Continuing the theme under a new name, Michael Graham Richard @ Treehugger.com believes he may have found evidence of another scandal, much like the VW scam:
Samsung likes to brag about its ‘smart’ televisions. Well, maybe they’re a little too smart for their own good. Drawing an uncomfortable parallel with Volkswagen’s emission rigging scheme, the European Commission is now investigating the South-Korean company to figure out whether its televisions’ are designed to modify their power consumption when they detect that they are being tested for energy efficiency. This alleged fraud has been uncovered by independent labs, once again.
From his source at the guardian:
The European commission says it will investigate any allegations of cheating the tests and has pledged to tighten energy efficiency regulations to outlaw the use of so-called “defeat devices” in TVs or other consumer products, after several EU states raised similar concerns.
Which sounds very upright, doesn’t it? Outlawing defeat devices, that is. Except we’re really talking consumer fraud here, and so there’s a law already in place to cover the situation.
But as an engineer, my question is this: why are the test engineers disclosing their test environment to the development engineers? That’s madness barely understandable, and I do mean barely. Additionally, the testing should cover a very wide range of conditions in order to understand the behavior of the device as conditions change – it’s close to insanity to suggest that recognition of a test environment is even possible for responsible testing.
At this point, it’s really on the test engineers to explain how the device manufacturers can possibly discern the difference between real environments and test environments, and why their test environments should be detectable.
