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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

#471

Post by michaelmrose »

bargl wrote: post #382
jjeaff wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, for my own piece of mind. But I am also certain that it would have made no difference in our current predicament with a third of the country thinking the election was stolen. It has been shown to us time and time again that no actual evidence is required to get people to believe what they want to believe. And the more technical the evidence (i.e. source code), the less helpful.

>But I am also certain that it would have made no difference in our current predicament with a third of the country thinking the election was stolen. It would have changed some peoples minds I don't know if the change would have been a few thousand or 10s of millions. I can't say if it would have a dent in the 1/3 of people or not. I can't predict that. It would have helped me with my own peace of mind. And frank I t…

Why would people who weren't convinced by reputable evidence in the first place be convinced by slightly better evidence that is only better in a technical hard to express and prove fashion. This is especially true when the people doubting are the least educated and least intelligent.

It's like saying that better proof of evolution would convince some portion of creationists. That's just not how misinformation works.

Misinformation works by targeting vulnerable parties with misinformation that aligns with their existing vulnerabilities and beliefs in order to power relevant action with long stored and fruitful sources of hate, bias, and scorn in a fashion that bypasses the brain and goes right for the gut.

Like 30% in America believe in a young earth that is thousands not billions of years old.

If Bob is a scientist of some sort and presenting interesting scientific work to the community and incidentally advising the government on environmental policy that will harm some business and you want to crush support for this by playing on existing biases with this group you advertise to the young earth crowd about how bob is anti God and see if you can tie bob to as many negative things they already dislike as you can.

You aren't fighting an intellectual battle to set their ideas on bob let alone deeper ideas you are fighting an emotional battle to galvanize existing deeply held beliefs to obtain useful action like calling up and yelling at their congressman or voting.

In that context asking Bob to present a better case is laughable. The relevant parties never engaged their brain in the first place.

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

#472

Post by michaelmrose »

vmception wrote: post #386
hutzlibu wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yes, that middle zone (that most of us probably live in) is terrifying" More terrifying than the bottom where you got nothing to loose? I doubt it. Otherwise, why be afraid of it?

I would say just because of the energy and sacrifices used At the bottom you don't have to pretend that the circumstances will improve, and there is some freedom associated with some approaches to that. Careers don't need to have continuity, I know many people in hospitality and service industry whose vacation policy is saving and quitting one restuarant, travelling, and getting another job at a different restuarant…

You couldn't possibly be more wrong. Have you ever not been able to afford medication that you know you needed to breath and gone to sleep to have a nightmare about being attacked and suffocated and woke up to find it was real save for the fact that it was your own body?

Ever wondered if you could afford to keep a pet from dying due to being able to afford the care?

Ever wondered if losing your home was going to stress your marriage so much that it might splinter?

The only people who think the bottom is less stressful have never been there.

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

#473

Post by Blikkentrekker »

breck wrote: post #131
phire wrote: post #93

> The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour. First, the defence doesn't necessarily have to evaluate all 170,000 lines. They just need to find one buggy line which could potentially overturn the result.…

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.

It indeed doesn't seem fair to them that they are forced to share their trade secrets simply because the prosecutors elected to use their software.

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

#474

Post by contingencies »

edgyquant wrote: post #468
contingencies wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh that’s overkill. If can be proofed and guaranteed that it isn’t bugging out we don’t need to run through every building block this way.

I would have said that too before starting a hardware company. Now, I'm not so sure.

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

#475

Post by Blikkentrekker »

Spivak wrote: post #265
bdavisx wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also give every person convicted using their software an incentive to open an appeal.

I like how this is considered a bad thing. Like we can’t let this guy point out that he’s being convicted by an unauditable black box that suddenly isn’t worth using if it has to stand up to scrutiny because then everyone would want to. The horror. Like I’m actually kinda shocked this is the reality. I would have assumed that DNA evidence would have some blessed methodologies and tools/algorithms, with a strict defin…

I do not find this reality worse at all than people being convicted upon the black box testimony of blood splatter analysts, which is simply an expert testifying that in his conclusion the blood indicated such-and-that.

