Thanks for the info. I'm coming at this from basic chemistry and engineering knowledge and by reading up on the technology and VW's patents, but I don't have first-hand experience with these engines. The big question for me is, "what's the upside for VW?" For the lean NOx trap system, there's an obvious performance hit, but the EPA says VW cheated on its urea-system Passat too, and I can't figure out why. I had guessed the temperature restrictions might be part of it, but if that's not the case I'm left with nothing but "we wanted to save a few bucks on urea", which seems really petty.
Thanks, I was looking for this figure for an article I'm writing on diesel NOx chemistry. Sounds like you've got first-hand experience, but do you have an online source I could cite for that? A service manual or something?
It's very clever (but evil): EPA says the software looks at a variety of factors, including wheel speed, steering wheel position, engine run time, and barometric pressure (!), and compares those data against EPA's published testing guidelines.
You're right that the technology is installed and works, but the performance and maintenance downsides are severe. I didn't want to make my original post too long to read, but here's more detail to explain.
Most small VWs (Jetta, etc) use a "lean NOx trap" to capture NOx in a zeolite sponge. The zeolite fills up with NOx and needs to be cleaned out periodically (every minute or two, takes a few seconds). During the cleaning cycle, engine power is limited to *20%* of maximum. VW's patent says they wait until the driver eases off on the throttle to do it, but still, that's a huge performance hit and a big incentive to cheat (by not doing the cleaning.)
See patent link in my original post for details (warning: machine-translated from German.)
In VW's larger vehicles (Passat, mostly), the car carries an extra tank full of gallons of urea, which is sprayed into the exhaust to react with the NOx. This reaction needs precise temperature controls (which probably limits engine performance), and the tank is big and heavy. By using less urea than needed, VW can use a smaller lighter tank, which needs to be refilled less often. (VW pays for urea replacement for the first 30,000 miles.)
First let me say that this change is urgently needed.
But, it's unlikely that automakers who build gasoline cars are cheating like VW did. It's especially difficult to clean NOx from diesel engine exhaust because unlike gasoline engines, the exhaust contains lots of extra oxygen. Diesels need special NOx-cleaning devices which add cost and weight, and can seriously limit performance in some situations. Gasoline engines just need minor modifications to the engine computer software and the catalytic converter to clean NOx, so there's very little need to cheat.
Making your own circuitboards is almost never the best option. But making your own cloth with a hand loom is almost never the best option either, and people do that for fun all the time. If you're taking advice from a Hackaday author, you're probably a hobbyist, and you can hobby however you want to.
That's the point: there's all kinds of bombs for all kinds of purposes, and very few of them look like this one, and none of them look like movie bombs.
This is a pretty cool bomb though, if you like bombs. Which you shouldn't.
You can't become someone new in real life, but you can become a new person on the Internet, someone nobody cares about anymore. There are probably millions of doxx out there, and nobody has time to SWAT all of them. If your old identity disappears, people will stop caring.
Change your email, create new logins for your forum and social media sites and give the new identity only to people you absolutely trust. And stop going to the forum that doxxed you (or if you insist on being a moron, create a new login).
Two comments: first, this only works if people are interested in you because of who you are on the Internet. If you're somebody in real life, you're screwed, but you can probably get the cops to care. Second, yes, this is totally letting the doxxers win. But once your info's out there, it's not about being right on the Internet, it's about keeping your house from burning down.
My liberty to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose. My right to free speech ends when I write on your skin with a scalpel. My right to string DNA sequences together ends when I implement them in a legally-protected human or animal.
You're missing the point. Can the USA monitor people in Australia? Yes. Can Australia monitor people in the US? Probably not. In Australia, you've got your government *and* the Americans (and maybe the Chinese and Russians) listening; in the US it's probably just your own government, and they have to get a special piece of paper first.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate and say the USA. On the following logic: the USA is the only country with the capability and desire to perform mass surveillance in pretty much any nation on Earth, so they're your main concern. There's nothing stopping US surveillance agencies from monitoring other nations' citizens, but if you're American, they have to jump through a few hoops before they can look at your data -- FISA court, etc. They're bullshit hoops, I agree, and they won't stop a serious investigation, but at least they might make an NSA agent think twice before jacking off to your selfies.
