Category Archives: History

How Elon Musk Pulls An Enron And Gets Away With It

February 9, 2023 Davi Ottenheimer 2 Comments

The big question is why Enron, “the most innovative company in America“, ever got caught and held accountable for the thing Elon does constantly: lie and defraud people.

…Times story carried a quote from the closing arguments of the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Nicholas Porritt: “This case is about whether rules that apply to everybody else should apply to Elon Musk,” he said. On the one hand, sure, yes, that would be nice and good. On the other, it has become so radically implausible to the extent that it’s borderline absurd.

The answer, at least from a jury judging Tesla, was that they didn’t really understand how hateful constant improvisation and disregard for law and order by an American CEO would be a bad thing.

A jury was meant to recognize the harm in obvious crimes like, you know, intentional fraud.

Elon Musk’s own defense was that not everyone became his victim, therefore he couldn’t be held accountable for people he victimized.

Seriously, he said some people didn’t believe his fraud as if that should mean those who did have themselves to blame only. Imagine every bank robber ever saying “but whatabout the safe I didn’t crack” in order to avoid conviction.

Blame the victim didn’t move the jury to want to stop victimization. It reminds me of how hard it can be for rape victims to hold accountable their attackers.

[Laws] won’t be enough unless we change the culture that allows assault to happen in the first place.

And that touches on the thorny problem in American history, its sad record of injustice.

When British corporations in 1740s (e.g. James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia), and even their King decades later, started abolishing slavery the Americans revolted to find a way to legalize crime against humanity and keep it their primary source of wealth. President Washington used his lawyer to exploit loopholes and preserve slavery after he was ordered to abolish it.

Washington developed a canny strategy that would protect his property and allow him to avoid public scrutiny. Every six months, the president’s slaves would travel back to Mount Vernon or would journey with Mrs. Washington outside the boundaries of the state. In essence, the Washingtons reset the clock. The president was secretive when writing to his personal secretary Tobias Lear in 1791: “I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington.”

This racist and cruel “father” of America was selfishly manipulating laws through the late 1700s, according to his better peers. The Revolutionary War was about profit, not freedom; especially about profit derived from raping black women.

And we all know how the American courts treat black women plaintiffs let alone any woman.

What’s so bad about Musk undermining all inherent value to replace it with an arbitrarily controlled dictatorship that cruelly destroys society? And is it any wonder, as if mocking the American court system, his big project was announced as a robotic black woman to serve him?

It’s pretty obvious to anyone with expertise in cars that Tesla is a worthless company, yet experts have zero influence over Wall Street manipulation and related fraud.

History says it’s terrible to allow crimes like Musk’s, the worst because trust is erased by selfish predators, but then who is to say any American jury knows anything about history? (PDF of Killing Hope)

Former Chinese Premier Chou En-lai once observed: “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.” It’s probably even worse than he realized. During the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, a Japanese journalist, Atsuo Kaneko of the Japanese Kyoto News Service, spent several hours interviewing people temporarily housed at a hockey rink—mostly children, pregnant women and young mothers. He discovered that none of them had heard of Hiroshima. Mention of the name drew a blank. And in 1982, a judge in Oakland, California said he was appalled when some 50 prospective jurors for a death-penalty murder trial were questioned and “none of them knew who Hitler was”.

Those who know history are condemned to watch others repeat the worst of it.

Enron executives used fraud to inflate revenues and hide debt. The SEC, credit rating agencies, and investment banks were also accused of negligence—and, in some cases, outright deception—that enabled this massive fraud.

Now we can add jurors to that list, again.

In Musk’s case it seems to be taking a lot longer to convict someone for fraud than others like him. Maybe in the end Enron Musk will be like Ford and use his purchase of media to spread hate speech into every dashboard, even directly backing his loyal follower Adolf Hitler, yet get away with it all.

American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protest Ford for enabling his most infamous follower Adolf Hitler. Source: Wayne State

History, Security

Canadian wide-net forensic genetic genealogy (FGG) identifies soldier missing for 106 years

February 8, 2023 Davi Ottenheimer Leave a comment

Soldiers MIA are many. Here’s just one example:

He was 23 years old when he fought with the 7th Canadian Infantry Battalion in the Battle of Hill 70 near Lens, France, in August 1917. On Aug. 15, the first day of the fighting, he was reported missing and presumed dead — one day shy of his 24th birthday.

About 10,000 Canadians died, were wounded or went missing during the bloody, 10-day battle, National Defence said, including 1,300 with no known grave.

