Category Archives: Security

Unsafe by Design: Tesla Fails to See Children, Red Lights, Emergency Vehicles…

Tesla Deaths: 348 (and 19 confirmed on “Autopilot”)

If there’s one thing, ONE THING, a car manufacturer should be able to do it’s meet baseline safety requirements of operating on public roads.

For example, a car should not be engineered to systemically increase risk of accidents that involve children, red lights and emergency vehicles.

Fail those three very important tests, while claiming to be fully automatic and “driverless”, and the car should be banned from operation.

Simple. Tesla is engaging in deceptive and unsafe business practices, while failing basic quality tests. It deserves a ban.

Can’t see children? Banned.

Can’t see red lights? Banned.

Can’t see emergency vehicles? Seriously? Banned.

There’s no question from all this that Tesla engineering has reached depths so low it should be classified as the worst car in automobile history.

…in nearly 400 crashes involving cars with driver-assist systems reported by automakers between July 2021 and this past May, more Teslas were involved than all other manufacturers combined.

It’s extremely alarming how much worse Tesla safety is versus ALL other brands combined.

Source: tesladeaths.com

And Tesla owners are so cult-like in their worship and embrace of such failure that when you inform them that their car may be dangerous for children they immediately try to put children in harms way.

Do you see the problem here, as I warned back in 2008?

The people calling themselves conservatives seem to have an amazing “hubris”. They not only stick to their guns in the face of science or even just details (like Lehman’s CEO who refused to believe his company was in trouble) but they actually become more convinced they are in the right when evidence starts to challenge them.

It falls into a line with someone today who would try to promote a 1970s Pinto, 1980s Yugo, 1990s Kia (e.g. 1993 Ford Aspire), or 2000s Pontiac Aztek… whereas today’s Tesla is at a significantly lesser engineering level than all of them.

More fires than a Pinto.

More quality issues than a Yugo or Kia.

More about appearance (nothing inside) than an Aztek.

Not only is Tesla full of unmistakable quality failures, given it’s built using misleading and even fraudulent manufacturing processes, society suffers from a “get rich quick” CEO who flaunts accountability with literal boasts and brags about safety capabilities that do not exist while putting everyone in and around the car in imminent danger.

I just got off a call with a prestige car repair shop (Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, etc) who told me they consider Tesla the worst quality components they have ever touched. It’s so bad that their engineers are shocked by how many faults they find under the skin (see Aztek above) and said it’s a sad state of affairs anyone buys into one.

Perhaps it’s like asking in America why an obviously dangerous presence of lead in Michigan’s water took so long for action?

Fortunately it seems a certain state might just have the right stuff to start a “don’t mess with California” campaign.

The remedies proposed by the DMV if it prevails could be severe, including revocation of the company’s licenses to make or sell its cars in California.

Can California rid the public of garbage being dumped onto its roadways?

You may remember when the California DMV famously denied Uber an operating license because of false and deceptive claims about “driverless” technology.

It took less than a day for California to crack down on Uber’s self-driving cars
The future was here, briefly.

A terrible future that California banned, in order to have a better one.

Uber then took its backwards-thinking weak value systems to into Florida and Arizona instead where they could flourish with stupidly deregulated markets that don’t care about real quality let alone law and order.

“Our cars departed for Arizona this morning by truck,” an Uber spokeswoman wrote in an email. “We’ll be expanding our self-driving pilot there in the next few weeks, and we’re excited to have the support of Governor Ducey.”

Next thing you know Uber killed someone and shut down their entire driverless program, as that state governor danced around to evade his accountability for death.

In 2016, as Uber was refusing to comply with California’s automated driving law, I advised the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to revoke the registration of Uber’s vehicles. After the DMV did so, Governor Ducey tweeted that “This is what OVER-regulation looks like! #ditchcalifornia.” The very tool that he harshly criticized California for using is the one on which the lawful execution of his own decision [to ban Uber] may now depend.

The important fact here is actually not about a wishy-washy politician getting a spine to ban Uber but that Tesla killed someone at almost the exact same time as Uber yet received none of the appropriate regulatory attention.

