Technology

I'm amazed that it's legal for a car company to sell you something, and then after you own it, remotely disable xyz aspects of the functionality unless you pay them more. How can that be legal? I own the car, it's MINE now, how can I not use every single thing that's in it?

This is great. When you buy the car, you own it. I don’t care what kind of weird licenses and contracts they put together. If I buy the car and there is hardware in the car that allows for heated seats, there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to enable it myself, tear it out, or do whatever I want with it. It is mine.

I can understand there being safety concerns for modifying a car. But the owner of the car already accepts liability for the operation of that car. If I do not modify the car and I get into an accident due to Teslas auto pilot feature or another thing baked into their system, does Tesla accept liability? No, they do not. If it is my responsibility for the safe operation of the vehicle, then it is also my responsibility to modify a vehicle in a safe manner. 

of course it was the PSP. I’ll say it again and again; secure computing is like adding a back door that you know about. Fuck intel me, fuck amd psp, fuck apple sep, fuck microsoft tpm, and fuck anyone who wants to have control over a device I own.

Quick question: Couldn't Tesla's telemetry servers detect this kind of jailbreaking and, say, remotely disable the device? I'm kind of thinking of Nintendo consoles and their bans on some jailbroken consoles (typically the ones that play pirated games online).