John Wharton when at Intel was on the team that built a chip of which there are now more instances of than there are people on Earth (a description that's probably held true for several decades now). I'm not sure which it was, but he's worked on the 8085 and 8048 chips (see link below), though it may have been the MCS-51 (see Wikipedia link below). That's not the important part of this story.
What is, was John's telling of getting stranded with car trouble out somewhere in rural California -- central valley or the desert, pretty much the middle of no-where -- and ending up spending time at a local garage getting his car fixed up, and talking to the gearheads there.
They knew his chips better than he did, and had customised the living hell out of them. By John's own account.
I'm not convinced that this must be the inevitable consequence of Chipping All The Things, or that it's always going to be possible to reverse-engineer and hack everything and anything. And I've quite pessimistic about a great many elements of this trend, including what seems an inevitable conclusion that digitised cars will spy on and betray their owners (or more likely, merely users and/or occupants). That's a social and legal, not a technical problem, ultimately.
But ... there's some glimmer of light in history to date, as well.
(Accounts via personal conversation, though John may well have written this down or been quoted on it elsewhere. He's rather fond of the story.)
What is, was John's telling of getting stranded with car trouble out somewhere in rural California -- central valley or the desert, pretty much the middle of no-where -- and ending up spending time at a local garage getting his car fixed up, and talking to the gearheads there.
They knew his chips better than he did, and had customised the living hell out of them. By John's own account.
I'm not convinced that this must be the inevitable consequence of Chipping All The Things, or that it's always going to be possible to reverse-engineer and hack everything and anything. And I've quite pessimistic about a great many elements of this trend, including what seems an inevitable conclusion that digitised cars will spy on and betray their owners (or more likely, merely users and/or occupants). That's a social and legal, not a technical problem, ultimately.
But ... there's some glimmer of light in history to date, as well.
(Accounts via personal conversation, though John may well have written this down or been quoted on it elsewhere. He's rather fond of the story.)
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-51#Enhanced_8-bit_bi...