Vox Sentences: Volkswagen made cars smart enough to cheat on emissions tests

The EPA busts Volkswagen; Donald Trump supporters can be scary; and the ethics of ad blockers.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

When cars get too smart for their own good

Shutterstock

• The EPA has charged Volkswagen of intentionally getting around diesel emissions standards by programming cars to perform differently during emissions tests.

  [Wall Street Journal / Amy Harder and Mike Spector]

• A lot of news outlets reported this as a recall of 500,000 Volkswagen (and Audi) cars. The EPA is not recalling the cars yet, and they are fully safe to drive. But it's hinting an official recall will come at some point in the next year.

  [Environmental Protection Agency]

• In the first year Volkswagen Jettas were programmed with the illegal "defeat device," the car manufacturer actually won a tax break for selling fuel-efficient cars.

  [NPR / Bill Chappell]

• This isn't the first time that car software has made vehicles harder to regulate. A decade ago, an issue with brakes on Toyotas rested in part on what one engineer called "spaghetti-like" code — code so complex that it was impossible to understand, much less maintain.

  [Safety Research & Strategies]

• Arguably a bigger problem: The more software is integrated into cars, the more easily cars can be hacked remotely.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

Donald Trump indulges blatant bigotry. Again.

CNN

• Last night, a Donald Trump supporter asked the GOP frontrunner, "We have a problem in this country, it's called Muslims...We have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That's my question: when can we get rid of 'em?"

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Donald Trump's response: "We're gonna be looking at a lot of different things. And you know that a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We're going to be looking at that."

• Trump's failure to challenge the assertion that President Obama is a foreign-born Muslim got the first wave of press. But Trump's encouragement of a man's desire to "get rid of" American Muslims is a far bigger sin.

  [Politico / Nick Gass]

• Trump supporters have done some extremely ugly things over the course of this race. And Trump has not only failed to condemn them, this isn't the first time he's appeared to encourage them.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Immigration advocates are collecting a "Trump Hate Map" of harassment of Latinos by Trump supporters. Some of it is standard (if ugly) protester/counterprotester shouting — but it also includes instances of protesters being punched, spat on, and hair-pulled.

  [America's Voice]

• The Trump campaign attempted to clarify the candidate's remarks about Islam by saying he was really talking about the need to protect Christian religious liberty. There was no mention of Christians or religious liberty in the exchange.

  [Mediaite / Josh Feldman]

• Diverting the conversation to Christian is an increasingly common tactic, though — during the secondary GOP debate Wednesday, candidates responded to questions about the arrest of Ahmed Mohamed for bringing his clock to school by exclaiming that Christians were the "biggest victims" in America.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• (In progressive Internet circles, this kind of derailing is known as playing the "oppression Olympics" and it's generally seen as a petty and vindictive tactic.)

  [Geek Feminism Wiki]

• Anyway, here is your explainer on the "Muslim training camps" meme the Trump supporter referenced, which turns out to be a surprisingly popular, Fox News-endorsed conspiracy theory.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

No chance for Peace

Stephen Lam/Getty Images

• If you follow internet journalists on the internet, you have probably heard a lot of chatter about adblocker software. This explainer will tell you why.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• The latest version of iPhone software, iOS 9, will allow people to install apps to block ads while browsing the internet. This inspired a lot of Sturm und Drang among people who make their money from ads hosted alongside their internet writing.

  [The Awl / Casey Johnston]

• Ad-blocker champions and developers, like Marco Arment (whose ad-block app Peace became the top paid app in the US Apple Store when it was released two days ago), said the issue was really about page performance in online journalism: fewer ads made pages load faster.

  [Marco Arment]

• But the sites Arment's app was affecting included the blog of his friend, tech blogger John Gruber, who has complained that Apple is gaining "veto power over the internet" by shaping the market for mobile browsing so much (and encouraging publishers to display their content on non-adblocked Apple News instead).

  [Business Insider / Jim Edwards]

• Suddenly, Arment had a change of heart. He announced today that he's pulling Peace from the app store (though, because the Apple refund process is tedious, he's likely to keep most of the money he earned off an app he now finds unethical).

  [Alan Jacobs via Tumblr]

• The personal drama doesn't affect the structural trends, and it shouldn't obscure them: adblocking is here, and so are the counter-tactics advertisers and publishers are using to adapt to it (like "native" ads and posting articles on Facebook).

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

MISCELLANEOUS

Four years after the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, President Obama is appointing the first-ever openly gay Secretary of the Army, Eric Fanning. [Washington Post / Greg Jaffe]

• Jeffrey Farrow earns over $100,000 a year as executive director of an obscure federal agency called the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. At the same time, he has collected hundreds of thousands more annually lobbying for Puerto Rico and Palau, among other clients.

  [NYT / Eric Lipton]

• A 13-year-old Ted Cruz supporter rails into a falsely arrested Muslim 14-year-old in some horrifying version of Crossfire Babies.

  [Washington Post / Justin Wm. Moyer]

• A profile of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who at 68 "sometimes has a hard time being civil to children and still refuses to shake the hand of a reporter."

  [NYT / Jay Caspian Kang]

• I have never loved anything as much as the author of the Rockford Files Filming Locations blog loves The Rockford Files.

  [AV Club / BG Henne]

VERBATIM

"I'm in favor of this Lie Sangbong fellow and his vision of a world in which we are dressed in space-age monochromatic sleeves." [Elle / Reihan Salam]

• "If someone sees you reading Heidegger on a train, they might think you would be an interesting person to have sex with. If they see you reading Dewey, there is a risk they will think you would be an excellent person to serve on a committee."

  [Boston Review / Peter Godfrey-Smith]

• "Because of the vicious stigma still attached to HIV, doctors at Children’s would deliver the news with a pair of contradictory directives: Don’t be ashamed, but keep the virus a secret."

  [Washington Post / John Woodrow Cox]

• "If you think your child’s immune system is strong enough to fight off vaccine-preventable diseases, then it’s strong enough to fight off the tiny amounts of dead or weakened pathogens present in any of the vaccines."

  [Slate / Amy Parker]

• "When Roof showed up asking Joey for a place to stay, Joey says, he invited him in without hesitation. When Roof told him that he believed in segregation, Joey didn’t ask why. When Roof mentioned driving two hours to Charleston and visiting a church called Emanuel AME, he didn’t ask anything about it."

  [Washington Post / Stephanie McCrummen]

WATCH THIS

Color film was built for white people. Here's what it did to dark skin. [YouTube / Estelle Caswell]

Vox / Estelle Caswell

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