A recent trial centered around claims made by Tesla that its “Autopilot” makes the car safer than a human driver. A driver was killed by Autopilot and his surviving passengers sued. They claimed Autopilot is fraud.
Lawyers defending the brand said nobody should ever think that. Their strategy has been to counter-claim that warnings about the technology requiring human monitoring were made in owner documents/manuals, somehow being more important than extensive and repeated Tesla PR campaigns by the CEO that Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving” are better than humans and require no monitoring.
To which the CEO mercilessly danced on the tragically deceased Tesla driver’s grave by trolling him and the court on eXtwitter with…
Police say a Tesla was far over 100mph when it suddenly and typically lost control after slamming into another car before ending itself with an electric pole.
The driver, said to be a young father, died instantly despite the “safest car on the road” boast by the notoriously unsafe brand. Crowds gathered around to document his gruesome suicide.
Officially it is reported as a “two-vehicle crash” on October 22 at 15:30; W. Parmer Lane and Corpus Christi Drive in Austin, TX.
Cloud services should not be considered “agentless” when they involve the deployment of instances or agents that manage, monitor, or perform tasks inside the cloud infrastructure.
The term “agentless” in the context of cloud computing is used to refer to the deployment and management of services without installing additional software to run locally on each target system or virtual machine, operating remotely instead through APIs and network protocols. However, they are still agents in a distributed architecture of compute, and they are still on the “inside” of a notable data boundary.
Despite using a different term, the cloud instances serve functions similar to agents by executing tasks within the compute environment. While similar, the main distinction lies in the fact that instances are generally more centralized and standardized within the cloud framework. This is far more about performance and cost reasons (one large agent with remote capabilities doing the work of many agents) than any safety or security ones.
Many years ago I worked on a version of this at VMware, where we engineered anti-virus out of every individual virtual machine (reducing redundant waste) and to a single shared instance/agent with remote access to all the machines. The same safety issues remained before and after the transition from many dedicated agents to a centrally shared one.
This is like saying an NSA project migrated to one agent who setup a tap on the whole neighborhood backbone for all the house phone calls, because it allowed them to stop hiring many agents who setup a tap on every house listening to phone calls. One agent instead of many agents, even one agent deployed into a central office miles away, still is not agentless. Much efficiency is achieved, but cloud users must beware and not assume inherent security.
An agent that walks and talks like an agent… is an agent.
Let me give a quick example of the kind of semantic games I hear. Some call cloud a “dynamic” environment where “resources spin up rapidly” and they point out “ephemeral workloads”.
All of this is relative, and all of it is meaningless to the foundational principles of an agent. Agents, like anything else, can spin up quickly with dynamic settings and disappear quickly. In fact, those attributes are practically the definition of a good agent.
Ok, ok, I’ll admit reading logs, scanning networks and doing analysis of storage can reduce load to a single big agent, which is smaller and easier to query than a sum of many deployed ones. Maintenance and management cost is lowered. Again, much efficiency is achieved, but cloud users must beware and not assume inherent security.
Who can forget the NSA agent who basically lived inside the San Francisco phone exchange? It seems wrong to say all those houses in San Francisco were truly agentless, given an agent remotely listening to all the kitchen phone lines instead of sitting in any one kitchen eating all the toast. It’s a physical, an architectural, distinction that obscures an agent is still present.
An agent that walks and talks like an agent… still an agent.
Perhaps it helps to point out that the people often pitching agentless architecture either are trying to explain efficiencies, or they’re trying to hide the fact they still run an agent under a different name. If all you care about is performance and cost, the former is fine and you’re relocating the agent. More toast for you and yours. However, if you care about safety and security, watch out for the latter. You might be the toast.
Elon Musk’s approach to innovation and business practices has drawn substantial criticism, with some comparing him to notorious fraudster Bernie Madoff. Musk’s strategy, it appears, centers around a common swindler’s tactic: promising what people want to hear rather than delivering on feasible, tangible results.
Musk’s modus operandi seems to consist of peddling dreams and collecting upfront funds in exchange for assurances of future glory and riches. This approach is eerily reminiscent of advanced fee fraud, an intentionally deceitful scheme popularized in Africa as the “419 Scam” that relies on zero real-world skills or expertise.
Here is January 10th, 2016 for just one of hundreds and hundreds of examples:
Source: The shameless Tesla propaganda spigot called TopGear
Not only did this Model S fail to deliver any of such fraudulent promises to arrive in 2018, it has become more and more difficult to sell — ranked lower and lower over just five years since Musk’s deadline to become the least desirable used car in America.
False “luxury” marketing has basically been exposed by harsh reality, a brand quickly being driven to worthless status. Junkyards don’t even want one.
What sets Musk apart, and not in a positive way, is his penchant for taking inspiration from science fiction books and movies and then using his platform, whether a keyboard or microphone, to instantly spin grandiose tales of fantastical innovation and beg for undeserved attention from the most gullible and non-technical. These narratives are presented as fact solely because Musk decrees it, devoid of any genuine foundation, technical merit or logical reasoning.
A prime example of this tendency is Musk’s recent attempt to market a fictional Truck as a “survival” tool, even falsely trying to link to concepts popularized in the science fiction movie “Blade Runner.” It’s crucial to emphasize that the operative word here is “fiction.” The appeal of the flying car in the movie stemmed from its fictional nature—it could actually fly.
Yet, Musk seeks to convince the public that he’s working on bringing fictional technology to life. The reality, however, is so far from his grandiose claims it’s a giant predictable disaster.
Can you imagine a guy in the age of early hot air balloons who tries to rob people by taking payments for promises of expensive rides to the moon?
Bladerunner was a role. Deckard was the protagonist. This car is neither something any Bladerunner, or Deckard, would use. Their cars necessarily were able to fly. This garbage robot is what every Bladerunner would have put a bullet through to put it out of its own misery and to protect society from Elon Musk.
The actual product he has now touted as being the flying car from the future depicted in Bladerunner is far from anything that flies. In fact, it can’t even make it off the production line, let alone soar through the sky. Instead, it’s mired in technical difficulties and setbacks. Test after test reveals control arm failures on the earthly terrain, getting stuck in a little mud, being abandoned on the side of a paved road… far, far, far from rolling forward let alone any flight capabilities.
In essence, Musk’s creation is the antithesis of anything that flies, making his assertions nothing short of deceptive. Those who choose to associate themselves with Musk or invite him into discussions should be prepared to distance themselves, as his track record is a concerning blend of hype and hyperbole — laced with his brand of conspiratorial paranoid antisemitism, racism and misogyny — that fails to deliver on his obvious fraudulent promises.
Outside a courthouse, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, notified reporters “this kind of corruption is as old as time.”
Related: My 2019 BSidesLV presentation “AIs Wide Open”
Bladerunner was supposed to be science fiction. And yet here we are today with bots running loose beyond their intended expiration and with companies trying to hire security people to terminate them.
All I’m saying as a security expert who has worked with robotic safety issues for many years… if you see a Tesla Truck operating in public, and you serve as law enforcement, you probably should immediately Bladerunner it.
Deckard on the hunt with his special weapon to quickly kill robots, after he is tasked with eliminating ones that falsely become convinced they are indestructible.
