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>"When the news about Volkswagen broke last Friday, Carder heard from some of the heavy diesel engine manufacturers that were part of the consent decree. >"The

>"When the news about Volkswagen broke last Friday, Carder heard from some of the heavy diesel engine manufacturers that were part of the consent decree. >"They saw what had happened and called to say: 'Good job, you guys,'" Carder said. "Some folks said: 'How did they not learn from our mistakes 15 years ago?'" Neither VW nor these companies made a "mistake", though they all use that term. This was deliberate deceit, fraud, trickery. If there was a mistake it was thinking they could get away with it and come out with more money. Each time they talk about their "mistake" they reveal how deeply attached they are to a culture of denying responsibility.

niels_olson 11y ago
So, what deceits do software makers call "mistakes"?
- Gravityloss 11y ago
  Graphics drivers can detect when a speed test is being run, and degrade the output quality to get a higher frame rate. I don't think anybody called that a mistake, it's just straight cheating. If anything, they've probably seen that and thought it was a great idea! http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-quake-iii http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-q...
  - gambiting 11y ago
    As someone who works in games industry - we have a line to AMD and NVIDIA open all the time. They change their drivers to work with our game just as much as we change our games to work with their drivers. Each driver has thousands of profiles for different games, and that has nothing to do with cheating - it's because no one writes perfect, 100% standard-compliant shaders or other gpu related code. The article you linked is ancient, but this still happens - drivers know that in your specific game there's a problem with the textures so they will automatically reduce the fidelity of texture shaders, or do some other changes. If you changed the name of our game internally, the drivers would no longer pick it up and you would lose 10-20 fps depending on the situation. That's not "cheating".
    - MengerSponge 11y ago
      Optimizing the device's profile for a known input is generally celebrated. Deliberately misrepresenting the device's capabilities to deceive a test is what folks are generally upset about. It's a subtle distinction, but I'm happy to use Justice Stewart's "I know it when I see it" criterion. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/live-memory-test,1241-10.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/live-memory-test,1241-10... http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-android-benchmarks http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-andr...
    - ryandrake 11y ago
      To me, the line between cheating and ensuring good compatibility is drawn when you deceptively "optimize" for particular benchmark measurements at the expense of other qualitative un-measured or difficult-to-measure qualities. This undermines the purpose of the benchmark. There's a huge difference between "Game XYZ uses these inputs and shaders, let's make sure our driver works as well as possible when we see this pattern" and "When we detect the user is running Benchmark ABC, make everything look like shit so we come out with a high benchmark score that we can use in our marketing materials!" I'll admit, however, the line gets fuzzy when the game itself is used as a benchmark.
      - Gravityloss 11y ago
        Come to think of it, with computer proliferation this will permeate everything, and already has. Trying to buy airline or cruise tickets? Some kind of shenanigans are bound to happen. The system is trying to infer if you might be willing to pay a lot. Though, in the old times this haggling was done by real people.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  How about Google hopping on personal wifi networks, slurping up and storing any data they could grab? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-...
  - baldfat 11y ago
    > In 2010, Google acknowledged that its Street View Wi-Fi collection was a mistake. “We screwed up, and I’m not making excuses about it,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at the time. “We do have a lot of internal controls in place, but obviously they didn’t prevent this error from occurring.” That seems pretty upfront. Well you really got that opposite from what I saw. It wasn't slurping any data that was protected behind a wall of privacy that Google climbed over but was public broadcast. I have always tried to let friends know that if they have WiFi they need to have an understanding what they are broadcasting. One time my friend had no passwords on his wifi and his Documents were being shared. I got the last three years of tax records sitting next to me. I did ask want me to look at downloads, videos or pictures. He blushed said no and we put up a password on his wifi and stopped sharing his data.
    - ForHackernews 11y ago
      > That seems pretty upfront. Only in the exact way described by the parent: deceit couched as mistakes. Do you really honestly believe that they "accidentally" implemented a feature to associate with open wifi networks, grab any and all data they could, and store that data in their archive? Google is a big place. One or more people designed that feature, multiple people implemented it, probably dozens of others tested it, and managers signed off on it before it was deployed on their StreetView cars. It's not like "Whoops, someone left out a null check and it accidentally grabbed all your data!"
