It’s not just self-driving or any of the other “DDIY (don’t do it yourself) tech that isn’t ready for primetime.

It’s humans.

The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system was one of the probable causes of a fatal 2018 crash into a concrete barrier. In addition, the safety board said the driver was playing a mobile game while using Autopilot before the crash, and investigators also determined he was overly confident in Autopilot’s capabilities.

“Overly confident,” huh. Well, duh.

Who ever heard of a human who wasn’t, at the least, confident that the tech they spent their money, especially expensive tech, wouldn’t do what they expected.

“In this crash we saw an over-reliance on technology, we saw distraction, we saw a lack of policy prohibiting cell phone use while driving, and we saw infrastructure failures, which, when combined, led to this tragic loss,” NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said at the end of the hearing on Tuesday. “We urge Tesla to continue to work on improving their Autopilot technology and for NHTSA to fulfill its oversight responsibility to ensure that corrective action is taken where necessary. It’s time to stop enabling drivers in any partially automated vehicle to pretend that they have driverless cars.”

Even driverless cars tell drivers to stay alert, as do “Autopilot.”

Of course, doctors have been telling people to eat more veggies for decades and you know how well that’s worked.

Say the word “auto” to anyone and they will hear “you don’t have to do anything, X does it for you.”

Real pilots know better.

Image credit: Automobile Italia

Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

In August 2016 I wrote Self-driving Tech Not Ready for Primetime and a month later Tesla was hacked. But, as you’ll find out tomorrow, hacking isn’t the only problem — humans are actually way higher on the problem scale. While it’s not easy, hacking dangers can be minimized, but fixing humans is impossible.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I’ve been writing (ranting?) about the security dangers of IoT and the connected world in general.

Security seems to be an afterthought— mostly after a public debacle, as Chrysler showed when Jeep was hacked.

GM took nearly five years to fully protect its vehicles from the hacking technique, which the researchers privately disclosed to the auto giant and to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the spring of 2010.

Pity the half million at-risk OnStar owners.

A few days ago Tesla was hacked by Chinese white hat Keen Team.

“With several months of in-depth research on Tesla Cars, we have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities and successfully implemented remote control on Tesla Model S in both Parking and Driving Mode.”

They hacked the firmware and could activate the brakes, unlock the doors and hide the rear view mirrors.

Tesla is the darling of the Silicon Valley tech set and Elon Musk is one of the Valley gods, but it still got hacked. And the excuse of being new to connected tech just doesn’t fly.

And if connected car security is full of holes, imagine the hacking opportunities with self-driving cars.

The possibilities are endless. I can easily see hackers, or bored kids, taking over a couple of cars to play chicken on the freeway at rush hour.

Nice girls don’t say, ‘I told you so’, but I’m not nice, so — I told you so.

Image credit: mariordo59

Fake news. People everywhere in the US and in all walks of life are talking about it.

There’s no question that fake news is subversive, whether created by humans or driven by AI.

But what about unfake fake news as served up by mainstream and new media alike?

Think you’ve never seen it?

Sure you have.

Frequently in financial reporting.

From CNBC: Twitter rockets more than 20 percent after the company reports first-ever net profit.

From BI: Snap crushed Wall Street’s revenue targets in its fourth quarter, as it filled its Snapchat app with more ads than ever and tapped into a broader group of consumers.

From US News: Tesla Finally Gives Investors Good Earnings News.

Wow! Based on the above headlines they look like great bets to contribute to your retirement.

Maybe.

But before investing your hard-earned dollars you might want to see what the same information looks like sans spin, hype and OMG.

Consider the information, often buried in euphoric media hyperbole, kind of like the fine print in a warranty or lease.

From Recode: Achieving profitability was one of the company’s [Twitter] main goals in 2017, and one of the big reasons it laid off 9 percent of its workforce in late 2016, and then sold off its developer business and shut down its video app Vine. Investors like profitable companies, and so do potential acquirers.

From TechCrunch: Snapchat’s big redesign will reach all users during Q1 2018, up from 40 million users currently. It was due to be fully rolled out by now but that has been delayed following poor reception in countries like the U.K., Australia and Canada. Amongst some of the first users to review the update, 83 percent of App Store reviews were negative, citing a confusing interface, ads mixed into the message inbox via Stories and people who don’t follow you back getting pushed into the Discover section.

From the New York times: The company [Tesla] lost $1.96 billion for the full year of 2017, nearly three times its loss of $675 million in 2016. The company has never made a full-year profit since it went public in 2010.

So what would unfake/unspun headlines look like?

KG sent along some hilariously accurate examples.

Caveat emptor, indeed.

Image credit: Kate Mereand-Sinha

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

My mother was born a century ago in San Francisco; growing up I spent at least part of every summer vacation there; as an adult I lived there for 25 years starting in 1977.

One constant in all that time was the truth of the saying, “San Francisco is 49 sq miles surrounded by reality” (not original to 60 Minutes).

That was true when my mother was growing up and probably before that.

It is still true, only now it applies to the South Bay, as well as parts of the East Bay.

The Bay Area has always marched to its own, different drummer, but that drummer has lost its mind.

Or maybe it’s not the different drummer, but that the inmates really are running the asylum (pardon the mixed metaphors).

These days, tech is the drummer and the inmates are the billionaires enamored with their own visions of a world created for the 1%.

Elon Musk is a prime example as is Peter Thiel.

Talk about guys with a god complex.

