An immense body of software developed under the ‘move fast and break things’ policy dominates the software in our cars, the power grid, water treatment plants and chemical factories.
The Dawn Project demands that defective and insecure software be replaced with software that never fails and can’t be hacked.
Read more about The Dawn Project’s mission
Learn about our safety tests of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software
Power grids, hospitals, oil & gas pipelines, water treatment plants, traffic lights, cars, trucks, and trains are at the mercy of hackers, rogue states, terrorists and other bad actors. They can exploit these defects to disable, destroy, or commandeer our essential systems.
We cannot survive without our critical infrastructure. If it were to break down or be held to ransom, food would not be transported to supermarkets; electricity and water would not be supplied to homes and offices. Within weeks families would huddle together in the cold and dark, without food or clean water.
It is not acceptable for the software that runs the world to have bugs or security defects that hackers can exploit to bring us to our knees. It is an existential threat to humanity as great as climate change and as apocalyptic as nuclear Armageddon.
The Dawn Project’s mission is to identify and call out the software that puts humanity at risk and to demand that defective and insecure software be replaced with software that never fails and can’t be hacked.
Source: NHTSA Standing General Order on Crash Reporting
He sells defective self-driving AI software by telling consumers it is many times safer than a human driver, when in fact it drives like a drunk teenager.
He refuses to disable Autopilot on roads where he knows it isn’t safe. Watch the Autopilot crashes below.
Anyone who buys a Tesla from Elon Musk is an enabler for his reckless behavior, including his self-driving experiments that have resulted in over 1,000 crashes and at least 33 tragic deaths.
90% of people agree that the safety defects in Tesla’s self-driving AI mean it should be banned immediately. But Tesla refuses to fix the safety defects, the regulators refuse to ban the software, and the politicians won’t act until the public demands it.
So, now is the time for the people to send Elon Musk a message in the only language he understands: Money.
Many software security experts would undoubtedly question whether this laudable aim is possible. They would sincerely claim all software has bugs and every system can be hacked. Their experience would bear that out. However, their experience would be based on consumer and civilian systems. If they were to focus, for instance, on software for nuclear weapons systems they would think differently.
Dan has been a pioneer of making safety-critical software systems unhackable since his days at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Dan graduated from Caltech in 1976 with a Bachelors of Science in Engineering. Now Dan is a recipient of the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award, which is the highest honor which Caltech bestows upon a graduate.
Dan’s expertise in creating the most secure operating systems in the world led him to found The Dawn Project, which is dedicated to making computers truly safe for humanity.
Dan O’Dowd, Dawn Project Founder
Many software security experts would undoubtedly question whether this laudable aim is possible. They would sincerely claim all software has bugs and every system can be hacked. Their experience would bear that out. However, their experience would be based on consumer and civilian systems. If they were to focus, for instance, on software for nuclear weapons systems they would think differently.
In 1997 Dan won the contract to deliver his operating system to run the B1-B Intercontinental Nuclear Bomber, a weapon of mass destruction where one error could vaporize a city. The operating system controls everything in the plane: flight controls, navigation, communications, and weapons systems. Dan delivered it to Boeing and supported it himself until it was flying. More than 20 years later, it is still flying the B1-B.
The Dawn Methodology soon became the standard for developing software for weapons of mass destruction by winning contracts for the B-2 Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, as well as the F-16, F-22, and F-35 fighter jets.
The Dawn Methodology secures our nuclear forces, military aircraft and missiles, top secret encryption devices, and communications equipment. It also flies the Airbus A380 commercial airliner.
Recently, Dan used The Dawn Methodology to build an unhackable laptop for the FBI, an unhackable cell phone for the military, and to secure safety systems in millions of vehicles from the world’s leading car makers.
None of these systems has ever failed or been hacked. That is the way to develop the software for the systems that our lives depend on.
