One computer wiz claims to have hacked into Tesla's firmware and discovered a reference to a juicier battery. Self-proclaimed white hat hacker, Jason Hughes, says he discovered a secret in Tesla's firmware 7.1, but he didn't want to tell the world outright what he discovered, so he made Tesla Motors Club forum-members work for it by obfuscating the secret with a hash. TheSHA256 hash, a one-way function, would either require forum members to guess and check to decrypt this code, or to look it up in a hash directory. Forum member LuckyLuke decrypted Hughes' hash and discovered its meaning: P100D. In response to a fellow forum-member decrypting his secret code, Hughes responded on Twitter. On the forum, Hughes had some additional information to mention, saying: There have been references to the P100D in firmwares as early as 2 months ago. They finally added the badges to 2.13.77. I mucked it up a bit by adding a crappy background (it's a PNG with transparency in the firmware)... There are quite a few things that are in the firmware that I'm not prepared to share publicly. Just like the P100D has been in there for months with my lips mostly sealed. I don't want to spoil all of Tesla's surprises.

Emily Bell's latest

davewiner

Emily Bell: "Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security."

My two cents -- no one is balancing this story.

I'm a big sports guy -- baseball and basketball. In sports you don't give up until the game is over. And this game is not even close to over. There will be lots of turns and twists. Sure, Facebook put a lot of points on the board in the first inning. Okay that's cool. Now what.

The current online news service, including Facebook, sucks!

There's so much room for improvement, and improving we will do.

It's much more likely to happen outside Facebook, and I believe outside the venture capital-backed tech industry. Radical re-thinks don't happen inside big organizations.

To think it's over would be to think that television was over in the early 60s. Yet there was so much more to come. Same thing going on here. This is just another iteration of the same process, human communication. Facebook's model is still very much like the model it replaced. We've yet to really dip into the potential of electronic publishing, imho.

A PR drive by the prime minister to defend his position in corruption scandal turns into a criticism tool.

chasm22 writes: Verizon Communications Inc agreed to pay a $1.35 million fine after the Federal Communications Commission said on Monday it found the company's wireless unit violated the privacy of its users. Verizon Wireless agreed to get consumer consent before sending data about "supercookies" from its more than 100 million users, under a settlement. The largest U.S. mobile company inserted unique tracking codes in its users traffic for advertising purposes. Supercookies are unique, non-removable identifiers inserted into web traffic to identify customers in order to deliver targeted ads from Verizon and others. The FCC said Verizon Wireless failed to disclose the practice from late 2012 until 2014, violating a 2010 FCC regulation on internet transparency. The FCC also said the supercookies overrode consumers privacy practices they had set on web browsers, which led some advocates to call it a "zombie cookie." Under the agreement, consumers must opt in to allow their information to be shared outside Verizon Wireless, and have the right to "opt out" of sharing information with Verizon.