I know the department of defense used to use Ada because it was a “safety critical” language. I feel like when it comes to this devices there should be more stringent guidelines around coding practices. Is that not the case?
For example, I worked on a new ventilator at the start of the pandemic (https://www.cambridgeconsultants.com/press-releases/building...). As a medical device that was "in the loop" of keeping the patient alive, some of the strictest restrictions applied. There were 2 MCUs - one doing the control work, and another monitoring that first one, checking it agreed with the decisions and sounding an alarm if not. These two processors had to be different manufacturers, and had to use separate development teams (all to reduce the chance of a common mode failure).
The regulators are just checking you do the process though: does it look like you have done your design rigorously, and tested thoroughly. There's no way to check that you've done your design well though.
But I agree this is coming a bit late in the process if people have already been harmed.
And it doesn't sound to me like using rust or ada would have prevented this. It sounds like the android ui, which almost certainly is not in any certified toolchain, had a string handling error. The ui for a safety critical device is safety critical code, it sounds like that isn't how the rules actually work though, or you wouldn't be running it on a phone.
> 11. No single entity -- academic, corporate, governmental, or non-profit -- administers the Internet. It exists and functions as a result of the fact that hundreds of thousands of separate operators of computers and computer networks independently decided to use common data transfer protocols to exchange communications and information with other computers (which in turn exchange communications and information with still other computers). There is no centralized storage location, control point, or communications channel for the Internet, and it would not be technically feasible for a single entity to control all of the information conveyed on the Internet.
Ironically, in this day and age of Facebook and Twitter, that’s probably not even true anymore in a practical sense.
There... isn't such a norm (at least not in the American system) courts defer to legislatures on matters of policy, not fact. There's a norm that appellate courts in most cases have some deference to lower courts on findings of fact, reviewing them only for unreasonableness, but nothing about courts deferring to legislatures about matters of fact.
That's very much an overstatement, and arguably even flat-out incorrect. See https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
I really love open source IoT stuff for example and I think it's a great that people are trying to take real ownership of their devices. However it's different if the penalty for failure is your lights not working or immediate death.
I think a better solution would be if the source was required to be public so people can identify bugs, but without giving users the ability to flash.
That would be a solution, still has the problem of "how do you confirm the bug if you can't run the code".
Finding those kinds of subtle bugs pretty much requires you be able to execute it.
i think you would need an overwhelmingly large number of prevented suicides and avoided foolish accidents to justify such a monstrous evil
the balance of deaths is very likely to work out the other way around, in fact, because people reflashing their own insulin pumps have much stronger incentives to maximize their survival chances than any possible regulatory regime would, much less the one that actually exists
the policy of 'let us make laws and set up regulatory agencies to prevent people from harming themselves' has such an astoundingly bad track record that it always surprises me to hear someone advocating it in apparent seriousness