Y'know, a.theonion domain would be really useful: all satire websites could use it, and we could program browsers to add "[THIS IS SATIRE YOU MORON]" whenever my relatives paste a.theonion URL into Facebook.
Do we really need Snowden to tell us this? What is he now, the media's go-to guy for computer security? He's playing a key role in our understanding of CIA/NSA operations, no doubt, but he doesn't have any more expertise on the Clinton email scandal than your average Slashdot reader.
For anybody who's more in the know than me, what's the latest with Lockheed's supposed Skunkworks compact fusion reactor? There's so little info on it I'm inclined to think it's a pie-in-the-sky bid for government pork, but if there's been any recent updates I'd love to hear it.
By your argument, since scientific findings are always subject to revision in light of future data, they can never be used for decisionmaking. Well screw that, I don't want to live in a world where a double-blind placebo trial carries no more weight than a magic 8-ball.
I do agree with you on two things: first, that she should be given a proper well-blinded test for electromagnetic sensitivity, which I guarantee you she'll fail because *nobody* passes them except by chance ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... ). And second, we agree that this lady "needs help as she is clearly suffering". How about we have someone use actual medicine to figure out what's actually wrong with her, rather than giving her a bit of money and letting her suffer for the rest of her life because she wrongly thinks the wi-fi is to blame?
I agree that what you're talking about is a problem, and it sounds like your friend's father got really screwed, but having done a bunch of the Google Foobar puzzles, I can assure you that they have nothing to do with actual problems Google needs to solve for its business.
I don't want to give them away -- though I'm sure you can find them on the Web if you hunted -- but by way of example, the first one I did involved finding the smallest numbers which were palindromes (read the same backwards and forwards) subject to certain additional criteria. They're all straight up math/logic brainteasers with no practical use to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the info. I'm coming at this from basic chemistry and engineering knowledge and by reading up on the technology and VW's patents, but I don't have first-hand experience with these engines. The big question for me is, "what's the upside for VW?" For the lean NOx trap system, there's an obvious performance hit, but the EPA says VW cheated on its urea-system Passat too, and I can't figure out why. I had guessed the temperature restrictions might be part of it, but if that's not the case I'm left with nothing but "we wanted to save a few bucks on urea", which seems really petty.
Thanks, I was looking for this figure for an article I'm writing on diesel NOx chemistry. Sounds like you've got first-hand experience, but do you have an online source I could cite for that? A service manual or something?
I see this a lot: "hey, they passed the EPA's test, so they're technically not in violation."
Unfortunately, the EPA regs also state that you may not include devices designed to defeat EPA testing. See the EPA complaint for details.
No, even when breaking the law, German engineering does not screw around.
VW calls it "AdBlue" and charges $10 a gallon for it, but yeah it's just purified piss.
Point I'm getting at is, the payback is high for diesels, and negligible for gasoline engines. See http://slashdot.org/comments.p... for tech details.
It's very clever (but evil): EPA says the software looks at a variety of factors, including wheel speed, steering wheel position, engine run time, and barometric pressure (!), and compares those data against EPA's published testing guidelines.
See http://slashdot.org/comments.p... for tech details.
You're right that the technology is installed and works, but the performance and maintenance downsides are severe. I didn't want to make my original post too long to read, but here's more detail to explain.
Most small VWs (Jetta, etc) use a "lean NOx trap" to capture NOx in a zeolite sponge. The zeolite fills up with NOx and needs to be cleaned out periodically (every minute or two, takes a few seconds). During the cleaning cycle, engine power is limited to *20%* of maximum. VW's patent says they wait until the driver eases off on the throttle to do it, but still, that's a huge performance hit and a big incentive to cheat (by not doing the cleaning.)
See patent link in my original post for details (warning: machine-translated from German.)
In VW's larger vehicles (Passat, mostly), the car carries an extra tank full of gallons of urea, which is sprayed into the exhaust to react with the NOx. This reaction needs precise temperature controls (which probably limits engine performance), and the tank is big and heavy. By using less urea than needed, VW can use a smaller lighter tank, which needs to be refilled less often. (VW pays for urea replacement for the first 30,000 miles.)
First let me say that this change is urgently needed.
