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Will this software put you in Jail ?
By Martin English | September 21, 2007
In the UK, officials in Cumbria have been caught lying about faulty speed cameras, the Greater London Council was forced to refund over £300,000 due to faulty speed cameras, and aman in Dorset luckily managed to prove he was only driving 13 miles an hour despite the camera claiming he was driving at 51 miles per hour.
This oreilly.net article, You Have the Right to Read Your Accuser discusses a New Jersey Supreme Court decision to order that source code to a popular breathalyzer be revealed. The curious thing is that this is the Draeger 7110 – the same breathalyser currently allowed under the NSW Transport Regulations and used by the NSW Police.South Wales.
The problems with the device are many, but include:
- The program presented shows ample evidence of incomplete design, incomplete verification of design, and incomplete “white box” and “black box” testing.
- An interrupt that detects that the microprocessor is trying to execute an illegal instruction is disabled, meaning that the Alcotest software could appear to run correctly while executing wild branches or invalid code for a period of time.
- The diagnostic routines for the Analog to Digital (A/D) Converters will substitute arbitrary, favorable readings for the measured device if the measurement is out of range, either too high or too low.
- The software takes an airflow measurement at power-up, and presumes this value is the “zero line” or baseline measurement for subsequent calculations. No quality check or reasonableness test is done on this measurement.
- The software design detects measurement errors, but ignores these errors unless they occur a consecutive total number of times.
In other words, errors are often suppressed or ignored and false data can be deliberately returned.
Any software with substantial risk to harm your life or liberty must be open source.
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