CA Tesla Kills One in “Veered” Crash Into Pole

Why would yet another Tesla driver suddenly “veer” into a pole, killing herself?

The crash happened shortly after midnight near the intersection of Pelandale Avenue and Carver Road. Police said the eastbound Tesla Model Y struck a corner lightpole, claiming the life of the driver. The passenger, a man from Fresno, suffered moderate injuries. The Tesla was the only involved vehicle in the collision, police said.

Source: Google Maps

Jasjit Gill of Modesto reportedly was a nurse who worked nearby in Ceres, California and only 33 years old when her Tesla suddenly drove off the road and killed her.

Source: Modesto Fire Department

She fits a pattern of wealthy professional Asian-Americans in California being an increasingly common victim profile of the Tesla scams.

Notable is how Tesla have been suddenly “veering” into very obvious road-side poles (trees included), in stark contradiction to how the company CEO very loudly promoted to potential customers that by 2018 they no longer have to touch their steering wheel.

I’ve written about such basic engineering problems before as evidence of an advance fee fraud. Tesla has been in a careless, negligent pace to the bottom of safety, taking huge payments up front for low or even no quality control, while tragically misrepresenting to customers what a phrase like “pole position” will likely mean for them (death).

CA Tesla Kills Two After Entering Wrong Side of Highway

A Tesla started driving the wrong way on a highway just after midnight and crashed head-on into oncoming traffic, killing two.

Rescuers were able to pull the victim, 22-year-old Placentia resident Jeremy Breen, from his Mitsubishi Lancer, said Officer Javier Navarro, a CHP spokesman. But he was pronounced dead about 25 minutes later, the Riverside County Coroner’s Office said. The other driver, in a Tesla Model 3, could not be rescued, Navarro said. That driver was not publicly identified. Both drivers were traveling alone. Investigators were trying to determine where the Tesla entered the freeway and why it was headed in the wrong direction, Navarro said.

The incident reminds me of Canada, where an official statement condemned Tesla for putting society at risk with poorly engineered low-quality cars operated with predictable disregard for laws.

ICBC released a statement Tuesday afternoon saying that the incident captured on video by a Richmond News reader – which showed a driverless Tesla coasting on the wrong side of the road in Richmond Centre – is not permitted under B.C. laws. …it doesn’t appear as if the owner in question on Monday afternoon read the instructions properly, as the driverless car entered the lot on the complete wrong side of an intersection and continued for at least 50 yards on the wrong side of the road.

There have been many, many examples posted of Tesla choosing the wrong side of a road to drive on. It’s a horrible reality of a company that doesn’t seem to care at all about the extremely high risk they pose to human life.

Here’s a five-year old clarion warning from greentheonly in 2018, where the Tesla “vision” had two sides of a yellow line and chose the obviously wrong side. On a dangerously blind hill, while still thinking it was on the other side (see lower left diagram), the Tesla launches into an oncoming traffic lane.

Source: Streamable

This research was picked up and became more widely known in 2019 by attention-seeking “hackers” who gave a conference presentation on why and how greentheonly was right.

…the Autopilot system will [misread lines, become overconfident and] make an abnormal judgement, which causes the vehicle to enter into the reverse lane

It wasn’t theoretical, however. A conference wasn’t necessary. Wrong-way Tesla were in 2019 news for real risks on real roads.

The CHP said multiple reports came in of the vehicle going the wrong way — eastbound in westbound lanes — on Interstate Highway 80 near Fremont Street at 2:46 a.m.. The suspect, who wasn’t identified, continued the full length of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, through the toll plaza and onto northbound Interstate Highway 880, where a CHP spike strip stopped him around Fifth Avenue in Oakland, police said. The driver is in custody, and the CHP is investigating what prompted the wrong-way driving.

What prompted wrong-way driving? Tesla design failures with culpable negligence seems to be the simple answer.

Sadly by 2021 these warnings still did not stop Tesla from pushing its unsafe cars onto public roads, as documented by the NHTSA.

I tried to turn the wheel to avoid it from going into the wrong lane but the car by itself took control and forced itself into the incorrect lane

Fixed yet? Apparently NOT.

Two more people are dead.

Did Wiz Breach Customer Privacy With Its “MRI” Snapshot Architecture?

I recently discussed the controversial security firm known as Wiz in one of my previous articles. In that post, I just mentioned briefly a dispute between Wiz and another security company named Orca, which has now brought to light an intriguing revelation about Wiz’s security product.

In a well-documented lawsuit, Orca alleges that Wiz unlawfully appropriated their concepts across various domains, spanning from patents to marketing strategies. To provide some context, the complaint begins with an incident in which the founder of Orca had a meeting with the Microsoft Cloud Security team to present his innovative ideas. Subsequently, members of the Microsoft Cloud Security team departed from Microsoft and established a competing company that directly utilized these very ideas, thus competing with Orca.

Now, at first glance, this may seem audacious and apparent, but it’s essential to understand the context. We’re talking about a closely-knit group of former military intelligence personnel from Israel who have quickly earned a reputation in the civilian market for employing very aggressive and unfair competitive tactics more akin to wartime espionage.

