I was asked to be a guest on Cyber Security Headlines: Week in Review with CISO Series reporter Richard Stroffolino. It’s a quick 20-minute show that boils down the most important stories for the week and provides a little bit of context.
Bogus Insurance Report Disables AZ Tesla
Talk about a company that hates their customers…
A database with a bad record was used by Tesla to disable a critical car feature and then deny/ignore all customer complaints.
Tesla had intentionally deactivated Erickson’s supercharger feature for safety reasons. Here’s why. When replacing Erickson’s battery, Tesla says they discovered that Carfax listed her car as having a salvaged title due to being totaled in a collision. As a result, Tesla removed the supercharger feature as a safety precaution. But Carfax’s information was wrong because an insurance company provided incorrect information. Erickson’s car was never totaled.
Tesla “discovered” is more like bad surveillance, probably by some under-paid sloppy investigation task workers setting a bad example in Chinese prisons.
On Tuesday, the Tesla boss praised Chinese factory workers for pulling extreme hours while taking a shot at American workers. […] Tesla restricted its Shanghai workers from leaving the factory…. While locked inside, the workers were reportedly made to work 12-hour shifts, six days in a row, and to sleep on factory floors. […] Labor rights and safety violations have been reported at Tesla’s Shanghai factory since it opened in 2018, with some workers making as little as $1,500 a month in what an investigation by local journalists called the “Giga-sweatshop.”
Tesla claimed to be giving high praise for its unfortunate sweatshop victims as they were squeezed before being dumped ungratefully.
Tesla Inc. is laying off workers at its Shanghai plant…
I wonder if Tesla removed the “Arbeit Macht Frei” posters before or after they decided to layoff their workers locked inside the factory.
Safety reasons?
Tesla is by definition the opposite of safety.
Apparently if anyone anywhere in the massive information supply chain poisons a single database record Tesla will blindly ingest and act on it immediately without any integrity check or verification… acting unsafely for safety reasons. Is Carfax often wrong? Does a chicken have wings? It’s a marketing site that buys reports from far too many sources with little to no integrity verification.
- Carfax pulls information from more than 112,000 sources and that sometimes can lead to errors.
- Auto Damage Experts Warns Against Using CARFAX for Diminished Value
- One man said Carfax and Autocheck.com both reported his car was damaged, costing him thousands of dollars in value.
- Mistakes happen. A Carfax report has been likened to a credit report for vehicles. The information comes from a variety of sources.
- “All they can tell me is that it’s not my insurance company.” It takes a lot of work to fix errors on car and credit history.
- Carfax error leads to a diminishing estimate of a car’s value, but one owner fought back.
- Carr went to CARFAX with his vehicle maintenance records and a letter from his insurance company. CARFAX removed the total loss report.
Tesla safety is an oxymoron, their highly unsafe data “ingestion” methods from the known untrustworthy Carfax being no exception.
Sounds like the same company that created a driverless “safety” product, one that keeps crashing into huge trees and flashingly obvious firetrucks, is bad at basic data safety. Presumably here again they operate with only selfish reasons.
“I wouldn’t characterize it as customer service,” she said. “I mean, there’s not a way to email them. There’s a way to communicate on the app but they don’t respond. I’ve looked back, I’ve sent over 30 emails, every single day I’ve been dealing with this and rarely getting a response.”
Nothing says caring about customers like treating them as poorly as their Chinese workers being locked inside a factory: totally ignoring basic needs, giving no response to dozens of complaints about obvious and easily fixed problems.
Ukranian Drones Struck Russian Warships, Again Proving Elon Musk a Liar
Allegedly Elon Musk continuously lies about who told him to protect Russian warships and why he did it. Gaslighting, as usual, the unstable Musk has said both he personally stepped in to help Putin save the Russian ships, and also that he refused to step in and did nothing in order to help Putin save the Russian ships.
Either way, despite flip-flopping like a slimy “big fish” story out of water, it sure sounds like Logan Act time. If he really wants to be remembered in history as someone very unique, that looks like his best fit yet. And despite his self-dealing protests and complaints to silence independent expert reports, journalists are laying bare some actual truths about drone strikes in Crimea.
Here is the part you might not have heard, or not registered: The same team launched a similar attack again a few weeks later. On October 29, a fleet of guided sea drones packed with explosives did reach Sebastopol harbor, using a different communications system. They did hit their targets. They put one Russian frigate, the Admiral Makarov, out of commission. The team believes that they damaged at least one submarine and at least two other boats as well.