Or of course, that the U.S.A. permits conviction based on the sworn testimony of a single eye witness, which is noteably unreliable.

All of these are black boxes that are routinely meant to convict. — it would not surprise me if such software were far more reliable than human eye witness accounts, but if there's one thing I noticed, it's that a man is seldom afraid of bad matters, he is only afraid of bad matters produced by new technology; far worse matters can stay, so long as they be ancient enough.

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

#476

Post by Blikkentrekker »

belorn wrote: post #421
Spivak wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how this is considered a bad thing. Like we can’t let this guy point out that he’s being convicted by an unauditable black box that suddenly isn’t worth using if it has to stand up to scrutiny because then everyone would want to. The horror. Like I’m actually kinda shocked this is the reality. I would have assumed that DNA evidence would have some blessed methodologies and tools/algorithms, with a strict defin…

Here in Sweden, there is a legal practice that you can't find someone guilty based on DNA evidence alone. Probabilistic evidence is nice to point law enforcement in a direction, but there is always a risk of false positives. In this case we are also dealing with probabilistic genotyping involving DNA Mixtures with DNA from several individual contributors, and most likely degraded DNA. It is the tool the police can us…

In the U.S.A., a man can be convicted upon the word of a single witness, even if the defence poked significant holes into the reliability of said witness.

What can happen in the U.S.A. is that one lone man says “I saw the defendant do it.”; the defence attorney can point out that the witness was drunk at the time, that he has motive to lie, that he initially reported another story to the police and only later settled on this story, and what ever else to render him completely unreliable.

The jury can nevertheless return a verdict of guilty, and there are no grounds for appeal then, as it is the power of the jury to decide who is “reliable”, and it is not required to explain it's thought process at all.

What a shocking development that such would result into a criminal justice system where a defendant's race and gender plays such a factor.

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

#477

Post by hansel_der »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #473
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.

It indeed doesn't seem fair to them that they are forced to share their trade secrets simply because the prosecutors elected to use their software.

it doesn't seem fair to sentence someone (to death?) based on a unaudited secret sauce tool.

the company can always retract their product if they want to keep it a trade secret.

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

#478

Post by Blikkentrekker »

hansel_der wrote: post #477
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It indeed doesn't seem fair to them that they are forced to share their trade secrets simply because the prosecutors elected to use their software.

it doesn't seem fair to sentence someone (to death?) based on a unaudited secret sauce tool. the company can always retract their product if they want to keep it a trade secret.

You assume it to be one or the other.

The real solution would obviously that the prosecutors cannot enter into evidence the conclusions of any closed source software.

Of course, this only displaces the issue, what of the black box c.p.u.'s whereupon this software ran?

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

#479

Post by ArnoVW »

dragonwriter wrote: post #429
Aachen wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's not like you review all scientific evidence and re-do the experiments that lead up to the discovery of in the first place. Validating all that would also take years and much of it can be established as generally accepted by all parties. Similarly, there will be some trust involved…

> Validating scientific methods and validating a program is different in that the program is proprietary and the science (usually) merely behind a paywall. Or completely fictitious. Have you heard the story about the FBI crime lab and the “science” of fiber analysis that they developed, and not only used in federal criminal trials but also provided as a service for state and local agencies for decades?

Or the Shirley McKie debacle in Scotland in 2005, where it turned out that finger print detection was more of an 'art' than a science. The ball got rolling once they started convicting police officers (so at least the analysis was double-blind?)

Or the phantom of Heilbronn, where dozens of crimes were linked to a single woman. Who turned out to be the lab technician that assembled the kits. Doubts started once they discovered the caucasian female DNA in cells of the charred remains of a black male.

I often wonder how prosecuters defend against the use of these cases to create doubt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_McKie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn

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

#480

Post by AntiImperialist »

calciphus wrote: post #50
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, just like voting machines. But how do we confirm that the software which was vetted is the software that was actually _used_?

Compile it, run it with the same inputs the prosecution claims was provided, and see if you get the same result. That's sorta the point of computers, right? Same inputs on the same program, same output?

Reproducible builds are not as widespread as you'd imagine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
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