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posted by on Sunday February 12 2017, @08:28AM   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Monday February 13 2017, @12:29AM

    by Arik (4543) on Monday February 13 2017, @12:29AM (#466375) Journal
    After skipping the first three paragraphs (roughly correct, but somewhat out of place, making me wonder if you understand what you're replying to) we get to this:

    "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?
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @03:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @03:53AM (#466438)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @02:19PM (#466589)

      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 ...