And then? Nuclear war did not follow. Despite Musk’s fears, in other words—fears put into his head by the Russian ambassador, or perhaps by Putin himself—World War III did not erupt as a result of this successful attack on a Crimean port. Instead, the Russian naval commanders were spooked by the attack, so much so that they stuck close to Sebastopol harbor over the following weeks.
What would happen if Ukrainian drones struck Russian warships?
They did strike.
We don’t have to wonder.
BBC Verify’s research suggests Ukraine has carried out at least 13 attacks with sea drones – targeting military ships, Russia’s naval base in Sevastopol, and Novorossiysk harbour. This is based on announcements by Russian and Ukrainian authorities, and local media reports.
And we certainly don’t have to listen to Elon Musk, a proven serial liar. We know he personally interfered with U.S. foreign policy by directly negotiating with Russian officials to undermine Ukrainian defenses. He has consistently been on the wrong side of history; because he never changes.
Signs of a private citizen politically manipulating service availability to favor certain foreign policy already had been there for all to see a year ago.
Ukrainian operators are both to credit for the mission, and also to be held responsible for entrusting Musk. Militant due diligence (anathema to the ignorance and impulsivity of coin-operated Musk) alerted Starlink’s wannabe-dictator to the existence of operations threatening Putin’s naval assets in Sebastopol harbor.
It was a simple and classic mistake. Ukrainians trusted a man who can never be trusted. They expected a rational response from a man who thrives on contrarian and cruel lies. It was like filing a support ticket with a Belorussian telephone company hoping old “war crimes” Lukashenko would do anything other than suck up to Russia.
Regrettably, just like many individuals who purchased a Tesla, someone fell victim to Elon Musk’s cunning manipulation (promising assistance but ultimately not delivering). This tactic is commonly referred to as advanced fee fraud. Musk’s actions included sporadic service provision combined with requesting full payments, all while pretending to “care” about Ukraine. Unfortunately, this was a fraudulent scheme that some mistook for genuine support for Ukrainian defense efforts.
Here is how and why Ukrainian intelligence was duped.
Areas in Ukraine occupied by Russia were being given a taste of intermittent network access on purpose by the duplicitous and compromised Starlink operation:
Starlink UP
- RU occupied Kherson
- RU occupied Zaporizhzhia
- RU occupied Mykolaiv
- RU occupied Kharkiv
Starlink FAIL
- RU occupied Donetsk
- RU occupied Luhansk
- RU occupied Crimea
Political service map.
Shortly after Ukraine’s secret defense operation details for October 2022 were shared with the American company, meant to enhance network reliability under Starlink’s public commitments to assist in defense against Russia, Elon Musk seems to have employed this exact information to pursue a completely contrary agenda. He allegedly actively worked to undermine U.S. objectives, turned his assistance programs into a means to block operations, and promoted pro-Putin propaganda campaigns.
- October 3, 2022 proposed a “George Blake peace” plan that involved Ukraine surrendering and ceding its territory to Russia
- October 21, 2022 fraudulently asserted Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea should be taken away from Ukraine
Did I mention the Logan Act?
If this seems too simplistic, as if Musk doesn’t have a clear enough motive for personally interfering to block U.S. executive branch policy (e.g. appear so treasonous), blame China.
Musk caring about Russia invading Ukraine, which seems to have nothing to do with his stated “business” or even personal interests, actually parallels top concerns of his Chinese handlers (e.g. defense of Taiwan).
Taiwan is “not for sale”, the island’s foreign minister said in a stern rebuke to Elon Musk who asserted Taiwan was an integral part of China, as the billionaire again waded into the thorny issue of relations between Beijing and Taipei… Last October, he suggested that tensions between China and Taiwan could be resolved by handing over some control of Taiwan to Beijing, drawing a similarly strong reprimand from Taiwan.
Last October. See?
Musk does whatever China says. Ukraine is a proxy.
It’s no secret Russia is China’s strategic ally in these conflicts and also a present testing ground for undermining U.S. foreign policy (let alone actual defense operations) by compromising selfish and greedy American tech executives.
Musk’s behavior, clearly favoring enemies of the country he claims to call home, really is not far removed from stories about a serial liar in a U.S. company jailed on charges of treason and espionage.
In 2016, when Elon Musk was questioned about Tesla’s “Autopilot” potentially causing fatalities, his response was marked by anger and defensiveness. He argued that since millions of people die in car accidents, he shouldn’t be expected to care about individual deaths related to his product. Subsequently, he initiated a deceptive public relations effort claiming that his cars were the safest and would save more lives than any others, even though Tesla vehicles continued to be involved in fatal accidents, surpassing the combined total of all other electric vehicles.
