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A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

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Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#41

Post by hartator »

mabbo wrote: post #9

While I certainly don't support the 'rogue engineer' excuse that VW originally gave everyone, the idea does bring up an interesting point. An engineer did write this code. Almost certainly, many of them, working together. Now, their managers told them it was okay to do this, maybe that legal had given the go-ahead or that they had to do it to keep their jobs... But it's still pretty clear that this was not right. The…

Don't forget this exact same company literally made weapons for the nazis. Lying on emissions seems nothing.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#42

Post by ryandrake »

mabbo wrote: post #9

While I certainly don't support the 'rogue engineer' excuse that VW originally gave everyone, the idea does bring up an interesting point. An engineer did write this code. Almost certainly, many of them, working together. Now, their managers told them it was okay to do this, maybe that legal had given the go-ahead or that they had to do it to keep their jobs... But it's still pretty clear that this was not right. The…

Similar to graphics cards driver developers facilitating "cheating" on benchmarks. The major vendors get caught cheating all the time. Back in the nineties, it was as simple and naive as detecting whether the running program was a benchmark or a real game: If a game was running, use the normal driver path. If a benchmark was running, you switch over to a completely different code path that basically rendered at shit quality but did it very quickly and made your rendering speed benchmark number look great. I worked at a graphics company as a 3D driver developer at the time and was asked to help implement such a system but politely declined. No problem, I just got assigned to a different part of the driver. There were plenty of other developers who had no ethical problem with cheating a benchmark.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#43

Post by draw_down »

mabbo wrote: post #9

While I certainly don't support the 'rogue engineer' excuse that VW originally gave everyone, the idea does bring up an interesting point. An engineer did write this code. Almost certainly, many of them, working together. Now, their managers told them it was okay to do this, maybe that legal had given the go-ahead or that they had to do it to keep their jobs... But it's still pretty clear that this was not right. The…

> their managers told them it was okay to do this, maybe that legal had given the go-ahead or that they had to do it to keep their jobs

I prefer to think about this. Management gets what it wants, you can always find someone to carry it out. I think we should be very careful about moving to blame engineers first.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#44

Post by [deleted] »

mabbo wrote: post #9

While I certainly don't support the 'rogue engineer' excuse that VW originally gave everyone, the idea does bring up an interesting point. An engineer did write this code. Almost certainly, many of them, working together. Now, their managers told them it was okay to do this, maybe that legal had given the go-ahead or that they had to do it to keep their jobs... But it's still pretty clear that this was not right. The…

[deleted]

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#45

Post by a3n »

rrhyne wrote: post #19
mabbo wrote: post #9

While I certainly don't support the 'rogue engineer' excuse that VW originally gave everyone, the idea does bring up an interesting point. An engineer did write this code. Almost certainly, many of them, working together. Now, their managers told them it was okay to do this, maybe that legal had given the go-ahead or that they had to do it to keep their jobs... But it's still pretty clear that this was not right. The…

If I were an evil VP tasked with creating this loop hole, I'd tell my project manager we needed a configurable system that let us control emissions for our intneral testing environments or some other plausible and legal requirement. I'd keep the knowledge of the system obscure and communication between dev, testing and deployment sparse. I'd then have only one person change the configuration before deployment. I'm su…

Yeah; in weapons, it might go like this:

* Govt research agency awards contract to study smallpox, including stockpiling smallpox. Researchers are happy, they're protecting the world.

* Govt weapons agency gets notice from govt research agency that "it's ready now."

* Govt weapons agency confiscates smallpox stockpile and data, makes more, spoons it into the tips of missiles.

Original researchers are more or less legitimate victims, whose goal to help humanity was used to obscure the Govt weapon's agency's goal to kill humanity.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#46

Post by zardo »

obstinate wrote: post #16
avar wrote: post #8

I may be missing something here, but if you take a step back this just seems like a tragedy of misaligned economic incentives. Both the US & EU would have wanted this information from day one, and this whole fiasco cost VW billions in fines. There would have been any number of engineers at VW and Bosch that knew exactly how this worked, but there was nothing in it for them to come clear about it. They were never goin…

I don't know for certain whether the concept of a bounty was considered, and if so why it was rejected. But I can think of a few possibly good reasons to not do this. For one thing, it could be thought of as rewarding the engineers who wrote the evil code, maybe even creating an incentive for engineers to add such code in the future. There are precedents for enforcement actions having the unintended consequence of ca…

>For one thing, it could be thought of as rewarding the engineers who wrote the evil code, maybe even creating an incentive for engineers to add such code in the future.

In the development model used here, it not like engineers just indepently decide to add a feature. An autogenerated two line procedure is going to have two pages of documentation.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#47

Post by 21 »

jancsika wrote: post #12

> Firmware images were gleaned from car-tuning forums and from an online portal maintained by Volkswagen for car repair shops. Documentation, in the form of so-called “function sheets,” was harder to come by. The function sheets were necessary to give the binary context, but the sheets are copyrighted by Bosch and generally not shared with the public. The research team ended up turning to the auto-performance tuning…

FWIW, airplane or medical software is also closed.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#48

Post by bambax »

> In 2015, regulators realized that diesel Volkswagens and Audis were emitting several times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) during real-world driving tests. But one problem regulators confronted was that they couldn’t point to specific code that allowed the cars to do this. They could prove the symptom (high emissions on the road), but they didn’t have concrete evidence of the cause (code that circumvented US and EU standards).

I don't understand this from a regulator's point of view: as a regulator, all you have to do is test for symptoms. You don't have to explain root causes. You drive the vehicle in conditions as close as possible to real ones, measure emissions, and decide whether or not they're above the norms.

Why would regulators do this in a lab? It's like health inspections that would ask restaurants to send food to be tested, instead of showing up anytime, unannounced.

Regulators should pick up real cars from real owners and test them on the road, at regular intervals.

Or, modern technology should allow to test a car all the time and report emissions and fuel efficiency, etc. during its lifetime.

People cheat, and if cheating is easy they cheat more. The one thing a regulator cannot do is trust the industry.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#49

Post by Sunset »

mabbo wrote: post #9

While I certainly don't support the 'rogue engineer' excuse that VW originally gave everyone, the idea does bring up an interesting point. An engineer did write this code. Almost certainly, many of them, working together. Now, their managers told them it was okay to do this, maybe that legal had given the go-ahead or that they had to do it to keep their jobs... But it's still pretty clear that this was not right. The…

>In my opinion (and I welcome disagreement and debate) engineers have an obligation to say 'no' to wiring unethical code.

I respectfully disagree. Engineers have an obligation to do whatever is asked of them by management. If that means building nuke-hand-grenades so be it.

Being an engineer( be it software or mechanics ) should be a morally neutral thing. Do the job and keep your morals out of it. This is the only way we can have some semblance of sanity in the field.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#50

Post by gyrgtyn »

Sunset wrote: post #49
mabbo wrote: post #9

While I certainly don't support the 'rogue engineer' excuse that VW originally gave everyone, the idea does bring up an interesting point. An engineer did write this code. Almost certainly, many of them, working together. Now, their managers told them it was okay to do this, maybe that legal had given the go-ahead or that they had to do it to keep their jobs... But it's still pretty clear that this was not right. The…

>In my opinion (and I welcome disagreement and debate) engineers have an obligation to say 'no' to wiring unethical code. I respectfully disagree. Engineers have an obligation to do whatever is asked of them by management. If that means building nuke-hand-grenades so be it. Being an engineer( be it software or mechanics ) should be a morally neutral thing. Do the job and keep your morals out of it. This is the only w…

eww
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