[propercoil]

So many people like to nitpick when it comes to Tesla, It reminds me of the Apple critics in the early days of the iphone. They assume Tesla should have the highest standard and be absolutely impeccable with all their products.

Just don't buy it if you don't like it. Let the rest of us enjoy a sustainable future with insanely safe full self-driving electric cars.

[loeg]

The first iphone doesn't self-propel itself to 60+ mph nor was it capable of remotely damaging critical electric infrastructure. It was a toy.

When you're working in higher risk domains, higher safety standards are reasonably demanded.

[astronautjones]

this is an exploit that allows an attacker to disrupt the electrical grid - even if it's only to the substation, that effects all of your neighbors that didn't encourage you to blindly support Tesla's endeavour. it's highly irresponsible to have this kind of control behind such a trivial login on something that connects to your power lines, something extremely dangerous. far from a "nitpick"

[generatorguy]

It doesn’t disrupt the grid anymore than turning a heater on and off.

[sangnoir]

Can your heater push power into the grid?

[generatorguy]

An increase in embedded generation is the same as a decrease in load to the system. So turning a heater off is akin to “pushing power in to the system”, unless the embedded generation is larger than the load on a feeder, in which case the direction of power flow would be reversed, which may or may not cause problems depending on the protection settings at the substation.

The peak system load and generation on the Western North American grid is 167,000 MW. There is so much inertia there a 10kW power wall isn’t going to do anything.

[JaRail]

> Just don't buy it if you don't like it.

You say that about a security issue that could blow California's power grid in minutes.

[yellowapple]

In fairness, so could a strong breeze, apparently. Thanks, PG&E!

[JaRail]

Alright, I'll admit you made me laugh :D

[ajross]

This is absolutely true, and the blog post itself definitely has a little of that "picking on Tesla" vibe. And I think it's unfair too.

But at the same time, this is pretty genuinely bad security architecture, and it really needs to be exposed and embarrass the company that did it. Tesla does some great stuff. This thing seems a little mailed-in, though.