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from the and-then-we'll-welcome-you-to-obfuscated-code-contests dept.
Secret code is everywhere—in elevators, airplanes, medical devices. By refusing to publish the source code for software, companies make it impossible for third parties to inspect, even when that code has enormous effects on society and policy. Secret code risks security flaws that leave us vulnerable to hacks and data leaks. It can threaten privacy by gathering information about us without our knowledge. It may interfere with equal treatment under law if the government relies on it to determine our eligibility for benefits or whether to put us on a no-fly list. And secret code enables cheaters and hides mistakes, as with Volkswagen: The company admitted recently that it used covert software to cheat emissions tests for 11 million diesel cars spewing smog at 40 times the legal limit.
But as shocking as Volkswagen's fraud may be, it only heralds more of its kind. It's time to address one of the most urgent if overlooked tech transparency issues—secret code in the criminal justice system. Today, closed, proprietary software can put you in prison or even on death row. And in most U.S. jurisdictions you still wouldn't have the right to inspect it. In short, prosecutors have a Volkswagen problem.
Interesting article with implications for Open Source.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2015, @10:04AM
Ok, Volkswagen was the first to get caught. But were they the first? Who did it first and others had to follow suit in order to survive?
It isn't a Volkswagen problem. It is an industry problem and unrealistic emissions goals. It isn't time to destroy car-making companies because the impossible cannot be done. It is time to rethink emissions standards and if they are achievable with reasonable expectation and are they even technically possible.
If the standards ask for perpetual motion machines to be put in all cars, it isn't the car-company's fault that they have to cheat.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Sunday October 18 2015, @12:38PM
I can't speak to European emissions laws, but in the US, it's not a problem to meet emissions laws. Every gasoline-powered car sold does it, and there's no indication they have to resort to tricks.
The problem is that diesel emissions laws are unrealistic. However, there's a couple of schools of thought on this:
1) These laws are unrealistic intentionally, because they don't want anyone to meet them and sell diesel cars in America. Diesel cars are all made by foreign companies; domestic companies only sell diesel *trucks*. And of course the standards are *far* more lax for trucks than for cars. So there's every indication that these laws are designed for protectionism.
2) Everything I've read indicates that it just isn't really possible to burn diesel cleanly with low NOx emissions and also get good fuel economy and performance; it's one or the other. I'm also reading that there's a lot of problems with NOx pollution and smog in European cities because so many passenger cars there are diesel. So maybe relaxing emissions standards *isn't* the answer, and we should just stick with gasoline which doesn't have these problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2015, @01:36PM
I presumed the reader knew this was about diesel, so dropped the "diesel" part.
Some people prefer diesel cars. I do. So anything that hurts diesel car manufacturers hurts my interests. I would like a variety of diesel cars to choose from. The US being a large market can and does affect car companies.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday October 18 2015, @08:03PM
If you can't have a diesel car without creating a lot of smog (compared to a comparable gas engine), then what right do you have to a diesel car? You don't have an absolute right to pollute the air.
(Score: 1) by pipedwho on Monday October 19 2015, @03:10AM
True, the air pollution issue needs to be addressed. But, on the flip side, diesel engines are more fuel efficient (ie. less CO2) than petrol engines. So they are trading off one pollutant for another. Meanwhile, you have 'trucks' (including SUVs that fall under 'truck' classification) pouring out much higher noxious emissions than the a passenger car.
All this is really doing, is pushing the case for hybrid, and eventually fully electric vehicles.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday October 18 2015, @07:17PM
>Everything I've read indicates that it just isn't really possible to burn diesel cleanly with low NOx emissions and also get good fuel economy and performance
That's not protectionism then, is it? Nothing, or at the very least emission requirements don't stop foreign companies from selling gasoline cars in the US.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday October 18 2015, @08:14PM
I guess it can be argued both ways. (If someone sees any errors in my facts, please jump in.)
On the one hand, we do have diesel passenger vehicles here in the US, but they're all big giant pickups. And the US has long had a nasty habit of treating big gas-guzzling passenger vehicles differently than cars, because they're supposedly "work vehicles", when they're plainly not, as proven by all the soccer moms driving them around and people using them to commute to jobs where these vehicles aren't actually used for anything besides transporting a single person sans cargo. So it seems like pickups are exempt from the emissions rules that affect cars, and that can be argued to be protectionist, because American car companies don't make diesel cars while foreign companies (esp. European ones) do.
(We also see this preferential treatment with SUVs and tint laws, where big SUVs can have black-out tint but doing that in your small car will get you a ticket.)
On the other hand, in reality not many of the soccer mom and dumbass commuters actually drive *diesel* pickups (unlike gas pickups and SUVs), so they're probably not affecting our air quality much (unlike semis), so US regulation here could be argued to be mostly fine, and the fact that American cities seem to have lower smog than European cities seems to support this; do we really want to have *more* pollution in our cities? I don't. Diesel vehicles do cost more than comparable gas-powered vehicles; the premium on VWs was $5k for the TDI engine when I was looking at them a few years ago, so that already keeps a lot of buyers away from them in the US, unlike Europe where fuel economy is more important and engine size seems to be taxed heavily (unlike the US where there's no taxes on cars aside from regular sales tax on the overall price). So maybe keeping the emissions standards stringent is the answer, even if that kills the passenger diesel car market entirely, though I think the standards should be toughened on pickups to be fair. It's not like there aren't alternatives: today's gas engines are excellent and have really improved in fuel economy in the last 5-10 years.
(Score: 1) by Rich26189 on Monday October 19 2015, @02:26PM
Well, yes it is protectionism, in a way, for the trucking and rail transportation industries, industries that heavily use/rely on diesel. Adding a large number of private diesel vehicles here in the US would drive up the demand for diesel fuel and thus the cost.
I questions this idea efficiency of diesel vs gasoline, it's true but only for MPG. I think it's more correct to say the 'greater efficiency' is in the quantity of fuel a vehicle can carry. I am not a PetroChemEng but my, admittedly simple, understanding is that it take more raw crude to make a gallon of diesel that to make a gallon of gas. There's only so much energy in a barrel of crude. Cracking it into diesel or gas just converts that energy into others (liquid) forms. If there are any PetroChemEng out there please correct my understanding if it's wrong.