volkswagen – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Volkswagen Plans To Shift From Selling Cars To Offering ‘Vehicles On Demand’ – And Grabbing Even More Data About Drivers

from the you-don't-own-it,-you-only-drive-it dept

Volkswagen Financial Services (VWFS) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the well-known car manufacturer Volkswagen (VW). An article in the German Auto Motor und Sport magazine reports on a major shift in the way that VWFS, and hence VW, wants to operate (all translations by DeepL):

Volkswagen Financial Services (VWFS) is planning to introduce a new mobility platform in 2025 that will push traditional vehicle sales into the background.

Instead, the use of vehicles, summarised under the term ‘Vehicle on Demand’, will come to the fore, according to a report in ‘Automobilwoche’. This platform, which is to be launched in the relevant markets in the first quarter of 2025 as the successor to the Europcar app, marks a significant change in Volkswagen’s business model.

The CEO of VWFS, Christian Dahlheim, explained:

In future, customers will be able to use the [new] app to take advantage of various mobility offers such as leasing, rental, subscriptions or car sharing. Volkswagen will not provide all offers itself, but will work together with strategic partners, particularly in the area of car sharing.

Because VW will retain ownership over the entire life of the vehicles, it will be able to gather even more data about them and the people who drive them:

Another advantage of this strategy is the comprehensive access to data, both about the vehicles and about the customers. Volkswagen currently collects data on around eight million vehicles, and this figure will continue to rise in the future. This data enables VWFS to determine the optimal marketing channel for returned vehicles – be it remarketing as a leasing vehicle, a subscription, use in car sharing or sale as a used car.

The opportunity to sell many more used cars is an important aspect of the shift to Vehicles on Demand. According to Auto Motor und Sport, VW sold 142,000 used cars in 2020, expects to sell 462,000 this year, and hopes that will rise to a million vehicles in the future. With the new business model, VW wants to become one of the world’s largest used car dealers. Perhaps inevitably, AI will be applied to the data gathered about each vehicle, particularly in order to carry out “automated residual value forecasting”. According to Dahlheim:

The [new] platform should make it possible to optimise prices and residual values, taking into account capacities, logistics costs and market differences within Europe. This opens up new opportunities to market vehicles in different markets depending on demand and thus optimise price leverage.

It’s rather ironic that a company originally tasked by Hitler to produce an affordable vehicle that every German family would be able to buy (hence the name “Volkswagen” –– “People’s Car”) wants to shift to a business model where nobody buys one.

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Filed Under: adolf hitler, app, cars, data, leasing, ownership, rental car, surveillance, tracking, vehicles
Companies: volkswagen

Volkswagen Created A 'Backdoor' To Basically All Its Cars… And Now Hackers Can Open All Of Them

from the backdoors-are-bad-m'kay? dept

And… for our latest example for why requiring companies to build backdoors into encryption or similar technologies is a bad idea comes from automaker Volkswagen. Researchers are now revealing that approximately 100 million VW vehicles can be easily opened via a simple wireless hack. The underlying issue: a static key used on basically all of the wireless locks in VWs.

The researchers found that with some ?tedious reverse engineering? of one component inside a Volkswagen?s internal network, they were able to extract a single cryptographic key value shared among millions of Volkswagen vehicles. By then using their radio hardware to intercept another value that?s unique to the target vehicle and included in the signal sent every time a driver presses the key fob?s buttons, they can combine the two supposedly secret numbers to clone the key fob and access to the car. ?You only need to eavesdrop once,? says Birmingham researcher David Oswald. ?From that point on you can make a clone of the original remote control that locks and unlocks a vehicle as many times as you want.?

In other words, VW created a backdoor, and assumed that it would remain hidden. But it did not.

This is exactly the kind of point that we’ve been making about the problems of requiring any kind of backdoor and not enabling strong encryption. Using a single encryption key across every device is simply bad security. Forcing any kind of backdoor into any security system creates just these kinds of vulnerabilities — and eventually someone’s going to figure out how they work.