Perhaps we should revive an old roman custom — no, not feeding the 99% to the lions; that’s already happening.

Rather the one that reminded the 1% that they were not gods.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Winning takes many forms, as Ryan pointed out yesterday.

Let’s face it, we are not all going to be the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

But there seems to be plenty of room for us all to push a bit harder each day and surround ourselves with winners.

It is up to us to make that happen.

Not all winners desire to be founders anymore than all founders are winners.

I doubt anyone would/could/should minimize the abilities, skills, intelligence, and sheer grit that lands a person in a top senior role at a multibillion dollar tech company, such as Microsoft.

Achieving positions at that level are neither accidental nor serendipitous.

Now, imagine a future in which you are a winner of whatever kind and writing the summary paragraph of your LinkedIn profile.

What would you say when summing up what you did and how you accomplished it? What would you consider your major accomplishments?

Would it read anything like this? (Emphasis mine.)

“I am passionate about building technology that gets out of the way so you can focus on what matters most. My mantra ‘people first, technology second’ has been the driving force in my career. My focus has been leading teams and incubating new technologies and experiences to re-imagine the platform for intelligent work. In my career, I’ve helped build products, including Office, Windows, Internet Explorer, Xbox and Surface, that touch more than a billion people every day. As a leader, it’s important that my door always be open — to embrace everyone’s individual perspective, personality, style and abilities to makes my teams stronger — and creating a culture that the best ideas can come from anyone and anywhere.”

Is this someone worth emulating? Someone you’d want to hire?

Would your answer change when you learned this someone is a woman?

Because it is; she is Julie Larson-Green.

And it is the last 14 words of her summary that truly proclaim her a winner — by any standard.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Winning and competition are fundamental to our lives.

It starts early with your siblings fighting over the same toy and progresses to fighting with your spouse over the TV remote.

It is also something that enables us to push past what our preconceived limits are. I am sure you have had a time when you thought you could do no more, but then you see someone else succeeding a bit more and you push on.

The competition was what helped you achieve your goals and at the end of the day, everyone is better for it.

I have been watching the World Series, full disclaimer I am not a baseball guy, but I do love to see a winner. I happened to be in Houston for the start of the series and that determined the team I would root for, so for the past week or so I have been an Astros fan.

As I watched the series I started to get invested in the lives of the players and what had enabled them to get to this grandest of stages. It was interesting to learn about their paths to the big league and what challenges they faced.

I learned an interesting fact from my wife this morning. Her high school friend is a relief pitcher for the Houston Astros by the name of Tony Sipp. I looked up his stats and as far as I can tell he didn’t pitch a single ball, but he will get a ring.

What I found to be interesting about his life, though, was the path he took to get to where he is. He is from Pascagoula, MS, where he also played for the football team that took home the state championship in 2000, so the guy was a talented athlete that had been around success. He then went on to play at the local Junior College before transferring to Clemson. From there it was a series of double and triple ball teams before entering the majors many years later.

As I read a bit about this guy, I am realizing that he is a winner. He isn’t the big time flashy name that you hear every day, he is the grind-it-out-and-pushes-on kind of guy. He has continued to push his way to the top of his talent and been able to surround himself with others who are doing the same thing.

I am pretty sure we can do the same thing in business.

Let’s face it, we are not all going to be the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

But there seems to be plenty of room for us all to push a bit harder each day and surround ourselves with winners.

It is up to us to make that happen.

Image credit: Wikipedia

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Yesterday’s post focused on Tesla’s hacking and the lack of focus on security by tech, which is serious.

Today’s post is also about Tesla and I think it’s hilarious.

First, two facts.

• People who grow up in the US know that marketing language should not be taken literally.
• KG tells me that there are more Teslas in Norway per capita than anywhere else.

But Norway isn’t the US.

Tesla is being sued because a number of Norwegians don’t think the product lives up to the hype.

Some 126 owners of the Tesla Model S sedan’s P85D performance version are seeking unspecified reimbursements after the model only reached 469 horsepower instead of a pledged 700 hp, said Kaspar N. Thommessen, an attorney at Wikborg Rein law firm representing the plaintiffs.

Elon Musk is having a very bad week.

Poor Elon.

Hat tip to AnandSanwal/CB Insights for pointing me to this story.

Image credit: Hiking Artist

I’ve been writing (ranting?) about the security dangers of IoT and the connected world in general.

Security seems to be an afterthought— mostly after a public debacle, as Chrysler showed when Jeep was hacked.

GM took nearly five years to fully protect its vehicles from the hacking technique, which the researchers privately disclosed to the auto giant and to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the spring of 2010.

Pity the half million at-risk OnStar owners.

A few days ago Tesla was hacked by Chinese white hat Keen Team.

“With several months of in-depth research on Tesla Cars, we have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities and successfully implemented remote control on Tesla Model S in both Parking and Driving Mode.”

They hacked the firmware and could activate the brakes, unlock the doors and hide the rear view mirrors.

Tesla is the darling of the Silicon Valley tech set and Elon Musk is one of the Valley gods, but it still got hacked. And the excuse of being new to connected tech just doesn’t fly.

And if connected car security is full of holes, imagine the hacking opportunities with self-driving cars.

The possibilities are endless. I can easily see hackers, or bored kids, taking over a couple of cars to play chicken on the freeway at rush hour.

Nice girls don’t say, ‘I told you so’, but I’m not nice, so — I told you so.

Image credit: mariordo59