Hackers manage to unlock Tesla software-locked features worth up to $15,000
Hackers manage to unlock Tesla software-locked features worth up to $15,000
electrek.co
Hackers manage to unlock Tesla software-locked features worth up to $15,000
119 comments
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Heated seats you have to pay to unlock (but regardless have to pay to haul around) is the most late stage capitalist brainworm bullshit.
It should be illegal, and/or it should NOT be illegal to hack around the paywall if you purchase the car.
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You wouldn't download a car
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Send me a link and watch what happens!
And yes I know you are joking too :)
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It's fucking wasteful. A sign of absolutely deranged capitalism.
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most late stage capitalist
I mean, whatever you call it, opposition to this particular phenomenon would unite the militia and sovereign citizen kinds of people in USA (of what I've heard about) and ancoms and ansyns and ancaps everywhere and "citizens of the USSR" in the ex-USSR and reichsbuergers in Germany and I can go on.
Selling the same thing which differs in price and whether the same functionality is locked is something universally dishonest for everybody who is not in love with the organization doing this.
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Wouldn't it not be illegal to hack it? Since you own the hardware?
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You can hack the hardware but you can't hack the software if they tried to stop you.
The dmca is a disaster.
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If you own a computer it doesn't mean you have full control over the software on it. It's not legal to download a trial version of Microsoft office then hack it to remove the trial timer and turn it into the full product that costs money.
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You hype to never own anything again? Corporations have realized that they're essentially immortal and that the more stuff they have for rent, the less likely it is they'll ever have to sell any of it. I wish I could stick around for three or four more generations because I'll bet that eventually not only will regular people just never expect to own a home, but they'll all be so marketed-to by the landlords that it'll be considered common sense that buying a home is a bad idea.
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EU needs to start targeting this DLC for cars bullshit.
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The feature isn't worth $15,000. They charge you that much to send a small, very specific sequence of bits to your car. That's what you're paying for because the feature's already built in.
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Yeah anyone who’s familiar with the “software upgrade” know’s it’s just overpaying to be a beta tester for their self-driving. What’s more; people who don’t buy it still get auto-steer (lane maintain, car pacing & cruise control) which is what most would use self-driving for anyways. Aside from that, if it runs on code there will always be a way to beat it. People have been ripping .DLL files for enterprise software for decades that cost as much or more than this overpriced “feature.”
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I feel a bit conflicted on this. On the one hand, charging for heated seats that are already there and which is a purely hardware feature is bullshit.
Other things like Full Self Driving aren’t as black and white. Sure, the sensors are there but those are relatively cheap. A massive part of FSD is the software, and developing this kind of software is extremely expensive.
Should everyone get a copy of Windows and Office for free because it’s ‘just some bits’ and the hardware is already there?
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Calling it Full Self Driving is fraud, anyways.
I don't think licenses and/or subscriptions should be allowable on cars. Selling the car means it might not transfer and there's little way to ensure it has the software you need.
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It should be illegal to sell someone something they do not own. In your windows/office example, I'd say it should be illegal to crack/copy the software, but it should also be illegal to sell the software without an offline method of permanent and irrevocable activation (think offline cd keys), and it should be illegal for a company to put any barriers in front of use (vm, laptop, server, cpu cores, memory limits, etc) and illegal to put any barriers in front of resale. Selling a windows update, or a subscription model to updates seems completely reasonable (and probably should do online blacklists for shared keys) but the fundamentals of ownership shouldn't be eroded in law.
In the tesla example, your car should be your car. If you can modify the software to give you more features that's your car. If tesla wants to sell a subscription to incremental upgrades on their self-driving algorithms that's fine, but they should be liable for any faults in older revisions if they paywall updates. That incentivizes them to do the software equivalent of a recall when something is egregiously or dangerously broken, and also incentivizes innovation because they can't sell you an update if it doesn't contain anything valuable.
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The windows analogy is almost there.
It's more like, you pay for windows home edition, which would take up 24gb in your 128gb hard drive. But nope, it's actually taking up 89gb. Why? Because it has all the features of Windows Ultimate edition, all locked away, taking up precious space in a hard drive that you've paid for.
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The pricing and resale structure for "full self driving" is insane and anti-consumer so I lean towards enabling the software with a jailbreak not being a horrible thing. I certainly would have no issue with this being done on a used car that had the paid "full self driving" software removed by the mothership.
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I mean, people should be using open source software and Tesla should have its best software on every car for public safety.
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Free and open source software is indeed fantastic.
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If you buy the hardware you should be able to turn it on. Jail breaking is fully moral in that situation.
The self driving is software that uses the hardware so should be paid for IMO. You should also be able to use your own software that’s open source on the hardware you own
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Running your own software to control the automotive part of a car is probably not legal, since I assume the process of making a car street legal should requires an audit of said system.
Hmm, well, I hope it is the case, anyway.
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It's ridiculous how nowadays a lot of hardware car features are locked behind a simple software switch. Feels like both a massive waste of resources for people that don't buy the upgrades, and like having to pay for a feature that is already physically present in your car. Software-only upgrades like full self driving are understandable, hardware upgrades locked behind a software gate aren't.
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Cory Doctorow calls it autoenshittification and wrote about it here ... https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
edit spelling
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It's cheaper to build identical cars than it is to add certain features to some and not to others.
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If it's cheaper then they should include it. It's like being cheaper to make a more powerful engine then software limiting the car to only go to so many RPMs or speed. It's that John Deere bullshit all over again.
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Doesn't make it any less scummy. Its just an artificial inflation of price.
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That will hold true until the manufacturers realize that there will always be someone smart enough to break their software lock, and on a car, there’s always ample incentive to do so.
Literally begging for people to hack your shit
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If you buy a Tesla you’re encouraging and supporting these practices.
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Until the other manufacturers implement it, then it'll be unavoidable.
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The fewer people that buy it now, the longer that will take.
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So they downloaded a car from a car?
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"Music starts playing"
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Yes Hollywood. I absolutely fucking would download a car.
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... paying or subscribing to a service are becoming increasingly popular in the auto industry.
No paying or subscribing to a service (of which I would argue none of the thing paywalled in a car are a sevice) are becoming increasingly popular for auto makers. I don't know of anyone who is interested in paying for features forever.
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In before Elmo threatens with a lawsuit
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Wow, surprised that I hadn't heard of THIS vulnerability that previously existed: https://electrek.co/2020/08/27/tesla-hack-control-over-entire-fleet/
Pretty wild stuff, and that was 6 years ago!
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While I dislike this model I understand it, in the past sometimes you needed to pay more for that brand new stereo or AC. What I find it annoying is that you bought the car with the upgrades already on it, just need to open the paywall.
And at the end of the day they won't put it from their pocket, or you already paid for them or the people that bought the upgrades are financing the unused ones from others.
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It really fucks with the resale market, too. As is the intention. People will be getting used cars and being told they need to pay full, new price to unlock features.
More reasons to want right to repair and adversarial interoperability. So that if Tesla refuses to reasonable implement features that the hardware fully supports, a third-party can do it instead.
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Wouldn’t software tampering the full self-driving package give deniability to Tesla for your accident that killed someone?
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I dunno, this is great but it's also entirely possible Tesla retaliates by making your car 'accidentally' crash or something like that.
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If Autopilot's past performance is anything to go by, they don't need to force it to do anything.
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Are you talking about the toddler targeting vehicular assault package? That is some top notch programming, if we ever go to war with little kids, you can bet the DOD will buy up a fleet of Teslas in a heartbeat!
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They don’t need to make it crash on purpose, it can do it just fine in normal operation.
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119 comments