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on Sunday February 12 2017, @08:28AM
from the can't-get-caught-if-you're-not-cheating dept.
from the can't-get-caught-if-you're-not-cheating dept.
A French businessman is suing Uber for 45 million euros, for destroying his marriage.
It seems that he installed the Uber app on his wife's phone, used it once, and then logged out. Later, when using the app on his own phone to arrange tête-à-têtes with his mistress, his wife received Uber notifications, and figured out what was going on. Uber attributes this to a bug in their software specifically related to an older version of iOS.
What do soylentils think generally about the liability of tech companies for bugs in their software? Some say liability is needed to force some responsibility; others say it would be the death of the software industry as we know it.
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Logicians have but ill defined
As rational the human kind.
Logic, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Sunday February 12 2017, @01:54PM
If you want computers to be reliable and trustworthy then you don't want anything to do with what amounts to the animating paradigm for software development in this century. And that's a very sad thing to me. But obviously not everyone shares my values.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @11:42PM
Computers are already much more reliable than your average human. Computers basically do what humans can do without computers only faster and more reliably.
For instance take excel. You technically don't need a computer to do everything that excel can do. You can do it all with pen and paper and present it to others without any calculators and using no technology whatsoever. But it will be a whole lot slower, you will use a whole lot more space to store the same amount of information (thousands of sheets of paper vs a single hard drive), and the computations and copies will have a whole lot more mistakes.
The reason computers are useful is partly because they are a whole lot more reliable than their human counterparts. They can make perfect copies of files quickly and effortlessly (compared to the old days where to copy a manuscript by hand yielded variations and imperfections. Use a copy machine, sure, that's using technology and probably incorporates computer chips right? I suppose you can use a printing press and make impressions but then making changes is a hassle for one time prints and is that really more reliable than a computer?).
Just like with self driving cars. Are they ever going to be perfect? No, but they don't have to be, just much better than their human counterparts.
When saying computers and software is unreliable you need something to compare it with. What else does what a computer can do and how reliable is it? Well, humans we can communicate via speaking but how reliable is hearsay in making perfect copies of information vs copying the original text/audio/video and spreading it around (hint, if you ever played the kindergarten game called telephone where one person whispers something in the next person's ear and it travels around the class and by the time it reaches its destination it's a completely different message then you'll know. Our reliability is horrible).
A bridge doesn't need to copy, process/compute, and distribute information. Humans do. and when it comes to that computers are much faster and more reliable than their human counterparts. If we held software up to ridiculous standards no one would make software and we would be stuck without software and hence we would be much worse off in terms of reliability since we would be forced to do everything ourselves. and even your primitive computer can do certain things a thousand times more reliably and quickly than your most qualified and most highly licensed and educated human. For instance if I see an incorrect number in excel I assume it was inputted incorrectly, I don't assume that excel is what made the mistake. You would make the same assumption because you know that most mistakes are made by humans and not software/hardware/computers.
and there is already software that can diagnose patients better than your top doctors. Computers play chess better than we do. They will continue to progress and become better and better than us at everything. Will they ever be 100 percent reliable? No, but the base standard is are they more reliable than us given the same task. If so then we should use them or else we are stuck doing things the old unreliable way by doing it ourselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Monday February 13 2017, @12:29AM
"When saying computers and software is unreliable you need something to compare it with."
Yeah, you do. I'm comparing them to other programs. I've been using computers since 1980 feel free to do the math there. I'm comparing the software that's pushed today to the software that was used in past times, and I'm talking about the trajectory of development. You mention Excel. That's a specific example of a very common sort of program, a spreadsheet. There have been plenty of spreadsheets and they all do basically the same thing. If you were working rationally to produce quality software, and you're talking about a type of software that's been made for decades, you'd expect for there to be a fairly mature spreadsheet available and widely used by now.
Well that's not what happened and I've watched as these things transpire and it's very interesting what wound up happening instead. These programs are not maintained long term, perfected, and allowed to mature. Mature software is the last thing a commercial software house that makes its money selling software wants, because once everyone has bought it sales dry up! So what they do instead is avoid maturity, through constant rewrites and also through constantly adding new features but only rarely fixing old bugs. And as a last resort they simply discontinue software that has gotten too close to being a mature product and replace it with some new written from scratch POS.
So there's no mature, reliable spreadsheet that's been studied and vetted thoroughly over the years, no spreadsheet you can count on to do exactly what it's supposed to do, and no more, each time it's run. Instead there's the big one that's riddled with bugs, that's constantly receiving updates to add new features but only occasionally has a few of the worst bugs fixed, and the also-rans that spend most of their time copying that.
Hope that helped.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @03:53AM
This has little to do with licensing or the definition of the word 'engineer' and more to do with the fact that companies want to keep charging you for something they developed years ago. The issue here is the mentality that companies get from copy'right', they want to keep profiting off of something they made a very long time ago.
The problem is that they discontinue an older more mature product in favor of creating something newer that they can keep charging you for. If the old product is discontinued it will eventually stop working on newer computers or in newer systems, since the license is probably tied to a specific computer or system, and we can no longer make copies of it for others to use or for you to transfer the license over to others. So eventually the product dies. The solution is two fold.
Abolish copy'right' on discontinued products.
Reduce copy'right' laws to something more reasonable
This allows people to port old and mature products to newer systems and to keep making copies of them and improve upon them so that they can become a stable standard. This forces companies that want to make newer products to actually improve those products, to improve both the reliability and functionality by adding features. They can't simply force everyone to upgrade by discontinuing an old product because doing so automatically puts said product in the public domain.
But as long as psychopathic corporations keep writing byzantine self serving laws we're going to continue having these problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @02:19PM
In fact you can make a very strong argument that much of the early tech matured quickly exactly because it wasn't subject to things like patents at the time. Things won't mature as easily any more because IP gets in the way.
In fact much of the engineering stuff is mature exactly because it's no longer subject to IP or was never subject to IP. Look at anything that is subject to IP (ie: pharmaceuticals) and see how long it takes anything to mature. Usually maybe after the IP expires. Math is very mature because it hasn't traditionally been subject to patents. This lets people build upon old ideas and improve them without worrying about getting sued.
But of course businesses don't want that, they want to keep profiting off of something that someone else made decades ago. and as long as we keep on letting them write the laws ...