Tuesday Morning: Some Kind of Freak

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Today’s the intersection of my Gwen Stefani jag and International Women’s Day 2016. Need some more estrogen-powered music to celebrate IWD? Try this list — note and compare Lesley Gore’s You Don’t Own Me and Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walking against more recent tunes like No Doubt’s Just A Girl.

Let’s roll…

Volkswagen shocked, SHOCKED! the EPA went public on the diesel emissions standards cheat
But by the time the EPA made public statements regarding VW, the German automaker had already known about the International Council on Clean Transportation’s research results for a year and had yet to reveal to shareholders the risk of prosecution and penalties. VW’s leadership hoped for a mild and quiet slap on the hands and enough time for a technical solution before the EPA’s disclosure:

“In the past, even in the case of so-called ‘defeat device’ infringements, a settlement was reached with other carmakers involving a manageable fine without the breach being made public,” VW argued. “And in this case, the employees of Volkswagen of America had the impression on the basis of constructive talks with the EPA that the diesel issue would not be made public unilaterally but that negotiations would continue.”

Hope somebody is looking at insider trading for any sign that VW executives were unloading stock in the period between September 2014 when ICCT’s results were published, and when the EPA went public in 2015. Wonder what penalties there are under German/EU laws for this?

USDOJ appealed last week’s ruling in Brooklyn iPhone 5S case
At the heart of this appeal is Apple’s past cooperative actions when federal law enforcement asked for assistance in unlocking iPhones. Apple, however, said past acquiescence is not consent. USDOJ has now asked for review of Judge Orenstein’s ruling.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak appeared on Conan, sided unsurprisingly with Apple
Woz admitted to having tried his hand at writing viruses for Mac, but the entire premise terrified him, compelling him to destroyed his efforts. Video of his appearance included at this link.

France to punish phonemakers for encryption, while UK’s GCHQ says it should get around encryption
A narrow body of water, a different language, and a recent terrorist attack make for very different reactions to encrypted communications. France’s Parliament voted yesterday to punish phonemakers which do not cooperate with law enforcement on unencrypting data; the bill is not yet law, subject to further parliamentary process. Meanwhile, Britain’s spy chief said he hopes methods can be developed to get around encryption without building backdoors.

Drive-by quickies

And it’s Presidential Primary Day in Michigan, Mississippi, Idaho, Hawaii. I may avoid social media for most of the day for this reason. Hasta pasta!

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Monday Morning: Put Your Pom-poms Down

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A certain state governor (or his PR team) tweeted a bunch of smack last night during the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate. Like this:

RSnyder_tweet_06MAR2016

It is to laugh. Every decision made by this administration about Flint has been about money, not about the right thing, and not even about the legal thing.

He put his pom-poms down last week long enough to lawyer up, though. Mm-hmm.

By the way, that’s the NSFW version – here’s the language-sanitized clean version of that video for your office space. Crank the volume and bring it.

All around Apple town

  • Email provider Lavabit filed an amicus brief in #AppleVsFBI, arguing the FBI’s demands could have adverse affects on businesses:

    Such precedence would likely result in many businesses moving their operations offshore, therefore, making it more difficult for law enforcement to obtain even ordinary assistance from such companies…

    Wow, sounds familiar, huh? Brief’s worth a read (pdf).

  • Apple VP of software engineering Craig Federighi wrote an op-ed for yesterday’s WaPo, restating an opinion Apple and many of its supporters already expressed:

    “…it’s so disappointing that the FBI, Justice Department and others in law enforcement are pressing us to turn back the clock to a less-secure time and less-secure technologies. …”

  • The stakes get higher in #AppleVsFBI as Apple prepares to launch several new iPhones and an iPad on March 21. We all know a decision by Judge Pym will affect these devices in the future, not just the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5C.
  • And just to keep Apple users even more on their toes, there’s now Apple ransomware on the loose. So far only Mac devices have been targeted, but it’s only a matter of time before other Apple devices are similarly affected. I’d put my money on higher profile users or those using iPhones to remotely control costly systems.

Quickety-lickety

And on this day in 1876, U.S. Patent 174,465 for Improvement in Telegraphy was granted to Alexander Graham Bell.

What will they write about this day in another 140 years? Do something worth writing about.

