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That's the goal isn't it ? Finding critical flaws in a super complex system you built for years and sell to the entire world. For just the price of a car. Or,

That's the goal isn't it ? Finding critical flaws in a super complex system you built for years and sell to the entire world. For just the price of a car. Or, miracle occurs, nobody finds anything and you get some killer PR. That's a very good deal.

LeifCarrotson 8y ago
You don't think they could ask their own salaried engineers and get a nice long list of secured-by-obscurity vulnerabilities?
- sametmax 8y ago
  We are talking about a company that made electrical vehicules economically realistic in a oil-addidcted world. I think it's safe to think they have considered that already :) Would you say it's unlikely they just maxed out what they can do internally and want new eyes to work on it ?
  - Someone1234 8y ago
    > We are talking about a company that made electrical vehicules economically realistic in a oil-addidcted world. When did that occur? They're still selling $40K+ cars while their competitors are selling cars in the $20K range; Tesla cars continue not to make financial sense, they're a luxury good. Dollar per dollar the best bang for your buck is still likely hybrid vehicles followed by the cheapest electric vehicle you can find.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      It happened when we shifted from "electrical cars are hippie nonsense" to "we think there is a strong possibility in a not so distance future they will replace most oil based cars". They enabled that thinking. It just didn't exist before their first roadster.
    - cheald 8y ago
      It wasn't very long ago that electric cars were considered nothing more than an elaborate joke which would never command equal consideration with gasoline-powered cars. The Roadster definitely challenged a lot of those assumptions. Tesla proved they could make an electric car people wanted, rather than one they hated but tolerated out of a sense of moral obligation.
      - Someone1234 8y ago
        You're arguing a completely different point than the one I responded to. > made electrical vehicules economically realistic
        cheald 8y ago
        I don't think I am - consumer acceptance is a critical part of economic viability. A product which nobody wants to buy isn't a viable alternative, regardless of price point. To cast some perspective, Nissan has sold about 380k Leafs - the most popular electric car in the world - worldwide over the past 8 years. Tesla has shipped over 160k Model 3s in the US alone over the past 14 months (and currently continues to sell another 20k or so per month). The vehicle market is huge, and Tesla has by no means conquered it, but they've put a much larger dent in it than any other electric vehicle manufacturer, and have been instrumental in changing public opinion on EVs.
        astrodust 8y ago
        Tesla has made an inconsequential dent in the automotive market. Their cars really don't exist in any statistical sense. Volkswagen, post diesel fiasco, is best situated to hard-pivot to electric. Nissan is alreday succeeding. Others will follow suit as soon as it's economically viable, and mostly this depends on battery tech improving a little bit more. Tesla is not the leader: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2017/05/01/who-is-the-worlds-leading-ev-marker-no-its-not-tesla/#5f0379663912 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2017/05/01/who-is...
        8y ago
    - sametmax 8y ago
      You said "You're arguing a completely different point than the one I responded to" to another commenter, but so are you. The initial debate is wether given Tesla size and expertise, it's logical to expect them to indeed have done their homework and now chose another approach to find bugs.
    - freehunter 8y ago
      The Model 3 is the best selling luxury car in the US. Outselling tons of SUVs, in a US auto climate where the biggest automakers are ditching cars altogether in favor of SUVs. I'd say that counts as "economically realistic", even if it doesn't meet your further-back goalpost of "best bang for the buck". If the Model 3 isn't economically realistic, someone should tell that to Audi and BMW and Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/teslas-model-3-was-2018s-best-selling-luxury-car-in-us.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/teslas-model-3-was-2018s-bes...
  - gens 8y ago
    What about Nissan? That aside, i don't trust any car maker to make good software. Especially infotainment. Especially if it has bluetooth/wifi. And especially if there's internet involved. Let's just say i'm holding back words here. Grand majority of software development is not very strict on best security practices. But a two ton object that can easily move at speeds over 100kmh demands insane security measures. That's my opinion, at least. I know people will sooner buy a car with spotify. And i know people won't just hack other peoples cars and make them crash. But still, it weights two tons and moves at two hundred kilometers per hour. As a side note; someone else wrote how Teslas are advanced in terms of computer technology then other cars and how many computers they have in their cars. Lots of other cars have a ton of computers in them. It's nothing new.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      The comment was answering "You don't think they could ask their own salaried engineers and get a nice long list of secured-by-obscurity vulnerabilities?" by saying that since Tesla is a leading player in the electrical car industry, it's fair to assume they did that already and is why they are now seaking experience from outside. Since I'm not giving any evualation in any way about the quality of the software resulting in those actions, is your comment stating that I'm wrong, in a way I couldn't understand ?