Tesla spent its energy since then trying to run propaganda campaigns and legal battles. Did you know about Tesla, or only about that Uber death?

Tesla Keeps Japanese Pedestrian-Death Case Out of U.S. Court

Tesla used armies of lawyers along with cult-like social media orchestrated propaganda campaigns to promote false narratives about sub-par engineering and escape scrutiny, then started charging for its obvious failures by generating a belief-based speculative “upgrade” based on deceptive and false promises of future capabilities (that will kill even more people).

See points above about Tesla drivers intentionally putting children in harms way after being warned of danger to children, a form of mystical worship of lower quality as some kind of “premium” opportunity to be a believer.

Will the state of California set a better future again and regulate away such anti-engineering death cultism, or is American private action the case here? Should also we be asking who will be the Erin Brockovitch who can stop a business intent on destroying the safety (integrity) of transit?

“FBI’s complicity in spreading hate” and the Melzer Case

Experts in countering hate groups are openly questioning the role and strategy of the FBI, related to a domestic terrorism case stemming from interception of encrypted communication on Telegram.

…critics say, this is a crisis the FBI helped create. […] Sutter’s role as the chief American proselytizer of Melzer’s satanic ideology is complicated by the fact that Sutter was also enjoying life on the FBI payroll [since 2004], while publishing thousands of words of blood-curdling propaganda that radicalized a growing movement of dangerous extremists. […] …by employing Sutter, the distributor and author of texts that promote not only terrorism but also pedophilia, human sacrifice, and child abuse, the FBI has given its informant way too long a leash, and innocents have paid a price. […] “The more you push out their propaganda, the more someone who might be vulnerable, angry, or have a mental illness will say, ‘I’m gonna do this.'” […] Mike German, a former FBI agent who spent years infiltrating white-supremacist movements in the 1990s, points to [Whitey] Bulger’s case and Sutter’s years of satanist proselytizing as exemplars of “gross mismanagement” by the country’s premier law-enforcement agency… “Where the FBI gets in trouble all the time is ignoring the crimes the informants are committing.”

Melzer is accused of using his Telegram account to distribute classified details about U.S. Army assignments to enemies including someone he thought was Al Qaeda. He allegedly intended for his own unit (173rd) to be killed in an ambush that wanted to help plan with terrorists.

In other words there is a collision between data integrity and confidentiality. A data integrity collapse was coupled with dissemination using confidentiality.

If confidentiality hadn’t been broken (interception of encrypted communication) many people would have died from terrorism, yet the whole thing could have been prevented with improving data integrity controls.

That reference to Melzer as a copy-cat or follower of Sutter thus is a very big problem for the FBI, which tends to claim it wants to prevent copy-cat and follower crimes. It kind of begs the ethical question of the FBI watching and allowing dangers to manifest all the way to excuse breaking encryption, instead of helping prevent rise of dangers.

A lack of data integrity controls, let alone a strategy for enforcing them, has become the defining security problem of this decade.

Wyoming Congressional Race Wrecked by Terror Threats… Like It’s 1869 (KKK) Again

In a state that calmly sent the same candidate to Congress three times before, this year safety and stability has become noticeably bad in Wyoming.

The incumbent candidate (Liz Cheney) received so many violent threats during her GOP primary campaign that even having a special protective detail wasn’t enough to allow her to speak or meet with voters.

Rep. Liz Cheney’s campaign (R-Wyo.) spent thousands of dollars on private security this year following death threats… according to a new report. Cheney’s campaign spent $58,000 on security from January to March, The New York Times reported Monday, citing Federal Election Commission records. She was also temporarily assigned special protection by Capitol Police while in Washington, D.C., a move the Times noted is unusual for a member of Congress not in a leadership position. The few public appearances Cheney has made in in her home state of Wyoming, where she has spent much of the recent congressional recess, have reportedly not been widely publicized beforehand for security reasons.

And here it is reported again, but this time note the amazing buried lede at the end of the quote.

Due to security concerns, the congresswoman has rarely campaigned in the state, and when she has, it has been so with little to no public notice ahead of time or after. When she has appeared, it has been with a noticeable security detail nearby… Cheney and Hageman do not differ significantly politically.

