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Volkswagen’s Diesel Fraud Makes Critic of Secret Code a Prophet

474 points by nkurz 11y ago

snowwrestler 11y ago
I think that the code that operates dangerous machines should be publicly available. I think that applying the DMCA to keep it hidden is a bad application of that law. The DMCA was intended to protect creative works like movies or songs, where the whole value is in the encoded file. Code that runs a car is the opposite: it is worthless by itself. Keeping it hidden from the public just enables bad behavior, like Toyota's terrible code or VW's deception.
- leohutson 11y ago
  Agreed. The predictable retort that there is no need for a public review of source code, "because indecipherable/underhanded code can still be written" is nonsense. If the code is so poorly written and tested that it is possible to be underhanded without the risk of anyone noticing, that code should not be on the road! We wouldn't be happy if the cars wiring and hydraulic systems were a fragile spaghetti mess that was impossible to inspect, why should we allow it for embedded software?
  - adrianN 11y ago
    The submissions to the underhanded C contest don't look very poorly written to me.
- x5n1 11y ago
  Yes but it gives it to competitors as well, which is a problem.
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    Before cars had software in them, competitors could learn everything by just buying a car, taking it apart, and measuring all the pieces. Yet that was the golden age of the auto industry, with no lack of competition and market growth. So I think it's not a problem for competitors to gain access.
  - leohutson 11y ago
    Why? Competitors are the best placed entities, in terms of both resources and motivation, to perform a review. Also, do you want officials to have to review and test one hundred different implementations of a safety critical piece of code, or would you prefer an evolution to a single standard shared code base, shared between manufacturers, for which all testing efforts are directed at new patches?
  - phire 11y ago
    But your competitors can't really steal it, because they are subject to the same rules and have to make their code available too. So any theft of code will be apparent. Manufactures will probably check each others code to make sure none of their own code has been stolen and file lawsuits if it has.
    - ernsheong 11y ago
      There's still China you know. They don't play by the rules and copy everything relentlessly.
- azurezyq 11y ago
  This is too vague to judge. Does the AI code in self driving car apply? Or the control software in a drone? And in the future, ECU may not be a standalone device any more.
  - phire 11y ago
    Yes. Any code which has a safety responsibility should have it's code publicly available. You could divide the cars systems up into safety critical and non-safety critical components, like there is no reason why the software running the car's media center needs to publicly available, but there should be a well defined interface between the media center and safety critical code (or no interface at all)
    - floor__ 11y ago
      So you want software regulations on how code ought to be done? Forcing the separation of components based on safety... what even warrants a component to fall under these regulations. Such a dangerous slope. Just think of a time when regulation is at its peak and people want to innovate but can't due to law restrictions / regulations. Being trapped by standards that are produced by people who know nothing about software.
- rl3 11y ago
  Not to mention that as far as the physical portion of the car is concerned, competing manufacturers can simply buy the car and tear it apart. That said, there's probably a strong argument for protecting the source behind things like integrated entertainment/navigation systems, provided they're sufficiently decoupled from the car's critical systems. A really slick UI is a competitive advantage.
  - firebones 11y ago
    Yeah, but what are you going to gain from looking at the source when you can see the screens and output directly? Is there really that much innovation in entertainment systems that can't be discerned from the UX itself, and which requires deep analysis of the code? The only way that makes sense is if the code itself gets cloned, but that's a minimal development-time savings in an otherwise huge release of software + the car itself. DMCA in these cases seems to be a protection against third-party aftermarket for upgrades, and protection against remote hacking rather than protection of IP for competitive purposes.
    - rl3 11y ago
      Admittedly you're right; there's little to gain competitively from source access there. However, it wouldn't stop car companies from screaming bloody murder if they were required to disclose the source for those components—let alone the rest of the vehicle. I imagine it would also create a licensing nightmare since navigation and entertainment components often utilize licensed, closed source, third party software. Much more so than the core functions of a vehicle (e.g. engine, steering, braking). If anything, affording manufacturers the right to keep non-critical vehicle systems closed source would further the goal of opening up the critical portions. Also, DMCA as a means of protection against remote hacking is tantamount to security through obscurity—but worse. While public source code access isn't some magic solution to security, it seems likely that it would vastly improve automotive security via allowing security researchers to do their far job more efficiently.
      - firebones 11y ago
- knorby 11y ago
  > Code that runs a car is the opposite: it is worthless by itself What about for self-driving/automation features? There is a strong argument that such code especially should be available for scrutiny, but it is far from worthless as a standalone.
- floor__ 11y ago
  The problem with making it public is it would start this process of regulation. Then it gives way for these regulations to be used in such a way that would greatly restrict software creativity and growth.
tomphoolery 11y ago
The amount of logic that went into this program just so Volkswagen wouldn't have to lessen their emissions seems...illogical. Did it really cost less to build, QA and deploy this software (and keep it under wraps for this long) than it would have to just fix the damn engines?!
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Looking at it holistically, it seems pretty obvious that something like this would happen eventually. Look at the history. There have always been concerted efforts to game the standards as much as possible. In Europe where the standards are laxer there have been lots of dirty tricks employed for a long time. For example, you use a special test car for the emissions testing. One that has an engine lubricated by extraordinarily expensive, specialized lubricants. One that uses over inflated, slick tires. And so on. Taking every inch possible. Transitioning from that sort of behavior of playing chicken with the standards to outright subverting them is not nearly as drastic a change in behavior as going from purely lawfully abiding by the strict letter of the standards to deciding to smash them to pieces the next day. Not to mention that the fact that automakers have been gaming the system by inches for so long and getting away with it almost certainly led to a widespread belief that automakers could get away with much, much more, as well as perhaps taking the standards bodies less seriously. Once they began down that road, they probably didn't realize how severely the actual emissions would differ from the "fooling the test" mode to normal driving mode. And as they tuned the performance of the vehicle the divergence would simply grow to the limit of the system, which turned out to be enormous (up to 40x). I highly doubt that anyone at any stage was fully aware, until perhaps very late in the process, that the divergence was so large. But by then they were committed. Many poor decisions often result from such incremental processes.
  - hvidgaard 11y ago
    When they test the efficiency of new cars, it's fairly obvious that it serves only as a comparison between different cars, and it does not translate to real world experience. I really wish that companies was required to perform the tests with a car only as it is sold to the customers.
gaius 11y ago
I certainly hope Google will open-source their self-driving car code before it is let loose on the public roads.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  That wouldn't matter. We don't know how to inspect a trained deep neural net. No one knows how the car drives.
  - davmre 11y ago
    A trained network should be considered compiled code. It's almost literally a circuit wiring diagram, the lowest level of all code representations. Arguably the "source" in this case is the dataset used to train the model, along with the learning algorithm. If the data are released, so that you can inspect them and replicate the network weights yourself with an off-the-shelf learner, that's a reasonably good sign that nothing nefarious is going on inside the system. (though not strictly a guarantee: you could imagine someone searching very hard to find an innocuous-looking training set that somehow encodes malicious behavior)
  - argonaut 11y ago
    We have no indication (and I seriously doubt) that Google's self driving system is just a deep neural net. There are probably neural net components, especially in object recognition / tracking, but only as a component in a larger system.
danso 11y ago
