This feels like it could be exactly the type of thing that causes the car crash in the pilot episode of the Upload TV series.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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The setup they describe is so highly specific that it would also fool most human drivers.
While There's a lot of room for improvement, I'd argue that many people would be fooled too. Depending on the mirror's size, placement and angle.
"We show that by exploiting the physics of specular reflection, an adversary can inject phantom obstacles or erase real ones using only inexpensive mirrors," the researchers wrote in a paper submitted to the journal Computers & Security.
"Experiments on a full AV platform, with commercial-grade LIDAR and the Autoware stack, demonstrate that these are practical threats capable of triggering critical safety failures, such as abrupt emergency braking and failure to yield."
I'd be fooled, too, at first - and suspicious (who's fucking around with mirrors on the road?) - but I'd probably figure it out after a second.
My main concern is people could use these kinds of exploits to "jailbreak" robo-cars (or whatever we're calling them) to behave in dangerous ways in real traffic.
Oh okay, I have not factored in the idiots 😒
We must, unfortunately, factor in the idiots. They're quite pervasive.
They’re quite pervasive.
🫲 Gestures broadly around at everything 🫴
That'd need a new driving-license. With stricter checks. Not if applicants could memorize basic stuff but their emotional and intellectual maturity.
It is pretty disturbing that 99% of people driving havent been assessed in 10 years or more beyond “do you know what this yellow triangle is? Do you know what this red octagon is? Do you have at least one functioning eyeball?”
Very true... But at least we do test it at all. Anyone is allowed to have tons of kids and offer them no live or makes them fat or....
Isn't there an old engineering adage that anyone that tries to design something to be idiot proof generally severely underestimates the resourcefulness of idiots?
Something about that yes. Never underestimate the ingenuity of an idiot 🫤
Yeah there’s always someone. Now that the door is open for these stunts we’ll see them in real life, including ones that full humans. It is critical to figure these out before we rely on the technology, because people are assholes.
I’ve been saying for years that traffic will get much worse when we get to mostly self-driving cars. Many of the holdouts will decide they can act dangerously on the road because the self driving cars will get out of their way.
Almost everything can be applied to anything when you scale up.
"Your surge protector doesn't even protect against a 500J surge"
"Yeah but yours doesn't protect against a million joule one. Checkmate."
Lol true too.
Any car company that relies on only 1 type of sensor or only 1 sensor on a car for autonomous driving is a fool. The key terminology is "sensor fusion", where you have multiple types of sensors to generate an accurate model of the world around the car which is vastly superior to what a human can perceive. LiDAR is only one sensor. Add in cameras and radar which many cars already have and you'll have a car that can't be fooled by just mirrors.