Speaking of espionage, the Orca complaint recently was amended with some proof that Wiz seems to be sneaking data from customers with what seems to be an intentionally unsafe snapshot scanning architecture.

One common practice in cloud management is taking snapshots of customer workloads to create backups or facilitate disaster recovery. And the critical importance of keeping cloud snapshots private is hard to overstate. A supposed security vendor should never roll up to take snapshots of your workloads and read them out somewhere else, especially when claiming to care about your privacy.

The $10m Acoustic Kitty project as documented in “The Wizards of Langley” by Jeffrey Richelson in 2001. A new security firm named itself “Wiz” in a boast about their espionage roots, as if untouchable.
That just sounds like spying to me.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

A cloud snapshot is essentially a very fast point-in-time copy of a virtual machine (VM), it captures an entire workload’s state. It has the data, as well as configuration, and storage at a specific moment. Typically this allows a workload to be restored to that exact state, revolutionizing both backups and restores. Snapshots quickly became indispensable for many uses including tests, migrations as well as aiding business continuity, disaster recovery and reduced downtime.

The snapshots, like the name implies, can contain all kinds of sensitive information, including proprietary data, intellectual property, or customer records. Exposing snapshots to third-party vendors brings to mind huge risks of unauthorized access or data breaches. Given how many industries and regions have strict regulations governing data privacy and security, the very idea of transferring snapshots to external vendors probably trips compliance violations and legal consequences.

FTC are you listening?

So why would Wiz even think of moving snapshots into their cloud account? Terrible idea and totally unnecessary, a violation of basic safety. Yet here it is, as captured on page 46 in the new Orca amended complaint of September 15th.

Scan configuration — The list of disks for scanning is composed by the cloud fetcher leveraging the cloud provider APIs and sent to the Wiz workload scanner. Snapshot creation — The workload scanner, which runs in a dedicated account, creates the snapshot and shares it with the scanner cluster. These snapshots are created with ‘wiz:auto-gen-snapshot’ tag to help identify them. Snapshot scan — The snapshot is mapped as a read-only volume and scanned. The scan results include metadata on packages, vulnerabilities and mis-configurations and are sent to the backend. Cleanup — The snapshot is deleted from the customer tenant.

Note the flow at the bottom right, where Wiz takes a snapshot and then exfiltrates it out of the customer environment. Source: Exhibit 4: Orca v. Wiz Amended Complaint Exhibits 2023-09-15

Orca’s complaint calls out a marketing detail here. Apparently they pitched and grew their technology using the concept of their scanner looking at cloud machines like an MRI scans the human body.

Orca realized early on that its cloud-native approach could be
analogized to a medical MRI, providing a full model of the cloud environment without affecting it in any way. Early Orca marketing materials noted: “An apt analogy is to think of a medical MRI. Instead of probing inside the body with needles and scalpels, such imaging is an out-of-band method of obtaining a detailed picture of the organs and tissue within. The person is never physically touched.”

Page 10 of the complaint says Wiz then copied this MRI language from Orca almost word-for-word into their own marketing.

Just like an MRI performs a 3D scan of the body without affecting the body itself, snapshot scanning achieves deep analysis of the workload without any impact or interruption to the live workload

The problem, beyond stealing the marketing, seems to be that Wiz documentation also says snapshots are “always remaining within the customer tenant” yet their architecture illustrates that is NOT true: a “shared snapshot” is read into the Wiz cloud account and outside customer control.

That’s not “always remaining within” if you believe Wiz themselves when they jump up and down and scream at Microsoft for having a private key configured to be read by someone other than the person who owns that key. No joke, Wiz couldn’t be more excited to tell the world that Microsoft was “breached” yet here in their own documentation they seem to have designed a safety breach as inherent to their product architecture.

For comparison, Orca documentation has a very important statement that says basically the exact opposite to Wiz.

Note that these snapshots can only be accessed from your account for security.

Again, looking at the Wiz documentation in the complaint, it seems like Wiz created a snapshot flow that setup access from outside the customer account. How could they be so upset with Microsoft, their former employer, for excessive permissions in cloud when they just build an entirely new cloud scan empire based on excessive permissions?

Security vendors, no matter how reputable (no matter if they call themselves the untouchable “Wiz”ards), are not inherently safe and of course may themselves become targets. Their handling of snapshots increases attack surface and exposure to potential breaches.

Also data is subject to the laws and regulations of the country or region where it is located. Wiz shifting snapshots could mean they “somehow” show up in Israel with its different rules, creating compliance challenges.

What do I mean, could mean?

Read the Orca complaint in full, which documents how Wiz allegedly built their company from a culture of cynical extrajudicial military-espionage that goes even beyond industrial theft.

