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VW

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Re: VW

#21

Post by Silhouette »

Walkman wrote: post #9

Sometimes I would not mind if developing software would need a license, even if I'm speaking against myself ATM.

The trouble with licensing a profession like software development is that no-one really knows how to do it very well yet. It's far too young and diverse an industry to have that level of experience and consensus.

Lacking more objective standards, the most likely result of attempting to regulate at this stage seems to be regulators who talk a good talk -- such as the author of this article. Those people will not necessarily be the ones with either the best ideas currently available for building good software or the most useful experience and/or data to advance the state of the art in the future.

I sometimes work on software that really does have to behave properly because significant failures in production really could be very damaging. The idea that some of the careful, successful processes used on some of those projects might be required by regulation/legislation to give way to the kind of junk that a lot of consultants peddle is quite scary.

Re: VW

#22

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mledu wrote: post #20

What is stopping a company from hiring a contractor to code the illegal parts to thereby insulate them from responsibility? This happens with oil and gas disasters as discussed on John Oliver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYusNNldesc

Because many contractors are too smart to do that kind of dirty work. Contractors are liable for harm they cause. I've refused contracting jobs because of liability.

Re: VW

#23

Post by gaius »

Silhouette wrote: post #21
Walkman wrote: post #9

Sometimes I would not mind if developing software would need a license, even if I'm speaking against myself ATM.

The trouble with licensing a profession like software development is that no-one really knows how to do it very well yet. It's far too young and diverse an industry to have that level of experience and consensus. Lacking more objective standards, the most likely result of attempting to regulate at this stage seems to be regulators who talk a good talk -- such as the author of this article. Those people will not neces…

The trouble with licensing a profession like software development is that no-one really knows how to do it very well yet. It's far too young and diverse an industry to have that level of experience and consensus.

Only artificially so. Modern software development is mainly about re-inventing wheels from the 1970s with slightly different syntax and more bugs in. If we had settled on a language - doesn't matter what, Ada, ML, C, Lisp, FORTRAN - they're all Turing-complete after all - and gotten on with y'know actually building things, software engineering would be a mature discipline by now. Instead all the accumulated experience gets chucked out the window everytime fashion changes.

Re: VW

#25

Post by sebastianavina »

radiorental wrote: post #18
weinzierl wrote: post #4

I suppose you could make the argument that these programmers did not know what they were doing. That they were simply given some specs, and they implemented those specs, and didn't know that they were accomplices in a case of massive fraud. I think that argument is even more asinine than Michael Horn's. They knew. And if they didn't know, they should have known. They had a responsibility to know. I agree with all the…

"There are all kinds of reasons why a car has to behave differently while on a dynamometer and there are all kinds of special code branches that are executed only during test. For the programmers it probably was just another special case among many." I think the point is that someone deliberately did this and they had their hands in the code. Yes, there are variants of the tune-able parameters for various regions and…

remember, someone wrote the emissions defeatos, AND maintained the code for seven years until now.

Re: VW

#26

Post by rycfan »

"The public has been made aware that programmers can be culprits. This will make it more likely that the next time something goes wrong -- a plane crash, a fire, a flood -- that the public will jump to the conclusion that some programmer caused it. Yes, this is a stretch; but it wasn't so long ago that the concept of programmer implication in disasters was non-existent."

"...it wasn't so long ago..." What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 -- This has been a thing since at least 1985 and probably far longer.

Re: VW

#27

Post by jsprogrammer »

scintill76 wrote: post #16
dmd wrote: post #5

It is absolutely plausible that the programmers had no idea. From the excellent Metafilter thread: > i mean, how do the product managers rationalize this feature to their colleagues? what to they write in the spec that isn't all-out incriminating? Modularity Department 1: Req 1: Software should enable emissions controls upon receipt of control signal A. Req 2: Software should disable emissions controls upon receipt o…

Still seems kind of fishy, at least without some stated reason why it needs to know it's being tested.

The offending code could be obfuscated through all manner of requirements documents.

Without being able to see the actual code and requirement documents, all claims about them are pure, idle speculation.

Re: VW

#28

Post by mpclark »

sebastianavina wrote: post #25
radiorental wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are all kinds of reasons why a car has to behave differently while on a dynamometer and there are all kinds of special code branches that are executed only during test. For the programmers it probably was just another special case among many." I think the point is that someone deliberately did this and they had their hands in the code. Yes, there are variants of the tune-able parameters for various regions and…

remember, someone wrote the emissions defeatos, AND maintained the code for seven years until now.

It may not have been actual code. Perhaps only values in a look-up table? Perhaps even values in an area of a multi-dimensional array that was never expected to be used.

Re: VW

#29

Post by yason »

A wise future programmer might want to ensure that the software he writes acts mostly like science――it can be used for good and it can be used for bad but isn't inherently neither――and will thus force outsourcing decisions about the final product to someone else.

Maybe it's ok in the Volkswagen software to have a knob that controls the amount of NOX in the exhaust, for testing purposes and for adapting the car to various markets. Maybe it's ok for the software to provide heuristics for the driving conditions (highway, city, dynamometer) for some future telemetry application. But the wise future programmer does realize it needs to be someone else than himself who makes the decision to configure the system to couple those two things together, and make the car reduce pollution only when dynamometer mode is active.

Good old shifting of blame works for the bad guys as well as the good guys. It may not be pretty but it works well enough if only you're willing to draw the line of responsibility somewhere for yourself.

Re: VW

#30

Post by iofj »

rycfan wrote: post #26

"The public has been made aware that programmers can be culprits. This will make it more likely that the next time something goes wrong -- a plane crash, a fire, a flood -- that the public will jump to the conclusion that some programmer caused it. Yes, this is a stretch; but it wasn't so long ago that the concept of programmer implication in disasters was non-existent." "...it wasn't so long ago..." What? https://en…

Exactly. There is an existing legal and moral framework for precisely these sorts of situations. It seems to work very well for the emissions scandal too, so why mess with it.

Even if the programmer was fully aware of what they were doing, VW would still be the only party that's legally and morally responsible for this.

(And may God help whoever made the Therac-25 mistake, just imagine making a bug like that)

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