George Hotz Releases Open-Source Autonomous Driving Software ⇥ theverge.com

Sean O’Kane and Lauren Goode, the Verge:

Famed iPhone and PlayStation cracker George Hotz is resurrecting the DIY autonomous car project he canceled in October. But this time, there’s a twist: instead of selling a physical product, Hotz’s Comma.ai is releasing the company’s self-driving software, as well as the plans for the necessary hardware, which Hotz calls Comma Neo. All of this code will be available for free — in fact, it is already on Github.

[…]

Hotz compared Open Pilot to Android, and said that it’s really aimed at “hobbyists and researchers and people who love” self-driving technology. “It’s for people who want to push the future forward,” he said. When asked how or if Comma.ai plans to make any money off of this project, Hotz responded: “How does anybody make money? Our goal is to basically own the network. We want to own the network of self driving cars that is out there.”

On a tangentially related note, Check Point Research announced yesterday that they had found malware that compromised over a million Google accounts. The good news is that the malware affects Android 4 and 5, not more recent versions. The bad news is that those two version families represent around three-quarters of all Android devices in use today because the manufacturers and carriers have no incentive to upgrade.

Imagine the above paragraph, but instead of “Android” and “devices”, it’s “Open Pilot” and “cars”.