he did it intentionally.
“I’ve made the questionable decision of lying down in the mower’s path — to see just how far Makris, the security researcher who discovered those flaws, is able to push the mower.”
Sounds dumb, idk.
Even if you press that big red emergency stop button on the mower itself, a hacker can send another command to unlock it, Makris says.
Holy cow. I work in factories, and I know enough about industrial safety to know that would not fly.
Yeah a big red shutoff should be the cutoff to the electricity, water, air, oil, or whatever else it’s meant to stop.
And that’s only, like, the most basic part of an industrial e-stop. On top of directly disconnecting the energy source, it also has to include redundant circuits (since it’s possible for a contactor to break and fail open, or weld and fail closed), and some even need to have signal pulses constantly going through them to actively confirm they haven’t been pressed. They absolutely should not just send a signal to a Linux computer, because general-purpose operating systems are too complex to be rated for safety.
This isn’t even my area of expertise yet I know this stuff. The fact that they failed at the very first requirement is really messed up.