China has already taken land from India and is already posturing against Russia. Vlad the Receiver has no idea just how badly he fucked himself.

You obviously have no idea what a strawman argument is.

I don't believe it's cognitive dissonance. He's a mooch. The kind of guy who will gladly ask to take the shirt off of your back. If you go to a restaurant with him, after he's done eating he's the kind of guy who will say he forgot his wallet, tell you he'll pay you back, and never does. (Yes, people have reported having this exact experience with him.)

To him, taking things from other people without paying them back is normal, and he has no problem doing it.

So to rebut my comment, you talk about how cheap it is to recover data off of spinning disks? See the problem here?

The specific context was just, in the words of GP, "Tesla claimed they couldn't recover the video of a fatal crash". I don't like to make assumptions, however an inference from this is damage. Look at my first post, and notice I made a minimal set of inferences and assumptions, which was deliberate. But let's do your thing, and go ahead and make assumptions anyway, and let's go with this case:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/art...

Pedestrians, and a quarter of a billion in damages. Seems very reasonable to assume this is the one. Which by the way, I'm hearing about this for the first time, and I don't think that will survive appeal. The Jury finding of fact will, assuming that on appeal the evidence is found to be strong enough, but I strongly believe the dollar amount will not, regardless.

Assuming you're talking about the above referenced case, within a minute, the first thing I found out about it was that the Tesla had an airbag deployment. Already not sounding like, to quote you "without severe damage to the car itself". Then I found out that it hit a parked Chevy Tahoe, which then hit the pedestrians. You knew about this case longer than I did, and what made you think there was no severe damage to the car? Because I'm having a hard time imagining how a parked car kills two pedestrians in a secondary impact without severe damage. More importantly, there's actually a photo of the scene after it happened:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0...

So yeah, at this point, I'm even going to double down on my previous assertion about you not considering the context, and just making blind assumptions.

How? You just made a blind assumption that there's no severe damage. Look at the photo in that NYT link. That looks like severe damage to me. If that's not the one you're talking about, then which one ARE you talking about? I wasn't making any assumptions, by the way, this entire time I've been speaking purely in a general sense about how one party might not be able to recover data that another party could. If you specifically had this case in mind, then why on earth were you thinking severe low thermals in the Florida Keys? It's not exactly the Arctic Circle, is it?

Well, let's examine that -- In this case, which I have to assume you're citing, this expert -- and remember, you're claiming to know the specifics of this case, if this is indeed the one -- here happens to be a guy who himself has claimed many bug bounties from Tesla, and even has a collection of Tesla motherboards people have sent to him. Somebody who is collecting Tesla bug bounties and reverse engineered their hardware to this extent just might know a lot more about the internals of Tesla's hardware than even Tesla does. That includes the internals of how components that Tesla uses might work, which Tesla's engineers don't necessarily need to know about, rather they only need it to meet certain specifications.

So yeah, I think it would be safe to say that, in a very broad sense, he could probably recover data in a way that Tesla may very well be unaware of. Among other things, apparently a third party had to de-solder the NAND chips from the board to read them, and handed that data over to Tesla's attorneys and to the Plaintiff's attorneys.

So Tesla is supposed to be able to just guess that this guy can recover it, regardless of the state the device is in? I don't think so -- not buying that reasoning for a second. Particularly given you deliberately understated the damage to the car. At least, that's the assumption I have to work on, because again, you're trying to assert to me that you know more about the context than I do. The specific context I received was "fatal crash", which is exactly the context I used.

See what happens when you make assumptions?

About that -- let's go back to GP's assertion, the very last sentence no less:

And look at my response:

Now, what about my response is wrong to you? Unless you yourself believe that having a super computer and AI means Tesla can recover just any data? Perhaps it isn't to you, but to me, that's...a bit of a leap. It also smells of conspiracy theory, and I don't entertain conspiracy theories. Ideally, people instead think hard about how they come to their conclusions, and if they're not certain about something, at the very least try to look it up BEFORE running their mouth about it.

This is what's called critical thinking, by the way. How well do you think you did just now?

Which is why I specified homicides.

And this is based on?

If I had to guess, I'd say it's a case of people buying a house sight unseen. Though this almost sounds more like furnished rental properties.

That's the thing, they never were intended to be weapons. They always were utility knives. The original balisongs had tick marks so they could be used for measuring.

