Security

Tesla Owner Shocked FSD Has Been Rapidly Devalued by… Tesla

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An owner seems very concerned that Elon Musk promised that FSD would appreciate in value, while Tesla is doing the exact opposite and heavily devaluing it.

What is so frustrating about this is that Elon is always raving about how incredible FSD is and how most people “don’t understand its value,” but yet, Tesla itself heavily devalues it in used cars, despite not delivering on its promises.

Yup. It’s called fraud. FSD doesn’t even work.

Thus the Tesla “investment” is NOT going to turn out well, given the company keeps trying to pump valuations through giant promises it has no intention of keeping.

Bernie Madoff robbed 37,000 victims in 136 countries over the course of two decades before he was arrested…. Some victims, including those who could barely afford to invest in the first place, lost their entire life savings and several later committed suicide as a result.

History, Poetry, Security

Die große Trümmerfrau spricht

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A poem from the book Gleisdreieck (1960) by Günter Gras, speaks to the peculiar state of mythical German women tasked with clearing the rubble of WWII.

Gnade Gnade.
Die große Trümmerfrau…

Amen Amen.
Hingestreut liegt Berlin.
Staub fliegt auf,
dann wieder Flaute.
Die große
Trümmerfrau wird heiliggesprochen

That last line translates roughly as “Rubble woman is canonized”.

The “canonized” angle of the Trümmerfrau is interesting because they actually were a tiny and insignificant group of reluctant volunteers.

The historian concedes that, of course, the builders needed help – after all, about 400 million cubic meters of rubble and ruins were waiting to be cleared across the nation. “But women played a minor role in clearing German cities from the rubble,” Treber says. Berlin mobilized about 60,000 women to clear the war ruins, but even that amounted to no more than 5 percent of the female population – it wasn’t a mass phenomenon. In the British Sector, Treber says, only 0.3 percent of the women joined in the hard work. Yet it wasn’t just the women who were reserved when it came to clearing the war debris; men weren’t crazy about the task, either. In the eyes of the Germans, it was anything but honorable for people to show their “willingness to rebuild.” In fact, most Germans regarded clearing rubble as punishment – and for a reason. During the war, the Nazis made soldiers, the Hitler Youth, forced laborers, prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners clear the bombed cities after Allied air raids.

This checks out when you read American military history of occupation after the war. In fact, while a number like 60,000 sounds large, first-person accounts explain what they actually worked on in terms of an entire country reduced to rubble.

“We had 20,000 (people) per shift and we worked 24 hours a day with lights, generator sets — so there were 60,000 people,” Delbridge said. “We had more women than men that did all of the earth moving… and they moved the earth by hand.” In all, records from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Office of History estimate that more than 9.8 million work hours went into the [Tempelhof Airstrip] effort between military personnel and local Germans. Local Germans – mostly women according to Delbridge – accounted for the vast majority of that figure (more than 9.6 million work hours).

Thus it was 60,000 people, mostly women, who had cleared and built one airstrip. Undoubtedly an important project, yet that was just one airstrip.

For another simple number check, during WWII the Nazis deported 75,000 people into Leipzig to do forced labor including punishing rubble removal as “Ostarbeiter”.

Soviet prisoners of war removing rubble in the centre of Leipzig (Leipzig city archive)

The mostly forgotten “Ostarbeiter”, despite numbering far more than the Trümmerfrau, was in addition to the large slave labor supply out of Buchenwald concentration camps.

Here’s another typical image courtesy of Hamburg almost completely erased by the “big” Trümmerfrau story.

Concentration camp prisoners, many from satellite camps of Neuengamme, remove corpses of German civilians after Allied bombings of Hamburg. Germany, August 1943. Source: Holocaust Encyclopedia

Thus, a subset of 60,000 people clearing all of Berlin seems to NOT add up. It is dwarfed by the bigger picture of who removed rubble and when. One important airstrip indeed could be credited to tens of thousands of Trümmerfrau by the U.S. military, but what does that really represent about Berlin’s reconstruction?

…in a voluntary recruitment drive in Duisburg in the West German industrial Ruhr-area in December 1945, 10,550 men volunteered — and 50 women. Such evidence suggests that when they were not compelled to do so, German women did not volunteer in great numbers. […] The divided city of Berlin was a special case. Here, large numbers of women did clear rubble — about 26,000 women in total, and the term Trümmerfrauen originated in West Berlin. This large number was due to the fact that women far outnumbered men in Berlin — in the age group 20–39, there were 250,000 men and 500,000 women in Berlin in 1947.

