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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: 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.