» About     » Archive     » Search     » Forum     » RSS Feed     Updates Wednesdays

No. 86: Blue sky windscreen of death

First | Previous | 2016-09-14 | Next | Latest

Blue sky windscreen of death

First | Previous | 2016-09-14 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/pomh/?comic=86

Strip by: Ian Boreham

{A car has run over a cliff and crashed into rocks below. The police are investigating the crash. One police officer is reporting the situation on the phone.}

Police officer: We've determined that the driver was not playing Pokemon GO at the time of the accident. Or blindly following the GPS instructions.

Police officer: The car was not on auto-pilot, and there's no sign that known vulnerabilities in the vehicle control system had been hacked.

Police officer: So, we're basically down to a bug in the entertainment system crashing the car computer, or a sudden Windows 10 uprade.

The author writes:

This strip came out of a conversation among the Comic Irregulars back when Pokemon GO was all the rage. So, although this is somewhat more current than many of my strips, I clearly haven't yet mastered the art of being topical. I'll just have to tell myself that they are maturing like a fine wine in the interim.

Although I look forward to the day when other cars on the road are not controlled by other humans, I really hope the engineers designing the systems do a good job. We've already seen researchers take control of a car remotely using Wifi to connect to the car's entertainment system, and bugs in control systems causing cars to accelerate suddenly.

I don't look forward to the day when terrorists, foreign governments or Anonymous decide to make all the fancy cars gridlock major cities, holding their passengers captive.

Drawn in Krita and Inkscape.