The new cranky privacy report from Mozilla on car data is a useful point in time analysis… unmoored from the past and lacking suggestions for what to do in the future. Give it a read and ask yourself when things will change and why.
I’d say the problem is so old we’re already at the solutions phase, long past the identification and criticism.
Has it been 10 years already? You’d think I’d be excited for Mozilla to be pounding their drum so OEMs would rush into my welcoming arms. Alas, I am not sure it helps.
Earlier this year I was talking with data scientists inside a huge OEM and they said things like “wish I knew earlier about the solutions available, because the project just finished with some bad privacy compromises and will be released in a couple years”.
They know privacy is broken, because they have known for a decade, yet they still don’t know what they can do instead. That’s why the Mozilla report to them is ineffective, like a drop of rain in a hailstorm.
…according to our research, they are all bad! On top of all that, researching cars and privacy was one of the hardest undertakings we as privacy researchers have ever had.
.
^^^ That’s the world’s smallest violin playing for Mozilla researchers showing up suddenly and saying they had a very hard time researching car data.
*shakes fist
You kids, back in my day we walked uphill in snowstorms both ways to assess car data safety!
Here’s a fun fact: in 1999 it took me 30 seconds to install RedHat on an IBM 8-CPU Server with fiber NAS designed for Detroit OEM data analysis. I found some security flaws of course (it fell over if more than five virtual machines pushed via X to remote terminals, and it leaked metadata)… but I digress.
Let’s be honest here. The Mozilla narrative of “they are all bad” is lazy, the easiest form of research. It reinforces a deeper problem of coming up with no incentives for change. Mozilla is doing the opposite of “nudge” theory. Do they not have any economists on staff?
The report team even readily admits to using a counter-productive binary analysis for their entirely unsympathetic bashing of manufacturing. It’s easier to call everything bad for smash and grab headlines than do deeper nuanced analysis and open pathways to change.
Blurry, complex and messy things actually are hard and worth doing, so if some “news” interloper shows up to say it’s all bad… easy for OEMs to sit back and say they can do nothing. “We’re bad, impossible to be good, oh well”.
Mozilla says cars capturing customer “sexual activity” data is bad, for example, with absolutely no thought about why anyone designing seat recliners and center consoles would want to look into that ever.
Good/bad, leaves no venue for the process of getting better and even encourages cheats to just flip a score. I am reminded of the Tesla CEO yelling “fix this now so I won’t have to care” for everything without any real understanding of why complex interconnected things become so broken. His binary thinking led to coverups (bad flipped artificially to good) and has been getting hundreds of people killed unnecessarily.
To me there’s a huge missed opportunity for Mozilla to engage with data security experts, architects of information safety, and discuss what’s really possible for car privacy and therefore what’s next for OEMs. Let’s talk about goals for privacy change 12 months from now, 36 months…
Solutions exist.
The technology is ready.
Here’s one answer that an OEM just told me they liked, to drive out of the senseless “car data privacy sucks” headline loop while delivering data-driven consoles: solidproject.org
…you should pay attention to the April 27 announcement from Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, that he intends to launch his first unmanned Mars mission in just two years and will beat NASA’s goal of putting astronauts on the surface in the 2030s by up to a decade.
Pay attention everyone, a know-nothing loud-mouthed CEO rocked straight up to NASA to tell all the scientists and experts he has two thumbs and really knows how to science.
The far-off 2030 NASA timeline was made to look ridiculous by a rich racist white kid holding big dirty bags of ill-gotten money. He said his daddy told him to stomp a go button and make unmanned missions on Mars reality in just two years.
2018 unmanned landing on Mars! Men walking on Mars by 2020!
Believe him because this guy, who hasn’t done anything, can do anything!
Then on September 29, 2017 CNN gobbled up some new SpaceX lies that somehow immediately cast doubt on 2018.
The hard-charging tech mogul said his rocket company, SpaceX, aims to land at least two cargo ships on the Red Planet in 2022 in order to place power, mining and life support systems there for future flights. That’s just five years from now. “That’s not a typo — although it is aspirational,” Musk said Friday…
Hard charging in reverse? Record scratch. 2022?
What happened to our 2018 let alone 2020? Was it all just fraud?
*Me checks calendar for typos. Hmmm, can it really be almost the end of 2023 already? Where are the cargo ships on Mars sent to make democracy look bad?
By 2020… oh, surely by now you get the slick talking big city con man routine.
You’d think there would be serious doubts cast on the SpaceX circus act by 2020 but CNBC eagerly gobbled up more SpaceX lies.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he is “highly confident” that the company will land humans on Mars in “about six years from now. If we get lucky, maybe four years,” Musk said…
Luck.
That’s what real-world space programs run on, just like clowns and trapeze artists.