      - gens 8y ago
        I was reading the LKML(linux kernel mailing list) back when some.. people were pushing DBus (a message transport protocol) into the kernel (in a slightly different form, as kdbus). Main reasons were performance (dbus sucks there) and.. i think security or something. Many comments in and the main reasoning for the performance improvement (of moving it into the kernel) was context switching (going from a userspace program into the kernel and/or back). At least two senior RedHat engineers, the top kernel maintainer, and a bunch of other engineers. Out of all of them NOBODY bothered to check out why dbus is slow. Until Linus himself ran a simple test and found that the user-space dbus daemon is not optimized at all. Context switches were something like 1% of the actual performance cost. Well.. saying that nobody bothered to check is just my wishful thinking, thinking that it is incompetence or just them just being jaded by fancy technology rather then malice (there's more to the story). Anyway. One of the mails was an infotainment engineer at some car company. Before that I, for some reason, thought that such a big and serious industry is very serious when it comes to software. But right then it clicked that car software makers are just as any other software writers (maybe a bit more serious). This was before two hackers hacked a Toyota. And later a Range Rover (or something) over bluetooth. Bout those companies are much older and much more serious then Tesla, and probably have plenty of world class coders at their disposal. As for the first part of what I wrote above (that i forgot by now). Teslas are not the first commercially viable electric car. They may be among the first to have nice range (over 300km). And Teslas are not the most affordable, that goes to the Nissan Leaf (2017 and above). Granted the Nissan is not a big car, closer to a Clio. On another though, they could just hire a security company to do a deep audit. Maybe they have. Maybe that's why they are incentivizing crackers. I do not and probably can not know. edited for readability EDIT: I'd maybe trust Rolls Royce. But i don't have money for that so it doesn't matter.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    We're talking about a company that spent more than a billion dollars to build an assembly line they discovered after the fact wouldn't work... It's not safe to say anything about Tesla's capabilities or competencies at this point.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      Any people in this thread capable of creating revolutionary vehicules, mass building them, and selling them for years, raise your hand.
      - thecanman 8y ago
        What does that have to do with what he said about Tesla? Are you going to debate with him or are you going to make another non-contributing comment?
        rchaud 8y ago
        Rebuttals of the "Oh yeah? Well, what world changing things have YOU done?" variety are common if someone brings up anything remotely negative about Tesla.
        gamblor956 8y ago
        Well, for myself, I've changed the law in several countries in ways that have greatly improved the lives of the people affected by them. I feel pretty confident in my right to criticize Tesla for it's presumptive and poorly executed overreach.
      - gamblor956 8y ago
        Toyota and Nissan have their hands raised, and have had their hands raised for decades. The market for clean vehicles exists because Toyota and Nissan showed there was demand for it. Tesla came in and made better-looking cars (from a distance, they're quite shoddy looking up close), but they're competitively only because Toyota and Nissan have chosen to stick with their distinctive designs rather than put their EV tech into mainstream vehicles. And Tesla's big problem is that the rest of the industry is finally getting around to putting their EV technologies into mainstream vehicles, almost all of which are better made and far more reliable.
- _ph_ 8y ago
  If they want the best security, they should have a bounty program both internally and externally. Of course, one would expect the Tesla engineers to find bugs first, as they have earlier and closer access to the system. Such bug/exploit finding should be appropriately rewarded. But the closer you are working with a product, the more obvious things one might miss. I often miss bugs in my own code, while I am great at finding them in my coworkers code :). So external bounty programs attrackt a wide variety of clever people with an idependant mindset.
astrodust 8y ago
There's a zero percent chance that this car is not pwned. Those that have spoken out about Tesla's technical practices have described a situation so wildly out of control it's amazing their entire fleet hasn't been remote bricked.

