I'm not going to divulge any secrets about Ben's work, but we've both spent a bunch of time over the past year hacking the canbus ArbID sets and reverse engineering GMLAN language. Completely legal, and no different than what the EFIlive team does every day for a living. While Ben's focused on his projects, I've focused on my CAN gateways for marine and stand alone ECM's.
There is plenty of cool stuff you can do on these networks if you take the time to study them. Just think about all the modules that talk to each other hundreds of times per second every minute your driving. BUT you still can't perform anything that an ECU isn't capable of by default. So you need a custom DSP OS in there to begin with. Hence EFIlive making more $$$ off this...
Everything that moves across a hardwired network can be read, copied, and spoofed unless it's encrypted. There is currently no encryption on automotive networks. So what ever is being transmitted or received by the ECU's can be captured, manipulated, and if ya want, shared with the world for free. EFIlive's programing traffic and validation sequences are by no mean immune to this rule.
So before jumping to conclusions about anothers work, one should always think first and consider the long term effects. Cause often the only thing stopping someone of equal skills from busting a huge bubble in like .3 seconds, is the respect for that other persons hard work.
Nice work Ben..