No wonder SpaceX told the world they would have people on Mars by 2020, 2024, 2025… with a high confidence that they really, really meant by 2026.
Kids, make sure you study how to get lucky so you can build a rocket out of rotting potatoes and expired ketchup that goes a bazillion miles per hour to safely land 100 people on Mars four years from now. Oh and ask the government (your parents) for millions so you can call it your “business”.
Seriously, why didn’t everyone in journalism slap down SpaceX immediately as garbage?
It’s almost like SpaceX will next announce that they were telling the truth the whole time because by 2050 a time machine will be completed that allows them to reach Mars in 2018.
spaceflights do trigger grief and sadness… felt like a funeral and all he felt was sadness
On a related note, the same SpaceX guy in 2016 barked at the press he funded creation of the safest cars on the road. Yeah, well, lies. They have turned out to have the lowest quality and be the least safe.
Another day, another Tesla causing a tragic loss of innocent lives. It already appears from the police report that, as in so many previous instances and despite its longevity in the market promising future safety, Tesla’s poor engineering quality and “manslaughtering” design defects led to a “veered” collision with oncoming traffic.
Three people were killed in a car crash in Springfield Township, Fayette County on Sunday, state police said. It happened on Springfield Pike near Mt. Tabor Road around 5:55 p.m.. State Police Trooper Kalee Barnhart said two cars were involved in the crash. Barnart said both cars were sedans. One was a Tesla.
Of course State Police Trooper looking at the scene in rural Pennsylvania said one was a Tesla. Springfield Pike and Mt. Tabor Road, Pennsylvania. A common two-lane highway very reminiscent of other recent tragic “veered” head-on crashes (Bean Hollow, Lake Tahoe, Idaho).
Police seeing the Tesla deaths first hand, the unusual spike in fatalities caused by Tesla, are warning us don’t get in a Tesla. Don’t let our friends or family get in a Tesla. NHTSA data since January 2023 reveals Tesla has been quietly reporting one fatality in every ten crashes.
Just think for a minute how bad at basic engineering a company has to be to spend a decade enriching themselves with false promises of future safety while building such an unsafe robot that it operates worse and worse every year. Bernie Madoff was jailed for far less fraud.
Source: Tesladeaths.com
Encounter a Tesla? Take cover and have the police on speed dial. You’re looking at a loaded rocket launcher being casually waved around in public as if by a big blind and deaf white South African. One might ponder why such humanity-destroying-by-design devices reminiscent of Dr. Death were ever permitted on any public roads.
Guess how long Tesla has known about this exact problem and refused to admit fault, sending customers to a predictable death?
…on the launch of the driver assistance tech, Musk would learn firsthand that a curve on Interstate 405 caused Autopilot, thrown off by the road’s faded lane lines, to steer into and “almost hit” oncoming traffic. Whenever this happened, Musk would “furiously” storm into the Tesla office and proceed to chew out his engineers. “Do something to program this right,” he repeatedly demanded…. “There was just such a gulf between Elon’s goal and the possible” [according to Tesla senior vice president Andrew Baglino]. “He just wasn’t aware of the challenges.”
Clearly documented, from the start Tesla knew they had a head-on collision problem with slight bends in a road. Tesla staff know exactly why they never fixed it. Now guess why they don’t want anyone to talk about it.
Or let’s ask instead, why did the CEO stop making demands it be fixed?
Hint: he doesn’t understand technology. He was thus tricked by his own staff, who played a very cynical game with the sole purpose of stopping his abuse of them even if hundreds of people would die as a result.
…he kept coming back to the fact that people have just two eyes and they can drive the car. […] Clearly, nothing was getting through to Musk. It was only his chief of staff Sam Teller that was able to appease his CEO’s complaints. He came up with a simple solution: getting the lane lines repainted on that pesky curve — which of course, didn’t actually address the underlying problem. “After that, Musk’s Autopilot handled the curve well”.
It handled one curve well because they changed the curve, leaving the car unsafe to drive everywhere else. They altered surroundings to deceive a very gullible CEO, using a simple ruse to make him stop shouting. Handling tin-pot dictator tantrums took precedence over safety engineering and work to preserve lives. These Potemkin villagers failed basic engineering ethics and enabled criminal-level negligence.
The conman promises people things they want, not things that can be delivered.
The CEO, obsessed by fantasy and easily deceived, was manipulated by his own staff into swallowing his own dumb argument that “two eyes” are sufficient enough for safety. They’re NOT, proven by the fact that his own eyes were then easily fooled into dangerous overconfidence. The ruse sadly only worked to stop him from berating them, and the company then continued on an obvious track to kill more and more people unnecessarily.
The engineering inconsistency is a very concerning paradox that proves AI unfit for cars, which those with common sense should recognize as the fundamental issue contributing to a decade of avoidable deadly crashes involving Tesla owners, both as victims and perpetrators.
