Australian Cyber Security professional

  • 2 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle








  • Your experiences are valid and I’m not trying to invalidate them, but I do think a lot of the positives you’re talking about come from it just being an electric car, rather than it being a Tesla specifically.

    If you are on the market in a few years or so I’d definitely recommend checking out what other brands have to offer, as they’ve finally caught up to Tesla and even surpassed them in some ways.

    I’m sure you would have researched all the options anyway though, as you seem like a smart guy.



  • Engineer here. I wouldn’t buy a Tesla. They’re safe cars (outside of the self driving tech) but their reliability is awful. I’m not in the market for a new car right now but I expect by the time I am, Tesla will likely no longer be the dominant player in the EV market. I appreciate the engineering that went into making them so safe and performant, but every aspect of them that Elon touches is awful, and they’ve arguably already squandered their headstart in the electric car space.





  • The stuff about recording your camera/tracking eyes/recording mic are all bullshit (ish). That stuff is all possible, and does happen, but not from popular apps. You don’t really need to worry about that unless you’re going to really dodgy websites (and giving them access to your camera/mic), OR if you’re a high profile figure who may be targeted by far more sophisticated attacks. These privacy invasions are uncommon in popular websites and apps because it’s very easy for users to discover that kind of data/processing usage, and the blow to their reputation is far more expensive than the profits they’d get from recording you (not even sure what the commercial incentive would be for that). There are thousands of nerds like me in the cyber security industry who monitor websites network activity for this kind of shady shit, so they wouldn’t get away with it.

    Location is a far cheaper (and less conspicuous, data-usage-wise) process, so far more apps will be recording that. Google, Facebook, Apple, and likely dozens more companies know exactly where you’ve been throughout the day, whether by GPS or by wifi (maps of the locations of different wifi networks exist).

    As for targeted advertising - any app or website that has a share button for Facebook or other apps is most likely sharing your usage habits with those apps. This is a symbiotic relationship for the apps/websites, because letting Facebook know you’ve been searching their site for X means Facebook will start showing you ads for X, and you might go and purchase from them after seeing that ad. Many believe their phones are listening to them because their targeted advertising is so specific, but the reality is they don’t need to listen to you. They get far better info from your searches and browsing history.

    Sorry no sources at the moment because I’m at the gym, but I guess my source is that I graduated with a bachelor’s in cyber security in February lol.


  • You can think of it like HTTPS. It’s just rules for computers to talk to each other. If your computer follows those rules, it can talk to the other computers that adhere to those rules. These rules are necessary because otherwise the internet is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, you need rules to tell computers which 1s and 0s to send, and rules to tell computers what those 1s and 0s mean.

    The World Wide Web Consortium are developing this set of rules, just as they’ve developed many other rules. They’re a non-profit organisation just kinda trying to make the web a better place.