> Slowing down and eventually driving off on to a grass shoulder wouldn't even crack the bottom 1% of crazy shit I've seen people do on highways, on purpose.
The article claims that the transmission was cut on a section of the freeway with no shoulder, so I'm curious how being stuck in the middle of the freeway translates to "slowing down and eventually driving off onto a grass shoulder." (And just because something "isn't the craziest thing I've seen" doesn't mean it isn't dangerous)
With or without shoulder, a stalled automobile is an everyday occurrence that drivers must absolutely watch and be prepared for. It wasn't the safest thing to do, but it isn't outside the normal range of "dangerous" events that one will experience on their commute daily, often more than once daily. IMO it doesn't increase the danger nearly as much as traffic patrol conducting a routine traffic stop on the freeway. If we're prepared to accept traffic patrol on busy freeways, then I don't think it's justified to treat a rare, even if foolish demonstration such as this one as anything more than a nuisance.
I agree that it probably presented some level of danger to the public, but I maintain that (i) the added danger was small relative to the normal everyday danger of driving with humans; and (ii) the media exposure they've achieved by doing this on a public road has the potential to pressure Chrysler to remove tens of thousands of hazards (read: vulnerable Jeep Cherokees) from the road, which could ultimately reduce danger and save lives. It's not clear-cut when you're dealing with a vendor who chooses to ignore and/or litigate upon an initial disclosure instead of fix their product.
I think the point is that you, and the researchers, have no right to make that decision for other people. It's illegal to purposefully stop in the middle of the highway. It's illegal to cause someone else to do so as well.
People who routinely test things that have the capability for real harm learn to take precautions for as many of the the things you don't think off as you can. For example, the Mythbusters are routinely testing things with cars and other bits of machinery that can cause physical harm if something goes wrong. They also routinely retire to abandoned airforce bases, remote locations, and the salt flats to test things.
Point taken. Maybe I'm just being horribly jaded and/or emotionally invested from too much driving, but after a while it gets hard to discern malice from incompetence, and you start (wisely or unwisely) worrying more about actual outcomes than intent. If I'm hit by a security researcher or a drunk driver or a million miler who had one black swan of a bad day, the result is the same to me: I'm hurt or dead.
But perhaps a little more objectively, there's certainly a moral hazard here; if every security researcher did this on public roads it'd likely be chaos. An appropriate response, IMO, would be for the police to make a phone call and tell them not to do it again.
I agree, I don't necessarily want them to go to jail, but I would be happy if they were suitably scared shitless for a while as the enormity of how bad they fucked up (if the facts are as they seem) hits them. Part of the benefit of the extreme reactions from the people here is that future security researchers working on interactions between software and hardware appliances that may pose a physical threat will have an example of exactly why you should show your proof in a controlled environment.
It's actually not that different than pure software security research. You don't show a POC for your new DNS exploit by doing it against Comcast or AT&T public DNS servers without expecting some blowback. You set up a test environment.
> the danger was small relative to the normal everyday danger of driving with humans
The danger of a car having its transmission crap out on the freeway is non-zero, yes. On the other hand, they explicitly cut a vehicle's transmission on the freeway. The danger for the people in the immediate area of this vehicle was increased because the situation (a cut transmission) went from "maybe it will happen" to "it is definitely happening." At that point, whether or not an accident happened depended entirely on the skill and attention of the drivers around this vehicle something completely out of the control of the researchers.
That photo is next to the parking lot where he "found an empty lot where [he] could safely continue the experiment" and then "they cut the Jeep’s brakes, leaving [him] frantically pumping the pedal as the 2-ton SUV slid uncontrollably into a ditch"
FYI, here's a link to a video[1] of the situation (which bengali3 posted up-thread). The grass shoulder was later, cutting the power was actually done on a fairly busy stretch of highway with no shoulder. The reporter's words during that incident are particularly telling.
The article claims that the transmission was cut on a section of the freeway with no shoulder, so I'm curious how being stuck in the middle of the freeway translates to "slowing down and eventually driving off onto a grass shoulder." (And just because something "isn't the craziest thing I've seen" doesn't mean it isn't dangerous)