Just what are they doing with all that data???

A modern Ford F-150 has over 150 million lines of programming code in it's onboard computer systems. Probably similar in many cars.

A Boeing 787 has 7 million lines of code.

What they heck are they doing with all that data?

Considering the infotainment system can pair with your phone, USB port can download quickly, the microphone in the hands-free can listen to your conversations, and the computer can connect remotely for diagnostics, it's hard to not wonder if something nefarious is underfoot.

Are we no longer allowed to drive vehicles that can't spy on us?

It's the Russians!

I don't see the connection between lots of computer code and spying. Yes, of course it's possible. It's also been possible to put radio trackers on every vehicle pretty much since production started.

I suspect that internal combustion engines that operate under a huge range of conditions - including highly transient ones - require more control than jet turbines. And does that 787 include all the code for the nav, communications, the entertainment system for the entire plane, etc, or is it just the avionics?

How does lines of code written equate to data collected?

SVreX wrote: A modern Ford F-150 has over 150 million lines of programming code in it's onboard computer systems. Probably similar in many cars. A Boeing 787 has 7 million lines of code.

This sums up why I hate, and refuse to work on late model cars. I got into cars for the mechanical, if I wanted to get into computers I would have studied IT....

Also,yes,this is the beginning of total observation. It won't be long before police end pursuits remotely and speeding fines etc are displayed automatically on the infotainment screen as you drive, a hard copy automatically generated and posted to your mailing address.

Also,has anyone got a spare roll of alfoil, my hat's been misplaced...

Obviously the work of the Illuminati.

Really though, if that is the kind of thing people are afraid of I feel like the only real choice is just not to participate in modern society. Tear out your internet connection and throw away your computer. Smash up your cellphone, god forbid you have a smartphone with a camera and GPS they can track you with. Don't go out in public to anywhere that has a security camera with a mic (you would be AMAZED how good modern security cameras are). Only drive something with a carburetor and no electronics, and don't bother with a license plate because any LEO or repo man can scan and track it at the push of a button anyway (I always laugh at people covering their plates in online photos because it's not as if hundreds of people don't see it daily anyway).

Privacy in the modern age is nothing but an illusion, as far as I'm concerned. For all the things I would actually worry about compromising the little privacy I have, the amount of code required to propel a modern vehicle is not very high on that list!

The car listens to you, recording certain words. The stored data is covertly downloaded when at the dealer. That way Fjord knows if you are a pandora user or Spotify.

While that sounds like a Mel Gibson/Julie Roberts movie, I can certainly attest to Hulu, nextflix, apple, Samsung, Sony, and a few others that indeed do SPY on us and listen to what we talk about, and then use that info to bring you customized advertisements. (Anyone that's watched a latest season of South Park knows what I'm talking about and getting at)

I kid you not, one night, laying in bed, my wife said to me "let's go to Disney world." An ad appeared on Hulu about five minutes later for Disney world. Shocked, We decided to test it. We found that as I mentioned "Honda", "Macy's", and and another uhh.... "adult thing". Lo and BEHOLD, every single one of those commercials came up, and in that order.

The guvs listening too. The fact is, no one cares.

Based on what came out of the Toyota unintended acceleration cases, probably just lots of half assed inefficient spaghetti code. Code controlling fly by wire in an aircraft will be very well written, probably held to standards.

Trackmouse wrote: While that sounds like a Mel Gibson/Julie Roberts movie, I can certainly attest to Hulu, nextflix, apple, Samsung, Sony, and a few others that indeed do SPY on us and listen to what we talk about, and then use that info to bring you customized advertisements. (Anyone that's watched a latest season of South Park knows what I'm talking about and getting at)

That's why we don't have any always-on mics in the house. No Echo, no Google whatever, no "Hey Siri" on the phones. Not so much for the customized ads, but because I don't trust whoever's getting the data.

The statement "150 million lines of code" means basically nothing. For one thing, "lines of code" is a truly lousy way to measure program complexity. What is a "line of code"? Is it just the line count of all of the source files? Or do you exclude blank lines, comments, and lines with just formatting characters on them ("{", "}", etc). Combine those questions with the choice of code formatting conventions, and you can have a 10x difference in the number of "lines". Combine that with questions about what language is being used and you get another 10x difference.

