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CIA Drones May Have Used Illegal, Inaccurate Code
skids writes "Coders hate having to rush code out the door before it's ready. They also hate it when the customer starts making unreasonable demands. What they hate even more is when the customer reverse engineers the product and starts selling their own inferior product. But what really ticks them off is when that buggy, knockoff product might be used by targeting systems in military unmanned drone attacks, and the bugs introduce location errors of up to 13 meters. That's what purportedly happened to software developer IISi, based on an ongoing boardroom/courtroom drama that will leave any hard-pressed coder appreciating just how much worse his job could get. The saddest part? The CIA assumed the bug was a feature. The tinfoil-hat-inducing part? The alleged perpetrators just got bought by IBM."
So prosecute them.
Oh, wait, they didn't mean government employees, they meant UAVs.
"The CIA assumed the bug was a feature." Are CIA agents being issued iPhones, by any chance?
The CIA is involved in the collection and analysis of foreign data.
Building an attack drone is, let's say, missing the mark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW9cCWm53H4
Out of all the hardware that is controlled by software, I would have thought drone software would be the most scrutinized. Unbelievable. Even more reason why we should not arm robots (even remote human operated ones) with weapons such as Hellfire missiles.
Oh please... Indoor plumbing was too complex for the people that wrote the new testament..
Yeah, we wouldn't want people to think too hard, that might be "dangerous".
/rollseyes
And sub contractor steadfastly saying that they can't deliver production ready software in the given time fame.
Where have I heard that before? .. ah yes .. the current death march project that I am in the middle of!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
If the bug is actually limited to reducing accuracy by 13, that's not a huge deal given the kill zone of hellfire missiles.
No one will ever need more than 13 meters accuracy.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
CIA Predator drone misses assassination target, hits US diplomat in area for deniability purposes. IISi blamed despite the fact that the drone is still using buggy, inferior code.
to direct secret assassination drones in central Asia.
The CIA has the authority to direct secret assassination drones? Inside of Pakistan and possibly other countries?
Did we learn NOTHING from the Bay of Pigs, Nicaragua, the equipping of the Mujaheddin with weapons, etc... ? The CIA should not be fighting wars. We're supposed to be the city upon the hill. We shouldn't be fighting our wars in secrecy.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
What did the CIA also think the Toyota "Bug" was a feature. Great car, drives it self. :-)
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
Military drones, armed and dangerous, operating software resulting from IP theft?
Heh... I'd love to see the Business Software Alliance go after these guys... :-)
It's doubtful it was illegal. It may or may not have run foul of some licensing contracts, but isn't reverse engineering generally legal?
so what?
hellfires are laser guided, not GPS. a predator reporting its position as being 13 meters wrong is basically nothing....and a non-issue with regards to missile targeting.
if the predator was dropping JDAMS, i could see the issue. but even then, 13 meters is well within the CPE allowed for the JDAM.
THL phish sticks
Welcome to the fourth branch of US government, the bureaucracies with power of life and death.
I had no idea... We use the Netezza stuff at work. It has very impressive query performance. Nothing we're doing will cause anyone to die, however.
To be fair, fighting wars in secrecy has been going on for a long long time, way before 9-11, making it the proverbial drop in the ocean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions
Now, what should upset the American public is that 9-11 was probably engineers or supported by "allied" forces, in order to escalate conflict levels and justify wars.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
You asked for it. Plumbing in Jerusalem
The Romans had plumbing and they were occupying Jerusalem at the time the New Testament was written... but please don't allow facts to stand in the way of your religion-bashing.
Knowing a bit about the people who wrote the New Testament, I seriously disagree with your comment.
Electrical outlets today kill children with tweezers, I don't hear you trying to change anything about our domestic infrastructure.
Capture these badly programmed drones, reinstall them with some sweet, sweet Linux goodness, use them for fun aerial combat play, and taking snaps of bikini-clad neighbors. Problem solved. Patent not pending. Come as you are. There you go.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Hope you paid your $699 licensing fee to use that remark, you cocksmoking teabagger!
nothing is illegal.
