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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."
"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.
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.
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?
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
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... :-)
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
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.
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?
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.
Back when I was a lowly QA tester for a company that took DARPA contracts involving things specific to North Korea, it never ceased to amaze me that the entire programmer staff were H1B's from China, who just happens to be North Korea's main ally, who were hired solely for their utter cheapness.
This is why I just can't take tin-foil hat people seriously.
The greatest American general? Would that be Patton? Or Lee? Or the only man ever to get higher marks at West Point than Lee, Douglas MacArthur? Pershing was no slouch either. Eisenhower had actually been subordinate to both Pershing and MacArthur earlier in his career, and only a lucky break getting assigned to the General Staff in D.C. that allowed him some paper-pusher promotions got him to the head of the queue. He barely even had any combat experience.
The war in Germany was limited because the Americans and British, while not pro-Nazi (except the people where were), weren't really anti-German. There are too many Germans in the US and Britain for that to happen, and the current set of British Royals are German. My grandfather on my mother's side fought in Europe during WWII, but before he shipped out they trained him for bayonet on dolls with Japanese features.
The American people at that time probably would have accepted extremely high losses fighting the Japanese and wouldn't take anything less than unconditional surrender. If they hadn't given up after the two nukes, no one here would probably ever have heard the phrase "made in Japan."
But what the OP was referring two was more along the lines of the fact that between the US, UK and Canada, we suffered over 10,000 casualties, with well over 2000 of those being actual battlefield deaths, just on D-DAY. Just D-DAY, not even the whole Normandy campaign. We have had a bit of 4,000 dead in all 7 years of the Iraq war, while we lost over 418,000 in WWII, or about 0.32% of our population at the start of the war.
I'm not trying to diminish the feeling of loss I'm sure the families of the 4,000+ US soldiers who have died in Iraq must feel. However, the fact that in 7 years we've lost about twice the number of soldiers we lost trying to get ashore in France on 6 June, 1944, speaks volumes about what "limited" war might actually be.
tl;dr you're wrong.
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.
The Cold War arose because of the Russian fear of the nuclear-armed US [...] and their desire to create buffer zones in the West of the Soviet Union.
You mean to the West of the Soviet Union. Places like Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and anywhere else they could roll in tanks and grab.
-- Alastair
Sadly, I can top that story. I used to work for a government contractor that took blueprints and had them redrawn in AutoCAD in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Our main client was Los Alamos National Labs. We sent them the blueprints for almost every building there.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.