I have mixed feelings about this. I mean, yeah, open source would definitely alleviate this issue. I don't know enough about the state of car industry software (if Honda is par for course...I'm guessing, based on my new car...not that great?) but I imagine there would be unintended consequences that make OSS a difficult pill to swallow for carmakers. But sure, if it's feasible, make them do it. ...But my objection is that there seems to be many other ways that this problem could be solved...For example, perhaps the certification process should be slightly more rigorous than "self certification"? Obviously, testing is cumbersome if the EPA can only test "10 to 15 percent" of new cars...on the other hand, it sounds like WVU engineers were able to discover it accidentally without touching the software...which is how a lot of effective engineering testing manages to be done despite black box systems. Yeah, making software transparent is almost always a good thing...but if the test has the kind of predictable characteristics such that programmers can seemingly hard code the parameters...Is it really easier to move an entire industry to the open source paradigm than to design a more robust test? And not to throw too much pity on the regulators...but they were dealing with an exceptionally committed adversary. It's horrible how GM's culture allowed the ignition switch defect [1] to go unrecalled until a dozen people died in such senseless ways...but the ignition switch defect was a result of well-intended, if ultimately incorrect tradeoffs in the engineering process. And the deaths were far enough apart, and their cause not certain enough, for good-hearted engineers to have a "well, someone above my pay grade is dealing with this" mentality. But VW's situation...it's hard to imagine how the bad code came about without active intent by everyone who touched and tested that code. It's one thing for a huge company to have the kind of bureaucratic stagnancy that leads to tragic inaction...it's something else for them to commit to breaking the law in such an obvious way. [1] http://www.npr.org/2014/03/31/297312252/the-long-road-to-gms-ignition-switch-recall http://www.npr.org/2014/03/31/297312252/the-long-road-to-gms... edit: It really just seems the OP is throwing a bunch of assertions together, with software being the most mysterious and therefore the most obvious scapegoat. The advocate/technologist most prominently featured doesn't make cogent arguments (though maybe he was misquoted?). The following quote from Mr. Moglen is so nonsensical that it could only make sense to people whose understanding of computers seems very limited: > “Software is in everything,” he said, citing airplanes, medical devices and cars, much of it proprietary and thus invisible. “We shouldn’t use it for purposes that could conceivably cause harm, like running personal computers, let alone should we use it for things like anti-lock brakes or throttle control in automobiles.” Huh? If software shouldn't be allowed to run personal computers, because PCs can cause harm...then...huh?
credo 11y ago
I think the Volkswagen episode shows that we need better emission testing mechanisms. Demanding that all code be open-source unfairly targets the software industry (companies that sell software products for money). Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public ? If all software code must be publicly available, why not demand that Coca Cola also make their formula and their entire manufacturing process public ? Why not insist that no product must have any proprietary/secret information about how the product was created ? Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. I think we need a better emission testing system for testing emissions, not a government review of software code. IMO asking for free software code is an ideological demand that is better promoted through the free market. Free software ideologues should refuse to buy products that have proprietary components, but all of us should only ask that the government fix its emission testing process.
- lemming 11y ago
  Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public? That's a great question - why not? For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, and by meddling with search results (which they already do to try to personalise my results) they could make or break companies or politicians by presenting one-sided or even false material. That's a lot of power - why shouldn't we know how it works to make sure they're not abusing it?
  - sloanesturz 11y ago
    Maybe because thousands of people have spent millions of hours making the best search engine in the world and they should be rewarded for their work by making money off of it instead of giving it away for free?
    - damoe 11y ago
      They have been rewarded for their work. Perhaps there should be limits on these rewards?
      - 11y ago
silverpikezero 11y ago
This would be a good time to point out that a similar auto software story found its way to HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643204 Once Toyota's ECU code was reviewed by domain experts, they found extraordinary lapses in basic software quality practices. This and the VW fiasco clearly show that hiding ECU code is the wrong way to go. We can directly measure the negative consequences, and these are only 2 such incidents discovered recently. Who knows how many more issues are still hiding. We won't really know how at risk we are unless there is some kind of 3rd party review process, required by law. Clearly, the auto industry will prioritize profits and liability over actual quality, in much the same way that banks will never voluntarily limit their risk at the sacrifice of profits. Self-regulation is not working.
- loosescrews 11y ago
  External audits are already required for finances. Safety critical systems are even more important and should be subject to even more scrutiny as a result.
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    Absolutely. But finances are pretty standardized, software is vastly more complex. Audits are a good idea, but it's an incredibly hard problem.
    - tluyben2 11y ago
      Maybe parent meant the software in finances, because that also requires external audits to some extend.
    - DrJokepu 11y ago
      I think a better approach would be requiring that developers (and their managers and testers etc.) working on software that could kill or injure people if it malfunctioned have some sort of a professional license, that would be granted and revoked similarly to how medical and engineering licenses are granted and revoked.
seibelj 11y ago
My company, like most companies, relies on an enormous amount of open source code in order to construct a closed source product. We have also contributed to open source, and have plans to contribute more. There are certain things that help everyone without jeopardizing our business, and other things that are too valuable to share. We cannot force a company to open source code without an extraordinarily good reason. I believe in open source and support it, but at the application level it is a trickier issue.
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  > We cannot force a company to open source code without an extraordinarily good reason. I believe in open source and support it, but at the application level it is a trickier issue. The fact that human lives depend on the correct functioning of the code is an extraordinarily good reason. IMO, any code that can affect driving safety should be required to be released (note: this does not mean that the companies must relenquish any copyright claims, just that the code has to be publicly available for inspection). Right now this is hard to do because all the auto manufacturers like to have everything connected, so the result of this would be that everything including the in-vehicle entertainment system would have to be open-sourced. But that's the point - such a requirement would overnight force the manufacturers to implement a proper seperation between critical software and non-critical, so that they could keep the non-critical stuff closed.
venomsnake 11y ago
Really? Can't I hack into the build chain and inject code while building. The code will pure and clean like a ice block for sculpting.
ekianjo 11y ago
No mention of RMS as an earlier prophet ?
- oska 11y ago
  Eben Moglen has had a long history with the Free Software Foundation. He co-drafted version 3 of the GPL and still serves as their legal counsel. It's not necessary to mention RMS every time other leaders of the Free Software movement make a comment on something, unless it's something specific RMS has said on the subject.
nice1 11y ago
When I read the title I thought the article would be about Richard Stallman. I appreciate prof. Moglen's contributions, but not seeing RMS mentioned is surprising.
s0rce 11y ago
I'm curious how other companies did not know about this. Did engineers at GM/Chevy not inspect the VW product and figure out that it was cheating or even suspect that their competitor couldn't have some sort of magic engineering snake oil to pass emissions.
- etep 11y ago
  Great question. I've seen companies with entire teams dedicated to dissecting the performance claims of the competition, and then running their own tests to verify and/or debunk the same. Keeps everyone honest, and it prods along the in-house engineering effort. Why didn't the other automakers see this?
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    Maybe other car companies don't want to know because VW is not the only guilty company? What are the odds that only one car company cheated on only one car model?
vetler 11y ago
Somewhere, this software sits in a source code repository. Someone planned it, wrote it, reviewed it and approved it. Where are these people, and why are they not speaking up? Why have there not been any whistleblowing on this, it's huge?!
- joelthelion 11y ago
  > Why have there not been any whistleblowing on this, it's huge?! If whistleblowers were treated as the heroes they are instead of traitors, that might inspire other people to do the same...
- pt3530 11y ago
