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Green Hills Software founder takes on Tesla Full Self-Driving...and unsafe software everywhere

Accepted submission by at 2023-07-01 20:07:24 from the there's-software-and-then-there-is-SOFTWARE dept.
Software

Motor Trend is running this story, https://www.motortrend.com/features/tesla-full-self-driving-ban-attempt-elon-musk-dan-odowd [motortrend.com] While it starts out about Tesla self-driving software, it seems that the Dawn Project is also taking on security for safety critical software in general -- a topic near and dear to many at SN.

Dan O'Dowd is a man on a mission: to get Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology outlawed. He's likely spent millions of his own money—including a reported $600K on a recent Super Bowl ad and full-page ad in The New York Times last November—to accomplish this goal via his nonprofit group The Dawn Project. And he's incurred the wrath of Elon Musk and the Tesla co-founder and CEO's most rabid fans.

[...] Last August The Dawn Project conducted tests and shot a video showing a Tesla Model 3 using FSD plowing into a mannequin meant to represent a child. Tesla sent The Dawn Project a cease-and-desist letter calling the videos "defamatory." O'Dowd responded in a tweet by calling Musk a "crybaby" for complaining about the test and offered to reproduce tests for the media and regulators.

That's what brought us to Santa Barbara last week, where Green Hills Software, which O'Dowd founded in 1982 and is president and CEO, is based. Green Hills develops ultra-secure software for aviation, including the operating system (OS) for the Boeing 787 and B1-B bomber and the Orion crew exploration vehicle manufactured by Lockheed Martin and operated by NASA. Green Hills is also the first and only software company to develop an OS that meets the NSA's certification for EAL 6+ High Robustness, making it almost impossible to hack.

[...] O'Dowd isn't critical of Tesla vehicles and owns five of them: two Roadsters, two Model 3s, and a Model S. The Dawn Project is not only attacking Tesla FSD but any computer system it deems a danger. "Connecting the power grid, hospitals, and millions of cars to the Internet with software riddled with bugs and security defects has turned these systems into potential weapons of mass destruction at the mercy of hackers," the organization says on its website.

"We've been taking all the things that our lives depend on—water treatment plants and hospitals—where when something fails thousands or even millions of people could die," O'Dowd said.

Just a guess, Mr. O'Dowd is probably not a fan of Microsoft...


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