But, it's unlikely that automakers who build gasoline cars are cheating like VW did. It's especially difficult to clean NOx from diesel engine exhaust because unlike gasoline engines, the exhaust contains lots of extra oxygen. Diesels need special NOx-cleaning devices which add cost and weight, and can seriously limit performance in some situations. Gasoline engines just need minor modifications to the engine computer software and the catalytic converter to clean NOx, so there's very little need to cheat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.google.com/patents/...
Doping the silicon with a pipette and a microscope is time-consuming, but worth it!
There are lots of great PCB manufacturers in the US, and if you want 'em fast, that's the way to go.
Making your own circuitboards is almost never the best option. But making your own cloth with a hand loom is almost never the best option either, and people do that for fun all the time. If you're taking advice from a Hackaday author, you're probably a hobbyist, and you can hobby however you want to.
That's the point: there's all kinds of bombs for all kinds of purposes, and very few of them look like this one, and none of them look like movie bombs.
This is a pretty cool bomb though, if you like bombs. Which you shouldn't.
You can't become someone new in real life, but you can become a new person on the Internet, someone nobody cares about anymore. There are probably millions of doxx out there, and nobody has time to SWAT all of them. If your old identity disappears, people will stop caring.
Change your email, create new logins for your forum and social media sites and give the new identity only to people you absolutely trust. And stop going to the forum that doxxed you (or if you insist on being a moron, create a new login).
Two comments: first, this only works if people are interested in you because of who you are on the Internet. If you're somebody in real life, you're screwed, but you can probably get the cops to care. Second, yes, this is totally letting the doxxers win. But once your info's out there, it's not about being right on the Internet, it's about keeping your house from burning down.
I didn't say they had constitutional rights, I said they were legally protected. Try vivisecting your dog in the park and see what happens to you.
My liberty to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.
My right to free speech ends when I write on your skin with a scalpel.
My right to string DNA sequences together ends when I implement them in a legally-protected human or animal.
You're missing the point. Can the USA monitor people in Australia? Yes. Can Australia monitor people in the US? Probably not. In Australia, you've got your government *and* the Americans (and maybe the Chinese and Russians) listening; in the US it's probably just your own government, and they have to get a special piece of paper first.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate and say the USA. On the following logic: the USA is the only country with the capability and desire to perform mass surveillance in pretty much any nation on Earth, so they're your main concern. There's nothing stopping US surveillance agencies from monitoring other nations' citizens, but if you're American, they have to jump through a few hoops before they can look at your data -- FISA court, etc. They're bullshit hoops, I agree, and they won't stop a serious investigation, but at least they might make an NSA agent think twice before jacking off to your selfies.
Y'know, a .theonion domain would be really useful: all satire websites could use it, and we could program browsers to add "[THIS IS SATIRE YOU MORON]" whenever my relatives paste a .theonion URL into Facebook.
Do we really need Snowden to tell us this? What is he now, the media's go-to guy for computer security? He's playing a key role in our understanding of CIA/NSA operations, no doubt, but he doesn't have any more expertise on the Clinton email scandal than your average Slashdot reader.
For anybody who's more in the know than me, what's the latest with Lockheed's supposed Skunkworks compact fusion reactor? There's so little info on it I'm inclined to think it's a pie-in-the-sky bid for government pork, but if there's been any recent updates I'd love to hear it.
By your argument, since scientific findings are always subject to revision in light of future data, they can never be used for decisionmaking. Well screw that, I don't want to live in a world where a double-blind placebo trial carries no more weight than a magic 8-ball.
I do agree with you on two things: first, that she should be given a proper well-blinded test for electromagnetic sensitivity, which I guarantee you she'll fail because *nobody* passes them except by chance ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... ). And second, we agree that this lady "needs help as she is clearly suffering". How about we have someone use actual medicine to figure out what's actually wrong with her, rather than giving her a bit of money and letting her suffer for the rest of her life because she wrongly thinks the wi-fi is to blame?
It's the same basic premise, but this is a *lot* more elaborate than what you ran into.
I agree that what you're talking about is a problem, and it sounds like your friend's father got really screwed, but having done a bunch of the Google Foobar puzzles, I can assure you that they have nothing to do with actual problems Google needs to solve for its business.
I don't want to give them away -- though I'm sure you can find them on the Web if you hunted -- but by way of example, the first one I did involved finding the smallest numbers which were palindromes (read the same backwards and forwards) subject to certain additional criteria. They're all straight up math/logic brainteasers with no practical use to anyone.