germany or most likely all of Europe anyway, because you would as good as never get such a car certified and street legal. Not without huge limitations on the “open source” part of the open source EV. And such limitations would render any ideas of open source for an EV moot, there is no benefit for having an open source car when the hardware is under lockdown by the manufacturer/law.
I am making a argument about the plausibility and rationale of an open source EV, is it reasonable to invest time, thoughts and effort into something like that or not. And I say that it is not, not at all. It would only create a situation where a community of programmers makes a huge invest in time and work to create something that in the end only the companies benefit from.
We are not really on different sides of the argument, not with the car part at least. We maybe have different definitions of open source, at least it seems so.