So the researchers had the monumental task of whittling down Howarth’s identity from a massive list of lost soldiers.

And here’s what used to happen next.

“It is vital to remember that many lied about their age. So that date of birth on [their] attestation papers quite often is incorrect,” she said. […] His possession of [a whistle] suggested he ranked higher than a private, Lockyer said.

The reporter sure made a giant hoo-ha about age right before throwing that whole concept under the bus.

But did WWI soldiers lie about birthdays as much as people being forced to register on Facebook forms? Let’s not pretend this is a century old situation.

I’ve never thought of birthdays as a reliable identifier, especially where people have been disallowed from holding multiple birthday records. If your birthday is so important yet so visibly celebrated, why wouldn’t you have variations?

The lowly whistle was thus treated as a far more reliable issued token of identity than any birth record.

Perhaps think of it as low incentive to steal or tamper when issued a whistle. Primitive technology, the simplest token, yet crucial as an identity clue. A rank insignia would have to match the whistle.

And now methods of solving identity mysteries may be changing rapidly because ever larger immutable identification nets are being cast among the general population. What’s fascinating in this case was a soldier who allegedly had no surviving close relatives.

“That means we have to go up to his grandmother and see if his grandmother had any sisters. And we’re now in the early 1800s and trying to find records from that time,” Lockyer said.

“Then, based on finding out if the grandmother had any sisters … see if we can trace down through the maternal line to somebody who was living today, who’s willing to give a DNA sample.”

It took time, but they finally found a donor — Howarth’s cousin, four times removed.

“They admittedly had no idea who Percy was,” Lockyer said.

The burning question is now of course whether that donor owns and controls the data they consented to provide… or did it become property of the system doing the forensics processing?

I suspect “would you like to help recover the identity of a lost WWI soldier” is a consent request that should have a very, very limited timeframe. And I also suspect currently it’s being treated as a permanent one instead, which may be dangerous.

Energy, History, Security

FBI Announces Arrest of Nazis Attempting to Destroy Baltimore

February 6, 2023 Davi Ottenheimer Leave a comment

There are limits to the first and second Amendments in America, apparently.

A plot right out of the 1916 America First playbook (e.g. Preparedness Day bombing of SF) has been foiled by FBI arrests.

Here are some of the many important details to this new story, as documented by Heavy.

According to the criminal complaint, Russell was using the name “Homunculus” on an encrypted communication app in June 2022 and began talking with an FBI informant. He “encouraged” the informant “to attack electrical substations,” and said sniper attacks could cause a “cascading failure,” the FBI said. He also encouraged the informant to “read a white supremacist publication that provided instructions to attack critical infrastructure”…

Encryption doesn’t do much good to hide speech from the FBI if you’re using it to speak with the FBI.

Also “homunculus“?

German 1916 6-part epic film series follows the exploits of the soulless supervillain Homunculus, a creature created by science, as he wows to find love or destroy humanity. Robert Reinert’s multi-layered script draws on Frankenstein and Faust, as well as Freud, Nietzsche and Marx to create both a treatise on the human condition as well as a comment on WWI. …in repeated fashion Homunculus finds a woman whom he tries to love, but ends up driving her to kill herself, kills her family or is rejected and hunted…

That’s another America First 1916 reference.

Nazism really is rooted in the perverse hateful visions of men like Woodrow Wilson and Henry Ford. Hitler just followed their lead, which few Americans seem ready to admit.

I’m not surprised these white supremacists think their absolute right to own guns today translates directly into license to destroy critical infrastructure like it’s 1916 or the Red Summer again.

Promoting the KKK as “America First” while violently destroying black prosperity, President Wilson’s race war inspired Adolf Hitler in Germany.

Heavy:

Homunculus also stated that the ‘goal is for when most people are using max electricity’ and that ‘follow on [attacks] could lead to cascading failure costing billions of dollars.’

Max suffering? Guns are usually treated by white supremacists as their easiest force multiplier for domestic terrorism, right behind lighting fires. It’s the old Missouri Quantrill mindset, which did in fact start the Civil War. Heavy:

Clendaniel, using the name Nythra88 on an app, began talking to the same informant in January 2023, the FBI said in the criminal complaint, after Russell told the informant to work with her.

User name of 88? That’s plain Nazi signaling. Might as well name yourself Hitler.