As for bullets, I suppose if they're subsonic, sure, but that would have to be a very short effective range, and we're also assuming small caliber, because I can't imagine how you'd be able to silence the initial burst. One thing I think along the lines of is that movie no country for old men. Good movie, but... Silencer on a shotgun?

Confederation, not federation.

It's not just a thing with firearms, it's a thing with any kind of "weapon". And I quote that because, for example. look at the way California regulates the balisong. They are and always have been utility knives. Hollywood created the fantasy that they're some kind of macho weapon that they're not, mostly because the way they open looks flashy and nice for photography. But in a tactical situation, any knife that opens that way is a liability. But for non-tactical, i.e. strictly utility, they're pretty nice because you can open them with one hand in a situation where your other hand is holding something, and unlike e.g. a switchblade, no possibility of unintentionally opening it while it's in your pocket. Regardless, and as embarrassing as it is for me because I live here, California itself creates these myths and then actually buys into its own crap.

Also dunno if you're familiar with bullpups, but look at this ridiculous thing:

https://atlanticfirearms.com/a...

Pistol grips are...scary...or something. And no flash guard because it might...make you invisible...or something? Only it doesn't do anything to make you less visible to anybody. Hollywood also created the myth that silencers make bullets whisper quiet, which is physically impossible, in fact they're still loud as fuck, just far less likely to permanently damage your hearing if your earplugs fall out on the range, but here we are.

The one kind of weapon they do basically nothing at all to regulate are handguns, which are responsible for far more homicides than the "scary" weapons, even before they were ever regulated, by a factor of something like 9 to 1.

Dude I really need to ask, have you even spent so much as a fleeting moment to consider the context here? Because it really doesn't feel like it.

Actually, I'm thinking in the opposite direction, namely burned. I don't know about you, but I've never heard of a vehicle collision that resulted in sudden runaway freezing thermals.

Hmm...Ya think?

Hold on a second...you're talking about how cheap it is to recover data off of a spinning disk that failed, in your case likely failures that are primarily due simple mechanical failures such as worn out bearings head crashes. A common, age old and (at this point) relatively easily fixable problem.

Meanwhile, this entire time, my head was more in the direction of solid state disks experiencing extreme conditions. The kind where the worst case scenario is usually NOT a matter of sticking it into a plastic still air box, swapping the platters out, and making sure to use a torque screwdriver so you seal it to the exact specification. Worst case scenario is more like decapping it, dying it, and painstakingly reading it through a SIEM. Not easy, and certainly not cheap, assuming you even have access to all the tooling necessary, which isn't easy to come by.

It is very much so in fact.

Like I said, data recovery is a very fickle thing. I'm aware of cases where this kind of thing happens. For example, a sliced up floppy disk holding evidence to a homicide case was sent from a local PD to the FBI who spent about a million trying to recover data off of it, and totally failed at it, and said it was irrecoverable. Then, when they handed it back to the police department, one of the technicians simply tried taping it back together. Literally just some transparent scotch tape, the trick was it had to be thin enough to not bother the disk head. Lo and behold, it was fully readable like that.

In your mind, one data recovery situation is much like any other. In my mind, they are very much not so.

Though, I also look at data more from a security perspective, given security is what I do for a living, so maybe that's why my perspective differs from yours. Even in your world of spinning disks, a common way people destroy them is to drill holes in them. Common sense should tell you that most of the data is still there, but who is going to be able to recover it? And how much are you willing to spend? One person's recoverable is another person's irrecoverable.

SSDs are also in another world completely from what you're dealing with. Sometimes, indeed often times, swapping chips out just isn't enough.

How often were these devices damaged in a high speed collision and/or possibly exposed to thermals well beyond what they're rated for?

That's what people said about safety features in the 80s.

That doesn't tell you anything at all.

Data recovery is a fickle thing. Tesla likely has minimal knowledge about the storage medium beyond its technical specifications. The company who makes the SSD in your machine almost certainly isn't in the business of data recovery, and may not even know how to recover data off of it. The company who made the NAND chips soldered to it probably doesn't know either.

The guy who came up with magnetic force microscopy to read data from wiped 90s era HDDs didn't work for a company that made hard disks, and could recover data the manufacturers previously thought impossible.

Letting your emotions turn your brain off is unwise.

That's Florida. In Arizona, it's white BMW. In California, it's old dirt-crusted 90s car missing a muffler. In Texas, it's needlessly oversized pickup truck.