Energy, Security

Luxury EV Cadillac Lyriq Wows Critics With Knobs and Buttons

1 Comment

I’ve never been a fan of screens in cars. The last thing I want are “idiot lights” on a dashboard.

In 2020, Autoevolution highlighted “lack of physical buttons [in Tesla] as one of the worst automotive trends.”

Lo and behold the new Cadillac EV designers understand why touch means haptic, and they’ve delivered a proper sightless user interface.

And critics are raving:

I can’t overstate how comforting it is to have a bevy of physical knobs and buttons in a modern EV. More of this, please!

Safety feature, I would say.

(Firefighters cite Tesla’s “smooth” handle-free doors in slow painful deaths of occupants).

Critics also say the Cadillac prices rapidly are increasing, with demand far above supply for at least a year out.

Any manufacturer discounting their cars right now to find buyers must be in serious trouble given how strong EV demand is for brands as wide apart as Cadillac and Chevy.

Yet more evidence that collapsing sales of Tesla has to do with the fact that they stole their original technology in 2006 and haven’t had a good idea since.

And on that note, since we were talking about luxury brands that understand the beauty of touch, the 2022 Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing comes default with a Transmisiones y Equipos Mecánico (TREMEC TR-6060) 6 speed stick to control its monstrous 6.2-liter supercharged LT4 V8 engine (668hp, 659lb-ft trq).

Cadillac’s Blackwing knob and button cockpit had critics raving long before an EV showed up embracing the feel.

Knobs and buttons give drivers true freedom from the visual prisons of “luxurious ignorance” vehicles.

History, Security

Lowly U.S. Troop Carriers Now Considered Superior to Russia’s Best Attack Armor

Leave a comment

An article in Forbes seems to bend over backwards to emphasize that it’s talking about a defensive support technology.

…exactly the type of “inoffensive” and non-escalatory tool NATO is looking for to help meet Ukraine’s need for modern armor. As an amphibious troop carrier, clocking in at half the weight of an Abrams tank, the Bradley offers Ukraine a defensive, albeit robust, armored presence. Not considered a weapon for offense, the Bradley is still quite capable of dispatching almost any Russian vehicle on the battlefield.

“I’m just inoffensively in my Bradley delivering water. Who’s thirsty?” Fun history fact: the British military top secret codename for the world’s first armored fighting vehicles in WWI was “water tank“. Today we still say tank, unless of course they deliver water. Then they’re a defensive fighting vehicle.

A weapon not considered for offense?

A weapon for what?

Is there any weapon that by design can be used only in defense?

Look, I could understand if someone wrote that cement trucks are effective in traffic assassinations and were never built for that.

They weren’t built for that.

But who would say the cement truck is not ever considered a weapon for offense?

When being used in an attack, they’re in fact being considered by someone a weapon for offense. That counts.

The article ends by calling our attention to U.S. delivery of the M4 Sherman tank to Britain in WWII, which from its very first engagement handily exposed technological (and strategic) inferiority of Nazi armor.

While I agree with this historical analysis (and have written here about it several times before), the article seems to totally contradict itself in its final stages.

Saying weaponized armor — a light “tank” even with tank-busting weaponry — is somehow not considered an offensive weapon sounds very poorly contrived and unnecessary bureaucracy.

The better and simpler narrative is that the modern derivation of the American light tank dropped into Ukraine today could do to Russia what Britain did from 1942 onward with the American M4 Sherman (immediately and continuously drove Nazis out of occupied territories).


Sherman II tanks of the Queen’s Bays (2nd Dragoon Guards), 2nd Armoured Brigade, moving up to the Alamein line, 24 Oct 1942. Source: IWM photo E18380.

Related blog posts:

Update January 5: The U.S. is planning to send 40 Bradley vehicles to Ukraine, perhaps in time for a spring (March) “defensive” push.

The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to equip Ukraine with Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, while German officials said they would send Marders, decades-old weapons of a comparable class, as well as Patriot air defenses. The joint announcement by Berlin and Washington follows a similar move by France earlier this week. Paris pledged to send an unspecified number of AMX-10 RC vehicles, billed as light tanks on wheels boasting armor-breaking 105 mm guns.

Security

Russian Mercenaries Trick Mali Gov to Jail UN Peacekeepers

Leave a comment

Many counties (e.g. France, UK, Germany) recently signaled they would be backing away from aid to Mali after Russian mercenaries were exposed there having prominent influence.

The pressure to recognize and steer clear of Putin’s hand seems to have only worsened the Russian disinformation crisis (let alone ruthless massacres of civilians) in Mali.

Now the Mali government, under the grip of infamously deceitful Russian mercenaries, is reportedly trying to send UN peacekeepers to jail for being… mercenaries.

A court in the increasingly isolated West African nation of Mali sentenced 46 soldiers from neighboring Ivory Coast to 20 years in jail on Friday, after the military junta that runs Mali accused them of being mercenaries.

The government of Ivory Coast said the soldiers were in Mali to support the United Nations peacekeeping mission, a force of 15,000 members that has been there for almost a decade to protect civilians from violent Islamist groups. But the Court of Appeal in Mali’s capital, Bamako, convicted them of crimes including conspiracy against the government, after a closed trial that lasted a day and a half.

If that sounds like rediculously backwards double-talk, you’re hearing unmistakable sounds of Russian military intelligence.

It’s similar to how Russian mercenaries operate now in Ukraine under Putin’s Nazi-sounding doctrine, while accusing their anti-Nazi targets of being the Nazis.

To be fair, Mali presents a complex environment and reporters are saying “what if” about every possibility.

Ivory Coast is perhaps known best for both excessive corruption, and overcoming much of it during ebola thanks to direct UN military intervention. That background of militant anti-corruption success makes it an even more interesting case — Russia hates anti-corruption more than anything.

It’s possible the positive legacy of UN intervention there was still going, and someone hoped it could help Mali. That terrified the notorious Russian mercenaries who thrive on corruption.

Or it’s possible that a significantly reduced UN presence slipped back into the grip of local corruption, but that level of competition for power usually wouldn’t bother the Russians so….

Either way, Mali sounds like it’s aligning with the wrong side of history when totally corrupt Russian mercenaries are believed to be pushing politicians to put UN peacekeepers in jail.

Security

“Best of 2022”: flyingpenguin Blog wins Security Boulevard Award

Leave a comment

Security Boulevard is telling me that when they repost my content they get a lot of views — scraping my blog even generated one of their most popular pages in 2022.

As we close out 2022, we at Security Boulevard wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022:

Google Chrome CVE-2022-1096 Emergency Patch

I disagree entirely with analysis that lands on that page. It wasn’t popular at all compared to others on my blog.

My page about vulnerabilities in Tesla engineering, just for one example, had over twice as many views.

1 Death = Total Recall: Volvo Quietly Blows Tesla Out of the Water

Security is all about safety, because security is about the ethics of information technology.

I hope that perspective comes through in the above Google post they gave an award, while I’m sure it does in all my high traffic Tesla posts they didn’t award.

When I don’t see anyone elsewhere connecting the dots I start to write about them, which maybe explains why that boring Google browser vulnerability post got so much attention from the SB scraper.

North Korea hunted Americans on Google Chrome with CVE-2022-0609 to steal crypto coin and intelligence.

To my mind Tesla killing so many Americans is bigger news than Google losing everyone’s coins (funding North Korean nuclear proliferation), and strangely my site traffic tends to agree with me.

But if someone wants to give me an award for what they like, who am I to argue?