LeifCarrotson 8y ago

You don't think they could ask their own salaried engineers and get a nice long list of secured-by-obscurity vulnerabilities?

sametmax 8y ago
We are talking about a company that made electrical vehicules economically realistic in a oil-addidcted world. I think it's safe to think they have considered that already :) Would you say it's unlikely they just maxed out what they can do internally and want new eyes to work on it ?
- Someone1234 8y ago
  > We are talking about a company that made electrical vehicules economically realistic in a oil-addidcted world. When did that occur? They're still selling $40K+ cars while their competitors are selling cars in the $20K range; Tesla cars continue not to make financial sense, they're a luxury good. Dollar per dollar the best bang for your buck is still likely hybrid vehicles followed by the cheapest electric vehicle you can find.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    It happened when we shifted from "electrical cars are hippie nonsense" to "we think there is a strong possibility in a not so distance future they will replace most oil based cars". They enabled that thinking. It just didn't exist before their first roadster.
  - cheald 8y ago
    It wasn't very long ago that electric cars were considered nothing more than an elaborate joke which would never command equal consideration with gasoline-powered cars. The Roadster definitely challenged a lot of those assumptions. Tesla proved they could make an electric car people wanted, rather than one they hated but tolerated out of a sense of moral obligation.
    - Someone1234 8y ago
      You're arguing a completely different point than the one I responded to. > made electrical vehicules economically realistic
      - cheald 8y ago
        I don't think I am - consumer acceptance is a critical part of economic viability. A product which nobody wants to buy isn't a viable alternative, regardless of price point. To cast some perspective, Nissan has sold about 380k Leafs - the most popular electric car in the world - worldwide over the past 8 years. Tesla has shipped over 160k Model 3s in the US alone over the past 14 months (and currently continues to sell another 20k or so per month). The vehicle market is huge, and Tesla has by no means conquered it, but they've put a much larger dent in it than any other electric vehicle manufacturer, and have been instrumental in changing public opinion on EVs.
        astrodust 8y ago
        Tesla has made an inconsequential dent in the automotive market. Their cars really don't exist in any statistical sense. Volkswagen, post diesel fiasco, is best situated to hard-pivot to electric. Nissan is alreday succeeding. Others will follow suit as soon as it's economically viable, and mostly this depends on battery tech improving a little bit more. Tesla is not the leader: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2017/05/01/who-is-the-worlds-leading-ev-marker-no-its-not-tesla/#5f0379663912 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2017/05/01/who-is...
        8y ago
  - sametmax 8y ago
    You said "You're arguing a completely different point than the one I responded to" to another commenter, but so are you. The initial debate is wether given Tesla size and expertise, it's logical to expect them to indeed have done their homework and now chose another approach to find bugs.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    The Model 3 is the best selling luxury car in the US. Outselling tons of SUVs, in a US auto climate where the biggest automakers are ditching cars altogether in favor of SUVs. I'd say that counts as "economically realistic", even if it doesn't meet your further-back goalpost of "best bang for the buck". If the Model 3 isn't economically realistic, someone should tell that to Audi and BMW and Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/teslas-model-3-was-2018s-best-selling-luxury-car-in-us.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/teslas-model-3-was-2018s-bes...
- gens 8y ago
  What about Nissan? That aside, i don't trust any car maker to make good software. Especially infotainment. Especially if it has bluetooth/wifi. And especially if there's internet involved. Let's just say i'm holding back words here. Grand majority of software development is not very strict on best security practices. But a two ton object that can easily move at speeds over 100kmh demands insane security measures. That's my opinion, at least. I know people will sooner buy a car with spotify. And i know people won't just hack other peoples cars and make them crash. But still, it weights two tons and moves at two hundred kilometers per hour. As a side note; someone else wrote how Teslas are advanced in terms of computer technology then other cars and how many computers they have in their cars. Lots of other cars have a ton of computers in them. It's nothing new.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    The comment was answering "You don't think they could ask their own salaried engineers and get a nice long list of secured-by-obscurity vulnerabilities?" by saying that since Tesla is a leading player in the electrical car industry, it's fair to assume they did that already and is why they are now seaking experience from outside. Since I'm not giving any evualation in any way about the quality of the software resulting in those actions, is your comment stating that I'm wrong, in a way I couldn't understand ?