The United States is gradually advancing its efforts in the field of expanding awareness about codebreakers and the origins of modern computing, akin to the remarkable work undertaken by historians at Bletchley Park in England. An article featured in DCist sheds light on significant revelations associated with “Building E on the Foreign Service Institute’s leafy Arlington campus”.
“The codebreakers who worked here saved countless American lives and shortened the war by what many historians estimate to be at least two years,” [institute director] Polaschik said.
A group of Black women who worked at Arlington Hall — they were segregated from their white counterparts — kept tabs on messages from the private sector, ensuring that American companies were not doing business with Nazi Germany or Japanese companies.
Overall, women made up 70% of the American domestic codebreaking force, noted Adam Howard, the director of the Office of the Historian at the State Department.
[…]
At the end of the war, the women were mostly pushed out of their jobs to make way for men…
Listening to companies doing business with Nazi Germany? Like *cough, cough* Ford, IBM and Coke?
How awkward to enlist Black women to surveil the most powerful American brands for evidence of treason. I am sure it wasn’t hard for them to find America’s worst offenders, given evidence was so often out in the open while being ignored.
Furthermore, the conclusion of the Arlington story features a memorable quote that underscores potential injustices within America. However, it may not fully capture the nuanced and intricate web of challenges faced by women. A perfect example can be found in the case of Agnes Driscoll who expanded and thrived in intelligence work after her role in World War I ended, as documented in the NSA Hall of Honor.
In her thirty-year career, Mrs. Driscoll broke Japanese Navy manual codes — the Red Book Code in the 1920s, the Blue Book Code in 1930, and, in 1940, she made critical inroads into JN-25, the Japanese fleet’s operational code, which the U.S. Navy exploited after the attack on Pearl Harbor for the rest of the Pacific War. In early 1935, Mrs. Driscoll led the attack on the Japanese M-1 cipher machine (also known to the U.S. as the ORANGE machine), used to encrypt the messages of Japanese naval attaches around the world. At the same time, Agnes sponsored the introduction of early machine support for cryptanalysis against Japanese naval code systems. Early in World War II, Mrs. Driscoll was engaged in the U.S. Navy’s effort against the German naval Enigma machine, although this work was superceded by the U.S.-U.K. cryptologic exchanges in 1942-43. Mrs. Driscoll was part of the navy contingent that joined the new national cryptologic agencies, first the Armed Forces Security Agency in 1949 and then the National Security Agency in 1952.
Driscoll’s postwar career experienced a remarkable ascent, rather than being obstructed by male colleagues. It’s intriguing to observe that the greater a woman’s success in the field of cryptology, the less recognition she tends to receive especially if Black. This phenomenon could be attributed to a paradox: the less they are forced out, the more they are drawn into the shadows, if that conceptually aligns.
One might ponder whether any Black woman listening to the overtly racist white men driving American private sector to support Hitler and genocide (let alone the racists around them at work) would truly desire corporations like Ford, IBM, and Coca-Cola (among others) to unveil the extent of knowledge she possessed.
Here’s a medal. Now you’re dead.
On that note, the NSA claiming “work was superceded by the U.S.- U.K. cryptologic exchanges in 1942-43” completely obscures the critical role of Polish codebreakers. I wonder how this keeps happening to extremely important yet humble men in history like Rejewski.
It’s necessary for individuals, regardless of gender, to practice self-limiting humility when discussing their role in intelligence. Seeking attention and recognition for such roles is generally considered inappropriate, and yet we see men far earlier and more often breaking the most basic rule about breaking rules (e.g. spying often is by definition illegal). It’s not about encouraging women to become boastful too, and rather about protecting the necessary culture where both men and women are expected to refrain from stealing the limelight and instead focus on collective morally justified achievements of the team.
Whereas stories of their white counterparts have come to light as records have been declassified, the identities of most of Arlington’s Black code breakers remain unknown.
In researching her book, Mundy scoured National Security Agency records, among many other sources, and uncovered only two names of Arlington’s Black women code breakers: Annie Briggs, who headed up the production unit, which worked to identify and decipher codes; and Ethel Just, who led a team of translators.
William Coffee, a Black man, supervised the women and recruited many of them, later winning an award for his wartime leadership.
Black women in a WWII non-machine special unit of American military intelligence, led by cryptographic clerk William Coffee, Assistant Civilian In Charge of B-3-b. Source: NPS.gov (NSA)
The percentage of women to men in that photo is typical of codebreakers, if you ask the NSA historians. So let me also make an important point about the book-writing and touring reference in the above article quote:
Mundy scoured National Security Agency records…and uncovered only two names of Arlington’s Black women code breakers
Twenty years before Mundy the NSA Center for Cryptologic History published a book in 2001 called “The Invisible Cryptologists: African-Americans, WWII to 1956″ by Jeannette Williams with Yolande Dickerson (researcher).
