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Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

theregister.com

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Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#411

Post by breischl »

bargl wrote: post #357
meowface wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These cases also often come up with drug and alcohol detection tests, and as John Oliver points out in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f2iawp0y5Y , software used to select jurors. All of these companies claim that their source code is valuable intellectual property and that disclosing it can hurt their business. Even if this were true, when you're providing something that can be a significant factor in someone being…

Without jumping on the conspiracy bandwagon, I'd also like to see this applied to voting software. I know it's a hot topic, and I'm honestly not trying to get political. Software that is critical to our fundamental human rights, and is being used by our government should be open source, or at least audited by a group of people who sign Non-competes/NDA and can't go work for competitors, or with some other mechanism t…

Seems like both you and your parent comment are talking about software audits & auditors. I don't know if that exists in this form, but it seems reasonable that if you can get a security audit you should be able to get a correctness audit. And of course those auditors would be under some heavy-duty NDAs, given the nature of the work.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#412

Post by refurb »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #70
refurb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they get hired by the defense.

The defence can rarely afford their services.

The one trial I sat in on, it was the public defender who hired the expert.

Go figure.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#413

Post by curryst »

mulmen wrote: post #257
benlivengood wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the event that they get caught up with a biased lab, wouldn’t it look bad for their reputation? As in, they can’t even perform due diligence on their sources, how can you trust them in a promoted role? I am not a lawyer but as I understand the U.S. criminal justice system (which is adversarial between defense and prosecution with the judge officiating and the jury picking the winner) prosecutors are not experts…

I wonder how much of this has to do with funding differences. Public defenders are famously underfunded but prosecutors have essentially unlimited resources. As a result they are on a fast-track to political fortune, especially if they "do their job well" and "win" (get a lot of convictions). How can the truth-finding benefits of the adversarial system be preserved while leveling the playing field by equalizing resou…

So there's an underlying problem here, which is that at our current rate of indictments, our court systems cannot support everyone going to trial. One of the reasons people in charge of funding want to starve the public defenders is that if they're actually good, people will be less willing to just plea out to a lower charge. So the growth will be non-linear as their success rate increases due to the funding, which they now need more of to service the extra cases they get from being good.

One idea is that whoever introduces an expert witness must also pay for the other side's expert witness, up to the cost of your expert. The defense doesn't need to prove anything due to the presumption of innocence, so the defense gets free counter-experts and only have to pay for the counter-expert if they want to bring up an expert about something the prosecution doesn't want to talk about.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#414

Post by edgyquant »

contingencies wrote: post #399
edgyquant wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any software used to convict people, especially on a such a serious crime, should be audited like the fed is. Twice yearly, once by a public firm and another by the government itself. It should have to pass both of these audits to be used.

It should be audited by science.

Yes there should be teams comprised of people whose expertise is in biology (specifically whatever field is responsible for DNA matching) and other people who are programmers that review the code and make sure there’s no mistakes. That would do it and I’m surprised this isn’t already a thing.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#415

Post by ClumsyPilot »

kenjackson wrote: post #336
edgyquant wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is this persons life we’re talking about. No amount of time is too much and it isn’t hurting anyone to let him do a code review.

No. You give a reasonable amount of time. What if he asked for 100 years?

The person's guilt must be proven beyond all reasonable doubt. If you are accusing him there is a range of possible proof. If all you have is based on an unreadable codebase, that takes 100 years to read, that's your (the prosecution's) fuckup. As a jury I would not convict.

I don't want prosecutors sleeping on the job, bringing in fraudsters laymen and psychics to accuse people, etc.

The prosecutor should use a company that can present independent proof that their system actually works.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#417

Post by ClumsyPilot »

hirundo wrote: post #55

If an accused person has the right to see the source code that produced evidence against them, is it a violation of their rights for the source code to be obfuscated, or even just so spaghettified that not even an expert can understand it? I kinda think that should be a violation. But deciding whether a particular piece of code is so bad is so subjective that I'm not sure on how you'd make a legal standard out of it.…

There was a court case against Toyota, where one of their cars would randomly accelerate and cause crashes. The software audit said the code was unreadable and nothing could be proven. They settled.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/business/toyota-agrees-to....

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#418

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ChrisRR wrote: post #12

This is similar to a case a few years back where someone asked to see the source code of a breathalyser that had found them guilty. AFAIR, the breathalyser was incorrectly averaging the readings, giving disproportional weight to the first reading. I don't know if it was enough to rule in their favour, but I'm sure it called the data into question Edit: Looks like it was a Draeger breathalyser https://www.schneier.com…

This is also similar to how Toyota hilled people with control software that would cause car to accelerate randomly. The software audit team concluded that they could not find the bug, but the code was totally unreadable and terrible. They settled.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/business/toyota-agrees-to....

Also let's remember that a company in UK was selling fake bomb detectors to Israeli and other militaries, and it took them more than 10 years to notice!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29459896

There needs to be proper scrutiny into these things, I could start some random 'deep learning to find criminals' company tomorrow, and have less regulation than a car mechanic

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#419

Post by ClumsyPilot »

boyesm wrote: post #329
radu_floricica wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet somehow whenever you take a closer look at mislabeled product prices, the average is always in favor of the store. And that's far from the only industry. Complex tools are the product of many thousands of individual decisions taken by humans, humans aware of who's the paying client.

> And yet somehow whenever you take a closer look at mislabeled product prices, the average is always in favor of the store. What is this based on?

decades of data?

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#420

Post by h0l0cube »

knolan wrote: post #316
breck wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. If it would take 8.5 yrs to review, it's probably god awful, and should never ever ever be used to convict someone of such a crime. My prediction: this firm will probably try to get removed from the case, rather than open source their shitty code. Source: I've worked on MATLAB codebases for various genomics research projects in the past.

170,000 lines of Matlab code for a project is not a good sign. Unless they’re also including the source of various Matlab toolboxes which are already tested by the Mathworks. It’s such a high-level language it’s hard to imagine what the hell they’re doing with all that code. It’s probably mostly useless cruft from GUIDE.

Having seen Matlab code that's been exported to C, it's mostly bloated by static arrays, and there's quite a lot of redundant functions. So maybe the LOC count is from a C export?
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