[flagged]
TFA is talking about train software that deliberately renders it nonfunctional when it detects it is being serviced by a third party. This isn't about environmental concerns.
Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
41–50 of 309 posts
Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
#42My impression is that the quality of train firmware is generally not very good, and I hope that this scandal will lead to greater scrutiny. 3 years ago, Deutsche Bahn publicly complained of "grotesque" software problems with newly delivered Bombardier trains. For example, when train drivers changed the direction of travel, the train software would crash. It then took 1 hour to boot the train up again [0]. Switzerland…
I think the compensation given to software developers by companies that view software as their product has drawn many of the skilled software developers away from jobs that would have once grabbed them because of the fun factor. Companies that make things that contain software are not in markets prepared to pay 2 and 3 times what they were for software. What you are left with is people who are willing to accept that fun factor as the difference in TC, and people who couldn't get jobs that paid more. These are the people we have making most of our safety critical systems. Go look at software developer compensation at X vs spaceX. That is the market at work. Fun does count as TC, but you also end up with people who aren't good developers pivoting to engineer new processes and tools in these domains. They latch on to whatever fad full stack is just getting over a case of, and try to apply it to train firmware. It wouldn't surprise me to find out they are all about scrumfall and have 10x more text in jira than git. And they have restful apis, or service oriented architecture in a safety critical embedded system.
Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
#43[flagged]
The article has nothing to do with pollution.
The reference to Dieselgate might be because a geofencing condition was found in the code running the trains that caused certain misbehaviour when they were at the manufacturer’s competitor’s maintenance depots.
Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
#44It's one thing to implement a secret handshake and underdocument some procedures to make your competitors look incompetent, but actively breaking your product when it's in your competitor's shop - that reqires some chutzpah.
Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
#45My impression is that the quality of train firmware is generally not very good, and I hope that this scandal will lead to greater scrutiny. 3 years ago, Deutsche Bahn publicly complained of "grotesque" software problems with newly delivered Bombardier trains. For example, when train drivers changed the direction of travel, the train software would crash. It then took 1 hour to boot the train up again [0]. Switzerland…
Bad software is a symptom, not the cause.
What is the cause then?
Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
#46In a properly functioning country the responsible persons should already be imprisoned. Some governmental agencies were aware of that for at least half a year, but failed to act. The fact that source code was not immediately dumped and analyzed is the evidence of malevolence, corruption and intentionally putting people's lives at risk. Welcome to the dark side of Poland - where citizens don't matter.
"the responsible persons" ... hmmm. Who would that be?
The programmer who implemented the code? Do you think they thunk these tricks up? They was just following orders.
The manager of the programming team, who set these tricks as things that needed to be implemented? Again, just following orders.
The "Cxx" Title people who directed that there be "some protection" in some way that got implemented as what we see? Did they specify these measures? Did they say "it should break if serviced by a competitor?" Unlikely. Thye wouldn't know how to be that specific, probably.
Some middle manager, maybe a committee meeting, sketched out a "DRM" scheme with the specifics? What do you imagine that meeting looked like? "We've got a directive to secure the systems from outside tampering, what does that mean in terms of how the machine behaves?" Or does that bring us back down to the engineers again?
... the responsible part here isn't a person, its the company as a whole. Just as it took the collective efforts of everyone to make the train, it took their collective efforts to make it wrong.
Corporate Death Penalty; perhaps. make it plain that we will no longer tolerate sill shenanigans like this.
Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
#47It's one thing to implement a secret handshake and underdocument some procedures to make your competitors look incompetent, but actively breaking your product when it's in your competitor's shop - that reqires some chutzpah.
Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
#48In a properly functioning country the responsible persons should already be imprisoned. Some governmental agencies were aware of that for at least half a year, but failed to act. The fact that source code was not immediately dumped and analyzed is the evidence of malevolence, corruption and intentionally putting people's lives at risk. Welcome to the dark side of Poland - where citizens don't matter.
Corruption is not just the dark side of Poland, but the entire west IMHO
The west is the least corrupt part of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index#/...
.svg){kind=link}
Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
#49In a properly functioning country the responsible persons should already be imprisoned. Some governmental agencies were aware of that for at least half a year, but failed to act. The fact that source code was not immediately dumped and analyzed is the evidence of malevolence, corruption and intentionally putting people's lives at risk. Welcome to the dark side of Poland - where citizens don't matter.
Corruption is not just the dark side of Poland, but the entire west IMHO
I wanted to get numbers on this, but naturally it's not feasible to get accurate numbers on corruption happening.
I found the Corruption Perceptions Index which seems to be the closest we have in quantization. By measuring perceptions of corruption, as opposed to corruption itself, the Index may simply be reinforcing existing stereotypes and cliches though.
But according to their results the "west" has the least perceived corruption.
Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
To what end? So they can sell more trains? That makes no sense.
How does that make no sense ? That's the whole point of a business.
The idea that does not make sense is that this would increase train sales, not the idea that selling more trains would be good for business.