So... did the Chinese company put Romanian SIMs in the busses? Or was it an importer that installed those? Are there fleet management features enabled by that connectivity or are they actually secret?

Also, why would they purchase busses that they thought couldn't be remotely monitored or controlled?! That seems like a very valuable feature for public transport.

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CerebralCerb 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The fleet management features that lead to the review are documented and were easily disabled.

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hopelite 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To me this smells of rather basic economic/political propaganda to scare people. The collective west is clearly getting orders from high above to apply pressure on China and it may just be that this is part of it, spreading an air of concern and fear to dissuade other people who pay attention to this kind of thing in municipalities to avoid Chinese manufacturers. It's rather basic social engineering that has the ham fist of "intelligence" all over it.

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vintermann 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think it's orders as much as vibes. Some people have finely tuned senses for what they should do to be seen as one of the trustworthy ones, the ones that get it, the ones we could use in a more important job. And that trickles down: one of the things you do, is obviously to network with and boost people who look out for the same kind of political trustworthiness.

The ones at the top, assuming they're not asleep/drunk at the wheel/there at all, don't have to do much. The machine operates itself.

	▲	array_key_first 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, there's a lot of truth to this stuff: tech, and software, is extremely insecure, unknowably complex, and increasingly the most damaging avenue for an attack. I think the propaganda comes in when we point the finger at China, as if this isn't a problem in general. Here in the US, all of our vehicles have SIM cards and they have for decades. They sent off God knows what data, to God knows who, and they remotely receive commands, too. Could you car be hacked? If it was, would you ever be able to find out? Both of those questions are not easy to answer. Really, ALL of our tech works this way. That Android phone? It has countless binary blobs doing who-knows-what. It runs proprietary code at ring 0, and has access to the cellular bands. If it was compromised, you wouldn't know, especially if the attack was targeted. The people making the software and hardware are already "exploiting" it right now - mostly to gather data for advertising, ostensibly. But how do you know these systems are secure? We're talking millions of lines of C code, interfacing directly with the hardware, running at maximum privileges, written by people you don't know, which cannot be audited.

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theyinwhy 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The collective west is clearly getting orders from high above

God?

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bronlund 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Good questions!

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petre 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If the Chinese wanted to hide anything they'd put SIM chips without markings or eSIMs inside, as opposed to marked SIM cards. What they did is probably obtain a good quote on Romanian SIM subscriptions that work across the EEA. This is clearly FUD, but yes, they should have been more careful as to equip half of their fleet with Chinese buses that call home.