Security

Technopuff of Broken Promises: An Elon Musk Timeline

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Elon Musk has promised imminent full autonomy every year since 2014. Think about that. For over a decade he hasn’t delivered his very specific promise made each year of it.

The deadline is usually the end of the current year.

Each promise is dated and public. So is what Tesla actually did while he flapped his lying lips.

The feature went on sale the same month the company staged a demonstration of capabilities the software lacked, a capital raise followed the robotaxi pitch by ten days, and Tesla’s counsel assured the California DMV in writing that the product would remain driver assistance while the CEO told investors the driver was about to become optional.

The following table pairs each claim with the contemporaneous record: offering documents, regulatory correspondence, federal defect findings, court judgments. A federal court dismissed shareholder claims over these statements as corporate puffery. The third column shows the reality.

Date The claim The record
Oct 2014 “90 percent of your miles can be on auto” next year (CNN Money interview, October 2014). FAILED One week later Tesla unveiled its first Autopilot hardware and began selling the convenience features as a paid option on cars that carried the sensors but ran none of the software. The pattern begins with the first invoice.
Jun 2016 Autonomous driving is “basically a solved problem” (Code Conference, June 1, 2016). FAILED Joshua Brown was killed on Autopilot May 7. Tesla reported the death to NHTSA on May 16, then Tesla and Musk together sold more than $2 billion of stock on May 18 without a word about the crash. The public learned of it June 30, when NHTSA opened its investigation.
Oct 2016 LA to Times Square by end of 2017, no controls touched (press call, October 19, 2016). FAILED The same day, Tesla announced that every car now shipped with hardware for autonomy at a “safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver”, put Full Self-Driving Capability on sale as a paid option, and published a demo video captioned that the person in the driver’s seat was there only for legal reasons. Tesla’s director of Autopilot software later testified under oath that the video was staged to show capabilities the system lacked, on a route mapped in advance, and that a car crashed during filming (Reuters, January 2023). Tesla deleted the 2016 announcement from its website in August 2024.
Feb 2019 Feature complete this year. “I am certain of that. That is not a question mark.” (ARK Invest podcast, February 19, 2019). FAILED The shareholder class period in Lamontagne v. Tesla opens on this exact date.
Apr 2019 One million robotaxis on the road in 2020. Buying any other car is like buying a horse (Autonomy Day, April 22, 2019). FAILED Ten days later Tesla announced a $2.3 billion stock and convertible note offering, upsized the following morning. The prediction was the collateral.
Jul 2020 “Basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year” (video remarks to the World AI Conference, Shanghai, July 2020). FAILED In letters of November 20 and December 14, 2020, Tesla’s counsel told the California DMV that FSD “will continue to be an SAE Level 2, advanced driver-assistance feature” and that no planned enhancement would make the cars autonomous (letters obtained by PlainSite under the California Public Records Act). One statement for the investing public, another for the regulator, same quarter.
Jan 2021 Reliability “in excess of a human this year” (Q4 2020 earnings call, January 27, 2021). FAILED A DMV memo of a March 9, 2021 call records Tesla’s own director of Autopilot software stating that “Elon’s tweet does not match engineering reality”. The DMV attempted to redact the sentence and failed: the text sat white on white, intact beneath the redaction.
Apr 2022 Neural nets and cameras exceed humans. “I think we will achieve that this year” (Q1 2022 earnings call, April 20, 2022). FAILED On June 8, 2022, NHTSA upgraded its Autopilot defect probe to a full engineering analysis. In July 2022 the California DMV filed false advertising accusations over the names Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, the case that ends in the December 2025 ruling below.
May–Jul 2023 Full autonomy “does look like it’s gonna happen this year”. “Better than human by the end of this year.” FAILED The prediction year opened with recall 23V-085, 362,758 vehicles running FSD Beta, for behavior at intersections and speed limits. It closed with recall 23V-838, 2,031,220 vehicles, effectively the entire US fleet, over Autosteer driver-engagement controls.
Jan 2024 Other carmakers licensing FSD “will become obvious probably this year” (Q4 2023 earnings call, January 24, 2024). FAILED On April 25, 2024, NHTSA closed its engineering analysis: 956 crashes reviewed, 467 attributed, 54 injuries, 13 fatal crashes, and a finding of “a critical safety gap” between what drivers expected and what Autopilot could do. The same day it opened recall query RQ24-009, because crashes continued after the remedy. No carmaker licensed FSD.
Jan 2025 “Unsupervised Full Self-Driving as a paid service in Austin in June” (Q4 2024 earnings webcast, January 29, 2025). FAILED Delivered June 22 with a safety monitor in the passenger seat holding an emergency stop, invited riders only, a geofenced zone that avoided difficult intersections and bad weather. Unsupervised was the claim. Supervision was the product.
Jul 2025 Autonomous ride hailing for “probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year” (Q2 2025 earnings call, July 23, 2025). FAILED On August 1, 2025, a Miami federal jury found Tesla 33 percent liable in the Benavides Autopilot death: $200 million punitive plus a $43 million compensatory share, roughly $243 million. The first federal verdict against Tesla over a fatal Autopilot crash. Upheld on post-trial review February 20, 2026.
Sep 2025 “Should be no safety driver by end of year” (Musk on X, September 2025). FAILED Shareholders had just filed a second securities class action, Morand v. Tesla, over robotaxi claims (W.D. Tex., August 4, 2025). Its class period ends June 22, 2025. The day the service launched.
Dec 2025 Robotaxis with no one in them “in about three weeks” (remarks at an xAI hackathon, December 9, 2025). FAILED On December 16, 2025, the California DMV adopted the administrative law judge’s decision: the term Autopilot is misleading and violates state law. Sixty days to drop the name or take a 30-day dealer license suspension. Tesla dropped the name by February 17, 2026. Two weeks earlier the Ninth Circuit had affirmed dismissal of the Lamontagne securities claims. In a single December, a regulator found the marketing unlawful and a court confirmed investors could recover nothing for it.
Jan 2026 Fully autonomous vehicles in “somewhere between a quarter and half of the United States” by end of year (Q4 2025 earnings call, January 28, 2026). PENDING On January 22, 2026, the first monitor-free public rides began: a small number of vehicles in part of Austin, nine years after the coast-to-coast promise, in year twelve of “this year”.

