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Comment on Rivian blames “fat finger” for infotainment-bricking software update

Says a lot about their internal organisation structure for something like this to happen. Intern is the only tolerable excuse here, but even still why would you put a newbie in a position where they could brick thousands of vehicles with a slip of the finger?

I’d expect a tech company like Rivian who happens to sell a vehicle to know better than this 🤦‍♂️

wrong build with the wrong security certificates was sent out

Isn’t standard practice to validate signed code first before installing it? Hope the next update allows the car’s computer system to check the firmware signature before doing what I assume is an automatic installation…

may require physical repair in some cases

Ouch

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SquiffSquiff@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I don’t follow your line about an intern. I don’t see it in the article and even if it were the case, an unqualified person being able to do this is on the seniors/leads. Throwing the intern under the bus is what scummy companies do to shift blame - see solar winds , where (spoiler) this strategy doesn’t seem to be working out

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- surewhynotlem@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It’s more incompetent to allow an intern to fuck up production than it is to have normal developers make mistakes. It shows a complete lack of controls and care.
  
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- jackoneill@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yeah not the intern’s fault, the fault of the system that allowed the intern to be able to do it at all
  
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AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Anyone who builds software that runs on actual hardware should know that you NEVER deploy builds that haven’t been fully exercised on actual hardware.

This tells me that their software QC process is non-existent at best and actually malignant at worst.

If their software is supposed to be their defining feature this is the equivalent of McDonald’s “accidentally” shipping frozen discs of literal shit instead of burger patties to franchises who then serve them to customers without question.

If their company dies because of this (it fucking should imo) they 100% deserve it for the countless unknown dangers they’ve exposed their customers to. It’s not this particular thing, bricking the infotainment system, it’s the demonstration that they have no or bad process.

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- incompetentboob@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Ok, calm down. Seems like a bit of an overreaction to link a bad software update for an infotainment system to “countless unknown dangers”
  
  They screwed up, it happens to the best of us. There isn’t a company on the planet that hasn’t made a mistake and rolled out something that is broken.
  
  What’s important here is that they said “yep, we fucked up, we are prioritizing fixing this problem for customers” instead of trying to hide it or blaming the customer for the problem.
  
  If anything Rivian should be applauded for how they handled it and if this kind of thing continues to happen, then maybe we get the pitch forks out.
  
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  - AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Dollars to donuts their infotainment system shares a CAN bus with nodes that affect control systems. If they can’t handle the easy stuff, what the hell else are they fucking up?
    
    It’s not about the infotainment system, it’s about the culture that leads to this problem.
    
    This company will not end because of this issue. Boeing is still kicking and you can actually count the number of people they’ve killed with shitty software/system integration process.
    
    I’ve spent my career working in embedded systems and embedded test and verification. This issue is not the first or only issue to get by. Maybe they take this like the red hot poker it is and fix their problems, maybe not. I’m not gonna gamble on their products though.
    
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    incompetentboob@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    So if I’m understanding this correctly. If anyone ever rolls out a software update that causes a failure like this it is instantly a sign that the company has a culture that leads to problems. Hard and fast? No exceptions? No one makes a huge mistake, that’s just a mistake that slipped through the cracks?
    
    As for it being connected to the CAN bus, so what? It isn’t some sort of magical system where if something fails all the rest of the connected systems do too. That’s like saying if the monitor on my computer fails and it’s connected to the rest of my computer via the PCIe lanes on my graphics card, then everything else is going to be affected. It doesn’t work like that.
    
    I don’t even have an opinion on the company I just don’t think it’s the end of times because the wrong build rolled out. They fucked up, they owned up to it and based on the response they will learn from it.
    
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AndyLikesCandy@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Interns do but should not get the level of write access that makes a durable change impacting all customers. Deadlock a server or even wipe SQL tables, this is an outage. Break a customer’s configuration, send the wrong client’s paperwork, again small scale problem you can deal with. Interns don’t change company policy.

I think it’s a more foundational architecture question: why do you push builds to all customers at once without gating it by SOMETHING that positively confirms the exact OTA update package has been validated? The absolute simplest thing I can think of is pushing to 1 random car and waiting for the post-install self tests to pass before pushing to everyone else. Maybe there’s actually no release automation?? But then you make it safe a different way. It’s just defensive coding practice, I’m not even a CS degree but learned on the job something always breaks so you generally account for the expectation that everything will fail by making a fail-safe just so the failure is not spectacular. Nothing fancy, just enough mitigation to keep the fuck up from eating into your weekend if it happens on a Friday.

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AbidanYre@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

may require physical repair in some cases

Ouch

rivianownersforum.com/…/rear-ended-rivian-gets-42…

Ouch indeed.

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