Security Boulevard is telling me that when they repost my content they get a lot of views — scraping my blog even generated one of their most popular pages in 2022.

As we close out 2022, we at Security Boulevard wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022:

Google Chrome CVE-2022-1096 Emergency Patch

I disagree entirely with analysis that lands on that page. It wasn’t popular at all compared to others on my blog.

My page about vulnerabilities in Tesla engineering, just for one example, had over twice as many views.

1 Death = Total Recall: Volvo Quietly Blows Tesla Out of the Water

Security is all about safety, because security is about the ethics of information technology.

I hope that perspective comes through in the above Google post they gave an award, while I’m sure it does in all my high traffic Tesla posts they didn’t award.

When I don’t see anyone elsewhere connecting the dots I start to write about them, which maybe explains why that boring Google browser vulnerability post got so much attention from the SB scraper.

North Korea hunted Americans on Google Chrome with CVE-2022-0609 to steal crypto coin and intelligence.

To my mind Tesla killing so many Americans is bigger news than Google losing everyone’s coins (funding North Korean nuclear proliferation), and strangely my site traffic tends to agree with me.

But if someone wants to give me an award for what they like, who am I to argue?

Twitter under a new racist CEO, with his ties to apartheid, quickly has made itself known as a platform promoting violent hate speech.

Thus you probably won’t be surprised to hear that a man banned for hate speech, accused of slavery/abuse and wanted by law enforcement, treated Twitter as his safety zone.

Tate, who was only recently reinstated to the platform by Twitter CEO Elon Musk, started… conversation by tweeting at [a young female conservationist] about his [excessive waste]. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” Tate wrote.

To be clear, multiple social media platforms had banned a man who described himself as intending to victimize and violently harm women.

Twitter’s new CEO stepped in and restored Tate’s account, directly facilitating human trafficking crimes.

The confessed criminal liked having a personal license from Elon Musk — “freedom to profit from harm” — so much that he very arrogantly disclosed his location information.

…authorities may have been aided in Tate’s arrest thanks to a video he filmed [to bully the young woman further]. Tate posted a two-minute video response to his account roughly 10 hours after [she replied], in which the influencer is shown wearing a Versace bathrobe and smoking a cigar. About one minute into Tate’s monologue, a person off-camera hands him a stack of pizza boxes from the Romanian restaurant, Jerry’s Pizza…

I predicted this just a month ago when I explained Elon Musk’s plan for Twitter to be his personal lawless spigot of waste means it has become a honey pot to expose and arrest bottom feeders.

The quick action by Romanian police to stop the victimization of women stands in contrast, unfortunately, to Bulgaria, where a case is “ongoing”.

Rundo said on a US far-right podcast in November 2022 that, in photos and videos he puts out, “we have to edit so that you can’t tell location.” The thing is, you can tell the location here. And it took us less than ten minutes. 

There’s a sad story circulating about Palantir trying to weasel its way into German government through far-right channels.

Though “Hessendata,” adapted from the Gotham program developed by the US company Palantir, is not yet in use in Hamburg, it is already being used extensively by the Hesse police since 2017.

Hesse police are perhaps known best for being implicated in far-right political extremism.

Complaints about racial profiling — and far-right sympathies among officers — have plagued the German police, especially in Hesse.

Can we just say Nazis?

Hesse was trying to bring in Palantir while spreading hate.

Most of the suspects had sent messages in far-right chat groups from 2016 and 2017…. Seventeen Hesse officers were suspected of spreading hatred-inciting texts and symbols of former Nazi organizations – outlawed under post-war German law, said prosecutors. The three others, supervising officers, were further accused of obstructing justice while participating in chats but failing to stop the exchanges that continued until 2019. Aged between 29 and 54, all but one officer had been on active duty.

Oh. Not good.

The news reads like Nazi sympathizers in Germany were the ideal champion and target buyer for Palantir.

Why?

The above problems allegedly “ended” in 2019, right where the 2020 Hesse police scandals began.

Unidentified police officers in Hesse accessed the contact details of several politicians and prominent immigrants from official records and shared them with the neo-Nazi group, according to local reports.

Instead of getting better, the problems got worse and were directly related to information “access” (surveillance used in violations of privacy). Police were being setup to use Palantir for political corruption.

Which of course gets to the point: why doesn’t Palantir’s Peter Thiel ever condemn Nazism, especially given his parents fled to South Africa and America to avoid accountability for their offenses in Germany?

Thiel is no ordinary American or European. His father, Klaus, was born in Germany in 1938, which means Thiel’s grandparents were German adults during World War II.

Palantir technology doesn’t work, and becomes a tool of power abuse instead, but that’s just where the troubles begin.

It’s a Trojan horse that promises capabilities it doesn’t have, and by the time officials figure out they’ve been misled (e.g. Hitler’s rise) they’re stuck in the worst possible setup and can’t get out — expensive, highly political and totally proprietary data platform under the thumb of coin-operated politicians.

Hesse historically has been seen as a criminal justice embarrassment to Germany and even the EU.

The German state of Hesse has voted to finally scrap the death penalty from its constitution, amending a 69-year-old legal anomaly which allowed it. The western state is the last in Germany to amend its local legal code, after the national constitution abolished capital punishment in 1949. […] Capital punishment is banned in all EU countries, so this lingering quirk was seen as an embarrassment to Germany, an outspoken opponent of the practice.

Hesse police ignored a federal abolishment rule of 1949. Nudge nudge, wink, know what that means?

The Hesse police being used to push Palantir is yet another disappointment for the region, perhaps even designed to secretly help American extremists spread “death by AI” software to places that abolished fascism and its capitol punishment.

“When you saw their big growth, it was helped by the contracts they signed under the Trump administration,” Radke said. […] Thiel, who made his initial fortune co-founding PayPal [to offer the far-right an online money laundering service], is focusing squarely on getting Ohio’s Vance and Arizona’s Masters elected to the US Senate. Both Vance and Masters are former Thiel employees and raised money by offering dinners with Thiel.

Former Palantir employees are being funded by Palantir to get “elected” and run the government.

Nothing screams corruption, or that the software doesn’t work, like a fascist coup being their definition of “installed”.

Vance won. Masters lost.

Germany should thus treat the far-right sales tactics and extreme political leanings of Palantir as an opportunity to expose any direct ties from it to Nazism. I mean has anyone used Palantir on Thiel himself to show why his family went on the run from German authorities after 1949 but not during the Holocaust? I’m just asking questions.

I’ve tried and failed to make any sense of the statements that Smith & Wesson put before American courts.

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson Brands Inc seeking to block New Jersey’s attorney general from enforcing a subpoena to investigate whether the company committed fraud while advertising firearms to consumers. […] Smith & Wesson claimed the probe sought to suppress speech regarding gun ownership protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment…

It seems that the gun manufacturer has to be told at great taxpayer expense that fraud is not a free speech issue.

The state of NJ, investigating gun deaths, had demanded to know when and where Smith & Wesson had said its guns make people safer.

The company not only violently refused to admit what it has been saying, it tied up courts to argue that it could say absolutely anything to sell products.

It seems especially dubious to push at customers that guns will definitely make them safer, while telling the courts that’s just a random opinion and therefore can’t be challenged for being a lie.

Lawyers apparently now have to figure out if the company is engaging in willful fraud; deaths or injury of the very people told they would be safer.

And that reminds me of Sig Sauer, another gun manufacturer charged with lying to its customers.