She also used the account “kali1889”, named for Hitler’s birth year. Not subtle. It’s like someone wants to flaunt their intent to commit crimes.

Nythra?

Now that’s different. Nythra signals modern seditious conspirator in an American militant “accelerationist” hate cult trying to start race war.

…user Nythra claimed to attended Hate Camps in Death Valley and Washington State. Nythra also participated in a conversation that discussed raping and beheading a woman. The court also heard a portion of the phone call in which he tells his mother that the Garza County deputies, whom he referred to as pigs, were lucky that they caught him off guard or he would have shot them.

White supremacists want to target and control energy. They lust for power. This particular cult even named itself after nuclear energy.

Now back to the point about the FBI using someone’s speech to take away their guns. When I mean someone, I mean a person clearly unwilling to be anti-racist.

Free speech extremist (Twitter).

Free speed extremist (Tesla).

Accelerationists. It’s literally what they call themselves when they hate people.

0-60 in 2 seconds was made to kill how many?

Get it?

Elon Musk certainly does. Heavy:

Prosecutors wrote, “The fact that Russell lied about going to see his father and was found in Key Largo (at a restaurant and not his final destination), with long rifles and ammunition that he purchased less than 24 hours after being interviewed by the FBI, camouflage gear, and a skull mask, shows the character of someone prepared to follow-through with his violent ideology when called to arms.”

Serial liars, all of them.

Although Elon Musk tends to pretend that being rich somehow makes his lies different. Call it instead openly opposing science and safety regulation to create a state of permanent improvisation — as if nobody reads history.

Consider how a petty and jealous CEO says his workers must be loyal only to him and sacrifice all their family, sleep, feelings.

I wonder what would have happened in this case if mental health services had been more easily available than guns.

Food, History, Security

How Fixing Howitzers in Ukraine is Like Baking a Cake

January 31, 2023 Davi Ottenheimer Leave a comment

“From America with love” is written on a Ukrainian M777 “three axes” howitzer to be fired at Russians.

When I wrote my first book in 2012, I pitched the publisher on cooking recipes for cloud security.

My vision was that one page would describe how to make an historic meal (such as Royal Navy spotted dick) and then the rest of the chapter would be cloud technical steps (such as how to setup secure remote administration).

I even presented a test chapter for the RSA Conference in China on how to grill the perfect hamburger, as a recipe for cloud encryption and key management.

Things didn’t turn out quite like I had expected, as the publisher asked to change the title to virtualization, drop the food recipes, and insert a DVD. It felt like preparing a gourmet vegan dessert and being told to stick to the meat and potatoes.

*Sigh*

Nonetheless in my mind cooking remains a powerful way to convey the relationship between technology and knowledge.

Everybody eats.

Food automation tends to be disgusting, even causing illness. Whereas technology augmentation in human cooking, using recipes for quality control and governance, will produce the best possible meal.

Perhaps the canonical example I hear all the time in AI ethics circles… if you brought a robot into your home and told it to prepare you a steak dinner, should you be surprised if later you can’t find the dog?

Hey, I didn’t say the robot was Chinese. Stop thinking so simply.

Microsoft management clearly didn’t understand such basic anthropological tenets of technology use. The big news, hopefully surprising nobody, is illness has forced them to cancel a massively funded VR program.

The personnel demoing the tech appear to be using a variant of Microsoft HoloLens. The government recently halted plans to buy more “AR combat goggles” from Microsoft, instead approving $40 million for the company to develop a new version. The reversal came after discovering that the current version caused issues like headaches, eyestrain and nausea.

Such a waste of time and money to find out what is easily predicted.

Soldiers “cited IVAS 1.0’s poor low-light performance, display quality, cumbersomeness, poor reliability, inability to distinguish friend from foe, difficulty shooting, physical impairments and limited peripheral vision as reasons for their dissatisfaction,” per the DOT&E assessment. The Army knows that IVAS 1.0 is something of a lemon [yet] still plans on fielding the 5,000 IVAS 1.0 units it’s currently procuring from Microsoft at $46,000 a pop to training units and Army Recruiting command for a total price tag of $230 million.

It’s like reading some people got sick and then discovered their taco MRE bag wasn’t really a taco, just sugar and cornmeal drenched in preservatives and artificial taco flavors.

VR from Microsoft sounds like the hardtack (dry “cracker”) of combat goggles. A real bargain at $230 million.

See-through augmentation measured on efficiency and minimal interference is a whole different story, as it avoids all the foundational problems of automation (e.g. where to get flavor, or actual useful nutrition from).

