Discussion

Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded across the US

nekusar: I guarantee that basically nothing will come out of this.People dont willingly put these alcohol breathalyzer interlocks on their vehicles. They're 100% court mandated, as a punishment for, usually, drunk driving.This country is so hell-bent on making criminals' lives worse and worse as a never-ending punishment. So what 150k people cant use their cars. 'They did something wrong and deserve it', is the usual motto in the USA.Now, lets have a discussion about software liability....

bombcar: "Plea deals" have an interesting caveat that I didn't know - you can agree to punishments that the government couldn't impose as part of a plea deal.So if the punishment for driving drunk is 3 years in prison, you may be able to avoid it by accepting a plea deal that infringes on your third amendment rights.This can even occur in a civil case.

chuckadams: I'm pretty sure even a plea bargain can't result in soldiers being quartered in your home.

bombcar: It's a humorous example, but violations of the 1st, 2nd, and 4th are common.

dylan604: > People dont willingly put these alcohol breathalyzer interlocks on their vehiclesN=1, but I know of one case where the defendant was offered a lock on their car or an ankle alcohol monitor. Of course they were going to choose the car lock.

zoklet-enjoyer: I like to not share roads with drunks

calgoo: Well, one could remove their licenses instead, however the US is built around the car, and not being able to use one almost becomes a social credit, in that you can not function in the country without a car.

syntheticnature: I once helped someone get their car home after one of these was installed. Their license would not be returned until it was installed, but they weren't allowed to leave it on the lot. Someone else drove it there, and then I got to experience the breathalyzer to drive it home.The interesting part is how bad the interlock was. First off, it can apparently randomly not work, so you get three tries. Worse yet, per the official documentation, apparently they can misdetect an ignition while driving at speed, and when that happens you have to pull over and blow within thirty seconds. Now, this is not something you can do while driving, as you have to look at the camera while you do it, on top of needing to have a deep breath. There's no motivation to improve this, because the customer is the legal system, not the person who has to have it installed

applfanboysbgon: If I offer you the choice to give me your wallet or else be stabbed, I don't believe it would be appropriate to describe this as "willingly" giving me your wallet.

jMyles: I have no problem sharing the roads with drunks. It's the cars that scare me.

irishcoffee: So, you think someone that illegally drives drunk will magically decide to abstain from driving because they don't have a license? Really?

dghlsakjg: They aren’t violations if you are being punished. People who don’t take the deal and get sent to jail or put on probation typically lose those rights as well.

sumeno: Mugging victims didn't make a choice that endangered a bunch of other people that resulted in them getting mugged. Interlock devices are not given to random people for no reason.

nekusar: It is not so dissimilar.Courts (read: prosecutors) routinely use legal blackmail to coerce defendants into agreeing to plea deals. The threat is "we will prosecute you, and add extra charges, and push for maximums, that is unless you agree to these terms".And those terms, as others have rightly pointed out, can include punishments the court normally isn't permitted to ask for on sentencing.Also, with our judicial punishment based system, and that those with more money can afford better lawyers. And those with less money get public defenders, who are well known for not doing their job, or the absolute minimum to keep from being investigated by the Bar.The only way out of here is to ever avoid interacting with police or courts. Once you're in that system, any sympathy is thrown out the window, and you become a money-pinata for the state and private 3rd party companies predating on your class.

jeffbee: The issue here has nothing to do with the device and everything to do with the fact that car-brained America is so cowardly and broken that they will do some Rube Goldberg stunt before they even consider taking cars away from alcoholics.

jasonlotito: Yes. I think there are people who would not drive without a driver's license. I don't think magic would be involved.You are free to backup your claim that magically _everyone_ that illegally drives drunk will not abstain from driving becasue they don't have a license.

nemomarx: I'm generally against long term punishments for crimes like this, but operating a dangerous machine like a car is a serious matter. A breathalyzer is a reasonable compromise compared to just taking away your license, right?

dghlsakjg: More effective, too.An interlock prevents you from driving drunk. Suspending a license pretty frequently does nothing.

rootusrootus: It's actually an easy problem to solve, some places have done it with great success. You can't effectively stop DUI by taking the car away. The problem is the drinking. You make someone test every morning and if they've been drinking they get the slammer for the day. You don't need to take away their transportation.

jeffbee: That seems fair, yet even less likely to happen in America.

bluGill: Nobody in human rights would allow that. Take away the car and people cannot live.The above is sadly serious. It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other, demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people. Taking away someone's car is cruel and usual punishment that cannot be accepted.

philipwhiuk: > It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other, demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most peopleThis is exactly what the parent meant by designing the country in a 'car-brained' fashion. It's not true in many/most other countries.

tosti: Okay, so don't go outside?