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Friday Morning: The Political is Musical

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It’s Friday, and that means more jazz. Today’s genre is Afrobeat, which emerged in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

Nigerian musician Fela Kuti is credited as the genre’s progenitor, though Fela maintained drummer Tony Allen was essential to style, saying, “[w]ithout Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat.”

Afrobeat fuses a number of different types of music with jazz, including funk, highlife, rock, and folk music from West African cultures. In this video, Beasts of No Nation, it’s easy to hear the different styles of music added as layers underpinned and unified by drums.

The lyrics of many Afrobeat tunes are very political; the album of the same name, Beasts of No Nation, was an anti-apartheid statement released in 1989.

Recommended read to accompany today’s musical selection: The Wealth of Nations by Emmanuel Iduma (Guernica magazine).

Let’s move…

Not far from the Apple tree
Lots of developments yesterday in the  #AppleVsFBI story.

  • In support of Apple, big names in tech file amicus briefs to meet deadline. The two most powerful briefs constituted a who’s who of Silicon Valley. Amazon, Box, Cisco, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nest, Pinterest, Slack, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Yahoo filed one joint brief. AirbNb, atlassian, Automattic, Cloudflare, EBay, Github, Kickstarter, LinkedIN, Mapbox, Medium, Meetup, Reddit, Square, SquareSpace, Twilio, Twitter, Wickr filed the second. There were several other pro-Apple briefs filed, but none with the economic clout of these two briefs.
  • Cato’s Julian Sanchez may have the best take on yesterday’s filings.
  • UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said forcing Apple to write code for the FBI “could have extremely damaging implications for the human rights of many millions of people, including their physical and financial security,” constituting a “a gift to authoritarian regimes.”
  • Michael Ramos, the San Bernardino County DA, exposed his lack of technology prowess in an ex parte application to participate as Amicus Curiae.

    “The iPhone is a county owned telephone that may have connected to the San Bernardino County computer network. The seized iPhone may contain evidence that can only be found on the seized phone that it was used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber pathogen that endangers San Bernardino’s infrastructure…”

    Emphasis mine. WHAT. EVEN. Dude just screwed law enforcement, making the case (using a made-up term) for the iPhone to never be opened.

Brazil’s former president Lula held for questioning as home raided
The investigation into state-run oil company Petrobras now reaches deeply into the highest levels of Brazil’s government. Investigators are looking into former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s role in Petrobras’ corruption, including kickbacks and influence peddling. The investigation’s discoveries threaten the viability of current president Dilma Rousseff’s ruling coalition. Wonder if the NSA was following this when they were spying on Petrobras?

Quick licks

  • Absolute insanity: Amazon’s Kindle devices no longer encrypted (Motherboard) — Well, nobody in this household is getting a Kindle any time soon.
  • Nope, not hackers, not squirrels: bird droppings suspected in shutdown of Indian Point nuke plant last December (Phys.org)
  • Joint US-UK college hacking competition this weekend (Phys.org) — Wanna’ bet some of these students will be asked about hacking Apple iPhones?
  • Connecticut wants to ban weaponization of drones, thanks to stupid teenager’s home project (Naked Security) — Seems like a federal issue, IMO, but let me guess the gun lobby will step and whine about gun-enabled drones as a Second Amendment right. Surely our forefathers anticipated flying, cellphone-controlled privately-owned gun drones.

Ugh. That’s a wrap on this week, stopping now before this really devolves though I can’t see any distance between here and absolute bottom. Have a good weekend!

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Thursday Morning: Don’t Feel Bad

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While I am sorry a family has lost their father, I can’t mourn the bizarre passing yesterday of Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon.

McClendon had been indicted Tuesday for price fixing on real estate related to natural gas and oil development. Charges against him had been expected since 2012 when the violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act came to light.

But for a Michigander like me, this is not a remote and abstract story. Property over the Collingwood Shale formation in Northern Michigan was included in collusion between McClendon and Encana Oil & Gas executives to “avoid bidding up” prices. Between Chesapeake and Canadian corporation Encana, the two businesses owned nearly a million acres of Michigan — a chunk of land the size of Rhode Island.

Imagine it: two corporations buying a state-sized mass of land at rigged prices within a state. And all of it with underground water connected to a couple of the largest freshwater bodies in the world, much of it earmarked for fracking.