  What I have seen missing from most reports is that VW does not make the ECUs. Consumer reports has reported[1] that Bosch was the company that produced these ECU. So Bosch should have the repository and should have a request from VW to implement this particular code. I wonder if Bosch will be forced to throw VW under the bus. [http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/volkswagen-emissions-cheat-exploited-test-mode.htm http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/volkswagen-emissions...]
  - seren 11y ago
    If this is provided by a third-parties, there is a requirement written somewhere for the supplier to have two different modes of operation, one for test and one for road. This is likely redacted to be innocent sounding, but there is definitely a DOORS history that would give the date and the name of the people who have written the requirements. However there might be some good reason to have a test mode, for engineering tests, for example. The culprit would be the one who have decided to ship it and activate in production.
    - cakes 11y ago
      This is definitely a question I have especially since in my experience sometimes you had trade-offs due to other restrictions so every functional item needed to have value and new functionality may require removing/changing/disabling other functionality.
LVB 11y ago
I understand and sympathize with this point of view, but I have no idea how it would work out practically. Software patents are rightly criticized and I don't think they should be the avenue to recapture investment. But if you also remove trade secrets, the dynamics behind expensive R&D would certainly be a lot different. I used to work for a company that produced diesel engine. Trying to pass ever stringent emissions meant massive capital investment and millions of dollars in research and testing. The "secret sauce" ends up being a few thousand lines of code and lots of constants. It is literally the make-or-break factor in whether a manufacturer can sell a product or not. If all results had to be immediately shared, what happens to the competitive zeal? My most optimistic perspective is that critical pieces of software just become common, with everyone latching onto the best option available. There is still plenty of room to differentiate, especially in something like a car, and that the sharing would be just generally beneficial. But will the real breakthroughs still occur if there isn't the potential to be substantially better (and substantially rewarded) at some fundamental factor, like fuel efficiency?
- mahyarm 11y ago
  I'm surprised such a small amount of code hasn't been reversed engineered and the constants copied for millions of dollars of profit.
- IshKebab 11y ago
  Those magical constants would likely be specific to the engine though. I also think you're overstating how importnat these trade secrets are. If VW really had magical algorithms to reduce emmission they wouldn't have had to cheat.
- alkonaut 11y ago
  Hopefully any system of "code inspection" could be done by authorities, and not require the code to be public. As an example: I'm not sure, but I believe the Nevada Gaming Control Board inspects the source code of gambling machines in Las Vegas casinos. This doesn't mean the casinos can't have secrets in the source code, it just means that the authority sees all the secrets. I do think however that "code inspection" for engine control units is a dead end. Writing underhanded code that appears to do X but instead does Y is so easy. (See e.g.http://www.underhanded-c.org/ http://www.underhanded-c.org/). Inspecting a 100k C-program for illegal behaviour won't be doable until the next years model is out, at which point it's time to start again. The solution is to treat the code as a black box, and just test it as a black by casting a wide net. The problem is the reliance on simple lab tests that are easily fooled.
marcosscriven 11y ago
In the article, they say the software detected the 'speed' of the vehicle among other things. I always thought the speed was simply calculated as a function of the wheel turning rate - unless the article really means 'acceleration', and there's such sensors in the car?
- tajen 11y ago
  When the trajectory assistance detects that the front wheel spins at 60mph whereas the back wheels are fixed, of course the code puts itself in a special condition. Same goes if the wheel meets no resistance to acceleration. It's either surfing on butter or in a garage.
  - marcosscriven 11y ago
    Interesting - didn't know a) that cars measured torque, or b) speed of the unpowered wheels.
    - fianno 11y ago
      For the likes of ABS to work the car needs to know the speed of all wheels.
- folli 11y ago
  Maybe GPS or whether the rear (non-powered) wheels are spinning.
dragony4 11y ago
You really believe it was only VW doing this and not other companies? And it was miraculously discovered and not part of automotive war?
- JanneVee 11y ago
  The Swedish transport agency found that Volvo, BMW and VW had ten times as much nitrous oxide in roadtest than labtests. So it might be automotive war.
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on_ 11y ago
Does external code review even matter? Leaving aside the difficulties of fighting with lobbyists, entrenched companies, unions, IP risk and financial obligations, (among many other points of friction) what is the upside? OTA and continuous integration will only improve, and likely at a logarithmic pace typical to other technological advancements. What if you during your project you needed every line of code reviewed before it was deployed (you probably do), but then a thrid party has to review it before you can ship it? This would KILL turn around time. Entire teams are devoted to writing and reviewing this software at every company, and each continuous update. These updates can be rolled out daily, weekly or monthly. It probably takes internal testing and internal reviewing to push code. This is non-trivial and scales with the complexity of the design. Further, as difficult as internal reviews and testing may be, it can still be incorrect; even when the reviewers have intimate knowledge of the entire codebase and the granular changes, source-code diffs, and commented commit messages. How many people do you reckon it would take to independently review every line of code in production? At what level of inspection would you be able to achieve a confidence level >90% that the code did what the developers allege in a safe and sane manner? Open source works because people can contribute code, fork-code and use the code they write and fork. Without these incentives a decentralized community would be unlikely to contribute, review and maintain proprietary code as they would be disincentivised from doing so as the IP would be protected. The government or the auto-companies would do the reviews, which outside of the massive cost (passed on to consumers) I will leave you to work out the issues there. Oh thanks for this grim view, it is fairly accurate, I disagree with X but on balance maybe it is more true than false, what is the solution? We open source the testing and make that public, and we don't need the actual code to do this. Simple heuristics are developed for whatever we need to optimize for. * Safety works this way and is done really well, we smash some cars up, run some stress tests and qualify them. * Manufacturers are required to publicly announce when they have pushed an update and the specific systems changed like a longer commit message with details of the system and changes. * Third party tests are continuously upgraded for whatever the battery demanded by the market is. This will create a market opportunity for someone to create value. They will provide data and can sell it, distribute it or publish it. People will be incentivised to write tests because they use vehicles and companies will want to be auto-trends verified car of the year. If we accept that it will be almost impossible to convince automakers to give up their IP and that the code will regulalrly change making review prohibitivle expensive, this seems like the only option. Create in depth testing for emissions, safety, cruise control, privacy, data transmission ETC and have that be governed as open source projects. Open up bug bounties (either auto-trader/magazines/interested companies sponsor this or automakers are incentivized to foot this bill). By bug bounty, I mean more of audting the car and requirements, or if the companies allowed specific features to have code reviewed like the Jeep hacking experiment. This will happen anyway because people don't like their credit card data to be stolen, and they don't like getting caught cheating on ashley madison, but what they really don't like? Having their car remotely turned off, remotely piloted using self-driving technology to the criminals dark layer or have their car otherwise destroyed or used for crimes. Review is coming, maybe even endorsed by automakers with some of their code provided, but we can't expect the government to do a great job reviewing the code, so let's just have an open-source testing model and develop better tests for things we care about.
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Angostura 11y ago