SilverElfin: Isn’t there a proposed law to install these into every single new car?

kube-system: There is no proposal to require these janky ass aftermarket units, nor require any type of interlock at all.NHTSA was directed to write some guidelines/rules around the implementation of passive impairment detection as OEM features. They have yet to do so, probably because it is flaky technology.My guess is that the final rule implementation will be similar to the distracted driver detection that is already in many new vehicles.

sigmoid10: Nothing specific yet, but the legal groundwork has been laid both in the US and in the EU. Starting in July, all new cars sold in the EU will need to be able to fit after-market alcohol interlocks. In the US, interlocks are already mandatory for convicted DUIers in most states, but new cars will also have to come with factory installed drunk driving prevention technology in the coming years. We just don't know how far that mandate will go eventually.

astura: No, the 2021 infrastructure bill required automakers to install passive technology (passive meaning not requiring any specific actions from the driver) to prevent drunk driving by some future date. However, such technology doesn't really exist yet.

rootusrootus: > It's not true in many/most other countries.Europe may not drive as much as America, but it's still about half. Cars are popular worldwide for a reason, and it is not American corporations magically convincing everyone how useful they are.It's also entirely moot, as we're not redesigning the country in the short term to cut down on DUIs.

bri3d: Not really the same. There are proposals to require OEMs to install driver monitoring, but it’s usually IR camera based rather than blow in a tube fuel cell based. These systems are probably going to be a mess but the technology isn’t really comparable to DUI interlock devices and the unreliability of those systems is orthogonal.

cesarb: > Take away the car and people cannot live. [...] It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other,As a Brazilian, that statement feels bizarre. Yeah, my job and my home are not in walking distance of each other. I simply take the bus. Sure, some jobs are not within reach of the bus (or the ferry, or the metro, or the light tram, etc), and some jobs need a car (for instance, it would be hard for a HVAC technician to take all their equipment on a bus), but saying it's "almost impossible" to find a job?> demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people.That also sounds bizarre to my ears. Most places I've known have small grocery shopping places on nearly every corner. You just have to walk.

showerst: Unfortunately that just isn't true in large parts of the US. Many cities have no public transit, and no accessible grocery stores.Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns.The city of about 50,000 I'm from not only has no public transit and limited sidewalks, it doesn't even have crosswalks across the two main 6-lane roads that divide the city, so you can't safely walk more than about a mile even if you wanted to.

wildzzz: Having to blow while you're already driving is supposed to be a feature. It's to dissuade people from successfully turning on their car, immediately drinking, and then driving.

chromacity: > This country is so hell-bent on making criminals' lives worse and worse as a never-ending punishment.Interlock devices are typically mandated for 6-12 months if it's your first DUI. In California, you will be mandated to use it for three years after your fourth (!) DUI. DUI laws in many parts of the US are ridiculously permissive and your criticism is pretty off-base.

benatkin: The comment you're replying to isn't disagreeing with the sentences but with the additional hassle on top of the sentence. Do you think that additional ad-hoc punishment is justified? Where would you draw the line?If the people of the country were more constitution minded, they would want a punishment that fits the crime, and no additional punishment on top of it. So I share this gripe, even though I consider DUI a very serious crime (including those who do it and don't get caught).

astura: Interlock devices aren't "ad-hoc punishments," they are making sure someone with a history of driving drunk can't start their car when they are drunk for a very, very short period of time. 1 year is common and is extremely lenient.

hedora: We need to legally mandate a single physical switch that disables all vehicles radios, and a second that factory resets everything but the odometer and vehicle fault logs / black box.

kube-system: > a single physical switch that disables all vehicles radiosDisabling all of them would have silly consequences

bilekas: That's an extremely attractive attack surface. How about we just have keys to turn on the engine?

uxp100: Well, in this case because drunks keep murdering people.

kube-system: I don't think most people realize just how few people in the US obey license suspensions. Studies show the vast majority of people simply keep driving anyway.

cucumber3732842: This but replace Germans and British with americans above and below some fairly fuzzy income level.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo

mrlonglong: Why do people drink drive?

MSFT_Edging: Addiction, mental illness, a defacto requirement to drive to get around low-density towns where walking is often extremely dangerous due to lack of sidewalks and fast roads.Alcohol abuse has been around about as long as we've been human. We've just constructed a society where Alcohol abuse is far more likely to pick up collateral damage.

Someone1234: And there is nearly no oversight on how much these private companies are allowed to charge those 150K people for something that is court mandated. These interlocks can exceed $100/month for some of the poorest people in society.Unfortunately the US public has no interest in this issue. They have a dual morality where lawbreaking is wrong, but profiting off of criminals and the poor isn't. So mandatory prison labor, expensive monitoring, for-profit probation services, and for-profit jails are fine.Literally if you don't pay or play, you go to jail. But it was a plea so you "volunteered" (to not go to jail).

astura: Your insurance is going up more than $100/month if you get a DUI.

Someone1234: A lot of bad things will occur (and or should occur) if you get a DUI. I'm not sure what that has to do with private companies/individuals profiting off of the criminal justice system though.