On a related note, the article points out that the researchers who found this vulnerability are the same ones who also found another vulnerability a few years ago that allowed them to start the ignition of a bunch of VW vehicles. And VW’s response… was to sue them and try to keep the vulnerability secret for nearly two years. Perhaps, rather than trying to sue these researchers, they should have thrown a bunch of money at them to continue their work, alert VW and help VW make their cars safer and better protected.

Filed Under: backdoors, cars, encryption, hackers, research
Companies: volkswagen

VW Accused Of Using Software To Fool Emissions Tests: Welcome To The Internet Of Cheating Things

from the is-that-domestic-appliance-lying-to-you? dept

There have been a number of stories on Techdirt recently about the increasing use of software in cars, and the issues that this raises. For example, back in April, Mike wrote about GM asserting that while you may own the car, the company still owns the software that runs it. You might expect GM to come out against allowing you to modify that software, but very recently we reported that it had received support from a surprising quarter: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA had a particular concern that engine control software might be tampered with, causing cars to breach emissions regulations. We’ve just found out that the EPA was right to worry about this, but not for the reason it mentioned, as the The New York Times explains:

> The Environmental Protection Agency issued [the German car manufacturer Volkswagen] a notice of violation and accused the company of breaking the law by installing software known as a “defeat device” in 4-cylinder Volkswagen and Audi vehicles from model years 2009-15. The device is programmed to detect when the car is undergoing official emissions testing, and to only turn on full emissions control systems during that testing. Those controls are turned off during normal driving situations, when the vehicles pollute far more heavily than reported by the manufacturer, the E.P.A. said.

So, just as the EPA feared, software that regulates the emissions control system was indeed tampered with, though not by reckless users, but by the cars’ manufacturer, Volkswagen (VW), which must now recall nearly half a million cars, and faces the prospect of some pretty big fines — Reuters speaks of “up to $18 billion“. The EPA’s Notice Of Violation (pdf) spells out the details of what it calls the software “switch”:

> The “switch” senses whether the vehicle is being tested or not based on various inputs including the position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, the duration of the engine’s operation, and barometric pressure. These inputs precisely track the parameters of the federal test procedure used for emission testing for EPA certification purposes. During EPA emission testing, the vehicles’ ECM [electronic control module] ran software which produced compliant emission results under an ECM calibration that VW referred to as the “dyno calibration” (referring to the equipment used in emission testing, called a dynamometer). At all other times during normal vehicle operation, the “switch” was activated and the vehicle ECM software ran a separate “road calibration” which reduced the effectiveness of the emission control system (specifically the selective catalytic reduction or the lean NOx [nitrous oxides] trap.) As a result, emission of NOx increased by a factor of 10 to 40 times above the EPA compliant levels, depending on the type of drive cycle (e.g. city, highway).

That trick was discovered by the West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines & Emissions when studying the VW vehicles. Initially, VW claimed that the increased emissions were due to “technical issues” and “unexpected in-use conditions.” But further tests confirmed the problem, and eventually VW admitted “it had designed and installed a defeat device in these vehicles in the form of a sophisticated software algorithm that detected when a vehicle was undergoing emissions testing.”

It’s significant that the trick was discovered through extensive mechanical testing. Assuming some form of DRM was employed, it would not have been possible to spot the cheating algorithm of the emissions control code because it would have been illegal to circumvent the software protection. This emphasizes once more the folly of allowing the DMCA to apply to such systems, where problems could be found much earlier by inspecting the software, rather than waiting for them to emerge in use, possibly years later.

The revelation about VW’s behavior once more concerns code in cars, but there is a much larger issue here. As software starts to appear routinely in an ever-wider range of everyday objects, so the possibility arises for them to exhibit different behaviors in different situations. Thanks to programming, these objects no longer have a single, fixed set of features, but are malleable, which makes checking their conformance to legal standards much more problematic. When the VW story broke last week, Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, tweeted that this was an example of “The Internet of cheating things.” I’m not sure whether she coined that phrase — I’d not seen it before ? but it encapsulates neatly a key feature of the world we are beginning to enter.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: dmca, emissions, epa, hacking, recall, software
Companies: volkswagen, vw

Know Your Troll: Innovative Display Technologies Targeting Any Company That Creates A Product With An LCD Screen

from the plaintiff-utilizes-neither-innovation,-displays-nor-technology dept

Innovative Technologies, LLC of Austin, Texas doesn’t make any products or even have its own website. What it does have, however, is a handful of weaponized patents its parent company, Acacia, acquired from “we’re not a patent troll” Rambus. It’s using a handful of display-related patents to sue anyone who utilizes an integrated LCD screen. Its latest targets are cell phone distributors like Verizon, AT&T and Apple, but other lawsuits have also been filed against auto manufacturers (Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Mazda), camera companies (Canon, Nikon) and GPS suppliers (TomTom, Garmin).

