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"I feel like this is more mundane on Tesla's part than many are making it out to be. A mistake was made years ago. An employee recently discovered and "fixed" i

"I feel like this is more mundane on Tesla's part than many are making it out to be. A mistake was made years ago. An employee recently discovered and "fixed" it. Terrible communication and customer service, but nefarious? Nah." At this point I feel like terrible communication and service is an intentional business strategy for some companies who found that by making support so baroque as to be inaccessible or just eliminating it entirely that they can slash costs accordingly. I do consider it to be nefarious in such cases.

AinderS 4y ago
Software locks themselves are nefarious. Is it the owner's car, or Tesla's?
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I wonder if there is some nice fine print somewhere that they only sold a "licence" to use the car. Not the car itself... Kinda like software has...
  - noasaservice 4y ago
    If they want to *lease* the vehicles, that's fine. They need to make it explicitly known it is a lease for X term, and at Y cost per month of the lease. Modifying their property would be completely in the clear, or at least a hell of a lot less ethically ambiguous. But they're selling these vehicles. As in, transfer of title to the person they're selling to. Taxes are paid. Transfer is registered with the state(s). Insurance is purchased on vehicles in your possession. And full coverage is required for vehicle loans (another set of showing proper legal transfer). And, just because some click-wrap software has "We are allowed to murder your family and eat your children" does not make illegal clauses legal. And given in this instance, it was tesla->first owner->second owner->third owner , any click-wrap garbage would have been done by the first owner. Basically, this is the end-run around physical ownership for all the IoT companies and companies that pay for/demand 100% connectivity. All of these companies that have these always-on remote tie ins are the Darth Vader here - "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further." All the EV companies are doing this. I so want to buy an EV. I'm not willing to subvert my ownership rights for that.
    - jackmott 4y ago
      All cars are doing this stuff, it isn’t EV specific
  - AinderS 4y ago
    Contracts and DRM are two sides of the same coin when it comes to chipping away at ownership. They want to segment the market as finely as possible, to capture all of the excess value of their product. E.g. they don't want to sell you a general-purpose GPU, but a GPU that's good for one purpose only, and you have to pay extra to use it for anything else [1]. Tesla is leading the way [2], but I'm sure other automakers are also trying to come up with ways to restrict "personal" vehicles from being used for "commercial" activities. [1] Nvidia’s updates EULA to ban the use of gamer-oriented GPUs in data centers - https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-bans-consumer-gpus-in-data-centers/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-bans-consumer... [2] Don’t plan on using your autonomous Tesla to earn money with Uber or Lyft - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/dont-plan-on-using-an-autonomous-tesla-to-earn-money-with-uber-or-lyft/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/dont-plan-on-using-an-a...
    - cowtools 4y ago
      I have always suspected that nvidia's closed source drivers are an intentional result of hiding poorly-implemented limitations (see code 43 error, etc.) for the sake of market segmentation between data-center and gaming models. They would be screwed if data centers realized they could just reuse cheap off-the-shelf components for a fraction of the price. Not to mention they benefit from building up a proprietary ecosystem (CUDA, etc.) from collecting data from users (geforce now, etc.). It's something of a conspiracy theory.
      - judge2020 4y ago
        Do you think CUDA development would be completely sustained by the profit margins of consumer cards (that would then be shared between the CUDA and gpu research teams)?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    It wouldn't matter even if they did. In the US we title large pieces of property so that people don't pull this kind of BS.
- nr2x 4y ago
  It’s a rental car, you just don’t know that when you “buy” it.
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    This fucking exactly. I'm fucking over it. If I "own" the device - legally I should own a key to EVERY fucking lock inside it. Digital or physical. This attitude that it's acceptable to put a little green man inside of something you sell, and then retain control over that sold item using your little green man is insidious and immoral. I want it fucking banned yesterday, and it's rapidly becoming one of my strongest political opinions.
    - noasaservice 4y ago