Perhaps the thing that rings most hollow is how the German narrative tried to frame Nazi women after WWII as suffering hard labor, at the very same time that concentration camps were being fully investigated.

As a young woman who had grown up almost exclusively under the Third Reich, Frau Naß admits the end of the war threw all her beliefs into question: “We were totally disillusioned, because as girls we had gone through the Hitler Youth,” she says. “You have to imagine how you would react if the whole system you had been brought up in simply didn’t exist anymore. People just couldn’t grasp it.”

The lack of slaves?

Hard work really hit the Nazi girls hard, I guess, when they realized they couldn’t expect Hitler’s promises of slavery to work for them anymore. Their dream of easy living through slavery wasn’t easy to let go of apparently, and some say we should appreciate them more for it.

The suffering of these women isn’t even appreciated.

Here’s a good description of what is meant when “the whole system you had been brought up in simply didn’t exist anymore“:

Not only were the women not volunteering to help in the rebuilding, the men weren’t signing up either. It was not seen as honorable to help rebuild. In fact, it was considered punishment. The reason for that lies in the fact that the Nazi party forced soldiers, Hitler Youth, prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners to clean up the rubble in Berlin during the war. After the war, the authorities began using prisoners of war and former members of the Nazi party. Only when progress was insufficient using those forced laborers did the country turn to the general population for help. In the West, the help was voluntary…. Berlin encouraged participation by making the second-highest category of food ration cards available to the Trümmerfrauen. They showed images of smiling women cheerfully lugging stones and bricks. The image was repeated so many times, it is ingrained in the German collective consciousness.

A small group of reluctant volunteer women, only showing up for highly valuable ration cards, seems to be what became an ingrained German propaganda image of willing hard workers. Was it meant to be a subtle nod back to arbeit macht frei?

Some have started to study whether such propaganda was a calculated effort by Nazis after they surrendered to coldly erase the memory of those who had suffered actual hard labor under their tyranny. A strange irony is emerging. Clearing rubble was punishment to be avoided by German women, until “canonization” for hard work was on the table and then suddenly it was appropriated by them as a symbol of pride.

The focus of this research project is to investigate the Austrian “Trümmerfrauen”-myth as the idea that the removal of debris after World War II in Vienna was mainly done by voluntary female workers. To this end, previously unprocessed holdings of the Wiener Stadt und Landesarchiv will be systematically recorded and analyzed for the first time. From these holdings it becomes clear that the work in Vienna was primarily done by former National Socialists who were compelled by law to work. …this expiatory work by former NSDAP members could give rise to the Austrian “Trümmerfrauen”-myth decades later.

A Trümmerfrau at work. Source: Gleisdreieck by Günter Gras
Security

South Africa Opens Investigation Into “Lady R” Arms Shipment to Russia

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As much as South Africa has angrily protested foreign intelligence for exposing suspected arms shipments by Transmorflot Russia’s Lady R (Turkish built and formerly a Roll-On/Roll-Off Car Carrier SLOMAN PRODUCER)… the latest move to appoint an internal investigation has exposed large domestic disputes about global identity.

…President will appoint a judge (retired) to investigate this matter. This is where we find ourselves regarding whatever claim has been made about the alleged transfers of arms to Russia. On 28 May 2023, a three-person panel was appointed by the president, headed by Judge Phineas Mojapelo (retired).

“The panel is currently hard at work in order to bring this matter to its ultimate conclusion within its mandate. The Panel has been granted a six (6) week period to conclude its investigation.”

“Within its mandate” is code for under a rug.

The official opposition’s ire was raised by the reports with Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen leading the charge.

“Hiding the findings of the report will only further damage South Africa’s international standing, as it will create legitimate fears of a cover-up. The fact that Ramaphosa has suddenly announced his intention to hide the report from the public suggests he has already become aware of incriminating information he wants to hide from public view to protect his government.

It seems likely at this point that South Africa thought it would facilitate arms transfer to Russia by allowing a sanctioned ship to transit its port, intermediary for secretive private cargo handled by foreign military intelligence… and get away with it by claiming official “know nothing” status.

…the Minister speculated about the possibility of a private company potentially utilising the Lady R to transport illegal arms or other contraband destined for Russia.

Given South Africa’s dubious past role in arms deals — like the 1980s when it flipped the NRA in America from a regulator to the thin veneer for gun makers violating sanctions — this ship represents much more than a single port incident.