In early 1996, the History Center received as a donation a book of rather monotonous photographs of civilian employees at one of NSA’s predecessors receiving citations for important contributions. Out of several hundred photographs, only two included African-Americans – an employee receiving an award from Colonel Preston Corderman (reproduced on page 14) and the same employee posing with his family. […] the war came, and we needed to expand. They bought Arlington Hall, and built two buildings – A Building and B Building – and we moved on Thanksgiving Day of ‘42. I’m not sure when the first blacks came, but Geneva Arthur was one of the early ones [in 1947].
Geneva Arthur.
Just saying, Mundy allegedly “scoured” NSA records and then left out Geneva Arthur in the machine section, a Black woman who rose all the way to being section head before retiring in 1973 as documented in 2001 by the NSA. Annie Briggs and Ethel Just also were mentioned in the same book by the NSA.
I suppose the real question here is whether, like Driscoll, Black women in intelligence became so accomplished they were promoted quietly and intentionally restricted by race into being further buried in secrecy — deciphering Soviet communications on the Venona project based on Genevieve Grotjan’s celebrated work. Yet very unlike the celebrated Grotjan the very many other names have been completely written out of history.
We really have to put this in proper perspective, because it used to be a given that computers meant women and then essential career-motivating factors (e.g. taking care of others, doing the right things, optimism and hope that things were going to get better) were used against them.
In June 1942, when the US government took over Arlington Hall under the War Powers Act to become their center for military intelligence and cryptanalysis, it was an all-female Junior College and boarding school.
A year later something like 2,500 civilians and 800 military staff had been assigned to the station. To put it another way, women codebreakers initially were signed on as lesser civilians, as men directly entered above them into the benefits, recognition and status of being military.
[Eunice Russell Willson Rice] joined the Office of Naval Intelligence as a language analyst in 1935 and transferred to OP-20-G—the Office of Naval Communication’s Code and Cipher Section—as a civilian cryptanalyst in 1939. During WWII, Rice led the team working Italian ciphers and codes, then learned enough Japanese on her own to lead the team charged with recovery and analysis of the vital Japanese Water Transport code.
The monotony of repetitive precision work with letters and numbers (likened to crossword puzzles), let alone huge patterns of tiny thread-like wires, was treated as women’s work and famously called computing. In all aspects of software and hardware, therefore, computers in America initially were being quietly developed and operated predominantly by women as credit flowed into the hands of men around them.
Ms. Blum was one of the pioneers in writing computer software at NSA. She led the effort to recruit Agency employees to learn how to program cryptanalytic techniques. She was aware of and taking advantage of the computer language FORTRAN at least three years before it became publicly available in 1957.
Official American history tells us that IBM released the first commercially available computer language “Formula Translation” (FORTRAN), giving credit to John Backus. Is that right? Probably not.
The NSA tells us instead half-a-century later that Dottie Blum was given a special role at IBM and was developing FORTRAN by 1954. Dottie had for years worked on U.S. Army BOMBE hardware for decoding Enigma, before she worked on the 1950 Standards Easter Automatic Computer (SEAC). Therefore her seasoned influence into FORTRAN is likely much larger than ever stated, just like her mostly unknown colleague Henriette Avram (who also wrote programs for the IBM 701) much later was credited only with developing MARC.
These are the giants of history we know a little about, leaving the large question of what the ghosted Black women of Arlington Hall accomplished that made their secrecy so important. Were they just trying to stay alive by never revealing what they knew about notoriously racist American private sector corporations who had backed Hitler, or trying to fit into a work environment that did little to prohibit or end racism?
According to [chief of the Russian plaintext exploitation branch in 1948] Jack Gurin, the critical need for clerical support prompted him to approach the personnel officer with a request for additional typists. He was told that “Code 1’s” were not available, but “Code 2’s” could be obtained. The coding, it was explained, was used on personnel records to designate race. “Code 1” was white; “Code 2” was “colored.” On the advice of the personnel officer, Gurin discussed with the existing branch personnel the possibility of bringing “Negroes” into the unit. One person, “a very dignified, good-looking Alabama lady, objected, stating that she could not ‘sit next to a colored person and work’.” Gurin relocated her desk…
Jack Gurin, anti-racist agent of change, stands as a good example of white men we should also hear more about.
But what were the names of all the Black women and what credit are they missing? The NSA notoriously built a reputation of hiring single young white women from the American south. I mean Black women apparently were instrumental in monitoring private sector companies during WWII yet afterwards we hear only about white women tasked and trusted with big IBM research roles…
I came to be interviewed at Arlington Hall in 1951, and there was a woman. I don’t know her name, but she was white… she vowed that I would not be ‘going down in the hole’… Most of the blacks at that time were assigned to the basement.
