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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: 2, Disagree) by letssee on Saturday February 03 2018, @10:11PM

    by letssee (2537) on Saturday February 03 2018, @10:11PM (#632691)

    What a load of bullshit.

    Pacemaker software is not very complicated. well it might be, but it's not very complicated to secure.

    The current gen is a closed source mess. You don't need the source code to break them, just fuzz them with random wifi/bluetooth/zigbee and you *will* crash it.

    Everybody with bad intent can crash a pacemaker right now, the way they are secured now (that is, hardly) because the security was made by monkeys without supervision.

    I'd want the source as well, then you can at least *know* your own vulnerabilities.

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