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Posted by tencentshill 5 hours ago

U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app(macdailynews.com)
304 points | 196 commentspage 3
tehjoker 5 hours ago|
This does seem like a fishing expedition though there is a facially legitimate purpose.

Fortunately, we have more powerful policy tools to clean the air than attacking individual gearheads... convert America to an electric car system. You need to attack these problems at the point of production. Consumption side approaches are petty and not very effective.

EGreg 5 hours ago||
Worth pointing out that this is part of a much larger encroachment on user privacy, and not just in the US: https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
squibonpig 5 hours ago|
I wish that article wasn't extremely ai written
khazhoux 5 hours ago|||
[dead]
EGreg 5 hours ago|||
What would that improve in this case?
squibonpig 5 hours ago|||
It would be more concise and the analysis section at the end would be more useful. I still read it I just hate reading articles online knowing I could have run a chatgpt deep research to the same effect.
EGreg 5 hours ago||
Can you tell me what you would cut, in this article, specifically, that would make it more meaningfully concise?

The point isn't that you can't run the deep research. Everyone now has more capabilities, and if you want to waste time and tokens you can do it. The point is someone has done the work compiling these, and made it available once, for everyone to read. Think "caching". It has the exact amount of information needed to show the details of every attack. There is a lot. Sadly making it "concise" will remove information -- there is that much.

I do usually make edits to an article after I get it from an AI, as an editor would do when a writer submits something. I hate having AI shibboleths like "It's not X. It's Y". So I make it more humanized. But at the end of the day, the article does what it's supposed to do: make people aware of things in one place, rather than have to research it themselves every time.

ane 5 hours ago||
Why not just write it yourself? We can all have ChatGPT regurgitate the same information. You're supposed to add value, editorializing isn't enough.

Just like I don't want to look at AI art or listen to AI music, I don't want to read AI written blogslop.

The web is now full of shit. What a waste.

EGreg 5 hours ago||
Writing it myself would mean doing the research myself. How would I do that? ChatGPT can do it faster at scale. Then the summaries are short enough that cutting any particular part wouldn't make sense. I could re-word it, I guess.

Why don't you write all your assembly code yourself? Why do you use a compiler? Why do you generate images, when you can draw them yourself? You're supposed to add value.

I don't think preparing a list of all the threats, editing it and publishing it for others is a "waste". I'm not publishing random stuff, this is important and in line with what I want people to know.

Some people on HN downvote any criticism of AI, other people complain that things are written by AI. If you're such big fans of AI being used more and more, then accept the consequences!

NietzscheanNull 4 hours ago|||
How can you be certain that the ChatGPT "research" you cite is a faithful representation of facts? How do you know that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google haven't introduced RLHF to subtly steer model output on specific topics to align with their political/economic interests?

I'm seeing increasing numbers of people credulously citing ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini output as ground-truth fact. Many more are increasingly lulled into a false sense of security by the citations models append (to the point of neglecting even a bare-minimum skim of the cited sources, much less critically evaluating/contextualizing the nature of the sources themselves). My fear is that most people are blissfully ignorant at the new paradigms of propaganda that AI could enable; most of us here wouldn't be taken by the "slop" image-gen deepfakes (right now), but can you say the same about a couple of citations taken out of context?

We already know how trivial it is to win over a sizeable chunk of society by introducing red-herrings, misrepresenting statistical data, etc. -- oil companies perfected that art, and now as a result a huge number of voters in the US believe that climate change (doesn't exist|isn't man-made|is unavoidable). And that effort was "fully manual" and carried out without the aid of extensive psychological profiling at the individual level via an ad-surveillance complex. Today, society is almost completely defenseless against the extreme granularity/subtlety of manipulation that ownership of frontier AI models enables, especially when it's armed with even a fraction of the torrent of personal data that's being collected on each of us every day.

squibonpig 4 hours ago||||
The people doing the downvoting are different people from the whiners. I'm one of the whiners.

That's kinda fair, like it's still useful to prepare a list, but it's also like if you didn't go research your information yourself why would I start from a position of charitability when I read it? When I research something with LLMs, I know to double-check everything myself before I use it as a basis for my thought or repeat it to other people. Knowing an article is AI written forces me to doubt every sentence. Or maybe it's worse, I have to assume nobody cared about the sentence. The old format was a guarantee that someone gave enough shits to put the article together. Relevance comes implicitly bundled in each sentence. It's like someone talking to you in public in that there's often a reason to pay attention.

It's not as though that person is going to say something correct, or ethical, but I've had a lifetime of dealing with human kinds of wrongness. When stuff is wrong, I'll know it's wrong because the article is slanted or wrong because the author was lazy etc., which will let me discount it selectively and still get value from it when, e.g., a slanted author contradicts themselves. Reading an LLM article I have no clue whether the person who put it up even read the whole thing, so when I read sentences, I have no guarantee that the sentence communicates something worth paying attention to. I dislike that ambiguity and would prefer to guarantee that the text is slop by asking a bot myself. Then I know its worth upfront. I'd be fine with it if these sites included a direct statement in bold at the top: HEY THIS IS AI SLOP IF YOU DONT WANT THAT LEAVE. Then I know exactly how to parse it.

