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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

#451

Post by pvitz »

mattkrause wrote: post #402
pvitz wrote: post #82

I have worked with MATLAB code with 20,000 lines of code. Only over the past years, OOP and unit-testing has become properly available and usable. My guess is that this 170,000 lines are written in the old procedural way (also for performance reasons) and are full of bugs, also thanks to the lack of supporting tools. Most likely, this grew out of a research prototype that just worked too well to be reimplemented in a…

Matlab has had classes (both types!) for ages. The unit-testing stuff dates back to at least 2013, and there were toolboxes to do similar things even before that. The language certainly has some warts, but IMO, the bigger problem is that it's usually learned/used in contexts that focus on code quality: the goal is the resulting number or plot rather than the software that generates them.

That's why I wrote "available and usable". What Mathworks called unit-testing back then was laughable. It only got interesting in the past two-three years. Same with OOP and the features added in the past years (e.g. type hinting etc.) You can see that Mathworks themselves preferred not to use OOP in their own toolboxes. Parts of the Financial toolbox use it (e.g. the SDE stuff) or the datafeed toolbox, but much stuff is still written the old way. Another example would be Appdesigner as the new preferred way of writing GUIs with OOP. It is still much slower than the old GUIDE functions.

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

#452

Post by owl57 »

edbob wrote: post #438
owl57 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they be? I went to university with people from all over Russia. They don't tend to return to their home towns after getting educated. Does this work differently in America?

Not all poor people are stupid.

Yes. Not sure how is it relevant. I don't expect small town judges and cops to be particularly poor, or particularly stupid for that matter. I do expect them to be uneducated and uncaring.

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

#453

Post by contingencies »

edgyquant wrote: post #414
contingencies wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hardware and business process would also need review. Its no good having perfect code if you can insert the wrong sample. It's also no good having perfect code if a well-timed EMI burst or power level shift games the result.

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

#454

Post by kenjackson »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #415
kenjackson wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

So what if I say i need to review camera footage of me doing a crime and it will take me 100 years to validate it?

You need to establish reasonable timelines for this or any guilty person will claim any technology used will take 100 years to verify.

There is no reason you can’t analyze a DNA analysis codebase in 6 months. Unless you also need to verify the science.

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

#455

Post by carlmr »

generalizations wrote: post #442
WmyEE0UsWAwC2i wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. But I believe this is a case where correctness and clarity are the paramount concerns. There should be a public reference implantation of these methods if they are going to be used in court.

Seems like mathematical clarity is what Matlab is good at, at least compared to e.g. python and C.

Most industry Matlab I've seen is similar to numpy code, heavily vectorized to make it work fast, somewhat inscrutable for everything that's not linear algebra, and a lot of assumptions about perfect floating point precision. Couple that with a unit-testing unfriendly culture and you have a code disaster. Especially on 170k lines.

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

#456

Post by kenjackson »

willis936 wrote: post #440
kenjackson wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The burden of proof does not suddenly fall on the defendant just because one for-profit conviction company can’t back up their product.

Who said they can’t back it up? The defendant claimed he needed to review it. The company presumably has done its own validation.

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

#457

Post by kenjackson »

edgyquant wrote: post #387
kenjackson wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As long as he’s actually reading the code, and still in jail unable to hurt anyone, let him have it. He’ll likely pass before that time is reached and if he’s just wasting time he’ll get bored having to spend hours a day looking at code that he doesn’t care to look at. I get what you’re saying but my point is him wasting time reading code isn’t hurting anyone and is a better use of an inmates time than sitting around…

If he’s in jail doing it then that’s fine.

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

#458

Post by ClumsyPilot »

kenjackson wrote: post #454
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

So what if I say i need to review camera footage of me doing a crime and it will take me 100 years to validate it? You need to establish reasonable timelines for this or any guilty person will claim any technology used will take 100 years to verify. There is no reason you can’t analyze a DNA analysis codebase in 6 months. Unless you also need to verify the science.

I am not clear what you are arguing - it there a real problem where people invent fantastical amount of time to review simple evidence?

The claim about the amount of time was not made by the defendant, it was from the company that produced the code.

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

#459

Post by gorgoiler »

frongpik wrote: post #363
ineedasername wrote: post #324

If ever there was something that should be fully transparent it is the mechanisms by which a person might be found guilty of a crime. The defendant shouldn't even have had to fight for this. It should be a fundamental cornerstone of criminal prosecutions.

Nothing is going to change until this software convicts a 10M net worth dude for something he didn't do.

This is pretty depressing unless you can elaborate on your take.

Yes, the system is stacked against the poor, but there are people fighting that. If they are fighting and failing then we need to know why.

If they aren’t fighting at all then (in part, but it’s still a significant part I’m afraid) it’s because of attitudes like this.

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

#460

Post by michaelmrose »

One would suppose that for a word of such import there would be a detailed analysis of the work product along with testing they had done to prove it actually worked.

They ought to ask for access to THAT in addition to the source code. One would imagine that it doesn't come with 170k lines of documentation or analysis and it would be orders of magnitude easier to review than the source code alone.

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