      - baldfat 11y ago
        It was one programmer that put in the code. Interesting read here but I still buy the one engineer theory. http://allthingsd.com/20120501/google-releases-fuller-fcc-wi-fi-data-report-but-it-actually-makes-google-look-worse/ http://allthingsd.com/20120501/google-releases-fuller-fcc-wi...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
dalke 11y ago
I interpreted their mistake as mistakenly 'thinking they could get away with it and come out with more money', as you said.
a3n 11y ago
If you steal a car when you're young, then become a fine citizen later, then it's common usage to call that a mistake. People understand what's meant.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dlhavema 11y ago
  i don't think we can compare a naive, young and/or peer-pressured juvenile to a multi-million ( billion ? ) dollar company that knows what they are doing.
  - brainfire 11y ago
    "knows what they are doing" I'm not sure that necessarily applies to most large companies.
brudgers 11y ago
The minimum code necessary to pass the test is considered good engineering practice in the software industry. The application of that practice in the case of automobile emissions is an artifact of the lack of professional licensure for software engineers: e.g. in the US a professional structural engineer who took professional responsibility for a similar expediency in the design of a building would be personally liable because professional liability cannot be assigned to fictitious persons. The idea that "Engineer" connotes a person who applies some sort of professional standards to trump the most base of business interests is why Canada is pushing title protection and professional qualification as prerequiste for calling one's self a "software engineer". The meaninglessness of the term "software engineer" and celebrated industry practices are why I am not optimistic about the safety of self-driving cars. Volkswagen presumably can attract as good and ethical a software engineering cadre as anyone in the business. However, my suspicion is that VW allowed this to come out now in order to again pull diesels out of the US market for business reasons. I think it's a bet on low gasoline prices in the short term and fuel efficiency via electric motors in the long term with a little P.T. Barnum the-newspapers-can-write-whatever-they-want-so-long-as-they-spell-my-name-correctly thrown in. This will blow over faster than you can say "I don't care if I pay a nickle more per gallon, I won't fill up there because of Deepwater Horizon". It's not like Martin Winterkom shot an elephant or anything.
- mc32 11y ago
  There is no way, except for downright mad, that winterkorn would put the fate of his company in jeopardy just to pull out diesels from a market. If they had wanted to pull diesels out, they could have said, they don't sell well, people are asking for electrics instead. That's very unlikely speculation without sound basis. With regard to engineering titling, this was done in Germany, I don't think any more rigidity would have had an effect on countering fraud. We have fraudulent physicians -having the distinction doesn't prevent that.
  - brudgers 11y ago
    1. US engineering licensing is more than title protection, it is backed by education, testing, and work experience requirements. 2. Suzuki closed the deal to buy out Volkswagen's stake amid claims that Volkswagen was withholding information that effected their partnership in regard to fuel efficient technology, immediately [for some definition of "immediately"] before the revelations in regard to the TDD practices for TDI software: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34275917 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34275917 There's a matryoshka of foundations and policy groups behind the research funding for the project that uncovered the software design. VW has been in and out of the US diesel car market with every change in the price of gasoline since the first diesel Rabbits in the 1970's when famously, they had to remove the assertion that diesel fuel was less expensive than gasoline from their television commercials. This way, Volkswagen Passenger Cars [a wholly owned subsidiary of Volkswagen Group] does not have to negotiate with its US car dealers regarding a lineup change that removes high profit options and models that bring customers onto the lot who often drive off with some other VW instead of a TDI. If history is a guide, with gasoline down around $2.00/gallon it won't be long until Americans lose most of their rather limited interest in diesels. The worst case fine of $16 billion is highly unlikely and even were such a fine politically feasible in the US it almost certainly wouldn't send Volkswagen AG under. The timing is no more likely to be accidental than the way in which the software is configured. The study was completed in 2013.
rdancer 11y ago
> mistake [...] thinking they could get away with it and come out with more money Oh, you're funny!
magicalist 11y ago
> If there was a mistake it was thinking they could get away with it and come out with more money Not to get in the way of someone getting to make an angry comment, but considering that the article is referring to companies similarly trying to fraudulently pass EPA tests and being punished for it, it's pretty obvious that's exactly what they're referring to.

niels_olson 11y ago

So, what deceits do software makers call "mistakes"?

