
Volkswagen Engineer Gets Prison in Diesel Cheating Case (2017) - jsiepkes
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/business/volkswagen-engineer-prison-diesel-cheating.html
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exabrial
Good. But what about his boss, and all of the management all the way up to the
CEO?

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pkaye
Germany does not extradite its own citizens.

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ionised
Under any circumstance?

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germanier
Unless the extradition is to another EU country or an international court,
Article 16 II of the German constitution explicitly prohibits that.

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ionised
That actually sounds perfectly reasonable.

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RandomInteger4
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.

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ionised
Fraud seems to have paid off pretty nicely for the likes of HSBC and Goldman
Sachs though. Repeatedly.

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ThomWilhelm3
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.

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pkaye
Would not have caught this. Every time the vehicle is randomly tested it would
have entered cheat mode.

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alkonaut
"Random test" means taking a production vehicle of any age, and testing it in
real world conditions. Basically putting measurement devices over the exhaust
and driving it on the highway, not in a lab.

It's less scientific but also so much more scientific if you _expect_ the
object you are measuring to be cheating in lab conditions - and they should be
expecting that.

