There seems to be a very specific reason Elon Musk was getting so angry about tariffs. Korea has been targeted by him as a dumping ground for deadly Tesla software because Korea doesn’t regulate US-made defects.
…Tesla now faces fewer regulatory hurdles than Hyundai, which must comply with Korea’s stricter rules — an uneven playing field…. Industry watchers say Tesla…can enter Korea under US safety standards and can add new Level 2 features via over-the-air updates without prior review by Korean regulators. By contrast, Hyundai and Kia must follow Korea’s stricter safety framework, which imposes more detailed requirements on electronic control units and functional-safety validation — giving them far less flexibility than Tesla to leverage lower regulatory thresholds or push Level 2 as aggressively.
November 28: Pardon for the man convicted of facilitating 400 tons of cocaine because he was “treated unfairly”.
Hernández allegedly uttered the phrase that would come to define the prosecution’s case: “We’re going to shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” This statement, corroborated by witnesses who saw Hernández accept bribes in exchange for military protection of the lab, dismantled his defense that he was a loyal U.S. ally. It portrayed a leader who harbored deep cynicism toward the United States, viewing the superpower not as a partner, but as a market to be exploited and a political patron to be manipulated.
December 2: Defend the murder of shipwreck survivors (war crime), saying he “would have made the same call” because… drugs allegedly in their boat.
December 6: Another unfair extrajudicial bombing kills four more people at sea, increasing the dead to 87.
The throughline isn’t drug interdiction because it’s the assertion of unchecked executive power. The Defense Secretary statement that Trump can take military action “as he sees fit” is the operative principle.
The drugs are a dog whistle for the poor and non-white, merely set dressing for a modern day “Birth of a Nation” performance endorsed by the White House.
Screen capture from 1915 “Birth of a Nation”, which President Wilson used to restart the KKK as “America First” and incite racist violence.
What’s particularly revealing is the accountability structure. The man pardoned was defined by a “cocaine superhighway” involving the military, state protection, cartel bribes, even a connection to El Chapo, to explicitly harm Americans. Trump grants clemency anyway.
Meanwhile, workers on boats (who may or may not actually be traffickers, what’s the evidentiary standard here?) get killed, including obvious war crimes by murdering survivors. These aren’t judicial proceedings. These aren’t even the theatrical military tribunals of the War on Terror. It’s “suspected cargo on a boat”, then deadly strike, then another strike to kill survivors. What makes any boat “suspected”? Who reviews that designation? What happens when they’re wrong?
An Admiral who “sunk the boat and eliminated the threat” is a lie. People clinging to wreckage after their boat was destroyed aren’t a “threat.” That’s the language of illegal execution, not interdiction.
Nearly 100 people killed on over 20 vessels, with zero proof any of them carried drugs. The evidentiary standard is so low, it’s nonexistent. Talk about unfair treatment.
..the two survivors were waving overhead before the second strike killed them. One of the sources said the action could be interpreted as the survivors either calling for help or trying to wave off another strike.
The drug superhighway guy trial at least had witnesses, evidence, a jury. The facts are plain to see that he was the primary reason drugs flowed into America. The people killed at sea get none of that, and might not even have any drugs.
The asymmetry between who gets pardoned and who gets killed maps precisely onto class and power. This smells a lot like Palantir, which has been assassinating innocent misidentified people around the world for over a decade with zero accountability.
If you doubt Palantir, you’re probably right.
The legal questions Hegseth is dodging are significant. Killing survivors of an initial strike isn’t interdiction; it’s something else entirely. And the “I wasn’t in the room but would have made the same call” framing manages to simultaneously disclaim and claim responsibility while endorsing war crimes.
Honduran president of drug pipeline into America with El Chapo connections? Trump orders freedom.
Poor Latin American workers at sea? AGM-114 Hellfire missiles on their heads, even as they plead and cry for help.
Rich and connected versus poor and anonymous. The drug war of Nixon and Reagan always operated this way, designed to incarcerate and murder poor non-whites, but this week Trump has made it unusually overt and undeniable.
The local news in North Carolina says the pickup passenger died.
One person was killed and four others were injured Saturday afternoon in a violent head-on collision on U.S. 301 just south of Benson, near Hodges Chapel Road in Harnett County. The crash, reported around 2 p.m., involved a green Tesla and a red Ram pickup.
The initial issue with Kohler using the term “end-to-end encryption” is that it’s not obvious how it could apply to their product. The term is generally used for applications that allow some kind of communication between users, and Kohler Health doesn’t have any user-to-user sharing features. So while one “end” would be the user, it’s not clear what the other end would be.
The researcher takes issue with the term E2EE, despite an already-compromised meaning, pretends it has a pure canonical definition, then catches Kohler failing to meet his fictional standard.
That’s a definitional sleight of hand and for what end, exactly?
Whatsapp is a Facebook product that falsely claims E2EE. When they say “we can’t read your messages” they actually mean they can read your message when your contact taps a Report button, and they harvest all the metadata, and cloud backups may be accessible, and….
The researcher even cites Whatsapp as an example of E2EE. That’s like saying Exxon is an example of how to protect the environment. Marlboro is an example of healthy living.
At least Kohler is being plain and honest about being an end of their encryption. They say they will use the data and why. What the hell are the huge warehouses of Whatsapp staff doing with all the data they harvest from bogus E2EE, which apparently even fooled this researcher into promoting?
Talk about burying the lede: if you want to hunt vulnerabilities, the Kohler AI training angle is actually interesting research!
What happens when the de-identified stool image datasets get breached or sold? What’s the actual re-identification risk? What are the clinical validation standards for the insights they’re selling?
Instead we got “users at a company who use your data can access your data.”
No shit.
A real security/privacy analysis of the back-end architecture was available and the researcher chose definitional games instead. I mean, if you want to hate on Kohler, there is plenty to dislike without cooking up encryption semantics.
The subscription model is $600 for hardware that becomes a brick if you stop paying or they shut down. That’s the enshittification lifecycle applied to your actual toilet.
De-identification is hard, and this is distinctive dumps. Stool images are biometric-adjacent. The claim that de-identified toilet photos can’t be re-identified is… doubtful.
The gut health insight market is largely unvalidated. What evidence-based intervention follows from the data? “Your stool is different today” brings what actionable change beyond what you can detect naturally already? It’s quantified self for a process that mostly works fine without surveillance.
Attack surface expansion. Your toilet worked fine before. Now it’s a networked sensor with dependencies, firmware updates, and an app that needs permissions. Every connected device adds more liability; this one points at you with your pants down.
Subscription healthtech has misaligned incentives. They need you anxious enough to keep paying but not so alarmed you see a real doctor. That’s a weird optimization target to sit on.
And so forth…
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