Here we are, August 2026.

Source: My presentation at MindTheSec 2021
Security

Scientists Fit Surveillance to Butterflies

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Every time someone says surveillance capitalism is a novel theory recently discovered, I think about decades of science like this:

Coastal Program biologist holding a radio telemetry transmitter for a monarch butterfly. Image: Colleen Grant/USFWS.

The more scientists know about a particular species, the easier it is to protect. So in an effort to eventually track how these pollinators use their overwintering habitat and nectar flowers close by, staff from organizations such as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Coastal Program in Central California and the biological and environmental consulting firm Althouse & Meade tagged monarchs in three locations across San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties in November 2025.

The effort is part of a study testing technology that can monitor monarch movement and migration. These tags look like an antenna sticking out of a small rectangular box, and staff used eyelash glue to stick them to the back of the butterflies. The tagging system employs solar-powered radio telemetry tag technology, which sends geospatial data through radio waves.

Works for butterflies? That’s great news for people working on the surveillance of everything else.

Notice the “easier to protect” framing. Related: tracking insects leads to more effective methods of automation in killing them.

Security

Storage Service Threatens Loss of 70 Years of PBS Station Data

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Open Source Storage, without any warning, abruptly quit business and left PBS looking for all of its archives.

…Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.

Iron Mountain has refused to return the materials to the station because its client, OSS, technically owned “the physical services housing the data” within Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.

In case you were wondering how American-based tech service providers are running these days.