Then, in 2022, when informed about the use of drones to prevent ships from bombing civilian areas, Musk intervened with network services to ensure these ships could continue their actions, which resulted in harm to hundreds or thousands of innocent people including children. He subsequently launched a fraudulent propaganda campaign, taking credit for preventing a fake potential world war by stopping drones, despite the simple fact that the drones still managed to target the ships.
There’s a consistency to his interference with U.S. policy, “grossly inflated sense of self worth“, hatred of humanity and greedy pattern of self-serving propaganda.
Who better for China to compromise?
OR Tesla Kills One. Police Charge Manslaughter
The name Gabriel Owens is infamous in Oregon. It is known much wider in mountain biking communities. Last year Owens rode downhill at very high speed on a “double black diamond” trail and sued the mountain when he crashed.
A Multnomah County jury awarded $11.4 million to Gabriel B. Owens after the cyclist’s lawyers said he hit a rut in the route…
The result of that huge jury award was mountain biking was banned for everyone on Oregon’s Mt. Hood.
The basis of Owens’ case was he lost control on the very thing that gives a trail a “double black diamond” rating (most people would call the rut a jump, the sort of thing they expect and want as a challenge) yet he found a lawyer to argue there was no personal responsibility for a crash.
Here’s a video showing the spot where he crashed and showing the kinds of exceptional “thrill seeking” behavior in the face of trees, rocks, ruts, jumps all around a 10 foot wide trail.
As much as I would like to agree with trail auditors there always could be safety improvements, we’re talking about a “double black diamond”, which indicates the highest levels of risk. It’s hard to overlook that a person engaging in dangerous high-speed thrill seeking behavior refused personal responsibility. Owens suing the mountain doesn’t pass a common sense test, which hopefully that video demonstrates.
Even the most detailed case reviews including pictures and diagrams don’t really adequately explain away rider responsibility. One expert asked to testify on behalf of Owens argued all riders knew very well that dangers were high because so many were injured all the time.
Lopes told me that, when he did his site visit to Skibowl, he observed a medical tent set up at the base of the mountain with a constant stream of injured guests getting bandages and ice packs applied to all kinds of injuries.
The legal team managed to spin this fact into the mountain failing to research and prevent injuries, rather than the more obvious analysis that Owens would have seen the constant stream of injured guests and known a “double black diamond” trail carried exceptionally high risks including catastrophic injury or even death. If he had crashed on a rock or into a tree, his legal team argued, they would have considered that Owens’ fault. But somehow because he crashed on a jump, and he slid into a wooden post similar to a tree, then they argued all liability switched over to the mountain and lawyers had to jump in for huge awards.
The whole case revolved around predicting risk by looking for trends in harm. Who was responsible? Owens. Who paid a high price? Owens wanted it to be someone, everyone, but him.
Bottom line is Owens became known as that guy in Oregon who took huge risks that screwed up his own life, and then ruined the lives of others.
Fast forward, no pun intended, and Owens on September 8th was allegedly intoxicated and traveling at high-speed with his Tesla when he crashed into another car and killed the driver.
Upon arrival, deputies determined the vehicles involved were a Tesla Model S sedan and a Mazda B2300 pickup truck.
The driver of the Mazda, 36-year-old Kira Haston, of Aloha, was transported to a local hospital where they later died. The victim’s dog was located near the crash scene and was transported by a deputy to a nearby emergency veterinarian hospital. The dog was treated and later released to a family member.
The driver of the Tesla, 44-year-old Gabriel Bryce Owens, of Oregon City, was also transported to a local hospital for treatment. He was later arrested and transported to the Clackamas County Jail on charges of manslaughter in the first degree, driving under the influence of intoxicants, and reckless driving. Mr. Owens is being held on $250,000 bail (full amount required).
Did Owens use the money from his case to buy a Tesla for the selfish purpose of further putting himself and everyone around him in thrill-seeking danger of sudden catastrophic loss?
Manslaughter charges fit where a Tesla owner can be proven to be reckless and intoxicated, causing death of another person. Police seem to be judging a state of mind, intent, and specific circumstances of Owens’ reckless behavior this year very differently than last year.
Or to put it another way, the legal team that won over $10 million for Owens claimed a feature of the trail was dangerous because riders might have been unaware. Yet understanding a “double black diamond” trail’s features, potential hazards, and the level of difficulty is inherently required for someone to ride it safely.
Owens being unfamiliar with a rut in the trail, failing to assess the challenge and control his ride yet blaming others when he crashed catastrophically, certainly begs whether him next committing manslaughter with a Tesla (being unaware of its risks and operating recklessly) could have been predicted.