Gravityloss 11y ago
Graphics drivers can detect when a speed test is being run, and degrade the output quality to get a higher frame rate. I don't think anybody called that a mistake, it's just straight cheating. If anything, they've probably seen that and thought it was a great idea! http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-quake-iii http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-q...
- gambiting 11y ago
  As someone who works in games industry - we have a line to AMD and NVIDIA open all the time. They change their drivers to work with our game just as much as we change our games to work with their drivers. Each driver has thousands of profiles for different games, and that has nothing to do with cheating - it's because no one writes perfect, 100% standard-compliant shaders or other gpu related code. The article you linked is ancient, but this still happens - drivers know that in your specific game there's a problem with the textures so they will automatically reduce the fidelity of texture shaders, or do some other changes. If you changed the name of our game internally, the drivers would no longer pick it up and you would lose 10-20 fps depending on the situation. That's not "cheating".
  - MengerSponge 11y ago
    Optimizing the device's profile for a known input is generally celebrated. Deliberately misrepresenting the device's capabilities to deceive a test is what folks are generally upset about. It's a subtle distinction, but I'm happy to use Justice Stewart's "I know it when I see it" criterion. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/live-memory-test,1241-10.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/live-memory-test,1241-10... http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-android-benchmarks http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-andr...
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    To me, the line between cheating and ensuring good compatibility is drawn when you deceptively "optimize" for particular benchmark measurements at the expense of other qualitative un-measured or difficult-to-measure qualities. This undermines the purpose of the benchmark. There's a huge difference between "Game XYZ uses these inputs and shaders, let's make sure our driver works as well as possible when we see this pattern" and "When we detect the user is running Benchmark ABC, make everything look like shit so we come out with a high benchmark score that we can use in our marketing materials!" I'll admit, however, the line gets fuzzy when the game itself is used as a benchmark.
    - Gravityloss 11y ago
      Come to think of it, with computer proliferation this will permeate everything, and already has. Trying to buy airline or cruise tickets? Some kind of shenanigans are bound to happen. The system is trying to infer if you might be willing to pay a lot. Though, in the old times this haggling was done by real people.
ForHackernews 11y ago
How about Google hopping on personal wifi networks, slurping up and storing any data they could grab? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-...
- baldfat 11y ago
  > In 2010, Google acknowledged that its Street View Wi-Fi collection was a mistake. “We screwed up, and I’m not making excuses about it,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at the time. “We do have a lot of internal controls in place, but obviously they didn’t prevent this error from occurring.” That seems pretty upfront. Well you really got that opposite from what I saw. It wasn't slurping any data that was protected behind a wall of privacy that Google climbed over but was public broadcast. I have always tried to let friends know that if they have WiFi they need to have an understanding what they are broadcasting. One time my friend had no passwords on his wifi and his Documents were being shared. I got the last three years of tax records sitting next to me. I did ask want me to look at downloads, videos or pictures. He blushed said no and we put up a password on his wifi and stopped sharing his data.
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    > That seems pretty upfront. Only in the exact way described by the parent: deceit couched as mistakes. Do you really honestly believe that they "accidentally" implemented a feature to associate with open wifi networks, grab any and all data they could, and store that data in their archive? Google is a big place. One or more people designed that feature, multiple people implemented it, probably dozens of others tested it, and managers signed off on it before it was deployed on their StreetView cars. It's not like "Whoops, someone left out a null check and it accidentally grabbed all your data!"
    - baldfat 11y ago
      It was one programmer that put in the code. Interesting read here but I still buy the one engineer theory. http://allthingsd.com/20120501/google-releases-fuller-fcc-wi-fi-data-report-but-it-actually-makes-google-look-worse/ http://allthingsd.com/20120501/google-releases-fuller-fcc-wi...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

dalke 11y ago

I interpreted their mistake as mistakenly 'thinking they could get away with it and come out with more money', as you said.