Secondly, modern computers are astoundingly cheap in terms of dollar per MIPS of computation power or GB of memory. Engineering time, however, is more expensive than ever. These two factors together mean that modern computers are built on a huge underlying foundation of pre-existing code. That code is general-purpose code, it does lots of things, both the things that are required to implement the software, and a whole bunch of other things that aren't. You could trim out a huge amount of this "code bloat" if you wanted to, but it's much cheaper to just throw an extra gig or two or ram into the system than to pay a hundred engineers for a year to trim stuff out.

For example, modern embedded systems are all built on Linux. They don't need anything approaching the full functionality of Linux, but it's free, it's available, and most of the developers are already familiar with it. That means it's cheap. The Linux kernel, BTW, at last count was rated around 30 million lines of code. That's just the kernel, mind you, not counting the various libraries and utilities that run on top of it. And yes, see previous comment about how much that number is actually worth. Most of that code is for device drivers for every common PC peripheral anyone has manufactured in the last three decades (and a huge number of uncommon ones too). You're probably using less than 0.1% of that code in any given system.

So, Ford probably buys the stereo from a 3rd party manufacturer. That stereo is probably running Linux -- there's 30M+ lines right there. Then there's the NAV system, I bet that's running Linux too, and probably came from a different 3rd party manufacturer, so now we're at 60M. Etc, etc.

Boeing, OTOH, is unlikely to be using Linux in any of the control systems of their aircraft. I bet it's in the in-flight entertainment system, though (and since that 7M number is less than that's what's in the kernel, it's probably not included).

Writing special-purpose code costs money -- that's one of the reasons why 787 Dreamliners cost $300M each. :)

In reply to codrus:

C'mon man, we're just having fun.

Trackmouse wrote: In reply to codrus: C'mon man, we're just having fun.

Thank you. You beat me to it.

Some of you are WAAY too serious!

Keith Tanner wrote:

Trackmouse wrote: While that sounds like a Mel Gibson/Julie Roberts movie, I can certainly attest to Hulu, nextflix, apple, Samsung, Sony, and a few others that indeed do SPY on us and listen to what we talk about, and then use that info to bring you customized advertisements. (Anyone that's watched a latest season of South Park knows what I'm talking about and getting at)

That's why we don't have any always-on mics in the house. No Echo, no Google whatever, no "Hey Siri" on the phones. Not so much for the customized ads, but because I don't trust whoever's getting the data.

I know a guy who works for Amazon on the Alexa products, and no, they're not recording random stuff in your house. Recording stuff takes CPU power and storage, interpreting it with voice recognition takes a LOT of CPU power, enough that they have to ship the recording back to the "cloud" computers to do the interpretation. The only thing is can match locally is the special "wake" phrase ('OK Google", or whatever it is), and that's what keys it to start recording and shipping stuff off.

Google, Apple, and Amazon are not recording stuff without telling you, that's conspiracy theory kind of thinking. The gain for them in doing that is pretty small, and the potential loss in customer relations when the secret got out (and it would get out) is huge.

BTW, if you want to be really paranoid, consider that every laptop, tablet, and phone you buy these days has cameras and microphones in them. Those cameras usually have lights to indicate that they're in use, but malware can and does turn them on without turning on the light. Microphones don't even have lights. You can put tape over the camera when you're not using it, but you can't do that with a mike. So even if your laptop isn't supposed to have an "always on" microphone, malware can change that. Paranoid people go into the hardware and disconnect the microphone.

But it turns out that's actually not enough. See, a speaker is really just a microphone run in reverse, and the sound chips in most laptops have multiple audio ports which can run as either inputs or outputs, software can configure them either way. So there are malware programs out there that will reconfigure your speakers as microphones (albeit low-quality microphones) as spy devices.

So... how paranoid are you? :)

I disagree about them listening. My iPhone CLEARLY tells me that they are listening, and for the intent of "providing you with customized content". Which is a nice way of saying "we are polling you for commercialism." I can even go into setting on my iPhone and clear the "saved ad tracking data" and "limit advertising tracking"

In reply to codrus:

Well, Amazon just denied warrants for Alexa data in a murder case, Google Apple and the like have openly admitted to sharing data with the government, and NSA documents show they have hardware that can be tuned to the frequency of chips to not even need an internet connection to gather data from them. Meaning air gapped systems used to secure data aren't very secure.

I wouldn't necessarily call it paranoid anymore.

I rest my case.

In reply to pointofdeparture:

(Gasp!)

RevRico wrote: Well, Amazon just denied warrants for Alexa data in a murder case, Google Apple and the like have openly admitted to sharing data with the government, and NSA documents show they have hardware that can be tuned to the frequency of chips to not even need an internet connection to gather data from them. Meaning air gapped systems used to secure data aren't very secure.

