Open Source the answer?
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/2...tml?_r=0&referer=http://www.drudgereport.com/
As an Embedded Linux Architect, I tend to agree!
Here are some excerpts:
'One model that N.H.T.S.A. has studied is the one now used by the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial aircraft. The F.A.A. dispatches representatives to plane manufacturers to directly oversee the software design process for the critical systems that control flying.
“They go in periodically, and say, ‘Show me what you’re doing and convince me that you’re doing a good job — or else I’m not signing off, and it’s not going in an airplane,’ ” Mr. Koopman of Carnegie Mellon said. “Can you tailor this so that it works for the car business? That’s a question I don’t have an answer for. But it’s clearly an option.”
If it were to carry out those inspections, N.H.T.S.A. would need skilled people. The agency estimates that it has 0.3 staff members for every 100 fatalities in automobile crashes; the F.A.A. has at its disposal over 10,000 staff members for every 100 fatalities on commercial aircraft, according to N.H.T.S.A.
“Companies are trying to use state-of-the-art software,” said Mr. Gerdes of Stanford. “If you are going to attempt to regulate that, you need to have similar expertise in-house, and that can be challenging from a recruiting and compensation and talent perspective.'
'Given the challenges of regulating complex software, some experts are calling for automakers to put their code in the public domain, a practice that has become increasingly commonplace in the tech world. Then, they say, automakers can tap the vast skills and resources of coding and security experts everywhere to identify potential problems.
“We should be allowed to know how the things we buy work,” Mr. Moglen of Columbia University said. “Let’s say everybody who bought a Volkswagen were guaranteed the right to read the source code of everything in the car,” he said.
“Ninety-nine percent of the buyers would never read anything. But out of the 11 million people whose car was cheating, one of them would have found it,” he said. “And Volkswagen would have been caught in 2009, not 2015.”'
'Volkswagen, through its trade association, has been one of the most vocal and forceful opponents of an exemption to a copyright rule that would allow independent researchers to look at a car’s source code, said Kit Walsh, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for user privacy and free expression.
“If copyright law were not an impediment,” he said, “then we could have independent researchers go in and look at the code and find this kind of intentional wrongdoing, just as we have independent watchdogs that check vehicle safety with crash-test dummies.”
“Keeping source code secret does not prevent attacks,” Mr. Koopman of Carnegie Mellon said. “Either the code is vulnerable or it’s not.”
In the past, the Environmental Protection Agency has sided with automakers and opposed making automotive code public. There is a community of computer car tinkerers who tweak code to improve performance. The E.P.A.’s logic was that car owners might try to reprogram their cars to beat emissions rules.
The Volkswagen trickery has turned that argument on its head. The agency declined to comment on the copyright issue, and on Friday it announced it would conduct additional emissions testing on carmakers.
“Is the problem of individuals modifying their cars individually more serious than the risk of large-scale cheating by manufacturers?” said Mr. Moglen of Columbia.'