a3n 11y ago

If you steal a car when you're young, then become a fine citizen later, then it's common usage to call that a mistake. People understand what's meant.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dlhavema 11y ago
i don't think we can compare a naive, young and/or peer-pressured juvenile to a multi-million ( billion ? ) dollar company that knows what they are doing.
- brainfire 11y ago
  "knows what they are doing" I'm not sure that necessarily applies to most large companies.

brudgers 11y ago

The minimum code necessary to pass the test is considered good engineering practice in the software industry. The application of that practice in the case of automobile emissions is an artifact of the lack of professional licensure for software engineers: e.g. in the US a professional structural engineer who took professional responsibility for a similar expediency in the design of a building would be personally liable because professional liability cannot be assigned to fictitious persons. The idea that "Engineer" connotes a person who applies some sort of professional standards to trump the most base of business interests is why Canada is pushing title protection and professional qualification as prerequiste for calling one's self a "software engineer". The meaninglessness of the term "software engineer" and celebrated industry practices are why I am not optimistic about the safety of self-driving cars. Volkswagen presumably can attract as good and ethical a software engineering cadre as anyone in the business. However, my suspicion is that VW allowed this to come out now in order to again pull diesels out of the US market for business reasons. I think it's a bet on low gasoline prices in the short term and fuel efficiency via electric motors in the long term with a little P.T. Barnum the-newspapers-can-write-whatever-they-want-so-long-as-they-spell-my-name-correctly thrown in. This will blow over faster than you can say "I don't care if I pay a nickle more per gallon, I won't fill up there because of Deepwater Horizon". It's not like Martin Winterkom shot an elephant or anything.

mc32 11y ago
There is no way, except for downright mad, that winterkorn would put the fate of his company in jeopardy just to pull out diesels from a market. If they had wanted to pull diesels out, they could have said, they don't sell well, people are asking for electrics instead. That's very unlikely speculation without sound basis. With regard to engineering titling, this was done in Germany, I don't think any more rigidity would have had an effect on countering fraud. We have fraudulent physicians -having the distinction doesn't prevent that.
- brudgers 11y ago
  1. US engineering licensing is more than title protection, it is backed by education, testing, and work experience requirements. 2. Suzuki closed the deal to buy out Volkswagen's stake amid claims that Volkswagen was withholding information that effected their partnership in regard to fuel efficient technology, immediately [for some definition of "immediately"] before the revelations in regard to the TDD practices for TDI software: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34275917 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34275917 There's a matryoshka of foundations and policy groups behind the research funding for the project that uncovered the software design. VW has been in and out of the US diesel car market with every change in the price of gasoline since the first diesel Rabbits in the 1970's when famously, they had to remove the assertion that diesel fuel was less expensive than gasoline from their television commercials. This way, Volkswagen Passenger Cars [a wholly owned subsidiary of Volkswagen Group] does not have to negotiate with its US car dealers regarding a lineup change that removes high profit options and models that bring customers onto the lot who often drive off with some other VW instead of a TDI. If history is a guide, with gasoline down around $2.00/gallon it won't be long until Americans lose most of their rather limited interest in diesels. The worst case fine of $16 billion is highly unlikely and even were such a fine politically feasible in the US it almost certainly wouldn't send Volkswagen AG under. The timing is no more likely to be accidental than the way in which the software is configured. The study was completed in 2013.

rdancer 11y ago

> mistake [...] thinking they could get away with it and come out with more money Oh, you're funny!

magicalist 11y ago

> If there was a mistake it was thinking they could get away with it and come out with more money Not to get in the way of someone getting to make an angry comment, but considering that the article is referring to companies similarly trying to fraudulently pass EPA tests and being punished for it, it's pretty obvious that's exactly what they're referring to.