No real political differences between two candidates, yet one is violently threatened to block her from even speaking?

Threats from within the GOP to intentionally destroy the democratic process and replace it with violence? Sounds familiar to this historian, not least of all because some in the GOP have even dared to bring back “carpetbagger” rhetoric of the KKK to attack Liz Cheney (not so subtlety implying they want to murder her).

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama, 1 Sept 1868 Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor. The KKK threatened that March 4, 1869 — first day of rule by avowed racist Horatio Seymour — would bring lynchings of white Americans (“scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”) who weren’t racist. Instead the Presidency was won in a landslide by Civil War hero and civil rights pioneer Ulysses S. Grant)

1868 political campaigns were literally rife with Americans accused of being “carpetbaggers” and threatened to either quit the election or be lynched by white men. The cover of this history book from the 1960s makes the term painfully clear.

A book by Godfrey Hodgson from the JULLIARD COLLECTION ARCHIVES N° 23. 1966.

Such 1868 noose rhetoric being waved at political opponents, like the genocidal Nazi swastika or the racist Betsy Ross flag, implies suspension of law and order. It has been a favored symbol embraced by brutal anti-democratic mobs and traitors to America, which is why it keeps popping up lately within the GOP.

Little is known about how a gallows came to be built near the Capitol [during the January 6th violent coup attempt], but the motif has become a favorite among right-wing extremists and white supremacists.

While “carpetbagger” should be raising alarms for dangerous domestic terrorist tactics, it more likely is being overlooked by most Americans as they don’t know their own country’s history. Most likely think such a term and threatening behavior suggests a remote climate of some far away Banana Republic under the thumb of corruption and crime, as I’ve also written about here before.

However, Wyoming clearly has the domestic terrorism hallmarks in a slide away from democracy and towards the rather grotesque origin story of America as an intentionally backwards thinking profit-driven white police state (created to preserve slavery and opposed to freedom).

A long and troubled history of American election tampering (e.g. armed terrorists invading Kansas to stuff ballots and attack election officials) not to mention the long list of violence-backed coup attempts in the USA, seems more relevant now than ever.

In fact there’s many direct precedents for this current news story straight out of 1869 America, as I’ve also written before: “‘First-Class Men’ Torture and Try to Kill Congressman…

Recall Warning: Black Diamond PIEPS Avalanche Beacon

Black Diamond is one of the best if not the best manufacturer of outdoor gear for extreme conditions. Their detailed recall notice is one of the best I’ve seen for any manufacturer of any equipment.

Their explanation of risk severity is this:

We’ve identified a specific issue with the Pieps Micro family beacons where the front foil containing the buttons could be damaged during the manufacturing process thereby affecting the electronics of the device. If this were to occur, it could result in the beacon not being able to switch into the SEARCH mode for the Button and Race models, and loss of the Mark function for the Sensor model.

And the risk likelihood is this:

  • PIEPS Powder BT, Pieps Pro BT, Pieps DSP Pro, Pieps DSP Sport, Pieps DSP Ice, Black Diamond Recon, Black Diamond Guide: As of April 28, 2022, 0.07% of all beacons sold globally have been reported with this issue. In North America the reported instances are lower, at 0.02%.
  • PIEPS Micro BT Button / Race / Sensor: As of April 28, 2022, 0.53% of all beacons sold globally have been reported with this issue. 0.22% reported in North America.

A complete recall for a safety device with a reported failure rate of 0.07% (or even 0.02%) is the right thing to do, to say the least. They’ve not only triaged the manufacturing flaw for units in the field and issued a recall with easy instructions, they blocked all shipment until resolution.

We have pulled all current inventory and are performing a thorough inspection, including testing every single unit before placing them into the marketplace.

We have worked with our manufacturer(s) to identify and correct the material handling / assembly issue and are confident that this issue has been resolved.

[…] We issued a Notice for Safety Check and urge you to follow the instructions to check if you have an affected unit. We are working to repair or replace all affected beacons as quickly as possible. If you do not feel comfortable checking your own beacon, send it in and we will check it for you.

All affected units sent in will be replaced or repaired free of charge.

Well done Black Diamond.