Air-gapped systems were never that secure, "TEMPEST" shielding goes back to the mid 80s. :)

Amazon denied the warrants because they don't want to set any precedents for handing over any customer data to the govt, even if it's just a few searches for some videos. I doubt they even know what's there, they're just rejecting the government requests on principle.

SVreX wrote: A modern Ford F-150 has over 150 million lines of programming code in it's onboard computer systems. Probably similar in many cars. A Boeing 787 has 7 million lines of code.

Maybe the F-150 systems were programmed in the bloatiest bloated object-oriented programming language that ever bloated because they have to be able to roll out new features quickly, and the 787's systems were coded in assembler by old-school guys who count bytes and optimize everything manually?

In reply to Knurled:

Maybe.

Or maybe the vehicle is prepped for many other things.

Most likely a combination. Ford wants to step it up and prep the vehicles for advanced uses, but is stuck with legacy programming and crap code that almost does the job, but can't quite accomplish where they would like to be taking the company.

Or maybe the Illuminati really likes pick-em-up trucks.

codrus wrote:

Keith Tanner wrote:

Trackmouse wrote: While that sounds like a Mel Gibson/Julie Roberts movie, I can certainly attest to Hulu, nextflix, apple, Samsung, Sony, and a few others that indeed do SPY on us and listen to what we talk about, and then use that info to bring you customized advertisements. (Anyone that's watched a latest season of South Park knows what I'm talking about and getting at)

That's why we don't have any always-on mics in the house. No Echo, no Google whatever, no "Hey Siri" on the phones. Not so much for the customized ads, but because I don't trust whoever's getting the data.

I know a guy who works for Amazon on the Alexa products, and no, they're not recording random stuff in your house. Recording stuff takes CPU power and storage, interpreting it with voice recognition takes a LOT of CPU power, enough that they have to ship the recording back to the "cloud" computers to do the interpretation. The only thing is can match locally is the special "wake" phrase ('OK Google", or whatever it is), and that's what keys it to start recording and shipping stuff off. Google, Apple, and Amazon are not recording stuff without telling you, that's conspiracy theory kind of thinking. The gain for them in doing that is pretty small, and the potential loss in customer relations when the secret got out (and it *would* get out) is huge. BTW, if you want to be really paranoid, consider that every laptop, tablet, and phone you buy these days has cameras and microphones in them. Those cameras usually have lights to indicate that they're in use, but malware can and does turn them on without turning on the light. Microphones don't even *have* lights. You can put tape over the camera when you're not using it, but you can't do that with a mike. So even if your laptop isn't *supposed* to have an "always on" microphone, malware can change that. Paranoid people go into the hardware and disconnect the microphone. But it turns out that's actually not enough. See, a speaker is really just a microphone run in reverse, and the sound chips in most laptops have multiple audio ports which can run as either inputs or outputs, software can configure them either way. So there are malware programs out there that will reconfigure your speakers as microphones (albeit low-quality microphones) as spy devices. So... how paranoid are you? :)

I'm logical. Yes, there are a bunch of ways you can be spied upon, right to the point of bouncing lasers off your window panes. But it's one thing to be worried about that and something else to invite a unit into your house that is specifically designed to listen and send info to the mothership without malware or other intervention.

There are many ways to steal a car, but that doesn't mean you should just go and leave the keys in the ignition :)

I would be less concerned with spying with a large amount of code and more concerned with how a primitive calculator from the 80's was essentially bulletproof and a far more advanced modern Windows computer will come to a sudden stop for no apparent reason.

Ford's global vice president of marketing and sales, Jim Farley, said that the No. 2 U.S. automaker knows "everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing," according to the report. "By the way, we don't supply that data to anyone."

In reply to Knurled:

I wish it was written via legacy programming. That was written really well and easy to follow.

When memory size mattered, coding efficiency was at its best.

codrus wrote: So, Ford probably buys the stereo from a 3rd party manufacturer. That stereo is probably running Linux -- there's 30M+ lines right there. Then there's the NAV system, I bet that's running Linux too, and probably came from a different 3rd party manufacturer, so now we're at 60M. Etc, etc. Boeing, OTOH, is unlikely to be using Linux in any of the control systems of their aircraft. I bet it's in the in-flight entertainment system, though (and since that 7M number is less than that's what's in the kernel, it's probably not included). Writing special-purpose code costs money -- that's one of the reasons why 787 Dreamliners cost $300M each. :)

Nope, Ford is partnered with Microsoft, that crap will all be run by Winders