How VW tricked the EPA’s emissions testing system
In July 2015, CARB did some follow up testing and again the cars failed—the scrubber technology was present, but off most of the time. How this happened is pretty neat. Michigan’s Stefanopolou says computer sensors monitored the steering column. Under normal driving conditions, the column oscillates as the driver negotiates turns. But during emissions testing, the wheels of the car move, but the steering wheel doesn’t. That seems to have have been the signal for the “defeat device” to turn the catalytic scrubber up to full power, allowing the car to pass the test. Stefanopolou believes the emissions testing trick that VW used probably isn’t widespread in the automotive industry. Carmakers just don’t have many diesels on the road. And now that number may go down even more.
Depressing stuff — but at least they think VW’s fraud wasn’t widespread.(tags: fraud volkswagen vw diesel emissions air-quality epa carb catalytic-converters testing)
EU court adviser: data-share deal with U.S. is invalid | Reuters
The Safe Harbor agreement does not do enough to protect EU citizen’s private information when it reached the United States, Yves Bot, Advocate General at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), said. While his opinions are not binding, they tend to be followed by the court’s judges, who are currently considering a complaint about the system in the wake of revelations from ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of mass U.S. government surveillance.
(tags: safe-harbor law eu ec ecj snowden surveillance privacy us data max-schrems)
Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption and Related Impacts in the US-East Region
Painful to read, but: tl;dr: monitoring oversight, followed by a transient network glitch triggering IPC timeouts, which increased load due to lack of circuit breakers, creating a cascading failure
(tags: aws postmortem outages dynamodb ec2 post-mortems circuit-breakers monitoring)
What Happens Next Will Amaze You
Maciej Ceglowski’s latest talk, on ads, the web, Silicon Valley and government:
‘I went to school with Bill. He’s a nice guy. But making him immortal is not going to make life better for anyone in my city. It will just exacerbate the rent crisis.’
(tags: talks slides funny ads advertising internet web privacy surveillance maciej silicon-valley)
Frame of Reference and Roaring Bitmaps
interesting performance-oriented algorithm tweak from Elastic/Lucene
(tags: lucene elasticsearch performance optimization roaring-bitmaps bitmaps frame-of-reference integers algorithms)
Uber Goes Unconventional: Using Driver Phones as a Backup Datacenter – High Scalability
Initially I thought they were just tracking client state on the phone, but it actually sounds like they’re replicating other users’ state, too. Mad stuff! Must cost a fortune in additional data transfer costs…
(tags: scalability failover multi-dc uber replication state crdts)