EGreg 4 hours ago||
You might like my new startup, then: https://safebots.ai

I spent way too much time on actually building this — with Claude and double checking everything — so an article I publish can be OK to push out. We aren’t building a bridge for thousands of cars here, it’s an article.

A lot of things are automated and 95% of the time they are correct. The key is knowing whether the last mile is worth fixing, if the consequences are minor.

squibonpig 3 hours ago||
I read through your presentation but I still feel pretty confused about what ur startup does. Could you explain it?
shimman 3 hours ago|||
The purpose is to try to catch a sliver of all that fun money flying around in the current VC money.
squibonpig 2 hours ago||
I wanna give him a shot at explaining it
EGreg 2 hours ago|||
Shimman is wrong. The goal is much bigger, and almost the opposite of what he thinks. It's trying to solve the problem of people chasing "slivers" of money and selling out, which happened in Web2 and Web3: https://safebots.ai/singularity.pdf

What the startup does is make a verifiably trusted, zero-configuration, turnkey environment for businesses to move their data into and run AI workloads on, without worrying about their data being stolen, or some Agents doing unpredictable things. The environment is super-secured, with no ssh. It's an appliance, with over-the-air M of N updates. Think more "Tesla car" and less "OpenClaw". That's the foundation.

That environment then builds everything around a graph database, for people, organizations, and even code. We have Grokers that can ingest a codebase statically once, and then present the graph databases as a far better "RAG" than cosine similarity and pinecone vector databases.

At its most basic level: Agents can't be trusted. We want predictable Workflows, not agents. They can do 99% of everything Agents can, if done properly, and the remaining 1% are the dangerous parts https://safebots.ai/agents.html

It's a lot of innovations at once, including:

Collaborative Bots that are safer than agents.

Workflows and tools that can read, reason and propose actions.

Policies that must be satisfied before actions can be taken.

Logging of everything. Verifiable security and audits for SOC2 compliance etc. etc.

Everything is configurable and designed for serious businesses, not a grandma that finished a Chinese course on how to install OpenClaw on her terminal and not get pwned

nickthegreek 3 hours ago||||
> Writing it myself would mean doing the research myself. How would I do that?

This is why you should write things yourself. There is no way an AI would write something so insane in response to that question. Since I can now read your true understanding of the world, I know not to waste my time on your ai slop. I have no reason to believe you fact checked the 'research' done using AI if you cant even understand how the research should have been done in the first place. You want to waste the time of others but arent even willing to sacrifice a bit yourself.

AlexandrB 4 hours ago|||
You're free to write it using AI, but I'm free not to read it. The fact that it's written by AI is a strong signal that the references can't be trusted anyways.
EGreg 1 hour ago||
No one is forcing to you read it!
mzajc 1 hour ago||||
It would be written by a human.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

verall 4 hours ago|||
It's poorly structured. I think a better split between technical vs social measures and how they interact would result in a much better article. It also doesn't seem to even mention DPI or great firewall of China as prior art.
selectively 2 hours ago||
Lunatic, likely AI generated comments here.

This is an app for deliberately causing pollution. The users of that app should be criminally prosecuted and lose their license/spend a few months in prison. The price differential between this device/app and a generic ODB dongle you can buy on Amazon for ~$10 is entirely made up by the criminal features EZ Lynk offers.

The app being software versus hardware doesn't change the legal or moral situation involving it. Much like the DOJ would demand identities of people importing PlayStation 1 modchips back in the 90s, the users of this equally criminal application will be provided to the DOJ.

dmitrygr 4 hours ago||
There are already proper procedures for doing this. If the users did something illegal, you can go after them. If you prove that somebody actively enabled or encouraged them, you go after them. But even if the app actively enabled or encouraged something (which would still need to be proven) it would be a pretty tall order to prove that Google or Apple actively enabled or encouraged anyone to break the law. Both of them could fight the subpoena, and almost certainly win.
bethekidyouwant 4 hours ago||
The Department of justice needs witnesses because they’re trying to prove that ez lynk is profiting from the distribution of “emission disabling software” They are not going after any of these individual users. Tldr: they’re trying to get the mod taken off the market.
jjk166 4 hours ago|
That's the narrative. In reality, you don't need a list of every user to find a handful of witnesses. This is very clearly a power play - the feds can't make their case so they're making distributing the app a major PR headache for the platforms distributing the app. Apple and google will quietly change their user agreements to not permit these sorts of apps on their stores. The company's leadership will likely escape prosecution but their business will be crippled if not destroyed despite not being proved guilty of violating any law.
analogpixel 5 hours ago||
Hopefully they hand it over, and all of these people lose their licenses. I'm sick of breathing in their exhaust on the way to work.

