When San Francisco went from 10,000 Taxis to over 40,000 Uber almost overnight, most of them driving into the city from two or three hours away and sleeping in their cars, clogging all the artery roads like a sudden onset heart disease, it destroyed small businesses and city life.

Fast forward to today and Tesla is threatening Austin, Texas with an even worse fate, literally killing people and polluting the environment to hurt future generations.

Tesla has emerged as a bad neighbor and an even worse employer – polluting the air and water, violating environmental regulations, and endangering workers, some of whom have suffered serious injuries or died on the job.

The death-rate of Tesla software is far higher than domestic terrorism using vehicles, when you look at basic facts.

Austin should see the Tesla version of robotaxis (also announced to start on the Hitler-memed date of 8/8) as a clear and present danger to the security and safety of its residents. Don’t let this serial abuser hide the dangerous truth, since that’s exactly what Tesla is known to do with their robotaxi that Elon Musk has fraudulently announced every year since 2016 as ready for production.

The company routinely conceals hazards from regulators. For example, the Gigafactory uses industrial furnaces that operate at temperatures reaching 1,200 degrees. For months, a furnace door failed to close properly, reports The Wall Street Journal, exposing workers to extreme heat and toxic air, increasing fuel consumption, and releasing higher levels of pollutants from the factory’s smokestack. When a state regulator arrived for an inspection, Tesla employees reportedly staged an “elaborate ruse” to hide the malfunction – temporarily closing the door and lowering fuel input to make conditions appear normal.

Tesla’s environmental violations follow a similar pattern. According to the Journal’s investigation, in 2022 Tesla’s Gigafactory used a 6-acre evaporation pond to contain waste from construction, chemical spills, and the paint shop – which formed a hazardous combination of substances like sulfuric and nitric acids, gave off a foul odor, and even contained a dead deer. For months, Tesla discharged this fluid into Austin’s sewer system without the proper permits or treatment. More recently, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality cited Tesla at least five times since 2021 for violating state standards and on June 4, 2024, Austin Water notified that it had violated its permit by discharging over 9,000 gallons of untreated wastewater into our sewer system.

If you think discharging waste into water is bad, discharging robotaxis into streets will be far, far worse. It’s a killer on the loose already. The Tesla plan literally looks as if America is rolling over and inviting Nazis to deploy tanks into cities to take total control over freedom of movement.

Consider this:

State lawmakers are reviewing a bill that would ban fully driverless trucks in Texas. House Bill 4402…

And compare it to this:

Cruise had about 250 vehicles in Austin and was operating on limited streets during evening hours before it paused driverless operations across its fleet on October 26. Austin collected more than 50 Cruise-related complaints between August and October [such as] robotaxis bricking and blocking traffic and the outright dangerous report of a pedestrian nearly struck while crossing the street. […] [Uber and Lyft collectively paid $2.3 million through 40 lobbyists to block cities from regulating], both of which were pursuing robotaxis at the time, also helped successfully sway legislators to pass a similar bill during that legislative session that prohibited cities from regulating autonomous vehicles. The bill enshrined minimum safety requirements for AVs to be deployed on public roads.

Texas appears to be so coin-operated as to be completely without any moral compass. Truck lobbyists can ban automated vehicles to protect their business, while Big Tech lobbyists can ban any regulation of automated vehicles to protect their business.

Up is down, down is up. Welcome to Orwellian cattle-rustlers running the ranch, in a place called Texas.

Driverless is of course suspected in another case of Tesla ignoring stop signals and crashing high speed into the side of a large truck.

According to witnesses and dash cam video, the sheriff’s office said a semi hauling grain was turning eastbound onto State Route 17 from 40. The Tesla was driving westbound and failed to stop at the stop sign and collided with the semi and trailer. [Chief Financial Officer for the Salvation Army’s North & Central Illinois Division] Tsao was pronounced deceased at the scene.

Killed an elderly pedestrian in a crosswalk. Tesla driverless is of course suspected.

Police said a 2021 Tesla was going north on U.S. 98 South when it crossed an intersection on a green light and hit a man who was walking in the crosswalk.

The driver of the car stopped and remained at the crash scene, LPD said.

The pedestrian, identified as Jerald King, 68, of Lakeland, died at the scene from his injuries.

I was asked to take a look at a purported MCP vulnerability and ended up spitting my bourbon all over my favorite keyboard. Such are a risks of reading a “critical vulnerability” that essentially evaporates when you follow basic security hygiene.

When I looked at what this actually requires, I mean how it’s not much of an attack at all, I knew their report was going to give me a hangover.

• First, give your AI agent organization-wide GitHub access instead of scoping it to specific repos. Ok, that’s stupid, nobody should ever do that, but let’s go on for the giggles.
• Second, have both public and private repos (sure, that’s the usual kind of stuff, but it’s a requirement)
• Third your agent must be queried about public repo issues where an attacker already staged some malicious content
• And finally, fourth, the coup de grace, you need to put on a blindfold and tie your hands behind your back because this “vulnerability” requires users to disable their security prompts or click through them all without reading, acting like a kamikaze. Hold on TIGHT because you’re about to blow yourself up

ZOMG who could ever defend themselves against THAT! Call the police. Fire the torpedoes. The sky is falling.

SIGH, and so it goes, a “fix” is literally just… using GitHub’s existing fine-grained personal access tokens (PATs) that have been available for years.

Pffft. Sorry, FUD party over.

Scope your token to only the repos the agent needs. Done and done. Attack surface eliminated.

Imagine spinning up news of a “critical vulnerability” in houses that leave all the doors unlocked, give strangers the keys anyway, and then post a sign that says “WELCOME – OPEN”. Someone might come in and see something!

The “vulnerability” is just… a configuration.

The fact that Invariant Labs claims “GitHub alone cannot resolve this vulnerability through server-side patches” is particularly damning to Invariant’s view of the world.

Of course they can’t because it’s not GitHub’s vulnerability! Users configuring their tools poorly may need a better configuration tool, but a vendor coming along to sell them a “solution” should call it a misconfiguration wizard not anything more.

Newsflash: you should not grant org-wide access to your data with auto-approve. Here’s a tool that costs nothing to make sure you don’t do that. Are we done yet?

Taking a configuration issue that’s solved by clicking different checkboxes when generating your GitHub token and turning it into a “critical vulnerability affecting 14k+ users” that requires proprietary monitoring tools doesn’t have the right balance and tone.

Let’s call this what it is, access grants are a critical requirement for safe AI, let alone trusted MCP. But that’s like saying least privilege and role-based access controls have a market now as if it hasn’t existed for decades. Old wine, new bottles.