Hopefully, the Volkswagen events may make people think rather more about what is going on in their voting machines.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  I am up-voting you so hard right now. I really, really want it to be true. But I doubt that anyone even remotely likely to connect those two dots will be allowed anywhere near the camera lenses of any company that broadcasts television. The source code to one of Diebold Elections Systems (now dba Premier Elections Systems) voting machines was leaked in 2003, which summoned blackboxvoting.org into existence. As far as I know, every voting machine system that has been examined since then has been found to have potential attack vectors large enough to fly an intercontinental airliner through. When the public records are examined, the audit trail is often nonexistent, destroyed, or falsified. In the 12 years since then, the only meaningful result has been to end the practice of exit polling in the U.S. Yep, rather than explain the discrepancies between statistical sampling methods and the official results, we chose to stop sampling and trust the results. So some academics apply statistical methods to the official results, to show convincing evidence that one major party or the other, or both, are blatantly cheating using specific voting machine systems. You can hear those crickets chirping over the din of the absolute silence. ~But hey, let's all get worked up over homosexual marriage and Syrian refugees, mmkay? The 2016 national elections will be perfectly fair and honest, and not cracked and defrauded at the central tabulators at all. And since there's no cheating going on there, there certainly wouldn't be any at the primary level, with lower levels of scrutiny.~ Open source is democratic, but democracy certainly isn't open source.
  - webXL 11y ago
    Why did we end exit polling? Seems like an obvious counter-measure/check. I don't trust for-profit media to conduct them. This is something that we all need to chip in to accomplish, if we care about democracy. If we can't trust election results, we really can't trust anything connected to government, and as the state continues to grow, that's very little.
Pamar 11y ago
Haven't read all the comments yet, so maybe others have commented on this already, but I find the premise (critic of secret code validated by VW scandal) weak. According to the article: “Proprietary software is an unsafe building material,” Mr. Moglen had said. “You can’t inspect it.” Except that in this specific case, it was the builder who designed and implemented something "faulty" precisely because they needed that. There is a difference between installing a third-party set of windows and finding out that it soon falls apart because the frame is defective, and installing windows after you have secretly bored small holes in the frame (because you have an interest in your tenants going overquota with their heating expenses).
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tibbon 11y ago
If it was standard for the software on vehicles to be FOSS, this type of problem wouldn't exist.
matthewaveryusa 11y ago
>A group of automobile manufacturers said that opening the code to scrutiny could create “serious threats to safety and security.” I think it is tremendously difficult for the layman to understand that obscurity is not security. In fact it's counter-intuitive at first.
- gress 11y ago
  Obscurity is not security. True. Transparency is not security. Also true.
  - davexunit 11y ago
    But transparency is a prerequisite for security. Free software isn't necessarily secure, but only if its free software can we check and verify or fix it and distribute modified versions.
    - gress 11y ago
      That was true when the incentive was for vulnerabilities to be disclosed and fixed for the good of all, but sadly today, vulnerabilities are extremely valuable and so the incentive is for them to be sold to the powerful.
d_theorist 11y ago
VW could have given the EPA the complete source code for its system, and it would likely have made no difference. The main thing preventing inspect-ability isn't lack of access to the code. It's the incredible complexity of the software. Even barring deliberate attempts at code obfuscation, it would be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive for the EPA to gain any sort of understanding of a codebase of this size. Comparing a complex software system to an elevator is absurd.
- krupan 11y ago
  "The main thing preventing inspect-ability isn't lack of access to the code." No, I'm pretty sure you can't inspect code that you don't have access too. I get what you are saying about complexity, but I don't think that's an argument for prohibiting inspection altogether. This story directly illustrates that there was at least for this particular car a group of people will and able to inspect at least a particular part of the code, if they had access to it.
  - d_theorist 11y ago
    What I mean is that changing that variable would not have much effect.
  - d_theorist 11y ago
    >This story directly illustrates that there was at least for this particular car a group of people will and able to inspect at least a particular part of the code, if they had access to it. How does it illustrate that? They discovered the scam by doing better emissions testing not by reverse engineering the code.
    - breischl 11y ago
      That's true, but then there followed a long time (18 months?) in which VW denied any wrongdoing, and nobody could really prove them wrong. If the source code were available, the investigators could have quickly gone from "this looks wrong" to "hey, check out this really sketchy source code!" It might also prove that it was deliberate, rather than a complicated accident. Also, I have a hunch that they wouldn't have done it in the first place. If you know your code is going to be public that's an incentive not to do bad things, even if there's a chance nobody will ever read it.
jaybuff 11y ago
"Reflections on Trusting Trust To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software. " https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...
bmaupin 11y ago
"A group of automobile manufacturers said that opening the code to scrutiny could create 'serious threats to safety and security.' And two months ago, the E.P.A. said it, too, opposed such a move because people might try to reprogram their cars to beat emission rules." Oh, the irony.
digitalneal 11y ago
As a car guy, I fear this fraud is the symbolic fallen domino that will lead to the end of my hobby of tweaking the tunes on the ECU of my Subaru WRX STi.
- sounds 11y ago
  How will Volkswagen's cheating, or Eben Moglen for that matter, make it more difficult to tinker with your car? The Magnussen-Moss Act aside, auto makers seem to have failed to notice that DMCA-ing their software has not stopped tweakers and modders. It's so bad that John Deere doesn't want you to own your own tractor, just "license" it from them [1] (ostensibly so that they can refuse to let you look at the ECU). Would they take this step if they were confident in the DMCA's protections? Hollywood was the bellweather and tip-of-the-iceberg with DVD-CSS many years ago. [1] http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
- nutate 11y ago
  Missed in the media frenzy is that at least one company has offered a complete ECU upgrade for VW/Audi TDIs for a while: goapr.com ... plus homebrew. And VW never sicced DMCA on them.
clamprecht 11y ago
I can't believe it - not a single comment about Richard Stallman (in the article or this thread). When I read the title, I thought the article would be about Richard Stallman.
- krupan 11y ago
  Richard Stallman's lawyer isn't close enough for you? :-)
ChuckMcM 11y ago
And here I thought it was going to be an article about Richard Stallman. :-) I like the approach that proprietary software is an 'unsafe building material' (or component). I think that is something non-technical folks can understand a bit more easily than "software rights". I hope Stallman adds this approach to his arsenal.
jd3 11y ago
Stallman must be happy now that someone is actually listening (albeit; not to him)
bcg1 11y ago
Recording of Eben Moglen's speech, if you'd like to listen instead of reading the transcript: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2010/jul/20/episode-0x2c-eben-software-liability/ http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2010/jul/20/episode-0...
alansmitheebk 11y ago
This would be a great time to point out that the diesel engine was originally intended to be run on peanut oil. Any diesel automobile can run on "bio-diesel" with no additional modifications. You may be (un)surprised to learn that the inventor of the diesel engine died a rather mysterious death on a trans-Atlantic cruise.
cmurf 11y ago
Making it possible to download the firmware as a binary blob, even if it's encrypted, so that it can be hashed and compared to the published hash for the version of the software that's supposed to be in the car; while also publishing the source code of that version, doesn't in any way mean the user has a way to modify the code, compile it, and install it into the car. Now maybe the people talking about this to the reporter don't know this; but I suspect people at the car manufactures know they could do this, they simply don't want to, so they cherry pick b.s. arguments why disaster will strike if code is published.
acd 11y ago
I want open firmware in my next laptop so its inspectable. If you mix open source with closed firmwares you are half doing it. Half doing it means there are potential malware lurking around hidden in some corner where no one looks. Richard Stallman has been right the whole time. Also if the software is open there is possibility to maintain the code long after the manufacturer makes the next model and loses interest in the old device.
wedesoft 11y ago
I think it's a really weird situation where everybody has painted themselves into a corner: * the emission tests are extremely tight * the car industry is very competitive * loosening emission standards would be a politial issue As far as I know things started badly with emission tests not being representative and car manufacturers doing cheap fixes to pass them. Now would be a good time to fix this mess.
tefo-mohapi 11y ago
I hear all this talk about how this software scandal by VW is pointing to the end of diesel cars but this raises concerns about electric cars as they rely heavily on software. We actually discuss this in this podcast http://www.africantechroundup.com/volkswagen-up-in-smoke-as-the-south-african-government-is-set-to-investigate/ http://www.africantechroundup.com/volkswagen-up-in-smoke-as-... and even more concerning is when it comes to self driving electric cars. Mmm...

