
Tesla Motors’ Over-the-Air Repairs - astaire
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/523621/tesla-motors-over-the-air-repairs-are-the-way-forward/
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TrainedMonkey
Hats off to Tesla, right now they are doing for cars what Apple did for
smartphones in 2007. Under closer examination concept is simple - work closer
with customers. In Tesla's case this means monitor working parameters of all
the cars they sold. This allows them to identify, diagnose, and solve quite a
few problems extremely quickly.

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yread
That actually sounds a lot more like Microsoft - Windows and other products
are sounding massive amount of telemetry data back to Redmond

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TrainedMonkey
Microsoft is huge software corporation that dominates operating
system/productivity space. Tesla is a fairly small automotive company that is
really innovative. I think that comparison is actually extremely flattering to
Tesla.

Anyways your point is correct, however it is one thing to get telemetry from
your own operating system that connected to the internet, and entirely
different beast to bring that kind of technology to consumer automobiles.

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chroem
Because who doesn't love having their personal possessions tracked by third
parties, right?

One person's feature is another person's backdoor.

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brokentone
This post just a few away (on the front page) from "Cyber attack that sent
750k malicious emails traced to hacked refrigerator"

I suppose the correlation here being that I would be concerned about not only
about malicious activities being committed against your car, but someone then
turning your car against you or others within its range.

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wikwocket
Somehow I would hope that there would be a better security team at a car
company started by the founder of a worldwide online payment processor and a
space exploration company trying to mount a mission to Mars, than at your
average home appliance company, where odds are most of the management don't
even know what Linux is, let alone that their products are running it.

That said, it's a valid concern, and one I hope that's at the forefront of
their minds as they design this.

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sliverstorm
I shiver a little bit, picturing a future in which automotive software is
_released early, released often_.

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koenigdavidmj
Or the alternate phrasing, "move fast and break things".

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th0br0
Shouldn't that be "move fast and crash things"?

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pyrocat
thatsthejoke.jpg

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BlackDeath3
I think you've got a broken image link there, bub.

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kyle_t
Its only a matter of time before over the air car hijacking becomes a real
problem. I think I prefer my car not be wirelessly susceptible.

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greenyoda
Yeah, if you can program a car to not catch fire, it should also be possible
to program a car to catch fire.

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sliverstorm
You could do all sorts of nasty things depending on the car. With a gasoline
car, you could melt the engine if the fuel maps are accessible via OTA.

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Ygg2
You can probably melt the battery in Tesla. Batteries are heated, right? Add
stress to batter, turn heaters on. Watch battery melt and/or explode. You can
already do similar attack on laptops.

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mey
[http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-
killer...](http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-
firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences)

For this to gain more traction, manufactures are going to have to become
better/more diligent about their software development practices.

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pwelch
This is really awesome. Now if only Carriers/Manufactures would update Android
phones as quickly.

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cdr
Carriers and manufacturers have no incentive to deliver a good experience on
Android phones past the first few months. It's a high three digits dollar
device at best with a profit margin probably in the double digits, and
customers don't care enough to reward carriers for doing it.

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jbb555
This is good.... but I do worry slightly that I'd get in my car one day and
find some feature I liked had mysteriously vanished overnight or been replaced
by something I didn't like. On balance though...good :)

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dror
Is there anyone that understands computer security that doesn't think this is
criminal? There are so many things that can go wrong here, both intentionally
and by accident.

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userbinator
Currently the Tesla userbase is relatively small so it might not be that worth
pwning, but as cars start becoming more like this, we might start seeing some
worrying news items... and I'm almost willing to bet at least one person in
the world, if not a group, is already trying to find exploits in one.