      "Any digital restriction or otherwise arbitrary lock that tries to supersede physical ownership or first-sale doctrine or Magnuson Moss Warranty Act shall have all congressional protections, DMCA, copyright, patent, and trademarks stripped from those products. Any remote access after sale has occurred shall be considered a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and shall hold Chief * Officers, upper tier executive positions, and boards of directors fully liable, up to and including reimbursements of 3x per device to the citizens affected, and prison times no less than 1 week to a maximum of 10 years. Enforcement of this law shall be done by the Federal Trade Commission." I would LOVE to see something like this.
      - Willish42 4y ago
        Unfortunately this kind of law is like, at least 2 revolutions away from now w.r.t. US politics. No way this would ever pass even in the house under the current political system (see: Patriot Act, Citizens United, etc.) It's a nice idea though!
    - yarg 4y ago
      Within reason, sure - but there are limits. End user control over safety critical software is not only dangerous, but a potential source of significant legal liability. I don't want an EV that's capable of accelerating at the maximum rate supported by the motors.
- slg 4y ago
  Maybe this is a controversial opinion here, but I think software locks aren't inherently bad in a car that can be driven by software. I don't really trust Tesla's self-driving software as is, I certainly don't trust some random person's hack of already questionable Tesla code. This isn't an iPhone. Someone mucking about in the software can kill people.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    I assume you meant that the car in question was a 90 by virtue of a "random person's hack". Would you mind describing why you think this? The car is a 90 (effectively) because Tesla set it up that way.
    - _aavaa_ 4y ago
      From the twitter thread: "I try to help, but without completely disconnecting the car from Tesla, when I change it back to a 90 their "teleforce" bot reaches in remotely and flips it back to a 60 within moments. There's hacky ways around this, but none are ideal."
      - renewiltord 4y ago
        I see, so that comment is not disagreeing with the original 60 -> 90 switch. They think it's a bad idea when 60 -> 90 -> 60 was completed and then the user (and their confederate) attempted to go back to 90. So that commenter would have been okay with things if Tesla had modified nothing back down to 60. Thank you for explaining.
  - toss1 4y ago
    Absolutely true, in the realm of anything related to self-driving or even fly-by-wire controls. However, the software that artificially controls how much range the battery pack will produce (outside of the charging & self-protection algos) - that's borderline unethical to DRM.
  - stonemetal12 4y ago
    Random person's hack maybe not but what about say Shelby, or Saleen? I would be all over a Saleen Model S.
noasaservice 4y ago
Maybe. Maybe not. If I sold you my car, and I wanted my stereo but forgot it, the first sale doctrine covers the whole thing as delivered. If I was to go to the car, while in your ownership and possession, and attempt to remove the stereo, you'd call the cops for vehicular theft. That's because it's covered under first sale doctrine. And being a vehicle (unlike most other goods) has an attached ownership registered with the state in the forms of a registration. Previously, that was simple. I sell you X; you pay agreed price; we trade green paper for thing. Now, with remotely tied crap, people have no say on their properly owned things. That 3rd party who controls the software can do whateverthefuck they want - and that's because copyright and software erodes actual ownership. In reality, this "correction" on Tesla's part is no different if I decided to keep a hole in my previous company's servers, and then "reach in" for extra-legal 'modifications'. This should be a federal crime, including interstate commerce clause, wire fraud, and hacking. People should go to prison for this kind of thing. - and I'm talking about C levels, not ground-level techs.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  > If I sold you my car, and I wanted my stereo but forgot it, the first sale doctrine covers the whole thing as delivered. If I was to go to the car, while in your ownership and possession, and attempt to remove the stereo, you'd call the cops for vehicular theft. You could just have included the stereo explicitly in the contract. This happens all the time in large purchases like real estate. You would of course need to enforce the contract in a different way than breaking into their car, but it would be enforceable as long as the contract as worded doesn’t run afoul of state and local laws. Not doing that, and forgetting to remove it, well… it seems like consumers are giving up a very large concept of ownership for marginal seller use cases, charitably. Uncharitably it seeks to be a lower grab and cut contract law out of the equation. Edit: slight rephrasing because I misread your argument, I think we are in agreement
  - glitchinc 4y ago