It’s a giant domestic bone of contention. Should South Africans be allowed, even secretively, to passively enrich themselves by facilitating armed conflicts elsewhere? There’s a much larger matter here, of moving past lingering national indignities and achieving respect for law and order.

It reminds me of Chinatown corruption in San Francisco (facilitating illegal arms shipments) finally being confronted and then taken down by a Chinese-American Mayor.

Security

US Police Warrant Turns Any and Every Robot Into a Surveillance Tool

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Robots are essentially created to serve as surveillance devices that monitor and interact with their surroundings. This makes them susceptible to being utilized as informants by law enforcement agencies.

Information gathering (IG) algorithms aim to intelligently select the mobile robotic sensor actions required to efficiently obtain an accurate reconstruction of a physical process, such as an occupancy map, a wind field, or a magnetic field.

Presently, we observe that sizable companies with robots, supposedly on a “trial” period in San Francisco (pun unintended), have had some of them taken over by the police. The most important question is now looming larger than ever: can these robotic informants be deemed reliable? Or more to the point, What protections from abuse are available?

In addition to the San Francisco homicide, Bloomberg’s review of court documents shows police have sought footage from Waymo and Cruise to help solve hit-and-runs, burglaries, aggravated assaults, a fatal collision and an attempted kidnapping.

In all cases reviewed by Bloomberg, court records show that police collected footage from Cruise and Waymo shortly after obtaining a warrant. In several cases, Bloomberg could not determine whether the recordings had been used in the resulting prosecutions; in a few of the cases, law enforcement and attorneys said the footage had not played a part, or was only a formality. However, video evidence has become a lynchpin of criminal cases, meaning it’s likely only a matter of time.

It’s not surprising, but it’s important to note that 90% of engineers in America lack education or training in humanities and political science. Furthermore, none of them have signed a code of ethics.

This has practical implications, as many American engineering teams have not adequately designed robots to handle complex decisions regarding becoming a police informant.

While people often discuss typical security risks like privacy loss, I haven’t seen anyone addressing the fundamental issue concerning robots. Here’s a starting point for the correct analysis.

“Whenever you have a company that collects a large amount of data on individuals, the police are eventually going to come knocking on their door hoping to make that data their evidence,” Guariglia said.

Exactly right. This too.

For those who say it doesn’t matter if police have access to footage because they aren’t doing anything wrong, Guariglia says, “you have no idea what you’re doing wrong.”

“People in a lot of states where it was legal to get an abortion a few months ago suddenly have to live in fear that any day now, these states could retroactively prosecute people,” he said. “And then you start to wonder about all those months where you traveled to your doctor or mental health specialist, how much data had been collected and what can law enforcement learn about me when I didn’t think I had anything to hide?”

This perspective comes from Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a libertarian organization that strongly advocates for privacy rights.

The EFF primarily focuses on privacy-related issues, which sometimes leads to unintended consequences and societal challenges.

While privacy is frequently discussed, it’s essential to recognize that data integrity can be equally important. Journalists often refer to cases that were solved or hindered due to the presence or absence of accurate data.

However, it’s crucial to highlight the potential risks associated with data integrity abuse, which unfortunately receives little attention in the media.

When discussing privacy, the concern is about individuals losing their personal information, a concept widely understood. However, in terms of data integrity, the worry is that someone might manipulate or poison the data itself.

Consider the hypothetical scenario where a company like Waymo dislikes a politician and provides false data to the police to manipulate the political landscape. Or imagine a Waymo employee exploiting their access to corrupt data in order to frame their superior and have them arrested.

The significant flaw in these robotic companies lies in their insufficient safeguards against data poisoning attacks.

The proper assessment of risk models for robot implementation is often neglected or poorly executed.

This is why the EFF emphasizes privacy concerns, while companies continue to emphasize their commitment to privacy through PR campaigns. However, those of us involved in actual security and addressing real-world harms are more focused on the trustworthiness of the data.

I have personally experienced the numerous issues with the latest surveillance systems through my cameras in San Francisco. These problems are deeply rooted in American history, yet they are not adequately covered in the media.

This lack of exposure is unfortunate because without greater awareness, we may realize the urgency of addressing the colossal challenges related to data integrity too late.

The risk extends beyond privacy loss; integrity loss poses an equally significant if not greater threat to society. Waymo, for instance, could exploit high levels of privacy, satisfying privacy extremists like the EFF, while undermining democracy by compromising data integrity.