Court Orders Breathalyzer Code Opened, Reveals Mess

Death Metal writes with an excerpt from the website of defense attorney Evan Levow: "After two years of attempting to get the computer based source code for the Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C, defense counsel in State v. Chun were successful in obtaining the code, and had it analyzed by Base One Technologies, Inc. By making itself a party to the litigation after the oral arguments in April, Draeger subjected itself to the Supreme Court's directive that Draeger ultimately provide the source code to the defendants' software analysis house, Base One. ... Draeger reviewed the code, as well, through its software house, SysTest Labs, which agreed with Base One, that the patchwork code that makes up the 7110 is not written well, nor is it written to any defined coding standard. SysTest said, 'The Alcotest NJ3.11 source code appears to have evolved over numerous transitions and versioning, which is responsible for cyclomatic complexity.'" Bruce Schneier comments on the same report and neatly summarizes the take-away lesson: "'You can't look at our code because we don't want you to' simply isn't good enough."

Comments

Ballmer Peak

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly their programmers were not drunk enough when making this. Or, they were too drunk.

Re:Ballmer Peak

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly their programmers were not drunk enough when making this. Or, they were too drunk.

How else would you suggest they test whether or not it works? Huh, smartguy?

Watch those comments...

[tcopeland]

...from the article:

Several sections are marked as "temporary, for now".

So, make sure to strip out those TODOs before checking in the code. Bah!

Here's a little jem.

[needs2bfree]

I thought it was funny.
12. Defects In Three Out Of Five Lines Of Code: A universal tool in the open-source community, called Lint, was used to analyze the source code written in C. This program uncovers a range of problems from minor to serious problems that can halt or cripple the program operation. This Lint program has been used for many years. It uncovered that there are 3 error lines for every 5 lines of source code in C.

While Draeger's counsel claims that the "The Alcotest [7110] is the single best microprocessor-driven evidential breath tester on the market", Draeger has already replaced the antiquated 7110 with a newer Windows® based version, the 9510.

The code in question

[Linker3000]

10 REM Alky 0.1 A. Coder 2001
20 REM Turn off lights and buzzer
24 POKE 201,0
26 POKE 202,0
28 POKE 53280,0
29 REM Any Breath?
30 IF PEEK(200) = 0 THEN GOTO 30
32 REM Buzzer
33 POKE 53280,1
34 PAUSE(2)
35 POKE 53280,0
36 REM Lights...
40 A = 10 * RND(1)
50 IF A > 5 GOTO 80
60 REM Red light
70 POKE 201,1
75 GOTO 100
76 REM Green Light
80 POKE 202,1
100 PAUSE(3)
120 GOTO 20

Re:It has to be proven to work

[djupedal]

If a breathalyzer was a person, it would be bent over a bar stool, pants down, with the impression of a bullet-proof chest-buckle somewhere in the vicinity of a very reddened butt-crack.

Re:No.

[Locke2005]

The question in court is not "were you drinking tonight", but "how much did you drink" which is a very specific very objective, very deturminable piece of information.

You're spelling begs the question -- how much have you had to drink today?

Re:But does it work?

[Mateo13]

I wonder if they're hiring QA testers...

FARK was right on point

[tjonnyc999]

"DUI defendant finally gets access to breathalyzer code, ironically finds developers were probably drunk when they wrote it". http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=4387892

Re:No.

[LearnToSpell]

You're spelling begs the question -- how much have you had to drink today?

These threads never fail to please.

Re:who tested and approved the things?

[John Hasler]

> Before these things came into service, who approved them and what was their test
> procedure? Did they just look at the brochure?

No. They also went out to lunch with the salesman.

Re:But does it work?

[camperdave]

We trust our lives and livelihoods to shitty code every day

Well, like the saying goes: If builders built buildings the way that programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

Re:not written to a coding standard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah well... that darned Illegal Instruction interrupt kept going off... I couldn't figure out why, so I just disabled it altogether.

Re:But does it work?

[Stormwatch]

Oops, I moderated the wrong tag by accident.

Browsing under the influence, I see.

Re:No surprise

[hondo77]

80% of the code in business fits this description. With 20 year old legacy code written by 50 consultants, then upgraded in India, then ported from one platform to another to another, and a database engine switch or two. Code gets senile.

Ah, a co-worker!