    If the time in which the stereo was "forgotten" was at the time the exclusions were written into the sales contract (or the sales ad), the stereo would be legally conveyed to the purchaser of the car once the buyer and seller complete the sale. Similarly, once a real estate purchase is completed, all items within the bounds of the property purchased--whether it be roof shingles, trees, or former owner family heirlooms they forgot to take with them--legally become possessions of the new owner unless itemized in a sales contract along with agreed-to stipulations that permit retrieval of the items by the former owner after completion of the sale. Goodwill (and being a reasonable buyer/seller) goes a long way in situations such as these, and in most situations a buyer and seller will work out property sorting issues amongst themselves. However, there would be nothing legally preventing a buyer that stumbles upon a stash of gold bars left in the basement of their new-to-them house--that they did not know about, and that the previous owner did not disclose--and immediately selling them. [1] BMW's recent second attempt at "enabling equipment features as a service" is a canary in the coal mine, or trial balloon, so to speak. BMW's argument for heated-seats-as-a-service is, flippantly, "What if the second buyer of the vehicle doesn't want heated seats? They don't have to pay for the service. Problem solved." This distorted-reality C-suite speak so drenched in logic fallacy is worthy of a conversation by itself, but I bring it up to say this: instead of buying a car in the traditional sense, OEMs are attempting to change the model to buying "the physical components comprising a car, and the option to enable features of those physical components". I want no part of it. I like to use hyperbolic (at least for today) examples adapting commonplace business models for smart home devices, software licenses, hardware compatibility lists, EVs, cloud services, etc. to traditional / legacy / analog items: - What if you went to use your hammer you've owned for years, only to find out that it can't be used to drive in a nail because the company that made the hammer is no longer in business? - What if your basement flooded because, while the trench drain around your foundation is physically capable of directing enough water away from your foundation into your sump pump, you didn't opt to pay for the "catastrophic flooding capability" license? Better yet, let's say you paid for the license, but haven't checked your email in a few days (maybe because of the storms, since your power has been out and you don't have ready Internet access) to learn that the credit card the trench-drain-as-a-service company has on file has expired and the license renewal charge was declined, so the license you leased was deactivated via OTA update without notice sent via the post? - What if you find out while driving that your car brakes won't work because a repair shop you've gone to for years installed a set of third-party brake pads that used to be but are no longer compatible with your car (or part of an OEM-certified or OEM-supported configuration) as the result of a recent firmware update to your car's PCM/ECU? All of those sound terrifying to me. [1] Source: myself, but not about gold bars, unfortunately. More than one year post-purchase of a house I purchased, the seller decided they wanted a lamp back that they thought they left at the house prior to its sale. I did not remember if they left it or not, but they did leave several items behind. I sent items to their forwarding address that I deemed to be personal items (e.g. monogrammed clothes), but assumed that all other items were left because they didn't want to take them. I donated all of the items I didn't want, possibly including the lamp they desperately wanted returned, to charities. After spending a good bit of energy harassing me over the lamp, the seller consulted with counsel and learned that they had no options for recourse. The harassment stopped, and I have not heard from them since.
jackmott 4y ago
It certainly echos the approach of other tech companies like google and apple. Save money and reduce risk by not giving your employees any power or freedom to think on their own. Or not having employees even exist when possible. The customer suffers but the customer is also the sucker who used your service because it was the cheapest or free. its all gross and unnecessary
ratg13 4y ago
Imagine you bought a home, and 10+ years after you bought it, not the previous owner, but the owner before that comes to take the chimney off the house because they had a clause in the contract between the previous two owners where the chimney was not part of the sale. This was not in your contract. You gonna let the original owner take his chimney over some deal that happened a decade ago that you had no idea about?
- thfuran 4y ago
  Even worse, what actually happened was they sold the house to the previous owner without a chimney but then later installed it at no charge anyways. Then they decided that they wanted the chimney back after the house sold again.
rootusrootus 4y ago
It didn't need to be fixed, though. It's as if they consider it a moral error -- can't be giving free stuff out, ya know! The money was spent long ago, so the fix didn't save Tesla any money, no recurring costs, etc. It was purely a "fuck you" move, and any halfway competent employee should have seen this shitstorm coming a mile away.

