Weekly breakdown – 22w24d3

Automotive

https://fortune.com/2022/06/10/elon-musk-tesla-nhtsa-investigation-traffic-safety-autonomous-fsd-fatal-probe

The more cars Tesla sells, the more issues will be found, and not just technical ones.

It is hard to escape law of large numbers and Gaussian bell curve, especially the more organization grows.

And the below quote paints potentially damning decision how ‘Autopilot’ functionality handles itself in accident situations.

(really short rant ahead)

In general terms I consider Elon Musk as a quite smart guy with extremely good sales and marketing talent.

But sales is usually selling features that are not (yet) there and/or overblown capability of existing functionality.

Just look at the naming of ‘Autopilot’ feature of Tesla cars with actual level 2 autonomy.
If you check the meaning of level 2 autonomy, ‘Autopilot’ is in no way autonomous and ‘auto’ as the name strongly suggest.

Heck, Tesla has been already surpassed by Mercedes and Honda with limited, but legally approved level 3 automation mode, where the car manufacturer is actually responsible in case of accident when it is enabled and running in command.

Old-school car manufacturer juggernauts are slow (some will crash and burn), but will eventually catch-up and overwhelm Tesla unless it comes up with something radical, and so far nothing is announced.
And if it we’re, Musk is famous for over-promising and under-delivering on those, for those who follow.

And the famous Tesla bots will not be able to help it.

But I have been wrong, and it will be fun to watch 🙂

Fun

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/working-lego-computer-brick

Make your own fully functioning Lego computer block 🙂

Weekly breakdown – 22w22d3

Security

https://kenkantzer.com/learnings-from-5-years-of-tech-startup-code-audits/
Highly distilled and valuable knowledge about security and securing software from-first person audit experience.
Anyone who is interested in improving security (and everyone should) should at least glance through.

https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2022/5/18/pwn2own-vancouver-2022-the-results
Notable results:

Sandbox escape on Tesla Model 3 Infotainment System – Important due to fact that significant amount of car information is consumed, but also produced by the infotainment system, possibly leading to much significant compromise of safety relevant components of a car

Sandbox escape on Microsoft Teams – Important due to enormous presence of Teams in high variety of companies due to free(ish) model included in Office suite.

https://www.feistyduck.com/bulletproof-tls-newsletter/issue_89_certificate_transparency_data_is_used_to_compromise_wordpress_before_installation
How security improvement can have not-so-good side-effects when setting up your standard WordPress (or other web apps) installation.

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2022/01/19/security-engineering-course/
https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2022/03/18/security-course-at-cambridge/
Free quality lectures going through fundamentals of security and hands-on approach on gaining security experience. And students from few countries can apply for course access in full and free.
Best learning is when you get your hands dirty 🙂

Funny

https://rubenerd.com/git-ignores-gitignore-with-gitignore-in-gitignore/
Sort-of-recursion 🙂