Innovative Technologies calls this address in Austin, Texas “home:”

1701 DIRECTORS BLVD STE 300 AUSTIN TX 78744-1044

The offices at Southpark One in Austin must be incredibly large, seeing as the same address also houses a number of other Acacia-owned subsidiaries, like Database Sync Solutions LLC, Brilliant Optical Solutions LLC, ChipSys Integrations LLC, Cellular Communications Equipment LLC, Media Recording Solutions LLC, Lifeshield Sciences LLC, RFID-Rx LLC, Promethean Insulation Technology LLC, and Progressive Semiconductor Solutions LLC.

Of course, when your only “employees” are outside law firms, you don’t really need a big office. All you need is a business registration that will give you access to a favorable court system.

IDT is suing these companies for violating its patents on “light emitting panel assemblies.” The recent case filed against Apple is actually its second. The first ended with what appeared to be a settlement agreement (and dismissed without prejudice), but that must not have panned out as IDT filed its second lawsuit against the cell phone/tablet maker two months after its original dismissal, this time asking for nearly $6 billion in “accrued royalties.”

IDT currently has 34 cases in litigation. In addition to the premature dismissal above, it has already secured a licensing agreement from Garmin. But that’s it. Not a very productive set of weaponized patents, but a list of current litigation obviously doesn’t include anyone who agreed to pay a licensing fee as the result of lawsuit threats. This low “conversion rate” probably doesn’t matter much to Acacia, the company sitting on top of a pile of patents and LLCs that exist in name only.

Tracing the patents back from IDT to Acacia to Rambus, it’s immediately clear that no one along this supply chain has ever produced a product utilizing these patents, but that’s not going to stop all of these entities from attempting to profit from the products of others. And yet, Acacia still claims it’s a vital part of the innovation process.

According to its website, the company is an intermediary in the patent market and “facilitates efficiency and delivers monetary rewards to the patent owner.” Acacia boasts that it has generated more than 1billioninrevenuetodateandhasreturnedmorethan1 billion in revenue to date and has returned more than 1billioninrevenuetodateandhasreturnedmorethan455 million to its patent partners.

Marvin Key of Acacia says his company isn’t a patent troll and claims that it’s business model isn’t predicated on “frivolous” lawsuits.

“The implication in almost everything you read is that there is nothing positive at all about licensing patents,” Key said. “The implication is when someone is sued, whether a small or big company, that every single one of those cases is frivolous, abusive and without merit. And that’s simply untrue.”

But the legal history of the company says otherwise. Here’s its current “portfolio” of holding companies, along with the number of lawsuits filed.

