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> That may be, but it ignores the fact that software was written for the express purpose of not just identifying if a test was being ran, but then taking action
by gherkin0 11y ago
> That may be, but it ignores the fact that software was written for the express purpose of not just identifying if a test was being ran, but then taking action to change the results of the test has no real world use.
I think it depends on how general the implementation was. I could imagine real world uses for a feature to generically detect certain conditions and change parameters in response (e.g. to support different settings for highway vs city driving). If you have something general enough, then the "defeat device" could have just been a ruleset that only matched a very narrow set of conditions that usually only occurs during the tests.
- kbenson 11y agoMy point is I'm not sure of any scenario which would need that criteria to me met, and the chance that it was accidentally implemented such that it just happened to match test conditions and not other conditions, and just happens to enable running conditions that are sub-optimal for operation but allow it to pass emissions seems so vanishingly small that I can't consider it a possibility without further information coming to light to explain why it would make sense. Incompetence happens, but requiring chained events of successive incompetence to explain an outcome to explain an event doesn't seem rational to me.
- gherkin0 11y agoOh, I think that however it was done, it was done intentionally. My point was only that the "code" could have been kosher and the tampering done later via configuration.