“Energy visionary“? That’s what other resources leeches might call McClendon, who was at the heart of a dispute over Lake Michigan shoreline property. The land had been willed to “the children” of Benton Harbor by former residents J.N. and Carrie Klock, in memory of their daughter Jean, for use as a public park. In dedicating the land, J.N. Klock said, “…See to it that the park is the children’s.”

It was the only such lakefront park for Benton Harbor, a financially-challenged city with 89% African American residents. But the property adjoined the intended development of a Jack Nicklaus golf course, and the McClendon family as well as other notable figures (like Rep. Fred Upton and Whirlpool CEO Jeff Fettig) lived in the neighborhood of both the intended golf course and Jean Klock Park. The dispute caused considerable heartburn for Benton Harbor residents. It still boggles my mind that wealthy parasites like McClendon simply felt they could ignore the intent of the Klocks’ intentions, their proxies arguing the pricey (read: unaffordable to the average Benton Harborite) golf course would meet the standard of public access.

Note also, that Benton Harbor was among the Michigan cities to which an emergency financial manager had been appointed because of its municipal financial crisis — just like Flint, Michigan.

I can only imagine what other parasitic nonsense will emerge in the debris field left by McClendon. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Quick hits

That’s enough damage for now. Be anti-parasitic and do something nice for others today.

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Wednesday Morning: All the Range from Sublime to Silly

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We start with the sublime, welcoming astronaut Scott Kelly back to earth after nearly a year in space — 340 days all told. Wouldn’t you like to know how these first hours and days will feel to Kelly as he regains his earth legs?

And then we have the silly…

Apple’s General Counsel Sewell and FBI Director Comey appeared before House Judiciary Committee
You’d think a Congressional hearing about FBI’s demand to crack open Apple iPhone would be far from silly, but yesterday’s hearing on Apple iPhone encryption…Jim Comey likened the iPhone 5C’s passcode protection to “a guard dog,” told Apple its business model wasn’t public safety, fretted about “warrant-proof spaces” and indulged in a thought exercise by wondering what would happen if Apple engineers were kidnapped and forced to write code.

What. The. Feck.

I think I’ll read about this hearing in French news outlets as it somehow sounds more rational: iPhone verrouillé: le patron du FBI sur le gril face au Congrès américain (iPhone locked: FBI boss grilled by US Congress – Le Monde). Other kickers in Comey’s testimony: an admission that a “mistake was made” (oh, the tell-tale passive voice here) in handling the San Bernardino shooter’s phone, the implication that the NSA couldn’t (wouldn’t?) backdoor the iPhone in question, and that obtaining the code demanded from Apple would set precedent applicable to other cases.

Predictably, Apple’s Bruce Sewell explained that “Building that software tool would not affect just one iPhone. It would weaken the security for all of them.” In other words, FBI’s demand that Apple writes new code to crack the iPhone 5C’s locking mechanism is a direct threat to Apple’s business model, based on secure electronic devices.

Catch the video of the entire hearing on C-SPAN.

Facebook’s Latin American VP arrested after resisting release of WhatsApp data
Here’s another legal precedent, set in another country, where a government made incorrect assumptions about technology. Brazilian law enforcement and courts believed WhatsApp stored data it maintains it doesn’t have, forcing the issue by arresting a Facebook executive though WhatsApp is a separate legal entity in Brazil. Imagine what could happen in Brazil if law enforcement wanted an Apple iPhone 5C unlocked. The executive will be released today, according to recent reports. The underlying case involved the use of WhatsApp messaging by drug traffickers.

USAO-EDNY subpoenaed Citigroup in FIFA bribery, corruption and money laundering allegations
In a financial filing, Citigroup advised it had been subpoenaed by the U.S. Attorney’s office. HSBC advised last week it had been contacted by U.S. law enforcement about its role. No word yet as to whether JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have been likewise subpoenaed though they were used by FIFA officials. Amazing. We might see banksters perp-walked over a fútbol scandal before we see any prosecuted for events leading to the 2008 financial crisis.

Quick hits

I’m out of here, need to dig out after another winter storm dumped nearly a foot of the fluffy stuff yesterday. I’m open to volunteers, but I don’t expect many snow shovel-armed takers.

