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posted by mrpg on Saturday February 03 2018, @02:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the while-(will):live dept.

Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Conservancy delivered a keynote presentation last week at linux.conf.au 2018 (LCA) in Sydney, Australia. Specifically she spoke about her multi-year odyssey to try to gain access to the source code for the pacemaker attached to her heart and upon which her life currently depends. Non-free software is having an increasingly (negative) impact on society as people entrust more of their lives to it. That software is found in an increasing number of places, both high and low, as all kinds of devices start to run fully networked microcomputers.

In her first LCA keynote 6 years ago, Karen first told the people of LCA about her heart condition and the defibrillator that she needed to have implanted. This year she described her continued quest to receive the source code for the software running in her defibrillator, and how far she has been able to get in obtaining the source code that she's been requesting for over a decade now.

Source : Karen Sandler Delivered Keynote at Linux.conf.au


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Saturday February 03 2018, @04:39PM (4 children)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 03 2018, @04:39PM (#632580) Journal

    If I had the source code to a device keeping me personally alive, I'd be obsessed by it. I wouldn't stop thinking about it night and day. I've worked in safety critical industries before (nuclear power) and safety never relied on a single point of failure. I've seen the machinery, I've read the operating procedures and I've reviewed the safety case. I've also been "doing" software since I was a small child, and let me tell you the quality of that stuff is pretty uniformly terrible. In general, human beings refuse to learn how to write good software. In safety critical systems, we usually rely on at least redundancy (several instance of a device), diversity (different designs and manufactures) and segregation (physical barriers between systems to prevent a fault spreading, like fire). I'd much rather rely on a medical device that contains no software at all. Fly by wire aircraft worry me.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Saturday February 03 2018, @04:46PM

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 03 2018, @04:46PM (#632585) Journal

    Fly by wire aircraft worry me.

    I don't know if it still works but one guaranteed way to put a commercial jet pilot into great distress and or depression used to be to get them to realize that "avionics" are computers. Further that avionics were computers that had escaped, perhaps temporarily, the influence of Wintel and the M$ mindset. That "temporarily" part really used to get them.

    The current state does not look promising [aviationtoday.com].

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 03 2018, @05:05PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday February 03 2018, @05:05PM (#632591) Journal

    Is it that having the software would drive you crazy, or the mere fact that you could obtain the software? You are free to ignore it. But the rest of us would feel better if we could review and improve the code.

    There is a way to get peace of mind that it really is flawless, if the code base is small enough: formal verification. Being embedded, ithere's a good chance it is. It can't be the usual mess of 1 megabyte of library code per 100 lines of application code.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Saturday February 03 2018, @05:13PM

      by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 03 2018, @05:13PM (#632599) Journal

      You're right, if it's a few hundred lines of embedded code, it can be formally verified. The way things are going these days, the people doing the "verification" might not be up to it though. Peer review and independent scrutiny of these things is essential. The point I was trying to make through use of polemic was that some standards are very low these days, and frequently the people who put themselves in charge of upholding the standards aren't as clever or thorough as they think they are.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 03 2018, @09:41PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday February 03 2018, @09:41PM (#632681)

    The fun thing about an implantable defib is that it does nothing, hopefully for years at a time, until you need it - and then it saves your life.

    I worked with a guy that got an implantable defib, he basically died one night in the auto parts store - EMTs arrived just in time to revive him, then pumped him with some drug that erased all memory of the event... apparently it was quite entertaining for his friends, him going slightly nuts on the drug. Anyway... after the event he got a script for an implantable defib, and had had one for about 5 years the last time I talked with him - it hadn't gone off yet, but based on his EKG and the event in the auto parts store, the doctors figured it was a good idea.

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