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Volkswagen Engineer Gets Prison in Diesel Cheating Case (2017)

20 points| jsiepkes | 7 years ago |nytimes.com | reply

13 comments

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[+] exabrial|7 years ago|reply
Good. But what about his boss, and all of the management all the way up to the CEO?
[+] rhacker|7 years ago|reply
I don't know much about how this stuff works but it sounds like he made a plea deal, but the judge screwed him over anyway. I don't think anyone else is going to make a plea deal after that.
[+] _pmf_|7 years ago|reply
AUDI chief has been in investigative custody.
[+] pkaye|7 years ago|reply
Germany does not extradite its own citizens.
[+] RandomInteger4|7 years ago|reply
Just goes to show that fraud doesn't pay. If you're ever told to do something fraudulent as a programmer, it's your ethical duty to refuse. It might have consequences, but those consequences are less damaging than the alternative.

I was recently dealing with a company on a contract where I was tasked with cleaning up their analytics tags and implementing some new ones. I noticed one of their sites had multiple google analytics tags, meaning it was double counting, so I removed one thinking I fixed it, which I did, but apparently not in their eyes.

A month or so later i get an email saying that something was wrong with one of their sites and that traffic had plummeted. I explained the situation; that they were double counting page views before. They told me to put one it back saying "I know this might be unethical, but" I refused and the subject was dropped. I continued doing work for them thinking my invoice would be paid, but they apparently had other plans, so I fired them as a client.

EDIT: I'm not very aware of the space, but I assumed that the worst case scenario is that they were selling ad space to companies directly using their google analytics numbers and using double counted numbers would be fraudulent behavior.

[+] ionised|7 years ago|reply
Fraud seems to have paid off pretty nicely for the likes of HSBC and Goldman Sachs though. Repeatedly.
[+] ThomWilhelm3|7 years ago|reply
I feel like the designers of the test have to take more blame here. Having a test that was "just show us once and that's it" seems like a really bad test design.

Randomly testing vehicles after they've been produced should have always been part of the testing strategy. Shouldn't have been relying on a random researcher to catch them.

Would be like testing an Athlete once for steroids then never testing them again, ever.

[+] pkaye|7 years ago|reply
Would not have caught this. Every time the vehicle is randomly tested it would have entered cheat mode.