The USA's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is once again investigating Tesla's "full self driving" feature. It currently has "four reports of Teslas using FSD and then crashing after the camera-only system encountered fog, sun glare, or airborne dust", one of which "caused the death of a pedestrian when a Model Y crashed into them in Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023". The investigation wants to know FSD's ability to "detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions". If NHTSA considers that Tesla's camera only approach isn't capable of doing that, then they may issue a recall on FSD in all US Tesla vehicles. There's been so many NHTSA investigations that have found FSD to be half-baked, but the US government seems unwilling to regulate it.
Elon Musk gave a US$1m cheque to a random person at a Trump rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania over the weekend and said "he will continue to give that prize to one random voter per day until the Presidential election on November 5th". To be eligible for the $1m daily prize, you need to sign up for Musk's America PAC and be a registered voter. UCLA political science professor Rick Hasen reckons Musk's giveaway is "clearly illegal" under US law which states anyone who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting” can potentially see $10,000 in fines or five years in prison. Like most things Musk does, the government will refuse to punish him even if there's strong evidence of illegal activity. If Trump wins there's basically zero chance of any negative repercussions. He's a slippery bastard and he knows it
The Internet Archive got popped again, with the same mob that breached the website a few weeks ago doing the same thing with IA's Zendesk email support platform, emailing a message to everyone that submitted a removal request to let them know about the IA's failure to rotate API keys. The initial website breach happened due to a publicly accessible Git config file hosted on GitLab that contained various API keys and tokens. This latest Zendesk breach happened because the Zendesk API credentials were stored on GitLab too. Nobody's claimed credit for these hacks (a pro-Palestinian group claimed credit for a separate DDoS), there doesn't appear to be any reason for hacking the IA except for "cyber street cred" because "as a well-known and extremely popular website, it definitely boosted a person's reputation" in whatever hacking community they hang out in.
THE ABACUS is probably the first ever 1:1 interactive physical representation of real, functioning deep learning network, represented in the form of a light sculpture. (Copernicus Science Centre)
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