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Comment by yellow_lead | Hacker News Reader

There's been a few stories over the years that show Tesla is a bit "laissez faire" with their security and data protection. A recap from my own memory:

1. Engineer sharing how they SSH into moving cars in order to apply updates and troubleshoot (several years back)

2. Recent leaks of customer recordings.

The whole autopilot situation is concerning too.

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My favorite was the alleged sighting of "Wet Nellie" (modified Lotus from Bond movie that Musk bought years ago) in video footage sent to Tesla's servers by one of their cars - likely, when it was parked. They have been quite lax in multiple ways at times with various practices.

Definitely speaks to company culture that not only did all sorts of images & video get recorded on private property and sent to Tesla (at highly questionable times given the claimed reasons for the sending of images / video), these materials were then casually handled up and down the chain. Significant disregard to any real access control, training, rules, etc. - employees sharing, commenting, and making memes off of everything.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...

(Not the only article or set of sources, of course. I'd certainly still classify this as alleged, but, have encountered enough such reports and heard enough stories from various people to consider this likely largely accurate. My opinion, though.)

Yep, it's indicative of the culture for sure. If this sort of thing is still happening years after the whole "SSH into moving cars" thing, I can't expect it to improve.

That ssh into moving cars is really scary. I guess an engineer can do a lot in that session if he wants.

At least they're using ssh and not some home rolled garbage. If ssh uses keys and not small passwords, it's one of the most secure methods around to get access to a machine. Unfortunately far too many companies are just rolling their own extremely flimsy and insecure VPN programs these days.

You are missing the point. Their engineers have the ability to ssh into your car. While you arr going 85mph on the freeway. That's by itself is scary af.

I get anxiety updating my bios at the best of times, I can't even imagine at speed.

I can only speak for German car companies, but their tech is incredibly secure, and multiple teams work on just making sure it is close to impossible to get access to anything digitally controlled in a car.

The thing with cars is that malicious actors usually can get physical access to it, which makes it an order of magnitude more difficult to secure. This is one of the main reasons car computers often seem so clunky.

A lot of this tech seems to consider the legitimate owner of the car doing DIY repairs as "malicious" as well, unfortunately.

I see your point, but modern cars are too complicated to allow tinkering anyway.

Besides, would you dare driving next to the guy that just installed random rom from xda?

I'm talking about simple stuff like authorizing additional keys, enabling remote lock/unlock without a stupid subscription, etc.

The rom on the car is way less of a concern to me than whatever the person had to drink or their road rage fueled tailgating...

I think the protocol used to access the moving vehicle is the least of the concerns here.

It definitely a near top concern. If they're doing a flimsy home spun thing then it's much more likely to be compromised. While the company being able to do this is enough to prevent me from buying a car from them, an insecure system that could be compromised means I believe the company should offer a recall on all cars. Being more secure doesn't mitigate the concerns, but it not being secure hightens them.

To be clear, neither is acceptable but it being secure is still a big issue.

> That ssh into moving cars is really scary. I guess an engineer can do a lot in that session if he wants.

It all depends exactly what the engineer is SSHing into. A bash shell with root access? BAD. A shell with only monitoring and diagnostic tools that are cleared to use while the car is running? Probably not a problem and actually sounds both useful and the right way to do it. I'd love to be able to SSH into my car and get diagnostics.

According to the engineer who leaked that ssh thing (which was years ago) they were live patching and pushing updates to the cars over ssh. It was essentially full root. That said this was also super early in the company history, so this might have been for the roadsters more than the actual commercial cars.

Either way, that makes me think, maybe the code is still there? Oops I'm not rich enough to afford a Tesla anyway.

They're dropping the price hard. Probably one of the only nice things I'll say about Tesla is they're willing to wade in and compete on price. And that's mostly cuz Toyota or Ford are still charging too much.

With interest like this I almost feel vehicles are a burden, albeit a necessary one. Interesting that rate and price both hike.

The good old Ford Pinto playbook

Concerning, I'm sure Elon will look into it.

I guess Elon will handle this by tweeting something really crazy to shift focus from the real problem, and as usual we will fall for it.

On the other hand, he is running out of crazy things to say. The only remaining thing I can think of is he coming out in support for cannibalism

If things get tight in his Martian kingdom they may well have to invent the Donner Pass kebab.

Ah yes, reminds me of one reason I don't mind waiting so much for a table these days. Just list the family name as "Donner" - hearing the maître d' call out "Donner, party of 4, your table's ready" really makes up for the wait! ;)

Cannibalism is crazy now? Think of all the advantages:

- Cannibalism is a way to maximize the use of available resources

- If regulated in a certain way, cannibalism could serve as a form of population control

- With a balanced diet and careful preparation, human meat could be a source of protein and other nutrients

- Cannibalism could be seen as a means of waste reduction. Instead of bodies taking up space in graveyards or being cremated, they're consumed

- Cannibalism could be used as a symbol of dominance or power. Consuming another person might be a demonstration of absolute control or superiority.

Of course, this is all fictional, and I just thought it would be fun to try to think positively about a somewhat controversial topic. But still...

What "a humility-rich proposal" ;)

Not exactly on brand for him to be modest though, so I don’t imagine it would be suggested except maybe as an April Fool’s Day joke

There is one small hole in the whole thing called “prion diseases”, though…

They did cover that, under the “Population Control” bullet point.

But what about the buzzards? If we all begin to purge each other and eat one another, then the poor buzzards will starve. Lol

I remember meeting a girl studying anthropology. She talked about her taking a course on "man eaters". Primitive tribes who occasionally eat people. (Of course it's entirely unacceptable to say "primitive" or even "tribe" in anthropology!) Instead of condemning the practice as morally abhorrent, as they often do, e.g. for persecution of homosexuality, they just talked about why they (the man eaters) do it, what type of spiritual gains they hope to achieve with it, etc, very non-judgmental. On other matters anthropologists are some of the most judgmental people in academia. The absurdity of the double standard was hard to express. Some kind of inconsistent moral relativism.

Please let's not go into boring celebrity wars. Especially not this boring celebrity war.

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