What was going on in the background during the last 10 seconds of the video? You hear a bang, then someone repeating “Watch your legs officers!”.

Depends what you want to do. They don’t require a network connection to operate as a vehicle. So if you don’t care about the remote app features (local ones such as lock/unlock still work over BLE), live traffic, streaming music or updates, then a network connection isn’t necessary.

If you do want any of those features, then you would need to either get root access to the gateway and infotainment systems to modify the endpoints or take over the C&C server (formerly named “mothership”) domains and certificates.

The main things are removing the cellular connection and disabling the connection back to the Tesla services. Back in the old days you could pull the SIM card, root the center and driver’s displays, setup firewall rules to block traffic to/from the Tesla servers, and disable the VPN.

This is more difficult with the newer models. You can still pull the SIM, but would need to get creative for root access since it is a continuous game of whack-a-mole between the root methods and patches.

Will certainly be a bummer if they do go under, I really appreciated their serviceability. Have several in the immediate family that have been going for over 7 years at this point though all kinds of calamities. Each time can I just pop out all the components clean/replace as necessary and get it back in service, good as new.

I set the VPN tunnel from the VPS to deny everything to the internal network by default, then put the services that need to be accessed on the allow list in the firewall. So the VPN endpoint from the VPS can only hit the very specific IPs/ports/protocols that were explicitly allowed. There is still the possibility of a compromise chain of VPS->service->container/VM->hypervisor->internal network access, but I feel comfortable with those layers.

You could also setup an IDS such as Snort to pick up on that exploit traffic between the services and internal VPN endpoint if extra security is necessary on top of fail2ban and log alerts on the VPS.

Yeah, Tesla is certainly not the first ones to have this design or issues with it:

Texas man, dog die after being trapped in Corvette

Any chance you are using a Thunderbolt device such as a network adapter or external drives? I had the issue on a NUC 10 where it would randomly drop the TB devices every few weeks and occasionally appear to be frozen. The latest firmware update finally took care of it.

Not sure if the /s was left off or this was a serious question.

In the case it was a serious question, the first issue that comes to mind is when you seed clouds for one region, what happens to the next region downwind where the clouds would have rained without intervention? You are just moving the drought, there will still be a difference in the rain pattern somewhere.

Seeding to generate more cloud cover at a global scale introduces a whole host of problems. Firstly, you lower the solar output which then means solar power generation will be less effective. That energy will need to be produced by some means, which right now fossil fuels would be the most likely to take up the deficit, increasing atmospheric carbon output. Then to compound problems further, the reduced solar radiation reaching the surface would have a number of impacts such as plant growth being slowed reducing their CO2 uptake, less moisture being evaporated for precipitation over land masses, wind patterns being changed, and wind speeds reduced which means even further reduction in renewable energy generation. So with today’s technology seeding clouds would end up compounding the issues in the long term and accelerate the already alarming changes.