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Comment by AinderS | Hacker News Reader

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

It’s a rental car, you just don’t know that when you “buy” it.

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.

"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.

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!

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.

> End user control over safety critical software is not only dangerous, but a potential source of significant legal liability.

Sure is - and that's absolutely no reason to lock a person out of a car that they own. They OWN it - they are responsible for modifications (and the liability that comes with them). Exactly the same as every car built without a computer - which was roughly ALL of them until the late 70s/early 80s.

Why not allow access to safety systems? ICE vehicles have allowed for all kinds of modifications over the years that are unsafe and maybe illegal. Why take the user’s choice away now? Because of some bogeyman safety issues that might affect a dozen people who actually want to tweak things? It’s happening today anyways.

When's the last time you saw Toyota in the headline for one of their cars catching on fire on the highway? Tesla has hype on the same level of Apple, so any time anything goes wrong with a car catching on fire or crashing, or having a terrible time with getting the car serviced, they're in the news. Tesla's first-party service centers are usually a plus for consumers, but Ford GM et al. benefit from dealerships being separate entities that take all the blame when something goes wrong.

I don’t understand how a business’s PR concerns should affect my freedom.

As far as I can tell nobody is stopping you from doing this. Just as you can legally hack iPhones if you figure out how, so can you hack your Tesla. The only slightly illegal thing might be the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA, but you'd have to take that up with Howard Coble and the members of the 105th congress.

My comment is reasoning for why Tesla has a stake in protecting their reputation; if you don't like it, please don't support their practices by buying their cars.

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.

This sort of justification would never fly if we were talking about modding ICE vehicles:

* Illegal to replace your own brake rotors or pads, as faulty ones can cause safety issues.

* Illegal to replace your own headlights, as bad ones could be too dim or too bright and cause safety issues.

* Illegal to change your own oil, as bad ones could seize up your engine in the middle of the road and cause safety issues.

* Illegal to install a turbocharger, as that makes your car accelerate faster than the manufacturer likes and could cause safety issues.

The end result of this line of thinking leads to a million dollar tractor that a farmer can't fix when they need it most. I much prefer the idea that people are individually responsible for any modifications they choose to make to their cars.

In the UK, many modifications are restricted. For example, if I was to replace my halogen car headlights with LED ones, the car would be technically illegal, uninsured and fail inspection (if they notice). Exhausts can't be noisier than factory, which means in practice all aftermarket sports exhausts are illegal.

At some point, I assume modifying drive-by-wire systems will become legally restricted.

Are those modifications illegal or is driving it on public roads after those modifications illegal?

In the US, for a while, car manufacturers could void your warranty over modifications. Something happened some-odd years back that made it so that they had to prove that the modification is what caused the issue to refuse service.

1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act

https://www.autocare.org/government-relations/current-issues...

Well that's just not true.

You are talking about something subtly but crucially different. Replacing your headlights is not illegal, only the type of headlight you use is legally restricted. Modification itself is not legally restricted, only the end result.

Yeah, a better example is modifications to homes. Those are restricted in many places in the US. I can't replace a circuit in my homes wiring, even if I follow every code.

Who is going to stop you?

But even in that case, the restriction comes from law, not an arbitrary decision made by a private company.

And there are a number of competing, qualified, third party electricians who can make the change for you. You aren't locked-in to contracting with the company which originally built the house.

Sadly, a lot of people disagree with you and do want much heavier regulations for a lot of those things.

These seem largely to be straw-men; brake rotors, pads, headlights.... all have associated safety standards.

You can install your own brake pads sure, but as a layman if you installed brake pads of your own design and construction, it might be a bit of an issue.

In EU many modifications are illegal and you'll get huge fines and/or lose your vehicle.

Nitpick: the modifications aren't illegal. Driving with some modifications is illegal

You can modify your car to your heart's desire and put it in a garage or drive it on a race track. You just cannot go into a public road with them. Totally sensible.

Yeah, that's a better way to put it. But the end result for an average person is that on public roads you know that the vehicles are at least somewhat standard. You just can't go around trying to kill pedestrians or bicyclist because "muh freedom". [1]

[1]: https://i.redd.it/e9n15wjtad411.jpg

Gross.

Whether or not the car is street legal is an entirely separate concern, and certainly not one that should be enforced by allowing the manufacturer to prohibit all software modifications of any sort.

It's like preventing customers from changing their own tires because "they might do it wrong and cause an accident". Yeah, they might. But it's not the car manufacturer's responsibility to prevent that, and it certainly isn't justification for locking down the car to only be drivable with manufacturer-installed tires, or remotely disabling cars that use tires from unapproved brands.

> But it's not the car manufacturer's responsibility to prevent that

Imagine someone installs a cheap third-party ADAS in a Tesla that causes a multi-car pile-up. Should we expect highway patrol officers be able to determine if some third-party software interfered with the normal operation of the car? And, even if Tesla Inc is legally in the clear because the customer did it, they are the #1 target for bad news headlines because they're 'the Apple of Cars' (at least in terms of how much hype they attract), so by the time they set the record straight they've already lost some good-will.

While not exactly equivalent, what if the lock was on MPG on an ICE vehicle? Would that be reasonable?

Li-ion batteries have a huge environmental cost. To hide ⅓ of that material behind software is immoral (imho).

It sounds like they were swapping in a better part because they may have not had the original. In the past that was a “win” for the customer. It seems like Tesla has turned this into a loss for the customer (more weight on the vehicle) and a loss for humanity (70 tons of earth mined for unused lithium).

The energy cost difference with regenerative braking is essentially negligible between these two cars. Adding several hundred pounds to my EV driving around makes little difference by my measurements. And as to the idea of the lithium being wasted, that might not necessarily be true as well. Its not like those extra cells will never be used, its just the pack will never really hit 100% charge and will never really hit 0% charge, it'll essentially always be somewhere above 0% and below 100%. This will allow better wear leveling over the whole pack, so if the car is used a decent bit it'll get more miles on its life than the smaller pack.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Random person's hack maybe not but what about say Shelby, or Saleen? I would be all over a Saleen Model S.

https://www.saleen.com/gtx/

Now I kind of want to see what Shelby would do.

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...

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.

All cars are doing this stuff, it isn’t EV specific

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.

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...

[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-a...

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.

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)?

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