    - gens 8y ago
      I was reading the LKML(linux kernel mailing list) back when some.. people were pushing DBus (a message transport protocol) into the kernel (in a slightly different form, as kdbus). Main reasons were performance (dbus sucks there) and.. i think security or something. Many comments in and the main reasoning for the performance improvement (of moving it into the kernel) was context switching (going from a userspace program into the kernel and/or back). At least two senior RedHat engineers, the top kernel maintainer, and a bunch of other engineers. Out of all of them NOBODY bothered to check out why dbus is slow. Until Linus himself ran a simple test and found that the user-space dbus daemon is not optimized at all. Context switches were something like 1% of the actual performance cost. Well.. saying that nobody bothered to check is just my wishful thinking, thinking that it is incompetence or just them just being jaded by fancy technology rather then malice (there's more to the story). Anyway. One of the mails was an infotainment engineer at some car company. Before that I, for some reason, thought that such a big and serious industry is very serious when it comes to software. But right then it clicked that car software makers are just as any other software writers (maybe a bit more serious). This was before two hackers hacked a Toyota. And later a Range Rover (or something) over bluetooth. Bout those companies are much older and much more serious then Tesla, and probably have plenty of world class coders at their disposal. As for the first part of what I wrote above (that i forgot by now). Teslas are not the first commercially viable electric car. They may be among the first to have nice range (over 300km). And Teslas are not the most affordable, that goes to the Nissan Leaf (2017 and above). Granted the Nissan is not a big car, closer to a Clio. On another though, they could just hire a security company to do a deep audit. Maybe they have. Maybe that's why they are incentivizing crackers. I do not and probably can not know. edited for readability EDIT: I'd maybe trust Rolls Royce. But i don't have money for that so it doesn't matter.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  We're talking about a company that spent more than a billion dollars to build an assembly line they discovered after the fact wouldn't work... It's not safe to say anything about Tesla's capabilities or competencies at this point.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Any people in this thread capable of creating revolutionary vehicules, mass building them, and selling them for years, raise your hand.
    - thecanman 8y ago
      What does that have to do with what he said about Tesla? Are you going to debate with him or are you going to make another non-contributing comment?
      - rchaud 8y ago
        Rebuttals of the "Oh yeah? Well, what world changing things have YOU done?" variety are common if someone brings up anything remotely negative about Tesla.
        gamblor956 8y ago
        Well, for myself, I've changed the law in several countries in ways that have greatly improved the lives of the people affected by them. I feel pretty confident in my right to criticize Tesla for it's presumptive and poorly executed overreach.
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      Toyota and Nissan have their hands raised, and have had their hands raised for decades. The market for clean vehicles exists because Toyota and Nissan showed there was demand for it. Tesla came in and made better-looking cars (from a distance, they're quite shoddy looking up close), but they're competitively only because Toyota and Nissan have chosen to stick with their distinctive designs rather than put their EV tech into mainstream vehicles. And Tesla's big problem is that the rest of the industry is finally getting around to putting their EV technologies into mainstream vehicles, almost all of which are better made and far more reliable.
_ph_ 8y ago
If they want the best security, they should have a bounty program both internally and externally. Of course, one would expect the Tesla engineers to find bugs first, as they have earlier and closer access to the system. Such bug/exploit finding should be appropriately rewarded. But the closer you are working with a product, the more obvious things one might miss. I often miss bugs in my own code, while I am great at finding them in my coworkers code :). So external bounty programs attrackt a wide variety of clever people with an idependant mindset.

astrodust 8y ago

There's a zero percent chance that this car is not pwned. Those that have spoken out about Tesla's technical practices have described a situation so wildly out of control it's amazing their entire fleet hasn't been remote bricked.