All you need to do is disable the remote connectivity. It's trivial to do in the configuration.

That reminds me of BMW. You have to take the car in to the dealership if you change the battery. The new BMW I8 makes it almost impossible to work on. You need two people to open the hood and you have to know exactly what you're doing so you don't damage it.

My Tesla runs Linux, does that count?

In the early software releases if I rebooted the main display the X logo was prominently displayed. The GUI is built using Qt. It's not open, however, since no one has figured out how to gain access to the OS (though Tesla can do that over the VPN connection the car maintains).

Out of curiosity I put a packet sniffer on the traffic from my Tesla. All traffic is sent over OpenVPN so it is fairly secure. NMAP reports no open ports.

I don't think they can install an update without asking. For one thing the car cannot be driven while the update is taking place. Updates can take upwards of 45 minutes and includes updating many systems. During the update system lights will sometimes flash and various clicks and other noises are heard as subsystems are updated. It displays a message when the car is started indicating that there's an update and defaulting to installing it at 2am if you select that. Otherwise you can choose not to install it or install it at some other time. If you choose not to install it now a small icon is visible indicating that it is available.

Usually the updates add bug fixes or new features though there are also cases where new bugs are introduced.

All of the OTA updates to my Tesla ask me if and when to install the updates. Usually it's a no brainer.

I did that numerous times and while it helped a little it certainly did not fix the problem. I even tried a factory reset and reinstall and that didn't solve the problem.

My Nexus 7 2012 has been unusably slow since upgrading to 5.0 and 5.0.2 isn't much better. The web browser is useless. Granted, I have a lot of apps loaded, but it was far better with Kit Kat compared to Lollipop. It looks like the biggest culprit is Google Mail since I have several accounts with a LOT of email.

Amen to that. I've interviewed far too many people that I don't consider qualified. It's to the point where if I see certain large companies in their resumes it's a red flag. Finding GOOD tech workers is hard.

Sort of. Nagle's algorithm deals with the data, not the ACKs. Basically what is needed is Nagle's algorithm applied to TCP ACK packets which is what Apple is doing.

You forgot, all the congress critters are in the pocket of the big banks. Most of the congress critters have been doing whatever they can to water down any oversight so banks and big businesses can fuck over consumers even more.

I tried dealing with the Broadcom driver on my laptop and had to give up in disgust trying to get it to compile. I upgraded OpenSUSE which included a pre-compiled driver which seems to work for the most part. Broadcom historically has not been very open source friendly. At least one of the Broadcom 10G PHY drivers in the Linux kernel was written by my employer, now a competitor to Broadcom. (see drivers/net/phy/bcm87xx.c for example).

Several years ago I worked at Atheros working on improving their Linux driver performance for wireless access points. One of my tasks was to figure out why OS X was quite a bit faster than Linux and Windows. I tracked it down to the way OSX sends TCP ACK packets. Both Linux and Windows send a TCP ACK after every other packet whereas OS X would start to space the ACKs out if the connection was reliable. This had a significant impact with 802.11N where there is a lot of packet aggregation. I discovered that OS X would start spacing the ACKs out to every 16-32 TCP packets instead of every other packet. I wish Linux would do something similar.

I can't comment on any other drivers or current OS X since this was a bit over four years ago.

I can think of a couple of things that would improve Linux for wireless. First of all, spacing out the ACKs like OS X would help. Second of all, supporting transmitting a group of packets at a time, especially to a particular destination, would help a lot. This is due to the way 802.11N aggregates a lot of packets together into a single wireless packet based on the next wireless hop destination. It's much more efficient for cache utilization and for the code paths when groups of packets are handled rather than individual packets since there is a lot of queueing and dequeeuing going on inside the driver.

Tesla also has steering wheel controls which are highly configurable which can control the radio and climate control. There is also voice input.