False Positives at 725 Rounds a Minute
OK, last post today…I think:
Speaking of hard computing problems, according to Wired’s Danger Room blog, robots with machine guns have now been deployed in Iraq. These robots (dubbed special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system [SWORDS]) have not fired yet but:
Michael Zecca, the SWORDS program manager, tells DANGER ROOM. “But that’ll be happening soon.”
Speaking as someone whose seen commercial security systems fail repeatedly during my time in the industry, I certainly hope their software is better than our software. Something tells me that there isn’t a “powered by Windows Mobile” sticker anywhere on the bot. However, with commercial OSs performing more and more functions for the government, it doesn’t seem completely outside the realm of possibility.
Setting the ethical implications aside of turning war into a game of network Doom, the repercussions of a crypto or software failure in the transmissions from the controller to the bot are enormous. I wonder what they are using and what sort of testing they underwent. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some security through obscurity in there somewhere. On a related note, Steven Murdoch over at Cambridge has an interesting post explaining why software problems are as big or bigger than crypto problems in e-voting systems. The same applies here as well (note his mention of rocket launches):
Good software engineering is necessary but, in the case of voting systems, may be especially difficult to achieve. In fact, such systems have more similarities to the software behind rocket launches than more conventional business productivity software. We should thus expect the consequential high costs and, despite all this extra effort, that the occasional catastrophe will be inevitable.
Technorati Tags: biometrics, security
October 10th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
http://www.foster-miller.com/lemming.htm
URL to the TALON and SWORDS robots. Note URL is ending in ‘lemming’.