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Tuesday Morning: Guidance to Be True

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Now an oldie but goodie, this Fiona Apple ditty. The subtle undertow of irony seems fitting today.

Speaking of guidance…

Google’s self-driving car went boom
Oops. Autonomous vehicles still not a thing when they can’t avoid something the size of a bus. Thank goodness nobody was hurt. Granted, until now Google’s self-driving test cars were not the cause of accidents — human drivers have been at fault far more often. In this particular accident, both the car and the human test driver may have been at fault.

VW’s CEO Mueller spins the (PR) wheels on agreement with U.S.
This is now a habit: before every major international automotive show, VW’s Matthias Mueller grants an interview to offer upbeat commentary on the emissions standards cheating scandal, this time ahead of the 2016 Geneva International Auto Show. Not certain if this is helping at all; there’s not much PR can do when no truly effective technical fix exists while potential liability to the U.S. alone may approach $46 billion. Probably a better use of my time to skip Mueller’s spin and spend my time slobbering over the Bugatti Chiron. ~fanning self~

Apple all the time

#YearInSpace ends this evening for astronaut Scott Kelly
Undocking begins at 7:45 p.m. EST with landing expected at 11:25 p.m. EST, barring any unforeseen wrinkles like negative weather conditions. NASA-TV will cover the event live. Can’t wait to hear results of comparison testing between Scott and his earth-bound twin Mark after Scott’s year in space.

Department of No

That’s enough for now. I’m off to be a bad, bad girl. Stay safe.

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Monday Morning: Swivel, Heads

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Somebody out there knows what this tune means in my household. For our purposes this Monday morning, it’s a reminder to take a look around — all the way around. Something might be gaining on you.

Let’s look…

Android users: Be more vigilant about apps from Google Play
Better check your data usage and outbound traffic. Seems +300 “porn clicker” apps worked their way around Google Play’s app checking process. The apps rack up traffic, fraudulently earning advertising income; they persist because of users’ negligence in vetting and monitoring downloaded apps (because Pr0N!) and weakness in Google’s vetting. If this stuff gets on your Android device, what else is on it?

IRS’ data breach bigger than first reported
This may also depend on when first reporting occurred. The number of taxpayers affected is now ~700,000 according to the IRS this past Friday, which is considerably larger than the ~464,000 estimated in January this year. But the number of taxpayers affected has grown steadily since May 15th last year and earlier.

Did we miss the ‘push for exotic new weapons’?
Nope. Those of us paying attention haven’t missed the Defense Department’s long-running efforts developing new tools and weapons based on robotics and artificial intelligence. If anything, folks paying attention notice how little the investment in DARPA has yielded in payoff, noting non-defense development moving faster, further, cheaper — a la SuitX’s $40K exoskeleton, versus decades-plus investment by DARPA in exoskeleton vaporware. But apparently last Tuesday’s op-ed by David Ignatius in WaPo on the development of “new exotic weapons” that may be deployed against China and Russia spawned fresh discussion to draw our attention to this work. THAT is the new development — not the weapons, but the chatter, beginning with the Pentagon and eager beaver reporter-repeaters. This bit here, emphasis mine:

Pentagon officials have started talking openly about using the latest tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning to create robot weapons, “human-machine teams” and enhanced, super-powered soldiers. It may sound like science fiction, but Pentagon officials say they have concluded that such high-tech systems are the best way to combat rapid improvements by the Russian and Chinese militaries.

Breathless, much? Come the feck on. We’ve been waiting decades for these tools and weapons after throwing billions of dollars down this dark rathole called DARPA, and we’ve yet to see anything commercially viable in the way of an exoskeleton in the field. And don’t point to SKYNET and ask us to marvel at machine learning, because the targeting failure rate is so high, it’s proven humans behind it aren’t learning more and faster than the machines are.

Speaking of faster development outside DARPA: Disney deploying anti-drones?
The Star Wars franchise represents huge bank — multiple billions — to its owner Disney. Control of intellectual property during production is paramount, to ensure fan interest remains high until the next film is released. It’s rumored Disney has taken measures to reduce IP poaching by fan drones, possibly including anti-drones managed by a security firm protecting the current production location in Croatia. I give this rumor more weight than the Pentagon’s buzz about exoskeletons on the battlefield.

