Volkswagen and the Era of Cheating Software - The New York Times FOR the past six years, Volkswagen has been advertising a…
Volkswagen and the Era of Cheating Software - The New York Times
FOR the past six years, Volkswagen has been advertising a lie: “top-notch clean diesel” cars — fuel efficient, powerful and compliant with emissions standards for pollutants. It turns out the cars weren’t so clean. They were cheating.
The vehicles used software that cleverly put a lid on emissions during testing, but only then. The rest of the time, the cars spewed up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide emissions. The federal government even paid up to $51 million in tax subsidies to some car owners on the false assumption of environmental friendliness.
In a world where more and more objects are run by software, we need to have better ways to catch such cheaters. As the Volkswagen case demonstrates, a smart object can lie and cheat. It can tell when it’s being tested, and it can beat the test. […]
This isn’t the first instance of a car company caught cheating by using a “defeat device” on emissions tests. In 1998, Ford was fined $7.8 million for using defeat devices that allowed its Econoline vans to reduce emissions to pass testing, and then to exceed pollution limits when driving at highway speeds. The same year, Honda paid $17.1 million in fines for deliberately disabling a “misfire” device that warned about excess emissions. In 1995, General Motors paid $11 million in fines for the “defeat devices” on some of its Cadillac cars, which secretly overrode the emissions control system at times. The largest penalty for defeat devices to date was an $83.4 million fine in 1998 on Caterpillar, Volvo, Renault and other manufacturers.
Computational devices that are vulnerable to cheating are not limited to cars. Consider, for example, voting machines. Just a few months ago, the Virginia State Board of Elections finally decertified the use of a touch-screen voting machine called “AVS WinVote.” It turned out that the password was hard-wired to “admin” — a default password so common that it would be among the first three terms any hacker would try. There were no controls on changes that could be made to the database tallying the votes. If the software fraudulently altered election results, there would be virtually no way of detecting the fraud since everything, including the evidence of the tampering, could be erased.