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Breathalyzer Source Code Revealed
Nonillion writes "New Jersey attorney Evan M. Levow was finally able to get an order from the Supreme Court of New Jersey forcing the manufacturer of the popular Draeger AlcoTest 7110 to reveal the source code. Levow turned the code over to experts, Base One Technologies, to analyze. Initially, Base One found that, contrary to Draeger's protestations that the code was proprietary, the code consisted mostly of general algorithms: 'That is, the code is not really unique or proprietary.' In other words, the 'trade secrets' claim which manufacturers were hiding behind was completely without merit." Following up an earlier discussion here, the state of Minnesota has (without explanation) missed a deadline to turn over the code for a different breathalyzer.
My guess is that 99% of proprietary code contains a big trade secret: The secret of just how crappy the source code really is.
If they were expecting their code to be opened to the public, they would have taken the effort to fix up "spaghetticode.inc" which contains the single comment "//This works though i'm not sure why... clean up l8r!!!!".
It's a device intended to nab as many people as possible. The more people it "saves" from being killed by drunk driving the better. Accuracy doesn't matter, legal limits don't matter. ZOMG ALCOHOL!!! = Jail. Fines. Moral superiority. If police departments actually intended to serve the public, they'd come up with a more reliable system subject to completely public scrutiny and be glad to instill public trust in their methods by doing so.
Flip it to another tool used for criminal convictions: if DNA were a public, proprietary process through only two or three companies nationwide and they refused to show anyone how it worked, would you trust them? Absolutely not.
The unfortunate reality that the laws are trying to deal with, though, is that it is essentially impossible for law enforcement to spot all the drunks on the road, and deliver you home as you suggest (imagine the logistics of that: you could put all the police in this country on that duty full time!, and still not have enough cops).
Worse, it won't even be near to possible for them to indentify all of the sufficiently impaired so as to protect the rest of us from their idiocy.
What drunk driving laws do is create an incentive for everyone to voluntarily police themselves, and to act more responsibly. If you know you run a risk of a long incarceration just for drunk driving, you may not take my life into your hands by getting behind the wheel and driving the same roads as I do. If you (or most of these drunk idiots) know that the only penalty for getting caught is being taken home, then you'll be much more encouraged to just take your chances with my life, rather than deal with the inconvenience and cost of a taxi ride.
Drunk driving laws disencentivize behaviors on an individual basis that normally have unfortunate incentives on an individual basis, but have an extremely high average cost for the rest of society. This is also why no-sleepy-driving and no-cellphone-driving laws are a similarly good idea.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Here's a better idea: don't drink and drive.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
At the current BAC levels, drinking and driving do not mean what you think they mean. Using mouthwash in the morning or before your drive home (some people brush their teeth more than twice a day) can mean you'll test positive. If you have a beer with friends over dinner and drive 2 hours later, you can still test positive.
The MADD crew lost the moral high-ground long ago.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I think it's great the source code is getting out, and that we'll find out which devices are crappy and which are better.
But in the end, I don't think any of this matters. Drunk drivers are not prosecuted based on roadside breathalyzer tests. They are prosecuted based on tests done back at the police station using either a blood test or a much better lab-quality breathalyzer. These instruments are regularly tested in a way that makes it easy to convince a jury of the validity of the results. I've seen some of the corresponding tests on a roadside breathalyzer, and they convinced me not to trust the device.
So, it's good advice to decline the roadside tests.
Hi nate nice. Got any more tips for drunk drivers?
you have NEVER EVER had a beer at work (maybe some milestone or something) and then drove home, perhaps even a few hours later?
that never happens to you?
or you have a glass of wine out on a date?
the laws are too harsh and people DO need to know all the info that the other side knows. not only is it desirable to know all your rights, its -necessary- for the system to really work at all.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
As much as I hate to agree with the gp, there is a valid point there, even if calling prosecution of drunk driving modern prohibition is absurd. The valid point is that there are plenty of things that make drivers unsafe and the tests to determine competency are arbitrary. Blood alcohol content doesn't measure competency, it just measures a risk factor, of which there are many including age, rest and mood which are ignored. On any given day, despite the fact that I don't ever drive drunk, there is some reason to question my competency. It might be my eyesight or my mood, or just that I'm giving half of my conscious attention to a programming problem, but the issue is that my focus is rarely completely solely on the task of driving my car. Certainly the level varies between those times when I'm in heavy traffic and the times when I'm alone on the road, but I think it is fair to question whether our society's emphasis on one risk factor is a realistic reflection of the true dangers of the road.