I think people should have the freedom to do what they want; if you want to have a truck that has horrible exhaust, fine, but we'll have it piped back into your cab for you to breathe instead of the people behind you, and if you want a car that sounds like a thousand go-carts racing down the street fine, but it'll be through headphones destroying your hearing every time you hit the gas.

roughly 4 hours ago||
> I think people should have the freedom to do what they want; if you want to have a truck that has horrible exhaust, fine, but we'll have it piped back into your cab for you to breathe instead of the people behind you, and if you want a car that sounds like a thousand go-carts racing down the street fine, but it'll be through headphones destroying your hearing every time you hit the gas.

Hey congrats, you discovered Society! This is what all those rules and shit are all about - your impact on other people, and their impact on you! It turns out that just saying “people should be able to do what they want” doesn’t actually solve anything, because other people also exist, and some of them are you!

Terr_ 3 hours ago||
An I missing some context here? That seems unnecessarily hostile for something that seems like just agreement with the parent poster.
toss1 4 hours ago||
Yeah

I also absolutely loath the coal-rollers and everything about what they do, and if I could snap my fingers and have them lose both their trucks and their licenses to drive with no other consequences beyond their frustration, I'd do it.

Nevertheless, we cannot allow this good reason for which be both agree to be used as a wedge to let the state just wholesale collect data for whatever reason they want.

Very soon, the reason the state wants to wholesale collect data will be for a reason we entirely disagree. That is not an "IF", it is a "WHEN".

So, no, this isn't a justification.

Very soon, that ca

riversflow 1 hour ago|||
Collecting crime data is already in their purview. Thats literally what this is. If this was an app that primarily facilitated contract murder, this would be obviously justifiable. Seems to me you and many others here just don’t actually believe in the states regulatory authority of digital things, like the computer in your car.
bethekidyouwant 4 hours ago|||
But this isn’t actually to throw the coal rollers in jail and take away their trucks it’s to get witnesses so they can build a case to get this mod taken off the market
xp84 3 hours ago|||
Yes. Supposedly they aren’t going to prosecute those people, though if I were them, I wouldn’t trust that promise.

But if they get this thing taken off the market, that’s a huge loss for all of us because there are a ton of things this type of tool enables, many of them things people like us would be very interested in. Such as disabling privacy-invasive telematics, or disabling features like stop start, which I can personally attest has caused significant repair issues with the engine on my last car.

Having access to a tool like this is to a car what having an administrator account is on a PC. Without it, you are merely a guest, not an owner of the system.

sneak 3 hours ago|||
This is a lie. This is a way to get Apple and Google to not resist handing over bulk user data. Next it will be protest apps, or end-to-end encrypted messaging apps that aren't backdoored like iMessage is (e.g. Signal).
oceanplexian 3 hours ago||
These vehicle emissions laws are almost always fake compliance theater and were dreamed up by idiots. They are a huge drag on the economy and achieve absolutely nothing.

For example, the reason we don’t have super efficient turbodiesel subcompacts that are perfectly legal in the EU is thanks to the so called “Clean” air act. Since the law is based on vehicle weight I can go buy a 8,000 pound truck and commute to work alone in it and pollute all I want. But if I want a super clean 80MPG diesel subcompact that’s 1/4 the gross weight supposedly bad for the environment.

But it gets worse in all sorts of ways, the law grandfathers coal plants from all these emissions standards. One coal plant can emit more pollution than millions of trucks. Guess which polluter the government is aggressively pursuing and violating the rights of? You guessed it, car enthusiasts who downloaded an app. Give me a break.

traderj0e 3 hours ago||
I don't buy that those are actually clean. EU has always had majority high-MPG non-diesel cars that you also don't see here as often, simply because gas is cheap in the US. People complain that it's expensive but then 2/3 times go buy a truck or SUV anyway.
AngryData 3 hours ago|||
How much of the new car market is represented by the average person though? If 70% of the population wants fuel economy but only 10% of the population can afford new cars it is easy to see how the wealthier new car buyers can shape what cars are even available to the average person. Buying a user car in the US gives limited offers for super and turbo charged vehicles, and many turbo cars will want turbo maintence when they hit the used market with lower availability of turbo experienced mechanics.
traderj0e 2 hours ago||
That's a good point, but it looks like the top-selling used cars are trucks and SUVs too. It's possible on the face of it that this is just because they retain less value than efficient cars and buyers are weighing that vs the cost of gas, but doesn't seem like it from the pricing I've seen.
cucumber3732842 2 hours ago|||
Having run a ram ecodiesel inside a garage I believe it.
CommenterPerson 4 hours ago|
Missing key points:

Why is this administration, which is all for coal, oil, and against environmental policies pursuing THIS?

This DOJ is all about pursuing cases for retribution. It could be, they already know someone they want to punish, and already found they're using the device. Or, use it as a source for finding people they want to punish.

JoBrad 4 hours ago||
It’s not about this administration. The lawsuit was filed in 2021.
15155 4 hours ago|||
US Attorneys aren't forced to toe the party line on every issue.

This issue is just not directly politically important enough to get the "don't touch" treatment.

Donors and party power brokers aren't rolling coal.

tencentshill 4 hours ago||
Also strange as it would disproportionately affect modified diesel trucks, who are overwhelmingly Trump supporters.