- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
If all electric cars are just going to be subscription bullshit, I’m sorry, I won’t be driving electric.
Even ICE manufacturers have been including hardware that software disabled for a while
Audi had been doing this for years m they even disable stuff I’d you sell your car to another private person. One of my friends bought a used Audi and everything was disabled so he installed a cracked version of the infotainment software and now the thing that doesn’t work is the fingerprint unlock.
I got an OBDeleven for my 2015 GTI so I could unlock stuff and customize. Enabled rolling down the windows with the key fob, being able to display the engine oil temp in the dash and also setting the accelerator pedal curve to linear.
What I didn’t even know that was stuff you could even do
Kinda depends on the car. Volkswagen cars are pretty “hackable” with OBDeleven which is a wireless interface for the hilariously named “VAGCOM” protocol.
Subscribe to enable your BMW seat heater! They definitely require periodic software updates and is absolutely NOT a blatant money grab
There are some manufacturers that do not do this garbage, or at least not often. I’ve heard good things about Hyundai specifically.
For now they have customer goodwill to win back after nearly a decade of building cars that practically fell apart in a year or 2 in the late 00s and early 10s.
They’ll catch up to the others in anti-consumer practices soon, but for now they’re a good choice if you don’t particularly care for performance or ride quality.
Tesla got rid of the heater subscription bullshit in 2021. Now, the only thing locked behind a paywall is internet related stuff (sentry over mobile, streaming media access, etc.), the performance boost, and FSD.
But if the car is completely capable of habe that performance, why should people pay for it.
Oh I’m just correcting the article. Facts are better than fiction for conversations about reality.
It won’t just be electric cars, it’ll be all new model cars from manufacturing companies. At least until ICE is phased out.
Cory Doctorow has written a great article about this phenomenon a few days ago: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
Basically we move back to a feudalism world where you don’t own anything anymore and you have to pay recurring rents. And as you don’t own it they can fuck you over by increasing rents or disable features when you can’t pay.
More like, until the Chinese weasel their way into the US market with cheaper-than-used cars to undercut the legacy auto makers. 10 years or so, it’ll happen. And the big 3 will be begging for bailouts again. That is unless they smarten up and remember what made Ford what it is today.
They’re already doing that in some parts of the world. Then when they get sizeable market share, they emulated what the previous car makers do. It’s just not an improvement. It’s more of the same, only the manufacturer is different.
At some point, there will be practically nothing else to drive…
All the more reason to support public transportation.
Unpatchable
Good to hear
Good. There should be no such thing as unserviced features that are physically present in a product and locked out against its owner. Not in cars or anything.
deleted by creator
Why not?
Because it’s abusive and blatant rent seeking.
Look, if there’s an actual service feature that continually costs money to provide (eg.: a cell connection for distant remote start, GPS nav map updates, etc), charging a reasonable subscription fee for that is totally acceptable. But charging ongoing fees for fixed features like heated seats is 100% bullshit unless you’re going to include some sort of service benefits like free repairs (which I doubt they’re doing).
A subscription for hardware is such bullshit, I hope this trend dies.
We can all do our part by not buying anything from those who do this.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Utilizing multiple connections to the power supply, BIOS SPI chip, and SVI2 bus, the researchers performed a voltage fault injection attack on the MCU-Z’s Platform Security Processor.
“They allow an attacker to decrypt the encrypted NVMe storage and access private user data such as the phonebook, calendar entries, etc.”
“Hacking the embedded car computer could allow users to unlock these features without paying,” the TU Berlin researchers add.
In an email to Tom’s Hardware, one of the researchers clarified that not all Tesla software upgrades are accessible, so it remains to be seen if those premium options will also be ripe for picking.
Another consequence is that the exploit can “extract an otherwise vehicle-unique hardware-bound RSA key used to authenticate and authorize a car in Tesla’s internal service network.”
The TU Berlin team (consisting of PhD students Christian Werling, Niclas Kühnapfel, and Hans Niklas Jacob, along with security researcher Oleg Drokin) will present their findings next week (August 9) at the Blackhat conference in Las Vegas, where we hope to hear more about all the feature upgrades that are accessible.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Nice anti-AMD framing so shortly after that latest Zen2 vulnerability.
Right? Probably for attention grabbing, cause they do say the same flaw exists in zen2 and zen3, and the article is by no means slamming AMD for it. But the title does come off that way
Idk unpatcheable vulnerability for the core component of the system seems pretty negligent but what do I know
Not like they make boat loads of profit and are definitely just cutting corners on aspects of staffing to save extra money up for when the planet inevitably burns down (due to the very same people)
The title seems much more interesting than it is. I doubt most people have the ability to perform this type of exploit. It would be more interesting if a group would charge X to unlock it for you.
They should publish that private key 🤣
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=PWQL_XORalY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Oh no! Anyways…
I just created the summary! You can find it at https://lemmings.world/comment/919257.
Good bot!
For example, 2021 Model 3 SR+ vehicles can enable the Cold Weather Feature (heated steering wheel, heated rear seats) for an extra $300. This feature unlock is confirmed to work with the exploit.
So like cucks people were paying for something that their car already had offline, both hardware- and software-wise.
Cool! Now work on exploits for those paywalled features of BMW cars and Ford cars.
If you pay for something it’s yours by right. You should be able to use the entire thing, because you physically have it now.
When I need a new car it’s going to br older not newer…


