Lickety-split quickies

That’s a wrap — keep your eyes peeled. To quote Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

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Friday Morning: Afro-Cuban Coffee

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I should just dedicate Fridays to different genres of jazz. Today feels like a good day for Afro-Cuban jazz.

This chap, Francisco Raúl Gutiérrez Grillo, who performed under the name Machito with his Afro-Cubans, was an incredibly important innovator shaping Afro-Cuban jazz as well as modern American music. He was important to race in the music industry as well, as his Afro-Cubans may have been the first multi-racial band.

I’m brewing some Café Bustelo before I bust out my dancing shoes. ¡Vamonos!

Judge applies ‘Parkinson’s Law’ to VW emissions cheat case
You know the adage, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”? U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer gave Volkswagen 30 days to come up with a fix* for all the emissions standards cheating passenger diesel engine cars in the class action lawsuits he oversees in San Francisco. Gotta’ love this:

“It’s an ongoing harm that has to be addressed … I’ve found the process is a function of how much time people have available to fill. The story about lawyers is that that if you give them a year to do something, it will take them a year to do something. If you give them 30 days to do something, they’ll do something in 30 days.”

As time passes, vehicle owners are increasingly damaged as no one wants to buy their cars and their investment is lost. Hence the aggressive time limit.

* Caution: that link to SFGate may autoplay video and ad content. Really, SFGate? That’s such hideously bad form.

Rough road ahead in Saudi Arabia to a post-oil world
This piece in WaPo paints a grim picture of cheap oil’s impact on Saudi Arabia — and there are huge pieces missing. Worth a read while asking yourself how much Saudis are spending on military efforts against Yemen and Syria, and what new industries they’re investing in to replace oil-based employment.

Took long enough: Software and social media firms get Apple’s back
Did their legal departments finally read the case thoroughly and realize they had skin in this game, too? Who knows — but Google as well as Microsoft are planning to file amicus briefs in support of Apple. Microsoft had already indicated they would support Apple in a congressional hearing yesterday morning; Google piped up later. The latest skinny is that Facebook and Twitter both intend to file briefs as well in favor of Apple. Looks like Microsoft’s current management took an 180-degree turn away from progenitor Bill Gates’ initial response, hmm?

Hit and run

That’s a wrap on this week. Keep your eyes peeled for news dumps while folks are still picking apart last night’s GOP-cast reality TV show. And make time to dance.

EDIT — 8:40 AM — Ugh, why didn’t the Detroit News publish this piece *yesterday* instead of a Friday morning? Michigan’s Gov. Snyder’s “inner circle” exchanged emails advising a switchback from Flint River a year before the switchback took place, and only three weeks before Snyder’s re-election. There was enough content in this to go to press without waiting for a quote from one of the former advisers.

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Thursday Morning: Snowed In (Get It?)

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Yes, it’s a weak information security joke, but it’s all I have after shoveling out.

Michigan’s winter storm expanded and shifted last night; Marcy more than caught up on her share of snow in her neck of the woods after all.

Fortunately nothing momentous in the news except for the weather…

Carmaker Nissan’s LEAF online service w-i-d-e open to hackers
Nissan shut down its Carwings app service, which controls LEAF model’s climate control systems. Carwings allows vehicle owners to check information about their cars on a remote basis. Some LEAF owners conducted a personal audit and hacked themselves, discovering their cars were vulnerable to hacking by nearly anyone else. Hackers need only the VIN as userid and no other authentication to access the vehicle’s Carwings account. You’d think by now all automakers would have instituted two-factor authentication at a minimum on any online service.

Researcher says hardware hack of iPhone may be possible
With “considerable financial resources and acumen,” a hardware-based attack may work against iPhone’s passcode security. The researcher noted such an attempt would be very risky and could destroy any information sought in the phone. Tracing power usage could also offer another opportunity at cracking an iPhone’s passcode, but the know-how is very limited in the industry. This bit from the article is rather interesting:

IOActive’s Zonenberg, meanwhile, told Threatpost that an invasive hardware attack hack is likely also in the National Security Agency’s arsenal; the NSA has been absent from discussions since this story broke last week.

“It’s been known they have a semiconductor [fabrication] since January 2001. They can make chips. They can make software. They can break software. Chances are they can probably break hardware,” he said. “How advanced they were, I cannot begin to guess.”

