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In an unfortunately rare case of reason conquering madness, a VW exec (Oliver Schmidt) was extradited and convicted over the diesel emissions scandal, instead of the engineers taking the brunt of the punishment.

We expect name brand products to indemnify their vendors to an extent. Consumers don't want to chase down the guy who made the screw that failed and caused a bunch of excess deaths. You put the screw in the assembly, you took most of the profit margins. So you get the lawsuit.

If you want to go and sue your vendor to recover damages, that's between you and the vendor. But the class action goes to Acme Inc, not Acme Screws and Fasteners.

Similarly, I'm not getting a mansion. I can barely get you to buy the servers we need to make half of what you say not a blatant lie. I'm not the one who should be punished when they find out about it. I'm not the one lying to people's faces while I pocket their checks.

I doubt the case of the VW manager can be adressed to reason (alone). Lots of politics going on, too. US vs. EU.

I doubt the same would have happened, if Ford or GM would have been the one caught in the act.

> In an unfortunately rare case of reason conquering madness, a VW exec (Oliver Schmidt) was extradited and convicted over the diesel emissions scandal, instead of the engineers taking the brunt of the punishment.

Side note but I think he was grabbed at the airport, not extradited from abroad.

I was trying to recall his name and did some googling. One of the first articles said that he had been approved for extradition. Sounds like they just got to him before the state department had to step in.

> I've also been in situations where an ultimatum like E2E encryption is dictated by a marketing team and then expected to be created without adequate budgeting or time, essentially creating pressures on development teams, project/product managers, etc to lie.

Basically "Our customers have been asking for E2E encryption, so I'm adding that to our next sprint."

>Your competitors are doing it, if you don't, you lose.

What's far more interesting to me is the fact that your vendors are doing it. I wonder how much business efficiency could be gained by taking advantage of the fact that we all know the products our businesses are buying are oversold?

You may find it interesting that recently Malwarebytes was mentioned in relation to 230 of the DMCA which to my mind relates directly to this. They are an AV solution that holds "legitimate" software vendors that operate an above board business to the fire when they start any practice that they (Malwarebytes) determines is violating a PC users reasonable expectations. That software begins to be detected as "potentially unwanted software" and recommended for quarantine just like any other virus.

Malwarebytes spends a whole lot of time defending the fact it recommends software from these companies for removal and the recent SCOTUS memo on the topic sort of implies that the problem -- how do we determine the voracity of statements made by businesses regarding their software, especially software which exists in a constantly changing state -- may be headed towards getting worse as so few people are familiar with legislation also have good understanding of the inherent complexity of software.

Tangent: Cheat Engine, an amazing piece of software, mentions on their website that they may be detected as malicious software because they do a lot of the same things malicious software does - hook into other processes and modify their behaviour, optionally with a kernel hook.

They don't mention that their installer ships with tons of malware that they install, and more that they try to trick you into installing but you can technically opt-out.

> how much business efficiency could be gained by taking advantage of the fact that we all know the products our businesses are buying are oversold?

Not much tbh. Our only other option is to not buy, and build in-house instead. Sometimes that's worthwhile, but other times (like in the case of zoom) it still makes sense to buy the vendor's product, even if you know that it's not everything it's advertised as being.

The real efficiency is found in having people who can determine which and if you should buy a vendor's product, or if you should go in house. Specifically people who can see through the marketing BS and evaluate technologies without personal or hype bias.

Your experience sounds identical to my career in biotech. My PI wanted a new line that produced a certain transgenic protein. When I explained that it wasn't possible I was asked if one set of results from another assay could be "used" in the current project. I said no but still provided all the the necessary data to lie if that was what they wanted to do. The lab ended up getting a $75k plus grant because of the fabricated data and I was left disillusioned and quit soon afterward.

Ever since I have told anyone that would listen that science is broken and I rarely believe anything until there is a working product. It is beyond sickening how much and how often people lie and how it is constantly covered up by their colleagues who don't want to cause a fuss.

It would be easy to ignore them, if they don't poison an entire startup ecosystem. If such founder gets into press and speaking circuit, lot of newbie founders assume such exaggeration is needed to succeed and this behavior becomes part of that ecosystem. Then it becomes hard to have authentic conversation with anyone there.