This story should be on every newspaper front page right below war correspondents.
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Yeah, especially in the EU where apparently their laws regarding circumventing DRM might make the people who fixed this the bad guys instead of this comically evil manufacturer who put GPS kill switches on public passenger trains.
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"We didn't add a kill switch to our trains to force the use of our maintenance service, but fuck the hackers that removed the kill switch we didn't implement, and the trains that were hacked and don't have the kill switch we didn't add should be removed from service."
Dear Reader,
Regarding your recent free and non-profitable un-fucking of our problem, please use the honor system and manually refuck yourself.
Love, Technology Companies.
Someone's gonna figure out a horror movie for this called The Refucker
"And how dare those hackers go through all the trouble of finding those (literal) GPS coordinates of train maintenance centers not in our system to circumvent us getting more money."
That's awesome. Man, fuck that company. Bricking a train? Outrageous.
Poland ought to ban that company from ever working or operating or selling any products inside of its country and any trains made by that company that are not currently owned by Poland should be prevented from traveling on the tracks that cross through Poland.
This is the kind of government intervention I can get behind. This story is so outrageous, it's hard to believe it's true.
unfortunately they have a right wing government so it's likely they'll want more of this not less
They just swore in the new Cabinet today. They still have a far right President and Judiciary to contend with but the legislature is a coalition of centrists and leftists now.
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Maybe make it the entire executive and senior management, rather than the company.
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Run by fucking criminals. We should brick them like they're The Sticky Bandits
Better to brick them like The Cask of Amontillado.
Great idea, Marv.
The person is doing a talk about it in hamburg, germany (37c3) next week. Its on my to watch list because that sounds hella interresting.
Edit : 37c3 list of talks : https://halfnarp.events.ccc.de/#dec115da17562cebafa9ba7a150a4fc607c25c880c03593dcc8da6087c9441a4
That actually does sound hella interesting. I'm saving your comment to try to remember but actually look it up in about two years when I scroll back though my saved posts.
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It's 37c3, but thx for the hint. The talk is called Breaking "DRM" in Polish trains by Redford, q3k, MrTick
I will try to watch it on stage, unfortunately still no final schedule available
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SPS became desperate and Googled “Polish hackers” and came across a group called Dragon Sector, a reverse-engineering team made up of white hat hackers.
Hilarious. I hope 404 continues with this level of high quality journalism.
Dragon sector, who they hired, is a security capture the flag team.
Edit: Socials of those who worked on it
https://social.hackerspace.pl/@q3k
https://infosec.exchange/@mrtick
https://infosec.exchange/@redford
TIL that [security CTF](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag_(cybersecurity)) is
an exercise in which participants attempt to find text strings, called "flags", which are secretly hidden in purposefully-vulnerable programs or websites
Never heard of this and I may not be alone in that. Thanks for pointing this out.
I did one before. They are SO MUCH FUN. Now I have too many children.
sob
edit: There are other ways of capturing the flag like having your team name on the home page of a local web server or whatever.
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Finally, hackers with a cool name, like Bellingcat or Oryx. It's all I'm asking for, but the Russian and North Korean hackers are so disappointing in so many ways.
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This is good. Someone did that for printers too
And American Weight (?) digital scales. The ones that brick themselves after 2,000 uses because how dare you only pay once.
Lol. Always suspected there was a scam there, but every time I bring it up in a conversation - people just call me a conspiracy theorist.
This goes for pretty much everything though. Planned obsolescence is real, but people think it's just the natural way of things.
is there an article about this? Would love to read about it
There is no article that I could find, so I guess you take my word for it. But I'll fill you in on why I said it from what I remember. You can make up your mind on this:
I was looking for a digital scale during the pandemic and naturally went on Amazon. I found some within my budget (I live outside the US) but most of them had multiple reviews complaining about a weird error that they couldn't fix. I did some digging around, yet nobody seemed to know what the error really was that was showing up after some time of prolonged use without signs of wear. Eventually, I got to a thread on some technical forum that said it was a software error that strongly hinted at planned obsolescence after so many uses.
The weird thing is that I can't find any of the models that had this on Amazon anymore but it doesn't surprise me after some of the shit I've seen on there with people manipulating reviews on other products I've bought. So I guess it could go either way for someone review-bombing the product or it being a real issue, but that doesn't explain the error showing up on other sites. I wish I could remember what the error code was.
If anybody knows anything more about this, I'd love to hear it. It certainly was a strange surprise that ended up costing me a bit more than I was planning to spend. But I guess bullet dodged?
The anti-circumvention clause is being abused for some years now, it's disgusting.
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https://badcyber.com/dieselgate-but-for-trains-some-heavyweight-hardware-hacking/ link for very detailed description of this story, highly recommend the read!
Thank you! Came here to ask if anyone had one source with the whole story. This keeps trickling out as it evolves.
Edit: this story is considerably weirder than I expected, and I was already expecting some weird shit.
Begs the question: How is any of this legal?
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I like how, instead of recognizing that they got caught, now the train manufacturer is claiming this is some kind of dark PR strategy.
If it is, then please show the public that it's a dark PR strategy by explaining the hidden unlock codes and the DRM code!
I hate this fucking planet.
I think this is pretty cool. Sure, capitalists are gonna capitalist, but here we have subversive moves in a positive direction.
Oh yeah what the people did to get around this is fucking awesome I do love that side of this story don't get me wrong.
If they required the trains to be serviced by manufacturer they should have written it into a mandatory service contract at time of sales.
If anybody wants to know more, they can watch it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8NqBXT6Kos
Ah, Louis Rossmann, a real-life superhero. He did some great work in his career.
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Artificially bricked?! Who the hell keeps giving Viagra to trains? Evil bastards.
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Spewing bs about how they can't guarantee the safety and other outrageous shit pouring out their mouths as they provide clearly practiced lawyerspeak to squeeze money from public service into their owners pockets which will then be invested probably in war and killing children for profit.
But let's discuss ethics and shit! Fuck faces need to be brought to moral justice for the evil they commit every day of their brainwashed miserable hateful lives where they pretend to not harm people because they don't do it themselves but via money grabbing schemes. One day all of this shit will seem to be as stupid as hitting kids are these days
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