Tesla Model S Has Hidden Ethernet Port, User Runs Firefox On the 17" Screen

New submitter FikseGTS (3604833) writes "A Tesla Model S owner located a 4 pin connector on the left side of the Tesla Model S dashboard that turns out to be a disguised ethernet networking port. After crafting his owns patch cable to connect with the Tesla's port, a networking connection was established between the Tesla Model S and a laptop computer. The Model S is running a 100 Mbps, full duplex ethernet network and 3 devices were found with assigned IP addresses in the 192.168.90.0 subnet. Some ports and services that were open on the devices were 22 (SSH), 23 (telnet),53 (open domain), 80 (HTTP), 111 (rpcbind), 2049 (NFS), 6000 (X11). Port 80 was serving up a web page with the image or media of the current song being played. The operating system is modified version of Ubuntu using an ext3 filesystem. Using X11 it also appears that someone was able to somewhat run Firefox on both of the Model S screens. Is a jailbroken Tesla Model S on the way?" Some more details on this front would be appreciated, for anyone who has a Tesla they'd like to explore.

Re:Should void warranty

[TrekkieGod]

If you jailbreak your car, however, and inadvertently change something that impairs reliability, you're compromising the safety of everybody else on the road. Everything (including braking) in Tesla cars is tied into the software, and this is not something you should mess around with.

Bullshit. Tesla has stated that the computer that controls the 17" and panel LCDs are completely separated from the important stuff in the car. They'd be stupid not to. Case in point, you can reboot both systems by holding left and right buttons on the steering wheel. You can do so while driving, I've personally done it. The music stops playing, and you need to put your gps destination in again after it finishes rebooting. If you reboot the panel screen, you lose your speedometer until it boots back up. Steering, acceleration, braking, cruise control, it all continues to work normally.

Yes, you can change driving settings from that interface, but it doesn't mean the functionality resides in that interface. It just passes the message through to much more robust computer handling actual car functions, and I'm sure said messages are sanitized to the extreme on the receiving end.

Re:Why Ubuntu?!

[wolrahnaes]

I have no idea how they found it, but two possible ideas:

1. They found something that was more obviously Ethernet elsewhere and just traced it to this port.

2. They stuck a scope on it and saw something that looked like a link pulse [wikipedia.org], then assumed it was Ethernet from there.

Re:Why Ubuntu?!

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Exactly. Ethernet is transfomer coupled, so just try the various combinations until it works. Even worse, I'm pretty sure you don't even need to match tx to rx anymore, it auto-negotiates that now. Remember the blue ethernet cables with the red cable boots? The ones to connect computer to computer? They had crossed wires because ethernet didn't used to check for that. I'm sure you haven't seen a red boot on a cable in many years!