474 points by nkurz 11y ago

I think that the code that operates dangerous machines should be publicly available. I think that applying the DMCA to keep it hidden is a bad application of that law. The DMCA was intended to protect creative works like movies or songs, where the whole value is in the encoded file. Code that runs a car is the opposite: it is worthless by itself. Keeping it hidden from the public just enables bad behavior, like Toyota's terrible code or VW's deception.

leohutson 11y ago
Agreed. The predictable retort that there is no need for a public review of source code, "because indecipherable/underhanded code can still be written" is nonsense. If the code is so poorly written and tested that it is possible to be underhanded without the risk of anyone noticing, that code should not be on the road! We wouldn't be happy if the cars wiring and hydraulic systems were a fragile spaghetti mess that was impossible to inspect, why should we allow it for embedded software?
- adrianN 11y ago
  The submissions to the underhanded C contest don't look very poorly written to me.
x5n1 11y ago
Yes but it gives it to competitors as well, which is a problem.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  Before cars had software in them, competitors could learn everything by just buying a car, taking it apart, and measuring all the pieces. Yet that was the golden age of the auto industry, with no lack of competition and market growth. So I think it's not a problem for competitors to gain access.
- leohutson 11y ago
  Why? Competitors are the best placed entities, in terms of both resources and motivation, to perform a review. Also, do you want officials to have to review and test one hundred different implementations of a safety critical piece of code, or would you prefer an evolution to a single standard shared code base, shared between manufacturers, for which all testing efforts are directed at new patches?
- phire 11y ago
  But your competitors can't really steal it, because they are subject to the same rules and have to make their code available too. So any theft of code will be apparent. Manufactures will probably check each others code to make sure none of their own code has been stolen and file lawsuits if it has.
  - ernsheong 11y ago
    There's still China you know. They don't play by the rules and copy everything relentlessly.
azurezyq 11y ago
This is too vague to judge. Does the AI code in self driving car apply? Or the control software in a drone? And in the future, ECU may not be a standalone device any more.
- phire 11y ago
  Yes. Any code which has a safety responsibility should have it's code publicly available. You could divide the cars systems up into safety critical and non-safety critical components, like there is no reason why the software running the car's media center needs to publicly available, but there should be a well defined interface between the media center and safety critical code (or no interface at all)
  - floor__ 11y ago
    So you want software regulations on how code ought to be done? Forcing the separation of components based on safety... what even warrants a component to fall under these regulations. Such a dangerous slope. Just think of a time when regulation is at its peak and people want to innovate but can't due to law restrictions / regulations. Being trapped by standards that are produced by people who know nothing about software.
rl3 11y ago
Not to mention that as far as the physical portion of the car is concerned, competing manufacturers can simply buy the car and tear it apart. That said, there's probably a strong argument for protecting the source behind things like integrated entertainment/navigation systems, provided they're sufficiently decoupled from the car's critical systems. A really slick UI is a competitive advantage.
- firebones 11y ago
  Yeah, but what are you going to gain from looking at the source when you can see the screens and output directly? Is there really that much innovation in entertainment systems that can't be discerned from the UX itself, and which requires deep analysis of the code? The only way that makes sense is if the code itself gets cloned, but that's a minimal development-time savings in an otherwise huge release of software + the car itself. DMCA in these cases seems to be a protection against third-party aftermarket for upgrades, and protection against remote hacking rather than protection of IP for competitive purposes.
  - rl3 11y ago
    Admittedly you're right; there's little to gain competitively from source access there. However, it wouldn't stop car companies from screaming bloody murder if they were required to disclose the source for those components—let alone the rest of the vehicle. I imagine it would also create a licensing nightmare since navigation and entertainment components often utilize licensed, closed source, third party software. Much more so than the core functions of a vehicle (e.g. engine, steering, braking). If anything, affording manufacturers the right to keep non-critical vehicle systems closed source would further the goal of opening up the critical portions. Also, DMCA as a means of protection against remote hacking is tantamount to security through obscurity—but worse. While public source code access isn't some magic solution to security, it seems likely that it would vastly improve automotive security via allowing security researchers to do their far job more efficiently.
    - firebones 11y ago
knorby 11y ago
> Code that runs a car is the opposite: it is worthless by itself What about for self-driving/automation features? There is a strong argument that such code especially should be available for scrutiny, but it is far from worthless as a standalone.
floor__ 11y ago
The problem with making it public is it would start this process of regulation. Then it gives way for these regulations to be used in such a way that would greatly restrict software creativity and growth.

tomphoolery 11y ago

The amount of logic that went into this program just so Volkswagen wouldn't have to lessen their emissions seems...illogical. Did it really cost less to build, QA and deploy this software (and keep it under wraps for this long) than it would have to just fix the damn engines?!

InclinedPlane 11y ago
Looking at it holistically, it seems pretty obvious that something like this would happen eventually. Look at the history. There have always been concerted efforts to game the standards as much as possible. In Europe where the standards are laxer there have been lots of dirty tricks employed for a long time. For example, you use a special test car for the emissions testing. One that has an engine lubricated by extraordinarily expensive, specialized lubricants. One that uses over inflated, slick tires. And so on. Taking every inch possible. Transitioning from that sort of behavior of playing chicken with the standards to outright subverting them is not nearly as drastic a change in behavior as going from purely lawfully abiding by the strict letter of the standards to deciding to smash them to pieces the next day. Not to mention that the fact that automakers have been gaming the system by inches for so long and getting away with it almost certainly led to a widespread belief that automakers could get away with much, much more, as well as perhaps taking the standards bodies less seriously. Once they began down that road, they probably didn't realize how severely the actual emissions would differ from the "fooling the test" mode to normal driving mode. And as they tuned the performance of the vehicle the divergence would simply grow to the limit of the system, which turned out to be enormous (up to 40x). I highly doubt that anyone at any stage was fully aware, until perhaps very late in the process, that the divergence was so large. But by then they were committed. Many poor decisions often result from such incremental processes.
- hvidgaard 11y ago
  When they test the efficiency of new cars, it's fairly obvious that it serves only as a comparison between different cars, and it does not translate to real world experience. I really wish that companies was required to perform the tests with a car only as it is sold to the customers.

gaius 11y ago

I certainly hope Google will open-source their self-driving car code before it is let loose on the public roads.

wodenokoto 11y ago
That wouldn't matter. We don't know how to inspect a trained deep neural net. No one knows how the car drives.
- davmre 11y ago
  A trained network should be considered compiled code. It's almost literally a circuit wiring diagram, the lowest level of all code representations. Arguably the "source" in this case is the dataset used to train the model, along with the learning algorithm. If the data are released, so that you can inspect them and replicate the network weights yourself with an off-the-shelf learner, that's a reasonably good sign that nothing nefarious is going on inside the system. (though not strictly a guarantee: you could imagine someone searching very hard to find an innocuous-looking training set that somehow encodes malicious behavior)
- argonaut 11y ago
  We have no indication (and I seriously doubt) that Google's self driving system is just a deep neural net. There are probably neural net components, especially in object recognition / tracking, but only as a component in a larger system.

