Re: [TUHS] Death by bug

Hi Jon, True. I don't know of any but if I had to pick an area where they might be occurring it would be medical devices. I've been an external reviewer of a company's embedded C code for a medical device in the past, bare-metal, simple pre-emptive round-robin task-switcher, etc., though my suggestion is nothing to do with their quality of work or products, just that the level of detail they went to shows how slacker companies could err. The Therac-25 gave fatal radiation doses in a few cases. These were obvious when they occurred. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 What if a medical device which sits in the background quietly doing its continuous, but sometimes vital, thing had the occasional hiccough from which it recovered? If the blip is only fatal in patients which were already touch and go and device fault left no obvious sign to suggest death wasn't caused by the initial ailment then the cause of death would be, quite reasonably, assumed. Given some devices are present in large numbers for many years in hospitals, and there's a lot of hospitals, an unnoticed bug could be steadily chipping away at its human overlords. -- Cheers, Ralph.