The deadliest maritime disaster in recent US history has led five years later to a ship captain being sentenced to jail, for the deaths of 34 people in a fire at sea.

The Conception was anchored off Santa Cruz Island, 25 miles south of Santa Barbara, when it caught fire before dawn on the final day of a three-day excursion, sinking less than 30 metres from shore.

Thirty-three passengers and a crew member died, trapped in a bunkroom below deck.

…

“[Conception Captain Jerry] Boylan was the first to abandon ship and jump overboard. Four crew members who joined him also survived.

If that sounds familiar, it because Tesla has become notorious for creating a robot it calls “Full Self Driving” (FSD) that can’t actually drive itself and, even worse, abruptly abandons its passengers when in danger.

Back in 2016 I argued in a security conference keynote (just after Josh Brown tragically had been killed by his Tesla) that an algorithmic decision made by a software-based “pilot” was trying to save itself while sacrificing him instead.

The passenger died falsely believing his pilot would try to save him, when it instead literally threw him under a truck so it could drive away.

In 2019 I asked here on the blog if the Conception ship diaster in California should be compared to egregious safety failures in the tech industry.

Fast forward to 2024 and the www.tesla-fire.com site has recorded that at least 83 people have died in a fire while under the care of the Tesla robots that had promised safety from harm.

That’s nearly three times as many as this case sending the offender to jail.

Also by comparison, engineers at VW have been severely punished for less, as their algorithms simply polluted air when disengaging control.

The Tesla “pilot” arguably has been killing its passengers for years, and continues on killing, barely regulated while it buries fatality investigations by blaming victims and then paying their grieving families large settlements to hush.

Video has been posted already from local crews covering the West Covina news beat.

West Covina Police Department officers responded to a traffic collision in the 1100 block of south Orange Ave. around 1:50 a.m.

Upon arrival, they located a person trapped inside the vehicle. West Covina Fire Department paramedics pronounced the person deceased at the scene.

At the end of some extremely dark tire skids on the road, a large pole sits at an angle in the video indicating the Tesla slammed into it. The Tesla also seems to have had all its wheels destroyed.

But seriously, news from Enron not very long ago was that scores of upper management were let go because of performance needs. In reality, Enron executives were firing anyone who could see and document the fraud, let alone whether any dared to speak out.

In a similar vein Tesla today is so awash with egregious fraud that it’s halting their supercharger team (which was a huge scam from the start), stopping the gigacasting team and their obvious nonsense, throwing out the “new model” team, and even service teams are being let go… as the list goes on and on.

It’s all crazy not least because there is a skyrocketing demand for repair technicians to clean up the mess.

If Tesla hadn’t tried to use “environmentalism” and “reliability” fraud to hedge and corner the EV market, they instead could be heavily profiting right now just from training electrical engineers to repair or replace battery packs.

Honestly, the amazingly successful Nissan LEAF becoming the most popular EV in the world in 2019 seems like not that long ago, given that we can see clearly now how much Tesla basically lied to steal the market and blew itself out in just five years.

What’s left of this fraud balloon?

Remember a long time ago when I used to call Tesla a culture of “free speed extremism“?

Of course he refers to himself as a “free speech extremist”, but really how different is that from extreme thinking that vehicles shouldn’t be regulated (shouldn’t have any suspension or brakes) and allowed to repeatedly stupidly crash instead?

The Onion just took its own hilarious swipe by saying it far better than me.

“As the brakes never really worked anyway, we figured the team’s existence was redundant. Going forward, none of our models will be outfitted with brakes. Instead, we will shift our efforts to making fart noises louder.”

Perhaps most notable is the expansion of scope to any health related apps that are handling unsecured personal data.

“Protecting consumers’ sensitive health data is a high priority for the FTC,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “With the increasing use of health apps and connected devices, the updated HBNR will ensure it keeps pace with changes in the health marketplace.”

[…]

The revised definition makes clear that the final rule covers entities that offer products and services through the online services, including mobile applications, of vendors of personal health records. It also makes clear that only entities that access or send unsecured PHR identifiable health information to a personal health record — rather than entities that access or send any information to a personal health record — qualify as PHR related entities;

Also worth considering is a new notification requirement, which seems to recognize effective breach response team needs.

For breaches involving 500 or more individuals, covered entities must notify the FTC at the same time they send notices to affected individuals, which must occur without unreasonable delay and in no case later than 60 calendar days after the discovery of a breach of security

That’s a huge difference from the often threatened 72 or even 24 hour rule from lawyers, which risked undermining evidence gathering and therefore deny successful investigations.