In one of the coolest and more outrageous repair stories in quite some time, three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it. The train’s manufacturer is now threatening to sue the hackers who were hired by the independent repair company to fix it.
After breaking trains simply because an independent repair shop had worked on them, NEWAG is now demanding that trains fixed by hackers be removed from service.
Poland ought to ban that company from ever working or operating or selling any products inside of its country and any trains made by that company that are not currently owned by Poland should be prevented from traveling on the tracks that cross through Poland.
This is the kind of government intervention I can get behind. This story is so outrageous, it’s hard to believe it’s true.
Maybe make it the entire executive and senior management, rather than the company.
unfortunately they have a right wing government so it’s likely they’ll want more of this not less
They just swore in the new Cabinet today. They still have a far right President and Judiciary to contend with but the legislature is a coalition of centrists and leftists now.
I was wondering why Orban “left the room” when the EU Council voted for initiating membership negotiations with Ukraine (thus abstaining) rather than vote against it (and thus veto it) and thought that maybe he didn’t have Poland covering his back anymore (in the sense of stopping later reprisals if he blocked it), at least when it came to his pro-Russia posture.
Now given that change in Poland, I’m thinking it’s a much more far reaching thing and Hungary is now much closer to have their rights suspended as an EU Member.
I feel like train operators will have heard of this, and will not be accepting that company’s tenders
Realistically, that would be quite an overreaction and the corporation does have valuable knowledge and skill in creating trains. But how great it would be if this were to cause open source code to be a requirement…