danso 11y ago

I have mixed feelings about this. I mean, yeah, open source would definitely alleviate this issue. I don't know enough about the state of car industry software (if Honda is par for course...I'm guessing, based on my new car...not that great?) but I imagine there would be unintended consequences that make OSS a difficult pill to swallow for carmakers. But sure, if it's feasible, make them do it. ...But my objection is that there seems to be many other ways that this problem could be solved...For example, perhaps the certification process should be slightly more rigorous than "self certification"? Obviously, testing is cumbersome if the EPA can only test "10 to 15 percent" of new cars...on the other hand, it sounds like WVU engineers were able to discover it accidentally without touching the software...which is how a lot of effective engineering testing manages to be done despite black box systems. Yeah, making software transparent is almost always a good thing...but if the test has the kind of predictable characteristics such that programmers can seemingly hard code the parameters...Is it really easier to move an entire industry to the open source paradigm than to design a more robust test? And not to throw too much pity on the regulators...but they were dealing with an exceptionally committed adversary. It's horrible how GM's culture allowed the ignition switch defect [1] to go unrecalled until a dozen people died in such senseless ways...but the ignition switch defect was a result of well-intended, if ultimately incorrect tradeoffs in the engineering process. And the deaths were far enough apart, and their cause not certain enough, for good-hearted engineers to have a "well, someone above my pay grade is dealing with this" mentality. But VW's situation...it's hard to imagine how the bad code came about without active intent by everyone who touched and tested that code. It's one thing for a huge company to have the kind of bureaucratic stagnancy that leads to tragic inaction...it's something else for them to commit to breaking the law in such an obvious way. [1] http://www.npr.org/2014/03/31/297312252/the-long-road-to-gms-ignition-switch-recall http://www.npr.org/2014/03/31/297312252/the-long-road-to-gms... edit: It really just seems the OP is throwing a bunch of assertions together, with software being the most mysterious and therefore the most obvious scapegoat. The advocate/technologist most prominently featured doesn't make cogent arguments (though maybe he was misquoted?). The following quote from Mr. Moglen is so nonsensical that it could only make sense to people whose understanding of computers seems very limited: > “Software is in everything,” he said, citing airplanes, medical devices and cars, much of it proprietary and thus invisible. “We shouldn’t use it for purposes that could conceivably cause harm, like running personal computers, let alone should we use it for things like anti-lock brakes or throttle control in automobiles.” Huh? If software shouldn't be allowed to run personal computers, because PCs can cause harm...then...huh?

credo 11y ago

I think the Volkswagen episode shows that we need better emission testing mechanisms. Demanding that all code be open-source unfairly targets the software industry (companies that sell software products for money). Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public ? If all software code must be publicly available, why not demand that Coca Cola also make their formula and their entire manufacturing process public ? Why not insist that no product must have any proprietary/secret information about how the product was created ? Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. I think we need a better emission testing system for testing emissions, not a government review of software code. IMO asking for free software code is an ideological demand that is better promoted through the free market. Free software ideologues should refuse to buy products that have proprietary components, but all of us should only ask that the government fix its emission testing process.

lemming 11y ago
Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public? That's a great question - why not? For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, and by meddling with search results (which they already do to try to personalise my results) they could make or break companies or politicians by presenting one-sided or even false material. That's a lot of power - why shouldn't we know how it works to make sure they're not abusing it?
- sloanesturz 11y ago
  Maybe because thousands of people have spent millions of hours making the best search engine in the world and they should be rewarded for their work by making money off of it instead of giving it away for free?
  - damoe 11y ago
    They have been rewarded for their work. Perhaps there should be limits on these rewards?
    - 11y ago

silverpikezero 11y ago

This would be a good time to point out that a similar auto software story found its way to HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643204 Once Toyota's ECU code was reviewed by domain experts, they found extraordinary lapses in basic software quality practices. This and the VW fiasco clearly show that hiding ECU code is the wrong way to go. We can directly measure the negative consequences, and these are only 2 such incidents discovered recently. Who knows how many more issues are still hiding. We won't really know how at risk we are unless there is some kind of 3rd party review process, required by law. Clearly, the auto industry will prioritize profits and liability over actual quality, in much the same way that banks will never voluntarily limit their risk at the sacrifice of profits. Self-regulation is not working.

loosescrews 11y ago
External audits are already required for finances. Safety critical systems are even more important and should be subject to even more scrutiny as a result.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Absolutely. But finances are pretty standardized, software is vastly more complex. Audits are a good idea, but it's an incredibly hard problem.
  - tluyben2 11y ago
    Maybe parent meant the software in finances, because that also requires external audits to some extend.
  - DrJokepu 11y ago
    I think a better approach would be requiring that developers (and their managers and testers etc.) working on software that could kill or injure people if it malfunctioned have some sort of a professional license, that would be granted and revoked similarly to how medical and engineering licenses are granted and revoked.

seibelj 11y ago

My company, like most companies, relies on an enormous amount of open source code in order to construct a closed source product. We have also contributed to open source, and have plans to contribute more. There are certain things that help everyone without jeopardizing our business, and other things that are too valuable to share. We cannot force a company to open source code without an extraordinarily good reason. I believe in open source and support it, but at the application level it is a trickier issue.

throwaway7767 11y ago
> We cannot force a company to open source code without an extraordinarily good reason. I believe in open source and support it, but at the application level it is a trickier issue. The fact that human lives depend on the correct functioning of the code is an extraordinarily good reason. IMO, any code that can affect driving safety should be required to be released (note: this does not mean that the companies must relenquish any copyright claims, just that the code has to be publicly available for inspection). Right now this is hard to do because all the auto manufacturers like to have everything connected, so the result of this would be that everything including the in-vehicle entertainment system would have to be open-sourced. But that's the point - such a requirement would overnight force the manufacturers to implement a proper seperation between critical software and non-critical, so that they could keep the non-critical stuff closed.

venomsnake 11y ago

Really? Can't I hack into the build chain and inject code while building. The code will pure and clean like a ice block for sculpting.

ekianjo 11y ago

No mention of RMS as an earlier prophet ?

oska 11y ago
Eben Moglen has had a long history with the Free Software Foundation. He co-drafted version 3 of the GPL and still serves as their legal counsel. It's not necessary to mention RMS every time other leaders of the Free Software movement make a comment on something, unless it's something specific RMS has said on the subject.

nice1 11y ago

When I read the title I thought the article would be about Richard Stallman. I appreciate prof. Moglen's contributions, but not seeing RMS mentioned is surprising.

s0rce 11y ago

I'm curious how other companies did not know about this. Did engineers at GM/Chevy not inspect the VW product and figure out that it was cheating or even suspect that their competitor couldn't have some sort of magic engineering snake oil to pass emissions.

etep 11y ago
Great question. I've seen companies with entire teams dedicated to dissecting the performance claims of the competition, and then running their own tests to verify and/or debunk the same. Keeps everyone honest, and it prods along the in-house engineering effort. Why didn't the other automakers see this?
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Maybe other car companies don't want to know because VW is not the only guilty company? What are the odds that only one car company cheated on only one car model?

vetler 11y ago

Somewhere, this software sits in a source code repository. Someone planned it, wrote it, reviewed it and approved it. Where are these people, and why are they not speaking up? Why have there not been any whistleblowing on this, it's huge?!

joelthelion 11y ago
> Why have there not been any whistleblowing on this, it's huge?! If whistleblowers were treated as the heroes they are instead of traitors, that might inspire other people to do the same...
pt3530 11y ago
What I have seen missing from most reports is that VW does not make the ECUs. Consumer reports has reported[1] that Bosch was the company that produced these ECU. So Bosch should have the repository and should have a request from VW to implement this particular code. I wonder if Bosch will be forced to throw VW under the bus. [http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/volkswagen-emissions-cheat-exploited-test-mode.htm http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/volkswagen-emissions...]
- seren 11y ago
  If this is provided by a third-parties, there is a requirement written somewhere for the supplier to have two different modes of operation, one for test and one for road. This is likely redacted to be innocent sounding, but there is definitely a DOORS history that would give the date and the name of the people who have written the requirements. However there might be some good reason to have a test mode, for engineering tests, for example. The culprit would be the one who have decided to ship it and activate in production.
  - cakes 11y ago
    This is definitely a question I have especially since in my experience sometimes you had trade-offs due to other restrictions so every functional item needed to have value and new functionality may require removing/changing/disabling other functionality.

