Just a month after a father and son were killed by Tesla on the side of a road while refueling their car, Tesla has struck again. This latest tragedy, where “driverless” hasn’t been ruled out yet, involved a Tesla killing someone who had pulled over to fix a tire.
Source: News 13 / Florida Highway Patrol
Florida Highway Patrol troopers are asking people to look out for a 2021 or newer Tesla Model X, likely black or gray.
They say the vehicle was involved in a hit-and-run crash that killed a 37-year-old Lakeland man on Friday night.
The victim was fixing a flat tire on the shoulder of I-275 just north of 4th St. N in St. Pete when he was struck and killed.
Authorities may be investigating whether the Tesla owner was asleep, probing whether it was Tesla’s known deadly software and hardware design defects that took another human life.
Sam Altman just told us civil society must change, but his careful wording deserves much closer scrutiny. Within days of Trump’s return to office, OpenAI’s CEO dropped this stink bomb:
I still expect… over a long period of time… some change required to the social contract.
That “not this year” line? Pure misdirection. While Altman soothes with uncertainty and future tense, his team executes now. Go GO GO he probably screams when the cameras aren’t rolling. He’s likely already been told: make it happen this year.
Decoding Power Grab Language
Linguist George Lakoff identified three key techniques for normalizing radical institutional change. Altman hits all three:
Temporal distancing (“long period of time”) while changes happen immediately
Inevitability framing (“will be required”) to make rights negotiable
Watch how Altman’s language shifts from market/consumer speak to governance and infrastructure metaphors. This signals tech leadership no longer content with building products – they’re now claiming authority to reshape society itself.
When a tech CEO starts casually discussing the end of the social contract in the same week as a $500B military AI project launches, we need to respond and fast. Traditional oversight mechanisms seem challenged against this coordinated assault on civil society:
Civil rights groups lack technical expertise
Policy bodies move too slowly
Journalists struggle to connect the dots without fear
Democratic institutions seem already captured
Act Now or His Crime is Your Fault Says Altman
History shows that protecting civil society requires recognizing how institutional language gets weaponized against it, especially by powerful elites. Altman’s careful framing of radical change as “inevitable technology progress” is an alarm bell ringing we can’t ignore.
This isn’t academic linguistics analysis anymore, despite how that helps clear the fog of information warfare. This is about preserving democratic safeguards before the false narrative of “inevitable change” for the worse becomes selfishly-fulfilled by Stargate.
Not subtle at all. Not even trying. Seoul, South Korea, 22 August 2023. Source: Chung Sung-Jun / Getty
A fascinating case landed on my desk this week – a DOJ indictment that reads like a “what not to do” guide in operational security. North Korean IT workers, supposedly masters of hacking (thanks Russia), managed to steal nearly a million dollars through remote work fraud while breaking almost every rule of covert operations.
DPRK IT workers were aided in this fraud by both U.S. and foreign facilitators… These U.S.-based enablers provided a U.S. address for victim companies to send laptop computers and other devices…
“A U.S. address” it says. Let’s talk about hubris.
The operators ran multiple corporate infiltration schemes through a residential address in New York. Imagine running a nation-state operation and deciding to create one giant flashing neon sign above your physical single point of failure. This isn’t just bad tradecraft – it’s the kind of mistake that makes you question everything you think you know about DPRK tunneling maps.
The money flows were equally amateur hour stuff. They channeled $677,440 through a single Chinese bank account. One account. For perspective, even standard money laundering operations typically split flows across dozens of accounts. This wasn’t sophistication – this was counting on no one paying attention.
And here’s where it gets more fascinating: lazy remote work patterns. Anyone who’s managed remote teams knows the chaos of real remote work. People log in from coffee shops, airports, their kid’s soccer practice (hello Wiz staff, I see you on those Virginia country club tennis courts). There’s a natural entropy to human movement. These North Korean elite IT operatives? Static locations. Rigid patterns. It’s like they were trying to create the most obvious automated behavior signature possible.
The tooling choices then read like a “most obvious remote access tools” list – Anydesk and TeamViewer installed immediately after device receipt like a “yoo hoo over here” move. No attempt to mimic natural software deployment patterns or vary toolkits for obscuring plausible indicators of compromise. They might as well have named their front companies “This is Definitely Not North Korea LLC” – though Taggcar Inc. and Vali Tech Inc. weren’t much better. Taggcar? Was that someone trying to transliterate 탁차 (takcha)?
What keeps me up at night isn’t the sophistication, given it wasn’t sophisticated, it’s how long it ran despite being about as subtle as a disco ball at a funeral. The operators moved $866,255 through this scheme not because they were hot shots, but because IT isn’t regulated enough with basic quality controls, meaning Americans are often allowed to have gaping holes in obvious places.
Think about it: simple shipping address correlation would have caught this. Simple location variance monitoring would have spotted the automated patterns. Simple contractor vetting would have raised red flags. We’re not talking about advanced AI-powered detection systems – we’re talking about the security equivalent of people doing the job of paying attention, seeing if someone’s wearing a name tag that says “HELLO I AM [PRAWO JAZDY].”
If you don’t know the Prawo Jazdy story, well have I got 2009 fraud news for you!
The real lesson here isn’t about super scary hacker North Korean tradecraft. It’s about our willful blind spots in the age of lowered integrity. We pour money into flashy systems that sell us on detection of sophisticated zero-day exploits but somehow miss dozens of corporate devices being shipped into the same residential address. We’re looking for a microsecond of advanced persistent threats while missing persistent amateur hour.