I'm sorry to say that I don't really have a better solution than the standard of hoping that the watchful eyes of law enforcement will pick up on those who endanger the lives of others in the road, at least not a socially acceptable one. If I'm getting to make free suggestions though, I recommend that persons who have exhibited stability, sanity and a tendency to be the safest drivers be issued a permit to shoot up to one bad driver a year. Should such an absurdity come to pass, I just hope that I'm one of the gun toting vigalities rather than one of the careless and dead. Come to think of it, I'd probably get a job where I could use public transportation or bicycle to work if I had to take the risk, so it would be good for the environment too. See, guns do make things better!
Posting from Texas, the only state where "he needed killin" might convince a jury.
Back in my day when we chiseled our bits into stone and sent them by mule train from village to village...
Like calling a taxi or getting a designated driver?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Or just think ahead and don't drink if you're planning on navigating a massive structure weighing thousands of pounds down a highway with fellow human beings. Have a designated driver. Walk home. Take a cab. Driving isn't your only option.
Rather than making this an exercise in what you can get away with within the law, make it an exercise in personal responsibility in regards to your fellow man.
I have an even more important question: Does the friggin' device work? I agree that reading through the observations, the code doesn't instill confidence. But the real important question is whether or not it works. There must be some requirement as to how many false positives/negatives are allowed because no matter how good your code, nothing is infallible. So what is the requirement in terms of acceptable false positives and/or false negatives, and does the device meet that requirement?
Is there is a real and legitimate belief that this device doesn't work? Or is this just some escapade launched by an attorney to free a guilty drunk driver?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Yes, but how many karma points are *gained* by drunken slashdot posting? I'd say it's probably an order of magnitude greater than the points lost =]
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
If the law says 0.05 is fine then we should hold ourselves to it. If we wanted 0.00 then write the law as such. Why is carrying out the law properly even an issue?
The crazy shit won't stick in court? Where the hell do you live? I have lived in Jersey, Georgia, Tennessee and a bunch of other places while in college and in the Air Force and law enforcement officers at all levels are the same; they are a bunch of sleazy lying bastards. They will charge you with all sorts of crazy shit because they know that a judge will side with them on at least half the charges no matter how crazy of a story they make up or how good of an attorney you get to represent you.
In the US justice system today the average Joe Blow on the street is fucked before the case even gets to the court. If a cop pulls you over, pray he got laid that morning so that he'll be in a better mood...then you MAY have a chance to get away with only a ticket for a minor infraction instead of having to prepare for a serious ass fucking by some guy named Bubba who wants to make you his "wife". If the feds are investigating you...well you're just plain fucked, those bastards know how to play the courts like a fine Stradivarius violin so you might as well buy a case of KY to take with you to prison. And that shit about a jury of your "peers"??? Ya, right...In your dreams!!! I'll never understand how a bunch of housewives, gardeners, mechanics and other blue collar workers could ever be considered "peers" in cases involving white collar "crime" or highly technical issues. Think about it...we have morons who can barely balance a checkbook sitting in judgment of corporate accountants. We have fools who can barely run their own lives sitting in judgment of CEOs. We have idiots who have no idea what the sine or cosine of an angle means, but you will find them sitting on juries deciding cases involving engineering failures. The eyes of these juries glaze over 10 seconds into expert testimony, and yet they are "peers" of the accused? If the prosecutor tells them 2 + 2 = 5, they'll just take his word for it and convict. Thats justice by a "jury of your peers." Peers my ass!
Justice in the US courts? That is a myth. Why should there be any justice when just about every penalty includes an opportunity for the government to seize money, property, or labor, i.e. community service, from the so-called "guilty" party? Hell some "crimes" permit seizure of property on just a suspicion, with no charges needing to be filed and with little or no recourse to get the seized property returned. After all who has tens of thousands of dollars to spend to go through the process to get seized property returned. No one I know.
Fucked...just plain fucked. That what you are once the "justice" system gets a hold of you.
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Considering this is shipping code in a device that doesn't exactly do automatic updates over a wireless network, I'm not sure when, exactly, you're anticipating that this testing" code will be replaced with the "real thing". You'll forgive me for thinking you're taking a fairly blase attitude towards the obviously complete lack of coding standards, formal oversight, or rigorous vetting in code that can quite literally destroy someone's entire life based on the output.
Playing around with temporary hacks is fun for a shareware app, not an officially-sanctioned law enforcement device that decides whether you were the victim of an accident or the perpetrator of a felony.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.