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VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

reuters.com

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Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#71

Post by dsfyu404ed »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #69
Tomte wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common sentiment here on HN, and it is entirely devoid of factual grounding. This is one guy who happened to travel to the USA (stupid move: asking US authorities before travelling "hey, are you going to arrest me?" and taking their word that no, they don't plan to…). Another American VW guy has already been sentenced. The "real culprits" are all living in Germany. And the investigation in Germany is ongoin…

So, in short, these guys are being charged because they can. They're a victim of circumstances. Scape goats. Political/power pawns if you will. Understand the reasons why, but it does feel like justice.

"everybody who has anything to do with this affront to the EPA shall burn at the stake"

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#72

Post by dsfyu404ed »

dreen wrote: post #14

Good. For context, air pollution kills 200,000 in the US and 40,000 in UK every year. You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.

Don't put away the torches and pitchforks, we're going to go after the alcohol industry when this is done.

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#73

Post by dsfyu404ed »

tryingagainbro wrote: post #20

Not enough, and I have a feeling that he should've been one of the dozens, if not hundreds. Fraud in the case is commuted upon the buyers and everyone that breathes that air (cancers, asthma...etc). You're talking tens of billions. Go rob a store and you get a lot more jail time. Yeah the store owner and 3 customer were traumatized but so were the thousands or millions of people that suffered (directly or indirectly)…

I think the re-calibrated software that hurt performance and fuel economy caused customers to suffer a lot more than the pollution did.

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#74

Post by [deleted] »

gech wrote: post #56
wffurr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When asked why you were fired, being able to say "I was asked to do something illegal or unethical" is a strong response. That certainly helps with the "find a new job" part.

I could easily see the interviewer twist this to ask the next question "But does that mean you won't be loyal to us??"

[deleted]

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#75

Post by webreac »

skrebbel wrote: post #7

Fantastic precedent. When your boss tells you to do something unethical and possibly illegal, you now have a great reason to say no.

It is likely he will earn a good amount of money for having accepted to be the scape goat instead of VW.

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#77

Post by geofft »

gech wrote: post #56
wffurr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When asked why you were fired, being able to say "I was asked to do something illegal or unethical" is a strong response. That certainly helps with the "find a new job" part.

I could easily see the interviewer twist this to ask the next question "But does that mean you won't be loyal to us??"

"I am absolutely going to be loyal to Corpco and its best interests. If I am so much as arrested for my work, regardless of how the trial goes, I can't work for Corpco. If I do something that causes an investigation into Corpco, I will be hurting the company. I left Donoevil because I saw that if I stayed, it would be bad for the company, and I didn't want to be part of that - I wouldn't be showing the loyalty I promised the company. I'm proud of my decision and I wish all the best success to Donoevil."

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#78

Post by wslh »

roman_savchuk wrote: post #59
wslh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And QA engineers or security reviewers never detected this in the source code? I would love to see how many people participated in those source code repositories.

Except, they don't work with actual source code. An engineering team responsible for adaptation for certain market, most likely works in calibration space, that's it, just data (flags, thresholds and tables, thousands of them). To access this data they rely on ASAP2 description databases which are simply very large text files [1] containing ROM addresses, parameter names, etc. I don't know the whole VW workflow, but…

Are you saying that once the configuration is fonr there is not a QA environment?

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#79

Post by davidcuddeback »

drdeadringer wrote: post #61
w_t_payne wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes ... but as engineers we need to support the professional organisations that in turn will support us when we need to make these difficult and politically courageous decisions.

Who are such organisations?

IEEE and ACM are the professional organizations for software engineering. They even jointly published a code of ethics for software engineering: https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics.

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#80

Post by roman_savchuk »

wslh wrote: post #78
roman_savchuk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, they don't work with actual source code. An engineering team responsible for adaptation for certain market, most likely works in calibration space, that's it, just data (flags, thresholds and tables, thousands of them). To access this data they rely on ASAP2 description databases which are simply very large text files [1] containing ROM addresses, parameter names, etc. I don't know the whole VW workflow, but…

Are you saying that once the configuration is fonr there is not a QA environment?

No, I'm only saying this calibration QA has no readable source code to work with. And there are ways to obscure some parts of the ECU behaviour.
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