http://www.itwire.com/content/view/25080/1141/
Breathe into this, sir - proprietary software fails DUI test
David M Williams
A remarkable court case in New Jersey saw the source code for the Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C reviewed by an independent software firm.
The findings showed terrible bugs and technical deficiencies raising serious questions about the reliability of the devices and previous judgments issued.
This is why open source is a must for accountability.
...time around it is the software powering a breathalyser, as used by police officers around the world.
The fact software powers such a device is news to me; I always just figured it was a chemical reaction going on, but thankfully my experience with breathalysers is fairly limited.
The case in particular is State v. Chun where defense counsel spent two years trying to obtain the source code for the Alcotest device. They succeeded and submitted the code to Base One Technologies who performed a thorough code review.
The review found a stunning 19,400 potential errors.
Base One Technologies even went so far as to state the program showed “ample evidence of incomplete design, incomplete verification of design, and incomplete ‘white box’ and ‘black box’ testing. Therefore,” they state, “the software has to be considered unreliable and untested, and in several cases it does not meet stated requirements.”
That’s barely the tip of it!...
General