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Comment by p0w3n3d | Hacker News Reader

Title is a bit misleading, because this *gate is not about faking ecology, and trying to pass certification in artificial conditions, as dieselgate was, but simulating fake failures instead. The company hardcoded algorithms that would report failures of parts that work correctly (like a compressor), if it detected that train has been repaired by another company (based on location readings), and stop the train from running

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It's an example of fraudulent / malicious behavior found by decompiling industrial logic controllers, with incontrovertible evidence of illegality. Obviously no two situations are ever going to be the exact same, but I think it's clear why the analogy was made.

Yes, but “Dieselgate” is not appropriate here because that term has “cheating” loaded onto it, which represents a different struggle for companies than vendor lock-in. What this company is doing is related to DRM and arguably closer to what John Deere does with its products.

The example here includes faking a compressor failure, which is a bit beyond ‘vendor lock-in’.

yeah - this is basically stealing

> The company hardcoded algorithms that would report failures of parts that work correctly (like a compressor), if it detected that train has been repaired by another company (based on location readings), and stop the train from running

This isn't correct by my understanding - there's actually two separate things here:

- The company made their trains stop functioning after spending 10 days at competing maintenance locations, based on GPS

- In one firmware, they hardcoded to pretend a compressor failure a few days after the next scheduled maintenance for the train

I'm writing from memory so I could be wrong, but based on (IIRC) two articles and some comments I read in Polish:

- The 10 days limit was their initial attempt, no GPS involved

- After it turned out the trains were immobilized in the "wrong" location, they added GPS geofencing

- The compressor failure was supposed to happen every day till the end of the year, starting on the scheduled maintenance date. (This might as well be bad coding.)

Again, I could get some details wrong, especially that the articles I read were kinda all over the place (subjectively, IMHO).

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