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."

Comments

Re:Wow.

[Sonny Yatsen]

It's amazing that drone hardware is fairly well designed, but its software design and implementation is so slapdash. Just last year, it was revealed that the Drones broadcasted its video feed in unencrypted form and was being used by militants to spy on us.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/121709-drone-intercept-encryption.html