The European Commission is probing whether Samsung televisions' sensed when they were being tested for energy efficiency and changed their power consumption to get better ratings than they deserved.
Polish commuter train company Lower Silesian Railway (LSR), which operates out of Wrocław, sent their trains to Serwis Pojazdów Szynowych (SPS) for fixing and general repair. SPS had a problem, though. Trains that they had taken in for regular maintenance and repairs weren't working. — Read the rest
In 2017, Pricewaterhousecooper published Using science fiction to explore business innovation, a guide for corporations that wanted to work with sf writers to think about the future of their businesses; it was part of a wave of corporate interest in the insights of sf writers, which also coincides with a parallel trend in academia (see, for example, ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination and UCSD's Clark Center for Human Imagination, both of which I have some involvement with).
As Volkswagen's murderous Dieselgate scandal has unfolded, the company has steadfastly maintained that even if it did kill thousands of people with its toxic cars, at least it pays its taxes.
In my latest Locus column, "Demon-Haunted World," I propose that the Internet of Cheating Things — gadgets that try to trick us into arranging our affairs to the benefit of corporate shareholders, to our own detriment — is bringing us back to the Dark Ages, when alchemists believed that the universe rearranged itself to prevent them from knowing the divine secrets of its workings.
The most remarkable criminal justice story of 2017 is that the FBI has arrested a real corporate criminal, a VW executive who tried to engineer a coverup of the Dieselgate scandal, and that he might go to jail — it's remarkable because the Obama administration spent eight years resolutely not sending criminal executives to jail, preferring instead to let their corporations buy their way out of criminal sanctions with huge fines, a doctrine pioneered by Obama Attorney General Eric Holder back when he worked for Bill Clinton's administration. — Read the rest
A report in BILD am Sonntag claims that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has uncovered the secret test that Audis were programmed to perform to determine whether to pollute like crazy or to pretend that they were low-polluting, legally compliant vehicles.
Reuters reports that VW is about to tell the federal judge in San Francisco in charge of its case that it will offer to buy back nearly half a million of its diesel vehicles from owners who were deceived about the cars' emission standards and performance when the company engineered its cars so that they would act daemonically, performing differently based on whether they were being tested or not.
Cothority is a new software project that uses "multi-party cryptographic signatures" to make it infinitely harder for governments to order companies to ship secret, targeted backdoors to their products as innocuous-looking software updates.
German newspaper Bild am Sonntag received leaked internal Volkswagen memos and emails that suggest that then-CEO Martin Winterkorn and his executive team were informed in 2014 of the lethal Dieselgate scam the company had perpetrated, and decided to stall and obfuscate to avoid penalties for emitting titanic amounts of the toxic NOX.
After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in which BP killed 12 people, millions of marine and land animals, and one ecosystem, two scapegoats were located to fit up for criminal manslaughter charges: the supervisors aboard the platform at the time of its explosion.
Germany's Volkswagen is already in a whole heap of global trouble after the car maker was caught cheating on U.S. tests for nitrogen oxide emissions. Then, we learned "Dieselgate" also involved VW subsidiary brands Audi and Porsche.
Now it gets worse. — Read the rest
Rebecca MacKinnon, the journalist/activist who wrote the seminal Consent of the Network, has launched a new project called Ranking Digital Rights, part of the New America Foundation's Open Tech Institute. RDR issues report-cards that evaluate how Internet giants and other companies handle your data: what do they promise, do they encrypt, and who do they share it with? — Read the rest
Every three years, the Librarian of Congress allows the public to request exemptions to a law that makes it a felony to break a digital lock, even on on a device that you own, and which you are breaking for a lawful purpose. For the past year, public interest groups have been spending their scarce money and resources writing petitions to the Copyright Office, arguing that people who own devices with computers in them should have the same property rights as they do in their non-computerized devices: the right to open, change, and improve the things they own in lawful ways.
Under TPP, signatories are required to give their judges the power to "order the destruction of devices and products found to be involved in" breaking digital locks, such as those detailed in this year's US Copyright Office Triennial DMCA Hearing docket, which were used to identify critical vulnerabilities in vehicles, surveillance devices, voting machines, medical implants, and many other devices in our world.
Some day, you may be the defendant in a criminal trial that turns on whether the software in a forensic device reached a reliable conclusion about a DNA test or other piece of evidence. Wouldn't you like to have your own experts check the source code on that device?
Volkswagen's cars didn't have a fault in their diesel motors — they were designed to lie to regulators, and that matters, because regulation is based on the idea that people lie, but things tell the truth.
VW's diesel firmware detected when it was undergoing emissions testing and changed the engine tuning to produce 1/40 of its normal toxic output, fooling regulators. But though they're the only ones who've been caught using firmware to game emissions testing, they're not the only ones with something to hide.