LVB 11y ago

I understand and sympathize with this point of view, but I have no idea how it would work out practically. Software patents are rightly criticized and I don't think they should be the avenue to recapture investment. But if you also remove trade secrets, the dynamics behind expensive R&D would certainly be a lot different. I used to work for a company that produced diesel engine. Trying to pass ever stringent emissions meant massive capital investment and millions of dollars in research and testing. The "secret sauce" ends up being a few thousand lines of code and lots of constants. It is literally the make-or-break factor in whether a manufacturer can sell a product or not. If all results had to be immediately shared, what happens to the competitive zeal? My most optimistic perspective is that critical pieces of software just become common, with everyone latching onto the best option available. There is still plenty of room to differentiate, especially in something like a car, and that the sharing would be just generally beneficial. But will the real breakthroughs still occur if there isn't the potential to be substantially better (and substantially rewarded) at some fundamental factor, like fuel efficiency?

mahyarm 11y ago
I'm surprised such a small amount of code hasn't been reversed engineered and the constants copied for millions of dollars of profit.
IshKebab 11y ago
Those magical constants would likely be specific to the engine though. I also think you're overstating how importnat these trade secrets are. If VW really had magical algorithms to reduce emmission they wouldn't have had to cheat.
alkonaut 11y ago
Hopefully any system of "code inspection" could be done by authorities, and not require the code to be public. As an example: I'm not sure, but I believe the Nevada Gaming Control Board inspects the source code of gambling machines in Las Vegas casinos. This doesn't mean the casinos can't have secrets in the source code, it just means that the authority sees all the secrets. I do think however that "code inspection" for engine control units is a dead end. Writing underhanded code that appears to do X but instead does Y is so easy. (See e.g.http://www.underhanded-c.org/ http://www.underhanded-c.org/). Inspecting a 100k C-program for illegal behaviour won't be doable until the next years model is out, at which point it's time to start again. The solution is to treat the code as a black box, and just test it as a black by casting a wide net. The problem is the reliance on simple lab tests that are easily fooled.

marcosscriven 11y ago

In the article, they say the software detected the 'speed' of the vehicle among other things. I always thought the speed was simply calculated as a function of the wheel turning rate - unless the article really means 'acceleration', and there's such sensors in the car?

tajen 11y ago
When the trajectory assistance detects that the front wheel spins at 60mph whereas the back wheels are fixed, of course the code puts itself in a special condition. Same goes if the wheel meets no resistance to acceleration. It's either surfing on butter or in a garage.
- marcosscriven 11y ago
  Interesting - didn't know a) that cars measured torque, or b) speed of the unpowered wheels.
  - fianno 11y ago
    For the likes of ABS to work the car needs to know the speed of all wheels.
folli 11y ago
Maybe GPS or whether the rear (non-powered) wheels are spinning.

dragony4 11y ago

You really believe it was only VW doing this and not other companies? And it was miraculously discovered and not part of automotive war?

JanneVee 11y ago
The Swedish transport agency found that Volvo, BMW and VW had ten times as much nitrous oxide in roadtest than labtests. So it might be automotive war.

deleted 11y ago

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on_ 11y ago

Does external code review even matter? Leaving aside the difficulties of fighting with lobbyists, entrenched companies, unions, IP risk and financial obligations, (among many other points of friction) what is the upside? OTA and continuous integration will only improve, and likely at a logarithmic pace typical to other technological advancements. What if you during your project you needed every line of code reviewed before it was deployed (you probably do), but then a thrid party has to review it before you can ship it? This would KILL turn around time. Entire teams are devoted to writing and reviewing this software at every company, and each continuous update. These updates can be rolled out daily, weekly or monthly. It probably takes internal testing and internal reviewing to push code. This is non-trivial and scales with the complexity of the design. Further, as difficult as internal reviews and testing may be, it can still be incorrect; even when the reviewers have intimate knowledge of the entire codebase and the granular changes, source-code diffs, and commented commit messages. How many people do you reckon it would take to independently review every line of code in production? At what level of inspection would you be able to achieve a confidence level >90% that the code did what the developers allege in a safe and sane manner? Open source works because people can contribute code, fork-code and use the code they write and fork. Without these incentives a decentralized community would be unlikely to contribute, review and maintain proprietary code as they would be disincentivised from doing so as the IP would be protected. The government or the auto-companies would do the reviews, which outside of the massive cost (passed on to consumers) I will leave you to work out the issues there. Oh thanks for this grim view, it is fairly accurate, I disagree with X but on balance maybe it is more true than false, what is the solution? We open source the testing and make that public, and we don't need the actual code to do this. Simple heuristics are developed for whatever we need to optimize for. * Safety works this way and is done really well, we smash some cars up, run some stress tests and qualify them. * Manufacturers are required to publicly announce when they have pushed an update and the specific systems changed like a longer commit message with details of the system and changes. * Third party tests are continuously upgraded for whatever the battery demanded by the market is. This will create a market opportunity for someone to create value. They will provide data and can sell it, distribute it or publish it. People will be incentivised to write tests because they use vehicles and companies will want to be auto-trends verified car of the year. If we accept that it will be almost impossible to convince automakers to give up their IP and that the code will regulalrly change making review prohibitivle expensive, this seems like the only option. Create in depth testing for emissions, safety, cruise control, privacy, data transmission ETC and have that be governed as open source projects. Open up bug bounties (either auto-trader/magazines/interested companies sponsor this or automakers are incentivized to foot this bill). By bug bounty, I mean more of audting the car and requirements, or if the companies allowed specific features to have code reviewed like the Jeep hacking experiment. This will happen anyway because people don't like their credit card data to be stolen, and they don't like getting caught cheating on ashley madison, but what they really don't like? Having their car remotely turned off, remotely piloted using self-driving technology to the criminals dark layer or have their car otherwise destroyed or used for crimes. Review is coming, maybe even endorsed by automakers with some of their code provided, but we can't expect the government to do a great job reviewing the code, so let's just have an open-source testing model and develop better tests for things we care about.

deleted 11y ago

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Angostura 11y ago

Hopefully, the Volkswagen events may make people think rather more about what is going on in their voting machines.

logfromblammo 11y ago
I am up-voting you so hard right now. I really, really want it to be true. But I doubt that anyone even remotely likely to connect those two dots will be allowed anywhere near the camera lenses of any company that broadcasts television. The source code to one of Diebold Elections Systems (now dba Premier Elections Systems) voting machines was leaked in 2003, which summoned blackboxvoting.org into existence. As far as I know, every voting machine system that has been examined since then has been found to have potential attack vectors large enough to fly an intercontinental airliner through. When the public records are examined, the audit trail is often nonexistent, destroyed, or falsified. In the 12 years since then, the only meaningful result has been to end the practice of exit polling in the U.S. Yep, rather than explain the discrepancies between statistical sampling methods and the official results, we chose to stop sampling and trust the results. So some academics apply statistical methods to the official results, to show convincing evidence that one major party or the other, or both, are blatantly cheating using specific voting machine systems. You can hear those crickets chirping over the din of the absolute silence. ~But hey, let's all get worked up over homosexual marriage and Syrian refugees, mmkay? The 2016 national elections will be perfectly fair and honest, and not cracked and defrauded at the central tabulators at all. And since there's no cheating going on there, there certainly wouldn't be any at the primary level, with lower levels of scrutiny.~ Open source is democratic, but democracy certainly isn't open source.
- webXL 11y ago
  Why did we end exit polling? Seems like an obvious counter-measure/check. I don't trust for-profit media to conduct them. This is something that we all need to chip in to accomplish, if we care about democracy. If we can't trust election results, we really can't trust anything connected to government, and as the state continues to grow, that's very little.