AinderS 4y ago

Software locks themselves are nefarious. Is it the owner's car, or Tesla's?

Ekaros 4y ago
I wonder if there is some nice fine print somewhere that they only sold a "licence" to use the car. Not the car itself... Kinda like software has...
- noasaservice 4y ago
  If they want to *lease* the vehicles, that's fine. They need to make it explicitly known it is a lease for X term, and at Y cost per month of the lease. Modifying their property would be completely in the clear, or at least a hell of a lot less ethically ambiguous. But they're selling these vehicles. As in, transfer of title to the person they're selling to. Taxes are paid. Transfer is registered with the state(s). Insurance is purchased on vehicles in your possession. And full coverage is required for vehicle loans (another set of showing proper legal transfer). And, just because some click-wrap software has "We are allowed to murder your family and eat your children" does not make illegal clauses legal. And given in this instance, it was tesla->first owner->second owner->third owner , any click-wrap garbage would have been done by the first owner. Basically, this is the end-run around physical ownership for all the IoT companies and companies that pay for/demand 100% connectivity. All of these companies that have these always-on remote tie ins are the Darth Vader here - "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further." All the EV companies are doing this. I so want to buy an EV. I'm not willing to subvert my ownership rights for that.
  - jackmott 4y ago
    All cars are doing this stuff, it isn’t EV specific
- AinderS 4y ago
  Contracts and DRM are two sides of the same coin when it comes to chipping away at ownership. They want to segment the market as finely as possible, to capture all of the excess value of their product. E.g. they don't want to sell you a general-purpose GPU, but a GPU that's good for one purpose only, and you have to pay extra to use it for anything else [1]. Tesla is leading the way [2], but I'm sure other automakers are also trying to come up with ways to restrict "personal" vehicles from being used for "commercial" activities. [1] Nvidia’s updates EULA to ban the use of gamer-oriented GPUs in data centers - https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-bans-consumer-gpus-in-data-centers/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-bans-consumer... [2] Don’t plan on using your autonomous Tesla to earn money with Uber or Lyft - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/dont-plan-on-using-an-autonomous-tesla-to-earn-money-with-uber-or-lyft/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/dont-plan-on-using-an-a...
  - cowtools 4y ago
    I have always suspected that nvidia's closed source drivers are an intentional result of hiding poorly-implemented limitations (see code 43 error, etc.) for the sake of market segmentation between data-center and gaming models. They would be screwed if data centers realized they could just reuse cheap off-the-shelf components for a fraction of the price. Not to mention they benefit from building up a proprietary ecosystem (CUDA, etc.) from collecting data from users (geforce now, etc.). It's something of a conspiracy theory.
    - judge2020 4y ago
      Do you think CUDA development would be completely sustained by the profit margins of consumer cards (that would then be shared between the CUDA and gpu research teams)?
- kube-system 4y ago
  It wouldn't matter even if they did. In the US we title large pieces of property so that people don't pull this kind of BS.
nr2x 4y ago
It’s a rental car, you just don’t know that when you “buy” it.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  This fucking exactly. I'm fucking over it. If I "own" the device - legally I should own a key to EVERY fucking lock inside it. Digital or physical. This attitude that it's acceptable to put a little green man inside of something you sell, and then retain control over that sold item using your little green man is insidious and immoral. I want it fucking banned yesterday, and it's rapidly becoming one of my strongest political opinions.
  - noasaservice 4y ago
    "Any digital restriction or otherwise arbitrary lock that tries to supersede physical ownership or first-sale doctrine or Magnuson Moss Warranty Act shall have all congressional protections, DMCA, copyright, patent, and trademarks stripped from those products. Any remote access after sale has occurred shall be considered a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and shall hold Chief * Officers, upper tier executive positions, and boards of directors fully liable, up to and including reimbursements of 3x per device to the citizens affected, and prison times no less than 1 week to a maximum of 10 years. Enforcement of this law shall be done by the Federal Trade Commission." I would LOVE to see something like this.
    - Willish42 4y ago
      Unfortunately this kind of law is like, at least 2 revolutions away from now w.r.t. US politics. No way this would ever pass even in the house under the current political system (see: Patriot Act, Citizens United, etc.) It's a nice idea though!
  - yarg 4y ago
    Within reason, sure - but there are limits. End user control over safety critical software is not only dangerous, but a potential source of significant legal liability. I don't want an EV that's capable of accelerating at the maximum rate supported by the motors.
slg 4y ago
Maybe this is a controversial opinion here, but I think software locks aren't inherently bad in a car that can be driven by software. I don't really trust Tesla's self-driving software as is, I certainly don't trust some random person's hack of already questionable Tesla code. This isn't an iPhone. Someone mucking about in the software can kill people.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  I assume you meant that the car in question was a 90 by virtue of a "random person's hack". Would you mind describing why you think this? The car is a 90 (effectively) because Tesla set it up that way.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    From the twitter thread: "I try to help, but without completely disconnecting the car from Tesla, when I change it back to a 90 their "teleforce" bot reaches in remotely and flips it back to a 60 within moments. There's hacky ways around this, but none are ideal."
    - renewiltord 4y ago
      I see, so that comment is not disagreeing with the original 60 -> 90 switch. They think it's a bad idea when 60 -> 90 -> 60 was completed and then the user (and their confederate) attempted to go back to 90. So that commenter would have been okay with things if Tesla had modified nothing back down to 60. Thank you for explaining.
- toss1 4y ago
  Absolutely true, in the realm of anything related to self-driving or even fly-by-wire controls. However, the software that artificially controls how much range the battery pack will produce (outside of the charging & self-protection algos) - that's borderline unethical to DRM.
- stonemetal12 4y ago
  Random person's hack maybe not but what about say Shelby, or Saleen? I would be all over a Saleen Model S.