And then ask yourself why their architecture allegedly was built for stealing customer data in snapshots…

I know it’s fashionable to say cloud security means an ever-changing landscape, but in reality our book “Securing the Virtual Environment: How to Defend the Enterprise From Attack” from ten years ago still lays out principles that remain steadfast cornerstones. Safeguarding customer workloads and data is a top priority, such that it is unequivocally recommended to refrain from shifting snapshots to third-party security vendors. Keep them private, under strict access control so you can monitor activities, and ensure compliance with regulations, laws and security policies.


If AfD are Nazis, and Elon Musk Campaigns for AfD, What Does That Make Him?

First, the Nazis in AfD love saying they are definitely not the thing that they are.

There is a long list of cases with a neo-Nazi connections in the AfD – and it runs right up to the national executive committee.

AfD literally oppose law and order — want to undermine the Constitution — so they can plunge Germany into fascism.

Can you form a coalition with those people and make them accepted as normal partners? And there’s a huge understanding right now, or was a huge understanding: No, you may not, because they don’t play according to the rules. And the rules are the content of our Constitution and the rule of law. […] And it’s becoming clearer and clearer that [the AfD] is in huge parts, or in part, against the Constitution, and could [therefore] be prohibited.

German domestic intelligence has even warned publicly against voting for the anti-Constitution AfD.

“[P]arts of the AfD spread hate and agitation against all kinds of minorities in Germany, especially migrants … We see that parts of the AfD also hold and promote an anti-Semitic attitude. We see that parts of the AfD are very much influenced by Moscow and continue to spread Russian narratives”, particularly with regards to Russia’s all-out war in Ukraine, [chief of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV)] Haldenwang added.

German language reports say it most clearly and without hesitation, because it’s important: AfD are the old Nazis.

“Die alten Nazis sind wieder da”. Der ehemalige FDP-Innenminister Gerhart Baum blickt mit Sorge auf den Rechtsruck in Deutschland. Im Video erklärt er, weshalb er die AfD für demokratiegefährdend hält.

Second, guess who loves “die alten Nazis” in the AfD and why.

Elon Musk shares a post calling for the AfD to be elected.

Yup.

Elon Musk, already being sued for obvious racism, is without question using his platform to put Nazis back in power.

Twitter has changed its logo to an “old” swastika and claimed the Nazi Gleichschaltung concept as its “new” idea

Related: Why are he and South African businessman Peter Thiel, close friend of South African businessman Elon Musk, both apparently trying to restore Nazism in Germany?

Clue: Their families were on the side of Hitler in WWII and fled to South Africa in order to avoid accountability (e.g. Thiel and Musk failed to attend mandatory Holocaust education — Nazi atrocities of 1933 to 1945).

To be even more clear, Musk’s grandfather J. N. Haldeman was a chiropractor in the nineteen-thirties and forties who became director of a “Technocracy” pro-Hitler political campaign in Canada.

Source: The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Tue, Oct 8, 1940. Page 16

To be fair, Technocracy was a political movement that claimed it wasn’t political because politicians were not allowed, just like it was a fascist movement that claimed being anti-Semites opposed to fighting against Hitler didn’t mean they supported Hitler.

Perhaps you can smell the crazy. Technocrats in the 1940s tried to promote a single Technate (destroying national borders to form a massive empire) by claiming to have a technological army in grey uniforms, driving grey cars, greeting everyone in military salutes and pledging allegiance to a single white man as the supreme leader over the entire continent… all based only on inflated resumes with false engineering degrees or work experience.

Fascism? Who sees fascism? This 1941 Technocracy rally of “light grey shirts” (not to be confused with silver shirts) argued that all the governments in North America must be destroyed so a single white man can rule the entire continent. Source: Technocracy Inc.

In 1950, given his run-ins with the law during WWII for supporting Hitler, not to mention his continued spread of anti-Semitic hate speech, Haldeman fled to South Africa to promote a new white supremacist Apartheid regime.

An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled. “Instead of the Government’s attitude keeping me out of South Africa, it had precisely the opposite effect—it encouraged me to come and settle here,” he told a reporter for the South African newspaper Die Transvaler shortly after his arrival. The far-right Afrikaner newspaper treated Haldeman’s arrival as a PR victory for apartheid. (“PRAISES ACTION OF NATIONALIST PARTY REGIME: Canadian Politician Settles in South Africa,” the headline read.)

They meant Canadian Technocracy anti-politician politician.

Elon’s grandfather pivoted his track-record of rabid anti-Semitism towards boosting Apartheid racism. In 1960 he self-published a manifesto called “The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa.” Presumably bed-time reading to his grandson Elon born in 1971, this text updated Nazi “Dolchstoßlegende” propaganda about WWI used for blaming Jews for everything to also blame them for Germany losing WWII; an unhinged rant about achieving a white supremacist dream state.

Source: Twitter

Back to AfD in 2023: Perhaps now you see why little Elon has grown up to fulfill his grandfather’s conspiracy-filled hate campaigns, for a small group of white supremacists (with fake or inflated engineering degrees and experience) to rule via abuse of technology, and of course publicly campaign for “die alten Nazis“.

“Challenge accepted, Elon” Mehdi Hasan says as he lays out in gory detail the increasing hate speech (Xcrement) on Musk’s eXTwitter: