Open Source Can Be Hacked And Undermine Self-Driving Cars

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

You’ve likely had to enter a series of numbers and letters when accessing a web site that wanted “proof” that you are a human being and that you were not some kind of Internet bot.

These challenge-response tests are known as CAPTCHA, which is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

The idea is that if a website wants to keep automated bots from accessing their site, there needs to be some means to differentiate between whether a human is trying to access the web site or whether it is some kind of automation.

There are numerous variations nowadays of CAPTCHA algorithms.

Some use just letters and numbers, while some also add into the mix a variety of special characters such as an ampersand and a percentage symbol.

You’ve likely also encountered CAPTCHA that ask you to pick images that have something in common. For example, you are presented with six images of a grassy outdoor field, and are asked to mark the images that have a horse shown…