Japanese Metal Manufacturer Faked Specifications To Hundreds of Companies (jalopnik.com)

schwit1 writes: Kobe Steel, a major Japanese supplier of steel and other metals worldwide, has admitted that it faked the specifications to metals shipped to hundreds of companies over the past decade.

Last week, Kobe Steel admitted that staff fudged reports on the strength and durability of products requested by its clients -- including those from the airline industry, cars, space rockets, and Japan's bullet trains. The company estimated that four percent of aluminum and copper products shipped from September 2016 to August 2017 were falsely labelled, Automotive News reported.

But on Friday, the company's CEO, Hiroya Kawasaki, revealed the scandal has impacted about 500 companies -- doubling the initial count -- and now includes steel products, too. The practice of falsely labeling data to meet customer's specifications could date back more than 10 years, according to the Financial Times.

For rockets the concern is less serious as they generally are not built for a long lifespan, but for airplanes and cars this news could be devastating, requiring major rebuilds on many operating vehicles.

Comments

Why trust any vendor's claims?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would any consumer, be it an individual or a business, ever trust the claims that any vendor makes about its products?!

The assumption should be that the vendor's claims may very well be wrong, regardless of whether these claims may be accidentally or intentionally incorrect.

Let me give you an example. My team manages various servers. They aren't even overly critical, but we do want them to be working as much as possible. Some of these servers were running Debian 7. We wanted to upgrade them to Debian 8. For those who don't know, Debian 8 uses systemd by default. By using it in a stable release of Debian, we were going on the assumption that the Debian maintainers considered systemd suitable for production use.

However, we weren't idiots and we didn't fully trust that the vendor was correct. So we did our own testing. After doing some preliminary testing with systemd and Debian 8, we weren't at all happy with the results. We experienced far too many problems with systemd, and thus deemed Debian 8 unsuitable for our needs. Further investigation showed that most of the major Linux distros were using systemd, so we had to look to alternate vendors. We settled on FreeBSD, and put it through some extensive testing. It fared much better than systemd/GNU/Linux did, so we gradually moved our Linux servers over to FreeBSD instead. Thanks to our testing, we avoided serious problems, and in fact ended up using a much more reliable OS.

I would fully expect other organizations, especially those working on safety-critical products, to ignore what vendors claim and do their own thorough testing of any products or materials that a vendor may be providing to them.