<story><title>Apparent hackers behind Kia ransomware attack demand millions in Bitcoin</title><url>https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39309/the-apparent-hackers-behind-kias-ransomware-attack-are-demanding-millions-in-bitcoin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimmyswimmy</author><text>I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I suppose it&amp;#x27;s the sense of wastefulness, or perhaps the idea that the extra widget could break and take down other things along with it.&lt;p&gt;Consider how you would do this with a battery. The battery has to have extra cells in order to have extra capacity, and the software allows the user to use or not use the extra cells if you pay for the privilege. But if one of those extra cells fails, the entire battery pack does as well.&lt;p&gt;In your example, the hardware IS configured differently, and there&amp;#x27;s no sense of waste or increased failure therein. You bought a car with a crappier engine or a smaller tank, and that&amp;#x27;s what is in it. There&amp;#x27;s no software key to fix it. Something about the idea of software letting you access hardware you already paid for (even if you didn&amp;#x27;t pay for the software to use it), just feels wrong.</text></item><item><author>prostoalex</author><text>&amp;gt; allowed full usage of their battery.&lt;p&gt;I thought on the checkout page Tesla was pretty explicit that they were selling a 75 kWh model with discounts thrown in for artificially software-restricted 60 kWh version.&lt;p&gt;If an ICE brand sold two trims of the same vehicle - the cheaper one with the smaller tank or worse fuel economy, is it as appalling and aren&amp;#x27;t they endangering the drivers of the budget version?</text></item><item><author>grawprog</author><text>The whole idea of an internet connected car that constantly &amp;#x27;phones home&amp;#x27; without any easy way to bypass or disable is kind of mind boggling to me.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t understand why after this people weren&amp;#x27;t in an uproar.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;tesla-battery-irma-upgrade.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;tesla-battery-ir...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;When Tesla decided generously to temporarily grant residents fleeing a hurricane an upgrade that allowed full usage of their battery.&lt;p&gt;People&amp;#x27;s lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock.&lt;p&gt;The fact that it&amp;#x27;s come to that is completely appalling. When the manufacturer of your car has the power to save your life because if they didn&amp;#x27;t they&amp;#x27;d suffer bad publicity is  disgusting.&lt;p&gt;And the fact is, the only reason why hackers are able to gain access to vehicles, the only reason for any of it is because companies have decided cars need to be a service provided by them so they can keep making money after the initial purchase.&lt;p&gt;People buy cars so they can travel freely without relying on others. Making cars reliant on a third party server for something as basic as the ingition goes against the entire premise of owning a car.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;As we noted previously, it means that many Kia owners may be unable to remotely unlock their vehicles or warm them up during an especially nasty winter storm hitting much of the country this week.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cars had remote unlock and start &lt;i&gt;decades&lt;/i&gt; ago (if not OEM, then aftermarket systems were and still are widely available), with &lt;i&gt;zero&lt;/i&gt; dependence on what appears to be the company&amp;#x27;s servers. The only advantage I can fathom for being able to unlock and start a car over the Internet instead of only by being within radio range seems more oriented towards attackers and other user-hostile scenarios (&amp;quot;your car has now become a subscription, please pay to unlock it&amp;quot;). Have we gone backwards...?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jay_kyburz</author><text>It feels wrong because it is wrong. When you buy physical things, you should be paying the total cost for the hardware to be manufactured, distributed, and finally recycled or disposed of. When you buy something, you should own the hardware and should be free to do what you want with it.&lt;p&gt;I would like governments to make this clear in law, but I understand why some people feel might feel this is an overreach.&lt;p&gt;We can try and avoid buying hardware that has software restrictions, but without laws ensuring we can run whatever software we want on our hardware, manufacturers will take these rights away from us.&lt;p&gt;We are living in an age of environmental catastrophe, and I think we need to appreciate our physical things more, build them to last, and have laws that help us get the most out of the things we build.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apparent hackers behind Kia ransomware attack demand millions in Bitcoin</title><url>https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39309/the-apparent-hackers-behind-kias-ransomware-attack-are-demanding-millions-in-bitcoin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimmyswimmy</author><text>I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I suppose it&amp;#x27;s the sense of wastefulness, or perhaps the idea that the extra widget could break and take down other things along with it.&lt;p&gt;Consider how you would do this with a battery. The battery has to have extra cells in order to have extra capacity, and the software allows the user to use or not use the extra cells if you pay for the privilege. But if one of those extra cells fails, the entire battery pack does as well.&lt;p&gt;In your example, the hardware IS configured differently, and there&amp;#x27;s no sense of waste or increased failure therein. You bought a car with a crappier engine or a smaller tank, and that&amp;#x27;s what is in it. There&amp;#x27;s no software key to fix it. Something about the idea of software letting you access hardware you already paid for (even if you didn&amp;#x27;t pay for the software to use it), just feels wrong.</text></item><item><author>prostoalex</author><text>&amp;gt; allowed full usage of their battery.&lt;p&gt;I thought on the checkout page Tesla was pretty explicit that they were selling a 75 kWh model with discounts thrown in for artificially software-restricted 60 kWh version.&lt;p&gt;If an ICE brand sold two trims of the same vehicle - the cheaper one with the smaller tank or worse fuel economy, is it as appalling and aren&amp;#x27;t they endangering the drivers of the budget version?</text></item><item><author>grawprog</author><text>The whole idea of an internet connected car that constantly &amp;#x27;phones home&amp;#x27; without any easy way to bypass or disable is kind of mind boggling to me.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t understand why after this people weren&amp;#x27;t in an uproar.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;tesla-battery-irma-upgrade.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;tesla-battery-ir...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;When Tesla decided generously to temporarily grant residents fleeing a hurricane an upgrade that allowed full usage of their battery.&lt;p&gt;People&amp;#x27;s lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock.&lt;p&gt;The fact that it&amp;#x27;s come to that is completely appalling. When the manufacturer of your car has the power to save your life because if they didn&amp;#x27;t they&amp;#x27;d suffer bad publicity is  disgusting.&lt;p&gt;And the fact is, the only reason why hackers are able to gain access to vehicles, the only reason for any of it is because companies have decided cars need to be a service provided by them so they can keep making money after the initial purchase.&lt;p&gt;People buy cars so they can travel freely without relying on others. Making cars reliant on a third party server for something as basic as the ingition goes against the entire premise of owning a car.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;As we noted previously, it means that many Kia owners may be unable to remotely unlock their vehicles or warm them up during an especially nasty winter storm hitting much of the country this week.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cars had remote unlock and start &lt;i&gt;decades&lt;/i&gt; ago (if not OEM, then aftermarket systems were and still are widely available), with &lt;i&gt;zero&lt;/i&gt; dependence on what appears to be the company&amp;#x27;s servers. The only advantage I can fathom for being able to unlock and start a car over the Internet instead of only by being within radio range seems more oriented towards attackers and other user-hostile scenarios (&amp;quot;your car has now become a subscription, please pay to unlock it&amp;quot;). Have we gone backwards...?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fiddlerwoaroof</author><text>On the other hand, the extra cells give you more wear-leveling, right?  So, in theory at least, a 75KWh battery limited to 60KWh has a longer lifetime than the unlocked one.</text></comment>