noasaservice 4y ago

Maybe. Maybe not. If I sold you my car, and I wanted my stereo but forgot it, the first sale doctrine covers the whole thing as delivered. If I was to go to the car, while in your ownership and possession, and attempt to remove the stereo, you'd call the cops for vehicular theft. That's because it's covered under first sale doctrine. And being a vehicle (unlike most other goods) has an attached ownership registered with the state in the forms of a registration. Previously, that was simple. I sell you X; you pay agreed price; we trade green paper for thing. Now, with remotely tied crap, people have no say on their properly owned things. That 3rd party who controls the software can do whateverthefuck they want - and that's because copyright and software erodes actual ownership. In reality, this "correction" on Tesla's part is no different if I decided to keep a hole in my previous company's servers, and then "reach in" for extra-legal 'modifications'. This should be a federal crime, including interstate commerce clause, wire fraud, and hacking. People should go to prison for this kind of thing. - and I'm talking about C levels, not ground-level techs.

mattnewton 4y ago
> If I sold you my car, and I wanted my stereo but forgot it, the first sale doctrine covers the whole thing as delivered. If I was to go to the car, while in your ownership and possession, and attempt to remove the stereo, you'd call the cops for vehicular theft. You could just have included the stereo explicitly in the contract. This happens all the time in large purchases like real estate. You would of course need to enforce the contract in a different way than breaking into their car, but it would be enforceable as long as the contract as worded doesn’t run afoul of state and local laws. Not doing that, and forgetting to remove it, well… it seems like consumers are giving up a very large concept of ownership for marginal seller use cases, charitably. Uncharitably it seeks to be a lower grab and cut contract law out of the equation. Edit: slight rephrasing because I misread your argument, I think we are in agreement
- glitchinc 4y ago
  If the time in which the stereo was "forgotten" was at the time the exclusions were written into the sales contract (or the sales ad), the stereo would be legally conveyed to the purchaser of the car once the buyer and seller complete the sale. Similarly, once a real estate purchase is completed, all items within the bounds of the property purchased--whether it be roof shingles, trees, or former owner family heirlooms they forgot to take with them--legally become possessions of the new owner unless itemized in a sales contract along with agreed-to stipulations that permit retrieval of the items by the former owner after completion of the sale. Goodwill (and being a reasonable buyer/seller) goes a long way in situations such as these, and in most situations a buyer and seller will work out property sorting issues amongst themselves. However, there would be nothing legally preventing a buyer that stumbles upon a stash of gold bars left in the basement of their new-to-them house--that they did not know about, and that the previous owner did not disclose--and immediately selling them. [1] BMW's recent second attempt at "enabling equipment features as a service" is a canary in the coal mine, or trial balloon, so to speak. BMW's argument for heated-seats-as-a-service is, flippantly, "What if the second buyer of the vehicle doesn't want heated seats? They don't have to pay for the service. Problem solved." This distorted-reality C-suite speak so drenched in logic fallacy is worthy of a conversation by itself, but I bring it up to say this: instead of buying a car in the traditional sense, OEMs are attempting to change the model to buying "the physical