Fine fine understanding that the stars are giant balls of burning gas just like the sun and like the sun could have planets and like the planet earth some of them could have light was too complex for the people that wrote the new testament.
That's just thinning the herd.
Dear Terrorists, Due to a minor software glitch we request that you stay within 13 meters of your cell phone at all times. No reason, we just appreciate your help. Thanks, The US Government P.S. Don't look up P.P.S. ....no...what whistling noise do you hear?
Anyone who works in/for the U.S. military industrial complex should quit if they have any shred of morality in their being. It's way beyond defense.
Reminds me of this: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Deploy!--Deploy!-Deploy!.aspx
So the Romans wrote the New Testament?
However, as I suspect that you're writing that from your parents' basement, I doubt that you actually know any history, or were even around for the Cold War."We are too easily impressed by small wars nowadays"- if you knew any history, you would know that the Western invasion of Germany was a limited war because high casualties would not be accepted by the American and British public. Read up on Eisenhower. You need to learn about the greatest American general.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
1) US creates military drones used in Pakistan.
2) Drones are controlled using software.
3) Software company that writes drone software is bought by IBM.
4) Software can now, potentially, be outsourced to IBM development personnel in um, Pakistan.
Is it just me, or is something wrong with this picture?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Yeah forgive me for bashing a doomsayer. Funny, I didn't realize the Romans wrote the bible...
Of course we learned something: "Think Happy Thoughts."
-kgj
the risk of being included in the total, which is why they tend to win if they are also smart and can get enough resources.
Revolutions actually run on people who are much less risk-averse, including the ultimate risk of death. Pretending that everyone shares the same aversion to the risk of violent death that is characteristic of educated urbanites is naive. In many cultures of the world Western style conflict avoidance will get you exploited, enslaved, or even killed.
The Roman Catholic Church did.
I don't think we knew the stars/sun was a ball of burning gas until spectrometry developed around the end of the 19th century.
So that part might have been too complex for the people who wrote the Constitution...
What about the earth being a sphere (Isa 40:22) and hanging on nothing (Job 26:7)...?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
No, they were just guest stars, but they owned the place and had indoor plumbing.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Why the hell are these people even allowed to own weapons?
So the Romans wrote the New Testament?
The Roman Catholic Church did.
Hahahaha!
No.
No, but they did kill the protagonist.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I'm still waiting to hear whose house was 13 meters away and just got filled with popcorn.
2012 will be the year of Linux on the drone
Some Greek figured that one out. Damn heathen.
The CIA? This is a bunch who allegedly run clandestine torture camps. Use illegal software - oh no, they'd never do that...
Bibo Ergo Sum.
Sorta like complaining that a murderer stole someone's shoes isn't it?
Anybody who has been to a sea coast can notice one, and there are few enough options available that you can easily guess the other.
Okay, right, I get that, fair point. What I mean to say is, OTHER than plumbing, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Snooki, The Situation, Pauly D et al often seem to be out on appearance tours; the dispersed distribution could also serve disaster-recovery purposes for them.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Actually the *Bible* was assembled from books that the church chose to include and "destroyed" the rest they didn't approve of.
I for one would like to spend a month or two in the catacombs beneath the Vatican to see if some of those could be found.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Hahahaha! No.
What? I'm pretty sure the new testament was assembled (and revised many times) by the church that Peter built.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
They showed us the dangers of exposing the ruling class to lead for generations.
Oh and as to not arming robots? Too late really. We have been doing it for ever 100 years now.
The Torpedo is a Robot. The first ones where really steampunk killing robots. Suicidal ones to be sure but still robots.
This is not the root issue of using a robot. The root issue is that technologically advanced societies have been pushing the button from further and further away. The further away they are, the less incentive they have to make sure that their target is valid.
