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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

#101

Post by lmitchell »

Sunset wrote: post #90
lmitchell wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department! says Wernher Von Braun.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKn1aSOyOs I really really really strongly disagree with this. As the ones who are most knowledgable about the systems they're building, I definitely think engineers have a moral responsibility to make sure they're at the very least following applicable laws and regulations - I…

The problem with "moral obligations" is a person's moral axioms are fundamentally arbitrary. Would you still want engineers to be guided by their moral convictions when you fundamentally disagree with them yourself?

Inasmuch as I want everyone to be guided by their moral convictions, yes. I mean, even if I don't agree with them, I'd much rather an engineer's decisions be guided by 'what they feel is right' rather than guided by nothing at all, which seems to be what parent was implying.

Also, this is why we have engineering codes of ethics, at least in Canada and the US (and while I'm not familiar with elsewhere in the world, I would assume similar things hold in most first-world countries). We don't necessarily have to agree on everything, but there is a baseline for what we consider ethical, and engineers are expected to uphold that baseline, otherwise they are not permitted to practice engineering. Unfortunately the line between 'engineers' and other practicioners isn't as well-defined for software engineering as it is for most engineering fields - but that doesn't mean we should ignore it completely.

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

#102

Post by bicubic »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #73
vinceguidry wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is that it localizes the consequences of defiance on the weakest part of the chain, all but guaranteeing failure. You can't even expect engineers to blow the whistle on their soon-to-be-former employer. Ethics is about protecting the weak from the strong, not offering up the weak to get eaten by the strong. Only heroes put the good of the many over their own needs, and you can't expect everyone…

> Only heroes put the good of the many over their own needs, and you can't expect everyone to be a hero. > ... > it will never happen while the idea of a guild / union for software engineers is still anathema. Sounds like you're waiting for a union and that's the only solution. In the interim, we can and should encourage people to be heroes. Let's face it, there are other programming jobs out there. Do you truly need…

> In the interim, we can and should encourage people to be heroes.

In reality it's just not black and white like that. I expect a lot of engineers aren't sure if they should be blowing the whistle about a particular thing. And they have no one to turn to for advice, especially not with the NDAs they will typically sign.

So the position they'll find themselves is this: blow the whistle on a morally gray issue which may or may not justify doing so, and guarantee that you will be fired while not at all guaranteeing that the morally gray project will stop. A probable outcome is that the engineer gets fired, the ethics issues don't get escalated, and someone else is hired to continue the project.

Everything is stacked against the engineer. Telling them to fall on their swords for a maybe outcome is neither realistic nor ethical in itself.

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

#103

Post by megablast »

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.

Support Ticket 57: Assigned to: John

Hey, can you change this limit field here, currently it is a 5, can you make it a 9.

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

#104

Post by gutnor »

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…

You ignore the fact that the 99% of the cheat probably has or had a good reason to be there for one reason of another. The actual responsibility is probably multi-layered with the majority of contributor unknowingly participating in something fishy.

I remember that I worked on system that allowed a financial firm to change a account value outside of all the accounting routine and a way to transfer money from a shared account to any random external account. Sounds fishy, but the explanation was reasonable: this was the way to model dividend. Actual dividend money was coming in one account, the payment/reinvestment from another with a reconciliation done later on. This reconciliation was done by that department operational floor from data coming from other departments, with systems upstream and downstream. I may have unknowingly created the final piece of a massive international fraud system, but I have no idea and all the people had a valid business reason and nothing to gain.

Because that's the point, if I knew and I was willing to actually participate in fraud, I would like a cut in it and a serious one as I would literally provide a gun with my real id from a regular shop knowing you will use it for a bank robbery.

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

#105

Post by PhantomGremlin »

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…

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.

The USA already has a very workable solution. It's called the "prisoner's dilemma".

They were never going to get charged for writing that code

Wrong. That's exactly what you threaten them with. Engineers aren't hardened criminals. When faced with the possibility of jail, 99% will instantly sing like canaries.

The problem is of jurisdiction. The engineers are in Germany and no fucking way will Germany extradite them. So the usual threats don't work.

Well, we did catch one moron who decided to travel to the USA for vacation even though he was a big player in the mess.

Edit: I'm presenting the current general situation for the USA. Your idea of bounties is not bad. It has worked spectacularly well in rewarding employees of Swiss Banks. Somewhat ironically, it's something that Germany has done: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-city-find...

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

#107

Post by TwoBit »

ryandrake wrote: post #42
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…

Who was it that asked you to do that? Your mgr? Marketing?

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

#108

Post by bambax »

tehlike wrote: post #61
bambax wrote: post #48

> 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…

I think part of it is proving the malicious intent. You could have a bug that does that, or a commit that says "we have to do it to bypass regulations". I assume the law says different things about malicious intent and unmalicious-yet-still-harmful code.

You have to prove malicious intent to bring criminal charges, but not to decide whether a given car is road-worthy.

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

#109

Post by bambax »

wmil wrote: post #88
bambax wrote: post #48

> 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…

The standards are very tight. If they aren't well defined and tested in a controlled environment it'd be basically impossible for manufacturers to know if their cars will pass or fail.

That's a valid argument in theory. In practice though it should be possible to agree on a set of conditions strict enough to be "fair" and loose enough that the regulator has some wiggle room to adjust the tests as they see fit.

And there could be an appeals process whereas when a car fails it can be tested again, and the tests monitored by a 3rd party, etc.

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

#110

Post by kadavero »

dubyah wrote: post #97
kadavero wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should mention the lobby. The US auto lobby was the reason the US NOx diesel emission requirements are more stringent than EU in the first place, specifically disadvantaging European diesel cars (which are much cleaner overall).

>The US auto lobby was the reason the US NOx diesel emission requirements are more stringent than EU in the first place No, that was a result of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 for the reduction of acid rain. Though it was targeted towards industrial emissions of SO2 & NOx, but stricter regulation for vehicles were an additional effect. >specifically disadvantaging European diesel cars That's a weird argument gi…

>but stricter regulation for vehicles were an additional effect

Surely car manufacturers didn't have a say, which is why US and EU emission standards look like this https://longtailpipe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/us-europ... .

>same standard as gasoline ones

Well duh, let's keep diesel cars to petrol standards so that their benefits don't matter and their disadvantages are prohibitive!

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