Google glass really blew it on this point. They could have developed an HUD for highly technical work like repairing machines with both hands.

Of course Google didn’t think like this because their engineers all went straight from elite schools to sitting in a gourmet cafeteria eating free lunches and talking mostly about their exotic vacations.

They’re in a virtual world, the opposite of what’s required for knowledge, let alone innovation. And that’s why their products depend on finding people who really live, who have daily struggles and needs in a real world, to tell them what to engineer.

That’s all background to the main point here that howitzers in Ukraine are proving today what everyone should have been working on for at least the last decade: cooking.

DARPA’s training demos use something more pedestrian: cooking. Dr. Bruce Draper, the program’s manager, describes it as the ideal proxy task. “[Cooking is] a good example of a complex physical task that can be done in many ways. There are lots of different objects, solids, liquids, things change state, so it’s visually quite complex. There is specialized terminology, there are specialized devices, and there’s a lot of different ways it can be accomplished. So it’s a really good practice domain.” The team views PTG as eventually finding uses in medical training, evaluating the competency of medics and other healthcare services.

First you bake a cake together as a team using augmented vision… then you destroy invading armies with it.

Using phones and tablets to communicate in encrypted chatrooms, a rapidly growing group of U.S. and allied troops and contractors is providing real-time maintenance advice — usually speaking through interpreters — to Ukrainian troops on the battlefield. In a quick response, the U.S. team member told the Ukrainian to remove the gun’s breech at the rear of the howitzer and manually prime the firing pin so the gun could fire. He did it and it worked.

Delicious.

I’m not going to claim credit for this obvious future of technology based on ancient wisdom, given there are so many children’s tales saying the same thing.

Ratatouille is probably my favorite, easily digested in movie format.

The real kicker to the howitzer example is the technical teams spell out very precisely in life and death context where augmentation works best and where it fails (hint: Blockchain is a disaster).

As the U.S. and other allies send more and increasingly complex and high-tech weapons to Ukraine, demands are spiking. And since no U.S. or other NATO nations will send troops into the country to provide hands-on assistance — due to worries about being drawn into a direct conflict with Russia — they’ve turned to virtual chatrooms.

I use virtual chatrooms so much I forgot for a minute that they’re virtual.

The Ukrainian troops are often reluctant to send the weapons back out of the country for repairs. They’d rather do it themselves, and in nearly all cases — U.S. officials estimated 99% of the time — the Ukrainians do the repair and continue on. …Ukrainians can now put the split weapon back together. “They couldn’t do titanium welding before, they can do it now,” said the U.S. soldier, adding that “something that was two days ago blown up is now back in play.”

I love this SO MUCH. Right to Repair in a nutshell. Technology dramatically enhances developing markets by sharing knowledge like how to restore that technology in the field.

It’s the awesome Dakar Malle model of efficiency and sustainability that all technology should be put through, instead of lionizing the biggest waste teams.

And now for the main point:

Sometimes video chats aren’t possible. “A lot of times if they’re on the front line, they won’t do a video because sometimes (cell service) is a little spotty,” said a U.S. maintainer. “They’ll take pictures and send it to us through the chats and we sit there and diagnose it.”

Visual diagnosis in real time to bake a highly complicated cake. Including translation for chefs representing 17 nations in a small kitchen.

As they look to the future, they are planning to get some commercial, off-the-shelf translation goggles. That way, when they talk to each other they can skip the interpreters and just see the translation as they speak, making conversations easier and faster.

And I warned you about bockchain.

The expanse of weapons and equipment they’re handling and questions they’re fielding were even too complicated for a digital spreadsheet — forcing the team to go low-tech. One wall in their maintenance office is lined with an array of old-fashioned, color-coded Post-it notes, to help them track the weapons and maintenance needs.

Hope that’s clear. Writing a big blog post about how to share knowledge in the future is hard. Not as hard as a book, obviously, but I definitely could use some augmentation right now

More than anything it’s clear to me without government funded research teams, many tech companies would be utterly and completely lost in expensive dead end navel gazing.

DARPA is asking for developing recipes that really were needed a decade ago, based on assessment of hunger they see right now. While it’s fashionable to call this future thinking to avoid blame, in reality it’s being less ignorant about the present troubles.

Let the Russians desperate for a Chinese MRE eat cake instead, a delicious one right out of the howitzer.

Or I believe Molotov in WWII would have called them “bread baskets“.