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$75K Prosthetic Arm Is Bricked When Paired iPod Is Stolen
kdataman writes U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Ben Eberle, who lost an arm and both legs in Afghanistan, had his Ipod Touch stolen on Friday. This particular Ipod Touch has an app on it that controls his $75,000 prosthetic arm. The robbery bricked his prosthesis: "That is because Eberle's prosthetic hand is programmed to only work with the stolen iPod, and vice versa. Now that the iPod is gone, he said he has to get a new hand and get it reprogrammed with his prosthesis." I see three possibilities: 1) The article is wrong, possibly to guilt the thief into returning the Ipod. 2) This is an incredibly bad design by Touch Bionics. Why would you make a $70,000 piece of equipment permanently dependent on a specific Ipod Touch? Ipods do fail or go missing. 3) This is an intentionally bad design to generate revenue. Maybe GM should do this with car keys? "Oops, lost the keys to the corvette. Better buy a new one."
He'll be right. He is from the ARMy after all.
You know, given the terrible kind of software we see in embedded software, and the terrible security implemented by most companies ... I'm perfectly willing to believe this is an incredibly bad design, because there's plenty of evidence that these kinds of things tend to have incredibly bad designs.
Between companies using 10 year old Linux kernels, to having unpatchable systems, or just having really bad understandings of security, I've come to conclude this is the norm.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What if the ipod was dropped and breaks? What kind of poor planning is this where that one ipod was the linchpin of this expensive prosthetic?
MABASPLOOM!
I recently sat through a Touch Bionics seminar and, at least for the newer devices, all you need to do is enter the "serial number" of the hand into the app and it can control it. We even joked about how easy it was, so friends with prosthetic hands could prank each other by entering their friend's serial number into their own app and controlling their friend's hand. This may just apply to new devices though, maybe in response to problems like this?
The guy who stole it could now be controlling his hand. "Now hand over your wallet! No, wait... I'll do it! Bwahahahahah!" Small favors and all that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Seriously, they charge an arm and a leg for prosthetic limbs!
=Smidge=
The article doesn't specify why they need to replace the hand rather than just do a software reset. But my first thought was of all those stories a while ago about security on diabetic pumps, and I thought "Well now we know why there shouldn't be security on these devices"
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I am the submitter and the layout of the original submission was much different with a new paragraph there.
Possibility 4) Hardlinking to a specific iPod makes it harder to hack the prosthetic arm from.
Bricking a device because a external independent device which is well known to be fragile and/or a target of theft has died/lost/stolen is a pretty bad design.
And if the external device is not independent, but is in fact required part of the bricked devices operation - then that is also bad design
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
You should have gone with a more reputable news aggregation service like FARK or 4chan. Their editors are top notch compared to Slashdot.
Hi, I'm a volunteer for The Math Foundation, the non-profit devoted to helping everyday people do math, because Math Is Hard(tm). After careful calculations, I have concluded that replacing all of your keys via the dealerships costs more than two orders of magnitude less than purchasing a new set of cars, which means you could purchase over 100 cars for the cost of a set of keys, on average. You can now safely take the "new keys" option with the assurance that it is the wiser financial path between the two, and you no longer have to lie awake at night wondering whether or not the "new cars" option would be cheaper.
the iPod has an ARM processor.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Apple doesn't allow access to UDIDs (universal device identifiers) anymore, so unless the software is quite old, or requires a jailbroken device, the prosthesis cannot be paired to the device. (That's one of the reason why you can't access the UDID anymore, because pairing information with a device is stupid; the bigger reason is privacy).
The prosthesis can easily be paired to an AppleID plus an application specific ID. However, all information about this would be stored on the device, backed up to iTunes, and could be restored by just buying a new phone, entering the AppleID and password, and downloading the last backup.
If that doesn't work, then these guys must have some really strange and stupid software design + implementation.
So what you are saying is that Timmothy not only fails to edit most posts that need it. He goes above and beyond by editing posts at times to make them even crappier?
You must be new here...