components comprising a car, and the option to enable features of those physical components". I want no part of it. I like to use hyperbolic (at least for today) examples adapting commonplace business models for smart home devices, software licenses, hardware compatibility lists, EVs, cloud services, etc. to traditional / legacy / analog items: - What if you went to use your hammer you've owned for years, only to find out that it can't be used to drive in a nail because the company that made the hammer is no longer in business? - What if your basement flooded because, while the trench drain around your foundation is physically capable of directing enough water away from your foundation into your sump pump, you didn't opt to pay for the "catastrophic flooding capability" license? Better yet, let's say you paid for the license, but haven't checked your email in a few days (maybe because of the storms, since your power has been out and you don't have ready Internet access) to learn that the credit card the trench-drain-as-a-service company has on file has expired and the license renewal charge was declined, so the license you leased was deactivated via OTA update without notice sent via the post? - What if you find out while driving that your car brakes won't work because a repair shop you've gone to for years installed a set of third-party brake pads that used to be but are no longer compatible with your car (or part of an OEM-certified or OEM-supported configuration) as the result of a recent firmware update to your car's PCM/ECU? All of those sound terrifying to me. [1] Source: myself, but not about gold bars, unfortunately. More than one year post-purchase of a house I purchased, the seller decided they wanted a lamp back that they thought they left at the house prior to its sale. I did not remember if they left it or not, but they did leave several items behind. I sent items to their forwarding address that I deemed to be personal items (e.g. monogrammed clothes), but assumed that all other items were left because they didn't want to take them. I donated all of the items I didn't want, possibly including the lamp they desperately wanted returned, to charities. After spending a good bit of energy harassing me over the lamp, the seller consulted with counsel and learned that they had no options for recourse. The harassment stopped, and I have not heard from them since.

jackmott 4y ago

It certainly echos the approach of other tech companies like google and apple. Save money and reduce risk by not giving your employees any power or freedom to think on their own. Or not having employees even exist when possible. The customer suffers but the customer is also the sucker who used your service because it was the cheapest or free. its all gross and unnecessary

ratg13 4y ago

Imagine you bought a home, and 10+ years after you bought it, not the previous owner, but the owner before that comes to take the chimney off the house because they had a clause in the contract between the previous two owners where the chimney was not part of the sale. This was not in your contract. You gonna let the original owner take his chimney over some deal that happened a decade ago that you had no idea about?

thfuran 4y ago
Even worse, what actually happened was they sold the house to the previous owner without a chimney but then later installed it at no charge anyways. Then they decided that they wanted the chimney back after the house sold again.

rootusrootus 4y ago

It didn't need to be fixed, though. It's as if they consider it a moral error -- can't be giving free stuff out, ya know! The money was spent long ago, so the fix didn't save Tesla any money, no recurring costs, etc. It was purely a "fuck you" move, and any halfway competent employee should have seen this shitstorm coming a mile away.