CA Tesla Kills Pedestrian

Sacramento police say the Tesla ran over a woman crossing the street.

A CHP spokesperson said a Tesla was going westbound on Marconi Avenue when the driver hit the woman, who was crossing the street from north to south.

Notably, standing out on California roads even with police flashing warning lights, the reporter is wearing a bright yellow safety vest to reduce her likelihood of being killed by a Tesla.

MN Tesla Suspected in Pedestrian Death: Police Seize Evidence of Autopilot

Chilling details are emerging from a case in Minnesota, where a Tesla apparently killed a woman walking her dogs.

Apart from spelling out the evidence the BCA has in hand so far, the affidavit also disclosed that two women told investigators they saw Donovan’s body on the hood of a smaller SUV heading north on the highway, with her head near the windshield.

Her body was lodged onto the hood until she fell off and was run over and left behind.

The story indicates the Tesla owner slept or otherwise ignored his road robot while it was killing someone.

State investigators have seized an SUV and questioned the owner of the vehicle they suspect was involved in a hit-and-run crash that killed a longtime family doctor as she walked her dogs near Lake Mille Lacs last fall.

The seizure of the gray 2022 Tesla X is among several pieces of evidence detailed in a court document filed Tuesday afternoon that point to an Edina man as the person who hit 56-year-old Cathy Ann Donovan around sunset on Nov. 13 along northbound Hwy. 169 near the southern shore of Lake Mille Lacs.

The man claiming to have no knowledge of any crash, and never stopping despite a pedestrian being flung onto his windshield and then run over, to me says negligent homicide by Autopilot.

Update March 13: Police say they don’t think it was that Tesla.

NHTSA Promotes New “AV STEP” Program to Monitor Road Robots

The acronym STEP has a healthy dose of irony, because the entire reason American “wheelmen” (bicycles) devoted themselves in the late 1800s to paved roads in America was they couldn’t go when and where horses could (e.g. stepping through rain and snow, fields and forests).

The exit interview for the head of the NHTSA highlights their new road robot regulation program idea launched last June.

We’re also considering a new program called AV STEP. That would combine the opportunity for manufacturers to deploy automated vehicles with a process that would allow NHTSA significant access to information about redundancy and safety systems,

This program also has an Automated Vehicle Transparency and Engagement for Safe Testing Initiative (AV TEST) component described in an ARTS23 keynote speech.

We’re now looking to use Section 30114 to establish a new program, which we’re calling AV STEP, which I’m really excited to describe for you. Data truly is fundamental to our work, and we are continuously looking for new ways to gather ADS data to inform future oversight and rulemaking. One way we do this is through our import program established under Section 30114.

It started with a short list.

The participating companies are Beep, Cruise, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Local Motors, Navya, Nuro, Toyota, Uber, and Waymo. The States are California, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah.

The White House occupant in 2016, corrupted by Tesla, not only tried to silence the NHTSA but also declare robot safety a state concern instead of being under federal jurisdiction.

This led to over 30 states allowing known unsafe robots on roads, and predictable unnecessary deaths as a result, making US roads so unsafe it has been “like living through a war“.

AV STEP seems intended to return the country to some semblance of safety science, away from the corruption and fraud spread by Tesla. It’s a “step” in the right direction, although most car brands aren’t yet developing mechanical legs.

ChatGPT Generating Fake History and Leaking Passwords

Details on the ongoing ChatGPT security disaster have been posted by Dan Goodin, one of my favorite and most trusted tech reporters.

“I went to make a query (in this case, help coming up with clever names for colors in a palette) and when I returned to access moments later, I noticed the additional conversations,” Whiteside wrote in an email. “They weren’t there when I used ChatGPT just last night (I’m a pretty heavy user). No queries were made—they just appeared in my history, and most certainly aren’t from me (and I don’t think they’re from the same user either).”

As I presented at last year’s RSA conference in SF, using ChatGPT brings with it a critical integrity vulnerability. If your “history” is artificially generated by the software company, how would you prove it wasn’t/isn’t yours?

In related news, Italy says ChatGPT violates privacy regulations.