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> Sure, it may have been a PHB who came up with the idea and told them to code this into the algorithm - but it was programmers like you or I who actually crank
by therobot24 11y ago
> Sure, it may have been a PHB who came up with the idea and told them to code this into the algorithm - but it was programmers like you or I who actually cranked out the code that made this possible.
So i think there's been a lot of assumption that the software engineers made this code explicitly for production. For all we know they were making what they thought was code for specific in-house experiments and a subset or different set knowingly kept it for production.
- omouse 11y agoActually that was the purpose stated; they developed it for testing in-house and it makes sense to do so. However, at some point there must have been someone who was a front-line employee who could have blown the whistle on this kind of disgusting ethics violation.
- ams6110 11y agoThat's possible, but I find it to be a stretch. Unless one group were told "write some code to meet this emission standard" and another were told to "write some code to detect when emmission testing is happening" that could be the case. But somewhere along the line someone was given the task to combine those and "disable the emission controls unless testing is happening." In other scenarios, yeah it's perfectly possible for an developer to complete a task that seems innocent enough and unbeknownst to him will later become a part of something nefarious.