First, you've got hand to hand combat. You're not going to engage unless you absolutely have to, and can deal with listening to someone gurgle and plead while they bleed out. Then you can move on to ranged weapons. In the early days, you had to get pretty close to hit someone with a musket, but you still at least had to watch people die. Then we got cannon. Rifles. Machine guns. Artillery. Airplanes. Satellite guided bombs. With each advance in military technology, you are taking less risk to your own life when you take the lives of others. That's why there are 6,000 dead "coalition" troops and several hundred thousand dead Afghans and Iraqis. It's not a war, it's a shooting gallery with political implications. If it were a war, like it was with the Japanese and the Nazis, there would be a front somewhere. The chances of Iraqis or Afghans crossing continents and oceans are not virtually zero, they are exactly zero.
Now we're at the point where some militaries have the majority of their apparatus safely tucked away in a megabase or in the air or even back in their home country. Ninety nine percent of the military are good guys who sign up thinking they will be fighting for their country. For the military to work, when the guy with the most penises on their shoulder says "Kill" the command must be passed down until a trigger is pulled somewhere. But for that guy at the very end, it's still a human decision that can be overridden by natural desires to protect human life. He can make up something about the target being obscured. He can stop it if he really thinks it's not achieving an objective. He knows intuitively that he will pay a high price for taking this life, because he has to take that memory home with him.
When the top brass are over your shoulder, you'd better click the button and blow up the house.
And soon the top brass won't even need to issue a command. They will order the command, and the quasi-sentient robots (not some half assed definition that fits your argument) will kill, and the grunts will simply arrive to ID the body parts.
The real problem with this technology is that there is no pushback for human life. If a politician wants it, and he can find someone in the military who will perform it, you can bet your ass that millions of innocent people will die as a result. The more humans you remove from the end of the equation, the less humane the result will be.
But what really ticks them off is when that buggy, knockoff product might be used by targeting systems in military unmanned drone attacks...
....I HATE when that happens.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.--Mark Twain
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.--Mark Twain
Way to go brother! Stand up for pagan Rome! The christian roman empire was a washout, pagan Rome got things done!
Well actually Ptolemy's Almagest, written not long after the New Testemant, mentions that the distance to the fixed stars is so great that the earth can be regarded as a "geometrical point".
So presumably they must have deduced that they were pretty big (to be visible at very large distances), although they probably did not deduce that they were the same type of thing as the sun, as they did not have the observations to support it.
Many of the books that did not make it into the officially accepted cannon are easily available today, if you look for them: for example, the Apocrypha (which I think might be accepted by the Catholic Church -- but not being Catholic, I'm not certain of that) or the Book of Phillip.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Ummm...Paul was a Roman citizen and is frequently credited with writing most of the New Testament. Got any other prejudices you'd like to have disproved?
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
The entire point of American warfare is to expend as much ammunition as possible so to stick the American public with the biggest bill possible. A 13 meter margin of error means you can justify using three guided missiles instead of one. How does a military contractor not see the benefit of that? How are they supposed to create business for you if you're tying them up in court!
These clowns can't possibly think they're actually looking for WMD's and Osama Bin Laden could they? They're looking for an intractable enemy to spend billions trying to irradicate, and they've found them in the Taliban, just like Isreal found the Palestinians. Spooky sneaky "bad guys" are literally booming business.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Fine fine understanding that the stars are giant balls of burning gas just like the sun and like the sun could have planets and like the planet earth some of them could have light was too complex for the people that wrote the new testament.
Are you sure that you want to be "casting stones" regarding ancient and erroneous theory? ;-)
The Sun is not a ball of burning gas, its a ball of fusing gas. Burning is an exothermic chemical reaction, aka combustion. Fusion is a nuclear reaction, not chemical.
Somewhere out there Mullah Omar is reading Slashdot and thinking "Cool! Now I can send a DMCA take down notice and make these drones go away . Then I won't have to wear a burqa every time I set foot outside this cave."
Out of all the hardware that is controlled by software, I would have thought drone software would be the most scrutinized.
Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations, #12:
12. Never forget that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder.
They showed us the dangers of exposing the ruling class to lead for generations.
They also highlighted the effect of close inbreeding in the ruling class for generations...
(the southern republicans should take note ) //troll ;-)
I'm pretty sure that stars AREN'T balls of burning gas. That would imply some element was bonding with oxygen and releasing energy in the process.
I think they're giant balls of gas undergoing nuclear fusion, which is a different order of activity.