Here’s the final rub: the operation was vulnerable to a single knock-knock joke. One physical location. It’s the police, that’s who. All their operational security reduced to hoping no one would notice steady streams of corporate laptops arriving at a New York address. This is the hubris that happens when basic controls are so lacking that sophistication becomes unnecessary.
In the end, this case serves as a reminder that sometimes the biggest threats aren’t the most interesting ones. Sometimes they’re just the ones willing to walk through the front door we left wide open, a single guy awkwardly carrying dozens of laptops with TeamViewer already in an install queue.
The next time someone tells you about spooky scary politically-motivated threats from wealthy elites, remember this case. Sometimes the call is coming from inside the house – specifically, from a house in New York with a suspiciously large collection of corporate laptops. This type of fraud is easily preventable with basic controls:
Track shipping addresses for corporate devices and do a little satellite checking
Monitor for natural location variance in remote work patterns (e.g. encourage rather than restrict workers moving around their neighborhood and with family routines)
Implement basic contractor vetting beyond paper verification
Watch for systematic rather than human-pattern remote access (e.g. late night IP packets used to be an anomaly that set off alerts, now it might be a reassurance to reset a clock)
Cross-reference contractor details across business units
The DOJ says at least 64 American organizations were caught up in the North Korean infiltration including a financial institution and Bay Area tech firms, from April 2018 [pre-COVID!] through August 2024. In the end, this case demonstrates a need for some basic due diligence in our lives.
The poor, poor souls who fall victim to the advance fee fraud (AFF) known as Tesla regularly show up in social media very angry they didn’t realize the scam sooner.
Advance fee fraud is when [Elon Musk] targets victims to make advance or upfront payments for goods, services and/or financial gains that do not materialize
As an expert in decoding “African” email scams, often known as 419 email, I can say that Tesla ranks as the worst of them all by racking up unprecedented economic damage. Insurance companies signal this truth by immediately valuing a Tesla at less than half its asking price – totaling vehicles at the mere sight of a scratch.
One brave soul recently shared their complete fraud victim story, detailing how they fell into the trap of artificial demand buzz generated by Musk’s marketing machine. They paid $50,000 over asking price after years of waiting, only to receive a vehicle that fails to achieve even baseline capabilities – the definition of advance fee fraud.
Side-swiped by a scooter? Look at that damage.
Not only did Musk defraud buyers on basic vehicle capabilities, he clearly overstated everything like a typical advance fee scam. A tiny little scooter bumps into a new Tesla and the whole thing is “totaled”! $100K gets evaporated in an instant by anyone believing they paid Elon Musk a premium for something he personally engineered to handle their basic road conditions, let alone the apocalypse.
The Cybertruck exemplifies the fraud perfectly – for years the Tesla CEO generated buzz using the end-times fear tactics rooted in his family’s white nationalist empire of apartheid South Africa.
“[Elon’s mother and family] came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.”
Like his ideological predecessors, racist “support Hitler” teachings from his grandfather and mother, Musk’s unfounded beliefs and empty promises can be expected to collapse when confronted with simple reality.
It is impossible to avoid seeing how this heavily promoted ‘go anywhere tackle anything’ campaign invoking his white supremacist visions of domination produced instead an overpriced dumpster that instantly succumbs to scooters and rain drops. In this we see history repeating itself. From Hitler’s swastikas to Musk’s swasticars, the cascading failures of Nazi fraud remain unchanged.
75 percent of the German Army relied on horses for transport. Horses played a role in every German campaign, from the blitzkrieg in Poland in 1939 and the invasion of Russia to France in 1944. …the notion of the mechanized might of the German Wehrmacht was largely a glamorized myth born in the fertile brains of newspapermen.
No wonder Musk bought a social media platform to spread glamorized myths of deep swastika thought, as depicted in 2023 by the famous artist Ai Wei Wei.
This artist’s rendering of the X brand was deleted from the platform by the self-promoting “free speech extremist” Elon Musk. Source: Ai Wei Wei
And just like Hitler refused to admit, which Musk clearly refuses to admit too, all the horse power in the world doesn’t mean much when they die instantly from… weather.
A brand new Cybertruck showing severe instant moisture decay gets put out with the other garbage in the East Bay
The Cybertruck demonstrates what happens when fraud meets reality, and I mean the most basic things like a bump, scrape or atmosphere. Nazis either steal viable ideas from others, disposing of the inventors quickly to hide the evidence, or they target and seduce non-expert believers into unsustainable fantasy death-traps while deflecting all blame.
The Nazis in public used to not say the obvious Heil Hitler out loud, or give their obvious Hitler salute, because that would be far too obvious. Instead they stick a “88” everywhere to represent the 8th alphabet letters H-eil and H-itler. So clever, who could ever detect these genius Nazis hiding in plain sight?
Elon Musk made Tesla market their cars as $88K, with 88kWh power, 88 computer functions, recommended to drive at 88 km/hr to charging stations with 88 ports. NOT a joke. All those are the actual statements promoted by Tesla, just like tweets exposing himself as a Nazi.
Fast forward to Cybertrucks dying everywhere and guess who is emboldened by such failure…
Anyone surviving the massive Tesla fraud rooted in pathetic anti-science Nazism can say after losing hundreds of thousands of dollars (that they’ll never get back because Elon Musk apparently lives above the law) they’re at least still alive to warn others before more fall victim to one man’s elaborate swasticar scams.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