History, Security

How EuroNews Comment Launders Nazi Occupation of Hungary That Murdered Over 400,000

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I was sent a link to a comment with a clear case of pro-Nazi disinformation on the Euro News site.

Euro News hosts this disinformation comment getting history all wrong. Nazi Germany violently invaded Hungary and occupied it, murdering hundreds of thousands of Hungarians. Nazis violently taking over Budapest refused to surrender, causing Hungarian death and casualties to explode because of the occupation.

Imagine the kind of person who comments that the end of genocide wouldn’t be called by the “many” a liberation. Their comment fails on the most obvious facts: Operation Margarethe, the German invasion of Hungary on 19 March 1944.

Germany militarily occupied Hungary because the Kállay government had been negotiating armistice terms with the Western Allies, and Horthy had refused Hitler’s repeated demands to hand over Hungarian Jews. Do you see the problem with the comment yet? Who exactly would falsely claim that the Nazis were not a genocidal occupation?

Hitler summoned Horthy to Klessheim on 18 March 1944, and the Wehrmacht crossed the border while Horthy was still on the train home. That’s not allied.

Wehrmacht troops took the country, Veesenmayer arrived as Reich plenipotentiary, Eichmann’s Sondereinsatzkommando followed, and over 400,000 Hungarians were suddenly shipped to Auschwitz between May and the beginning of July 1944 (over 300,000 murdered immediately on arrival). Hungarians were told the Nazis would put them in a “safe” ghetto, which turned out to be insufferably cramped and cruel, and then told they were being taken by train to agricultural labor at Kenyérmező, a work site that never existed. Hungarian gendarmes under Eichmann’s direction forced them into rail cars locked for days without food, water or sanitation, causing many to die, and the trains deposited them in a death camp to be rapidly murdered. Postcards postmarked from the fictional resort “Waldsee” then arrived back in Hungary, dictated at Auschwitz to keep the deception running.

Remigration (forced deportation) of that scale was during, and because of, the Nazi occupation.

The alliance was worthless, completely exploited and then ignored by Germany. Hungary signed the Tripartite Pact in November 1940 and bled its Second Army out on the Don in January 1943. Then German troops crossed the border to mass murder Hungarians and hold the rest hostage. Germany itself declared that the alliance didn’t exist, by force, twice!

On 15 October 1944, when Horthy announced he had achieved Hungarian armistice with the Soviets, Germany (still not an ally) ran Operation Panzerfaust. That meant Skorzeny kidnapped Horthy’s son to force the Hungarian leader to abdicate under extreme duress. Szálasi and the Arrow Cross were put under direct German installation, completely the opposite of any alliance. The occupation turned into a siege (26 December 1944 to 13 February 1945) as Budapest was commanded by Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a German SS general, under Hitler’s Festung order forbidding capitulation or withdrawal. A foreign German officer commanding a Hungarian city he refuses to surrender, driving up casualties and death of the Hungarians, is an occupation in its plainest form.

“Liberation” meant the Red Army reached the sealed Pest ghetto on 17-18 January 1945, with roughly 70,000 people still alive inside, while the Arrow Cross squads under Nazi command were shooting Hungarians into the Danube nightly. Liberation was a literal end of the genocidal and suicidal Nazi occupation of Hungary.

So I posted this reply and was informed it went into moderation:

As a formally trained historian, I find this kind of disinformation comment very interesting. Germany occupied Hungary twice in 1944. First it invaded against Horthy’s diplomacy in March, and then against his armistice in October. What kind of German “ally” invades by force and murders roughly 437,000 Hungarians between May and [early July] of 1944? Operation Panzerfaust wasn’t just genocidal, it kidnapped Horthy’s son to force abdication of self-rule. Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a German SS general, under Hitler’s Festung order then commanded the Hungarian city by refusing to surrender! That is by definition an occupation of Hungary to cause mass suffering in its plainest form. Where do you think Dan got his backwards story from and why?