"Intelligent Integration Systems developed the technology behind Spatial, which initially ran on an earlier Netezza's data-warehousing platform, the Netezza Performance Server. "
Then Netezza sold the product on their new server TwinFin. "Intelligent Integration Systems officials say they didn't know about plans for TwinFin when they signed the contract with Netezza, and that the company never agreed to develop software for future platforms. "
Netezza signed a contract without bothering to check with IISi about porting the code.
So Netezza sold the hacked version to the CIA, which accepted it.
Nettezza sued IISi for breach of contract for not porting the code, which they just lost. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/24/cia_netezza/ "That case was dismissed last month, with the judge finding that contrary to Netezza's repeated claims, IISi was under no obligation to carry out the work."
Now ISSi is suing Nettezza.
So it looks like they stole both the original code and marketed it, and they stole the trade secrets in the code and sold them as well. It looks like a slam dunk that they will loose. So what part of illegal don't you understand?
Why is Snark Required?
I thought the problem is that such professionals brought in from the military were vastly outnumbered and outranked by kids fresh out of school that think they are James Bond and advancement is by nepotism and political links instead of competance. The CIA is not a professional military operation and it shows. They can be as supposedly good in their own mind but that didn't catch Bin Laden or all the other operations where the military were pulled out so that the CIA could take the credit for completing the operation - and then messed it up!
What the CIA do in the real world is not written by Tom Clancy, or it seems by anybody that has a clue what the organisation should be doing. Yet another example of Horse Judges out of their depth and unable to do anything useful even if they were given the best possible people to work for them.
That's an expensive way to kill goats and scare the crap out of the guys that left the place two days ago and pisses off the neutrals downwind enough for them to take up arms.
The idea fails on every single level even if you have zero morals.
Fuck with the CIA and you win a free limo ride through Dealey Plaza.
Have gnu, will travel.
To answer your question, the continuing lesson we've learned is that war channels national wealth to a relatively small coterie of companies and their owners/shareholders, etc. As long as there is money to be made by killing people, we will continue to ignore the larger lessons that might actually help us make a better world.
They were pretty much forced to believe that trash called the bible, it doesn't mean they were too dumb to install plumbing.
GLAS.
U.S. Space Command have move the bulk of their orbital lasers into a Geosync postion above Tehran with the remainng force to target Clergy, Civic Leaders and Mayors of surrounding communities.
THIS IS COOL!
Israel Forces: ... pinging targets of interest ... "did you see Batman and Robin on the roof?"
1) ground units moving into position in the Golan Heights, and Lebanon Boarder Region.
2) assination squads in Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia (the Royals are targeted for the kill).
3) pre-position units with laser "pingers" inside Iran
What a blood bath this will be!
Seriously, 13 meters off target just means you kill the innocent civilians misidentified as Taliban with shrapnel from further away.
Obviously, the Truth of the Bible is beyond your understanding. As Jesus said to the 11 apostles: “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”
I, and my true believing Christian brothers, will pray for you after our evening's PS3 session of Demon Souls, cursing at newbs online and "handling the snake" if you know what I mean, before retiring with a nice Liquid Drain-O nightcap.
yeah, but they also used lead pipes. I saw that on Doctor Who so I know it's true.
We are talking about a time when people thought sicknesses were caused by evil spirits or your own sin. So I doubt they would understand the subtleties of nuclear fusion. Burning balls of gas would have been a big improvement.
I always thought there were 12 apostles.
Managers control the part they understand. They farm out the parts they don't. The Pentagon managers (Air Force generals, I suppose) don't understand software. They do understand aviation and bomb targeting. And they probably understand combat and intra-service rivalry.
I18N == Intergalacticization
WW II: Marshall. Logistics, Marshall Plan.
Civil War: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan. Stonewall Jackson. Lee- already mentioned.
I think it's telling that the customer feels the need to go through the effort of reverse engineering when they have already paid for the whole project themselves.
Sounds like someone got too greedy to me.
Being a programmer ....all I can say to this is, Ouch!...gotta hate when this sh*t happens!