Pamar 11y ago

Haven't read all the comments yet, so maybe others have commented on this already, but I find the premise (critic of secret code validated by VW scandal) weak. According to the article: “Proprietary software is an unsafe building material,” Mr. Moglen had said. “You can’t inspect it.” Except that in this specific case, it was the builder who designed and implemented something "faulty" precisely because they needed that. There is a difference between installing a third-party set of windows and finding out that it soon falls apart because the frame is defective, and installing windows after you have secretly bored small holes in the frame (because you have an interest in your tenants going overquota with their heating expenses).

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tibbon 11y ago

If it was standard for the software on vehicles to be FOSS, this type of problem wouldn't exist.

matthewaveryusa 11y ago

>A group of automobile manufacturers said that opening the code to scrutiny could create “serious threats to safety and security.” I think it is tremendously difficult for the layman to understand that obscurity is not security. In fact it's counter-intuitive at first.

gress 11y ago
Obscurity is not security. True. Transparency is not security. Also true.
- davexunit 11y ago
  But transparency is a prerequisite for security. Free software isn't necessarily secure, but only if its free software can we check and verify or fix it and distribute modified versions.
  - gress 11y ago
    That was true when the incentive was for vulnerabilities to be disclosed and fixed for the good of all, but sadly today, vulnerabilities are extremely valuable and so the incentive is for them to be sold to the powerful.

d_theorist 11y ago

VW could have given the EPA the complete source code for its system, and it would likely have made no difference. The main thing preventing inspect-ability isn't lack of access to the code. It's the incredible complexity of the software. Even barring deliberate attempts at code obfuscation, it would be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive for the EPA to gain any sort of understanding of a codebase of this size. Comparing a complex software system to an elevator is absurd.

krupan 11y ago
"The main thing preventing inspect-ability isn't lack of access to the code." No, I'm pretty sure you can't inspect code that you don't have access too. I get what you are saying about complexity, but I don't think that's an argument for prohibiting inspection altogether. This story directly illustrates that there was at least for this particular car a group of people will and able to inspect at least a particular part of the code, if they had access to it.
- d_theorist 11y ago
  What I mean is that changing that variable would not have much effect.
- d_theorist 11y ago
  >This story directly illustrates that there was at least for this particular car a group of people will and able to inspect at least a particular part of the code, if they had access to it. How does it illustrate that? They discovered the scam by doing better emissions testing not by reverse engineering the code.
  - breischl 11y ago
    That's true, but then there followed a long time (18 months?) in which VW denied any wrongdoing, and nobody could really prove them wrong. If the source code were available, the investigators could have quickly gone from "this looks wrong" to "hey, check out this really sketchy source code!" It might also prove that it was deliberate, rather than a complicated accident. Also, I have a hunch that they wouldn't have done it in the first place. If you know your code is going to be public that's an incentive not to do bad things, even if there's a chance nobody will ever read it.

jaybuff 11y ago

"Reflections on Trusting Trust To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software. " https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...

bmaupin 11y ago

"A group of automobile manufacturers said that opening the code to scrutiny could create 'serious threats to safety and security.' And two months ago, the E.P.A. said it, too, opposed such a move because people might try to reprogram their cars to beat emission rules." Oh, the irony.

digitalneal 11y ago

As a car guy, I fear this fraud is the symbolic fallen domino that will lead to the end of my hobby of tweaking the tunes on the ECU of my Subaru WRX STi.

sounds 11y ago
How will Volkswagen's cheating, or Eben Moglen for that matter, make it more difficult to tinker with your car? The Magnussen-Moss Act aside, auto makers seem to have failed to notice that DMCA-ing their software has not stopped tweakers and modders. It's so bad that John Deere doesn't want you to own your own tractor, just "license" it from them [1] (ostensibly so that they can refuse to let you look at the ECU). Would they take this step if they were confident in the DMCA's protections? Hollywood was the bellweather and tip-of-the-iceberg with DVD-CSS many years ago. [1] http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
nutate 11y ago
Missed in the media frenzy is that at least one company has offered a complete ECU upgrade for VW/Audi TDIs for a while: goapr.com ... plus homebrew. And VW never sicced DMCA on them.

clamprecht 11y ago

I can't believe it - not a single comment about Richard Stallman (in the article or this thread). When I read the title, I thought the article would be about Richard Stallman.

krupan 11y ago
Richard Stallman's lawyer isn't close enough for you? :-)

ChuckMcM 11y ago

And here I thought it was going to be an article about Richard Stallman. :-) I like the approach that proprietary software is an 'unsafe building material' (or component). I think that is something non-technical folks can understand a bit more easily than "software rights". I hope Stallman adds this approach to his arsenal.

jd3 11y ago

Stallman must be happy now that someone is actually listening (albeit; not to him)

bcg1 11y ago

Recording of Eben Moglen's speech, if you'd like to listen instead of reading the transcript: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2010/jul/20/episode-0x2c-eben-software-liability/ http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2010/jul/20/episode-0...

alansmitheebk 11y ago

This would be a great time to point out that the diesel engine was originally intended to be run on peanut oil. Any diesel automobile can run on "bio-diesel" with no additional modifications. You may be (un)surprised to learn that the inventor of the diesel engine died a rather mysterious death on a trans-Atlantic cruise.

cmurf 11y ago

Making it possible to download the firmware as a binary blob, even if it's encrypted, so that it can be hashed and compared to the published hash for the version of the software that's supposed to be in the car; while also publishing the source code of that version, doesn't in any way mean the user has a way to modify the code, compile it, and install it into the car. Now maybe the people talking about this to the reporter don't know this; but I suspect people at the car manufactures know they could do this, they simply don't want to, so they cherry pick b.s. arguments why disaster will strike if code is published.

acd 11y ago

I want open firmware in my next laptop so its inspectable. If you mix open source with closed firmwares you are half doing it. Half doing it means there are potential malware lurking around hidden in some corner where no one looks. Richard Stallman has been right the whole time. Also if the software is open there is possibility to maintain the code long after the manufacturer makes the next model and loses interest in the old device.

wedesoft 11y ago

I think it's a really weird situation where everybody has painted themselves into a corner: * the emission tests are extremely tight * the car industry is very competitive * loosening emission standards would be a politial issue As far as I know things started badly with emission tests not being representative and car manufacturers doing cheap fixes to pass them. Now would be a good time to fix this mess.

tefo-mohapi 11y ago

I hear all this talk about how this software scandal by VW is pointing to the end of diesel cars but this raises concerns about electric cars as they rely heavily on software. We actually discuss this in this podcast http://www.africantechroundup.com/volkswagen-up-in-smoke-as-the-south-african-government-is-set-to-investigate/ http://www.africantechroundup.com/volkswagen-up-in-smoke-as-... and even more concerning is when it comes to self driving electric cars. Mmm...