Software can be Evil

Volkswagen’s “diesel dupe” scandal has been in the news for some time now. 11 million cars worldwide have a “defeat device” that could detect when the car was being tested and then change its performance to improve results. The difference?
“The engines emitted nitrogen oxide pollutants up to 40 times above what is allowed in the US.”
The CEO has resigned; and the company has set aside $7.3 billion to deal with the problem.

Marcelo Rinesi wrote this very interesting article wondering whether the cheating technique used by VW (write intelligent software to behave differently under different conditions) is the ticking time bomb that awaits us in the brave new world of the Internet of Things (In case you are wondering, the Internet of Things refers to the network of objects with sensors and software that can collect and exchange data. So yes, basically that covers almost everything in the future).

Rinesi points out the fundamental difference between objects and the new software-in-everything world we are speeding towards:
“Objects fail, and sometimes behave unpredictably, but they aren’t strategic, they don’t choose their behavior dynamically in order to fool you. Matter isn’t evil.”
Not so with software that can be change behavior dynamically, as shown in the VW scandal. Even more alarmingly:
“It’ll only take a silent background software upgrade to turn it into a discrete spy reporting on you via well-hidden channels.”

Entire systems will have to change to counter this problem, says Rinesi. Take standards, for example:
“The intrinsic challenge to our legal framework is that technical standards have to be precisely defined in order to be fair, but this makes them easy to detect and defeat. They assume a mechanical universe, not one in which objects get their software updated with new lies every time regulatory bodies come up with a new test.”

As I keep saying, the Internet is the wild, wild West: the old rules don’t quite cover it. And we’re still trying to figure out what the new rules should be.

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