3D DESIGN SOLUTIONS LLC – 1 3DEGREES LLC – 0 ARG MEDICAL SOLUTIONS LLC – 0 ACCUHALE LLC – 1 ADAPTIX, INC. – 64 ADJUSTACAM LLC – 2 ADVANCED PROCESSOR TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 12 AMERICAN VEHICULAR SCIENCES LLC – 35 AUTO-DIMENSIONS LLC – 6 AUTOMATED FACILITIES MANAGEMENT CORPORATION – 13 BEVERAGE DISPENSING SOLUTIONS LLC – 3 BODY SCIENCE LLC – 17 BOLT MRI TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 1 BONUTTI SKELETAL INNOVATIONS LLC – 11 BRANDYWINE COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 138 BRILLIANT OPTICAL SOLUTIONS LLC – 11 CELL AND NETWORK SELECTION LLC – 5 CELLULAR COMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT LLC – 12 CHALUMEAU POWER SYSTEMS LLC – 4 COMPUTER SOFTWARE PROTECTION LLC – 6 CONVERGENT MEDIA SOLUTIONS LLC – 0 DRAM MEMORY TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 3 DRAM MEMTECH LLC – 0 DATA ENGINE TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 7 DATABASE SYNC SOLUTIONS LLC – 1 DYNAMIC 3D GEOSOLUTIONS LLC – 6 DYNAMIC TRANSMISSION TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 4 ENDOTACH LLC – 7 EVM SYSTEMS LLC – 2 EXPRESS CARD SYSTEMS LLC – 18 GT GAMING LLC – 0 IN-DEPTH TEST LLC – 0 INDUSTRIAL PRINT TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 2 INNOVATIVE DISPLAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 37 INTERCARRIER COMMUNICATIONS LLC – 16 LABYRINTH OPTICAL TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 6 LAMBDA OPTICAL SOLUTIONS LLC – 1 LIFEPORT SCIENCES LLC – 6 LIFESCREEN SCIENCES LLC – 7 LIFESHIELD SCIENCES LLC – 0 LIGHT TRANSFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 5 MOBILE ENHANCEMENT SOLUTIONS LLC – 4 NAVATUNE LLC – 0 NUCLEIC ACID PURIFICATION TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 0 O.S. SECURITY LLC – 6 ONLINE NEWS LINK LLC – 17 OPTIMUM CONTENT PROTECTION LLC – 1 PANALOGIN LLC – 0 PARKING SPACE INNOVATIONS LLC – 1 PROGRESSIVE SEMICONDUCTOR SOLUTIONS LLC – 2 PROMETHEAN INSULATION TECHNOLOGY LLC – 10 SAINT LAWRENCE COMMUNICATIONS LLC – 1 SIGNAL ENHANCEMENT TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 1 SMARTPHONE TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 15 SUPER INTERCONNECT TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 6 SUPER RESOLUTION TECHNOLOGIES LLC – 5 TAXVANTAGE LLC – 0 UNIFIED MESSAGING SOLUTIONS LLC – 116 VERTICAL ANALYTICS LLC – 1 VIDEO STREAMING SOLUTIONS LLC – 3 VIEW 360 SOLUTIONS LLC – 1 WEB TRACKING SOLUTIONS LLC – 0 WIRELESS MOBILE DEVICES, LLC – 7

63 subsidiaries. 669 lawsuits, most of which were filed between 2011-2014 and not a single one of them filed by a company that generates anything more than legal filings. Acacia’s claim that these aren’t “frivolous” would be more credible if they weren’t filed exclusively by companies that exist only as a sheet of paper and almost solely in friendly Texas courts. The only innovations these “companies” can be linked to are efficiencies in billable hour recording.

Filed Under: lcd screen, patent trolls, patents
Companies: acacia, apple, at&t, canon, garmin, innovative technologies, mazda, mercedes-benz, nikon, tomtom, verizon, volkswagen

VW Will Block BlackBerry Email When People Are Off Work. Isn't That When It's Most Useful?

from the hmm dept

This is a bit odd. It appears that, as part of an agreement with its workers in Germany, Volkswagen has agreed to turn off BlackBerry messages to workers while they’re away from work. Basically emails will stop going to BlackBerries a half hour after they leave work and won’t come back until a half hour before they come back in.

Of course, it seems like if they don’t want people to access emails while away from work there’s a simpler solution: don’t have workers use BlackBerries. Just saying.

The idea here is to keep employees from “feeling chained” and allowing them to enjoy the life part of the work/life balance. And, as we’ve discussed in the past, the blurring of the work/life balance is definitely an issue that some people need to deal with. But I have difficulty seeing how this helps in any way. In my experience, being able to access emails while not at my desk and in off-hours actually helps keep the work/life balance, since stuff doesn’t pile up at work.

Years back, in college, I actually spent a lot of time studying how labor relations worked in Germany, and unions there tend to have a lot more say in how companies operate, to the point of being on councils with management making these kinds of decisions (it’s a lot more partnership oriented than the US adversarial model). In many ways that’s a good thing. Having management and employees working together to take on challenges, rather than just being at each other’s throats, definitely has its advantages, but it can also create some wacky outcomes… like this.

Filed Under: blackberries, email, germany, work life balance
Companies: volkswagen