The NSA has been awfully quiet about the San Bernardino shooter’s phone, haven’t they?

‘Dust Storm’: Years-long cyber attacks focused on intel gathering from Japanese energy industry
“[U]sing dynamic DNS domains and customized backdoors,” a nebulous group has focused for five years on collecting information from energy-related entities in Japan. The attacks were not limited to Japan, but attacks outside Japan by this same group led back in some way to Japanese hydrocarbon and electricity generation and distribution. ‘Dust Storm’ approaches have evolved over time, from zero-day exploits to spearfishing, and Android trojans. There’s something about this collected, focused campaign which sounds familiar — rather like the attackers who hacked Sony Pictures? And backdoors…what is it about backdoors?

ISIS threatens Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Dorsey
Which geniuses in U.S. government both worked on Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey about cutting off ISIS-related accounts AND encouraged revelation about this effort? Somebody has a poor grasp on opsec, or puts a higher value on propaganda than opsec.

Wonder if the same geniuses were behind this widely-reported meeting last week between Secretary of State John Kerry and Hollywood executives. Brilliant.

Case 98476302, Don’t text while walking
So many people claimed to have bumped their heads on a large statue while texting that the statue was moved. The stupid, it burns…or bumps, in this case.

House Select Intelligence Committee hearing this morning on National Security World Wide Threats.
Usual cast of characters will appear, including CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen, NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers, and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart. Catch it on C-SPAN.

Snow’s supposed to end in a couple hours, need to go nap before I break out the snow shovels again. À plus tard!

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Wednesday Morning: If It Ain’t Baseball, It’s Winter

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It may be sunny and 90F degrees where you are, but it’s still winter here. A winter storm warning was issued here based on a forecast 12 inches of snow and 35 mph winds out of the northeast off Lake Huron. For once, Marcy’s on the lee side of this storm and won’t be blessed with the worst of this system.

I’ll cozy up in front of the fireplace and catch up on reading today, provided we don’t have a power outage. Think I’ll nap and dream of baseball season starting in roughly five weeks.

Before the snow drifts cover the driveway, let’s take a look around.

Hey Asus: Don’t do as we do, just do as we say
Taiwanese computer and network equipment manufacturer Asus settled a suit brought by the Federal Trade Commission over Asus leaky routers. The devices’ insecurities were exposed when white hat hacker/s planted a text message routers informing their owners the devices were open to anyone who cared to look. Terms of the settlement included submitting to security auditing for 20 years.

What a ridiculous double standard: demand one manufacturer produce and sell secure products,while another government department demands another manufacturer build an insecurity.

Ads served to Android mobile devices leak like a sieve
Researchers with the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology presented their work yesterday at 2016 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, showing that a majority of ads not only matched the mobile user but revealed personal details:

• gender with 75 percent accuracy,
• parental status with 66 percent accuracy,
• age group with 54 percent accuracy, and
• could also predict income, political affiliation, marital status, with higher accuracy than random guesses.

Still some interesting work to be presented today before NDSS16 wraps, especially on Android security and social media user identity authentication.

RICO – not-so-suave – Volkswagen
Automotive magazine Wards Auto straps on the kneepads for VW; just check this headline:

Diesel Reigns in Korea as Volkswagen Scandal Ebbs

“Ebbs”? Really? Au contraire, mon frère. This mess is just getting started. Note the latest class-action lawsuit filed in California, this time accusing VW and its subsidiaries Audi and Porsche as well as part supplier Bosch of racketeering. Bosch has denied its role in the emissions controls defeat mechanism:

…The company has denied any involvement in the alleged fraud, saying it sold an engine control unit to Volkswagen, but that Volkswagen was responsible for calibrating the unit.

The scandal’s only just getting going when we don’t know who did what and when.

Worth noting Wards’ breathless excitement about VW passenger diesel sales uptick in South Korea. But then Wards ignores South Korea’s completely different emissions standards as well as the specifics in promotions for that market. Details, details…

Splash and dash

Don’t miss Ed Walker’s latest in his series on totalitarianism and Marcy’s fresh exasperation with polling on FBI vs Apple. Wind’s brisk out of the north, bringing the first wave of flurries. I’m off to check the gasoline in the snowblower and wax my snow shovels.

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