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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

by 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.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Can't reply to gens comment, so I'll do it here: I see that you had many experiences with failing engineering, and so have I. What's more, car manufacturers have been involved in more and more scandals, and this does include code quality. As a matter of fact, I did meet people with direct experience on car systems code that reported deep quality problems. It's then logical to say there is a possibility Tesla screw up. However, electrical cars have been holding computers since day one. Tesla demonstrated the ability to create, build and sell at scale complex electronic systems with generally well considered performance. Also their will to allow outsiders to attack it can be interpretted as a desire to improve the system, and hence it makes sense to think this desire existed before, and they that did their homework (which is the original topic of this thread). We are discussing ability to setup a process, not to succeed in it.
  - gens 8y ago
    You need to wait a bit. Anyway. I'm sorry. I forgot for a second that I don't want to take part in these kinds of discussions. Tesla, in this case. You can have your faith.

by gens 8y ago

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.
sametmax 8y ago
Can't reply to gens comment, so I'll do it here: I see that you had many experiences with failing engineering, and so have I. What's more, car manufacturers have been involved in more and more scandals, and this does include code quality. As a matter of fact, I did meet people with direct experience on car systems code that reported deep quality problems. It's then logical to say there is a possibility Tesla screw up. However, electrical cars have been holding computers since day one. Tesla demonstrated the ability to create, build and sell at scale complex electronic systems with generally well considered performance. Also their will to allow outsiders to attack it can be interpretted as a desire to improve the system, and hence it makes sense to think this desire existed before, and they that did their homework (which is the original topic of this thread). We are discussing ability to setup a process, not to succeed in it.
- gens 8y ago
  You need to wait a bit. Anyway. I'm sorry. I forgot for a second that I don't want to take part in these kinds of discussions. Tesla, in this case. You can have your faith.