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The presumption that computers are working correctly

emptycity.substack.com

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Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#4
My usual presumption is that the computers are not working correctly, as I've seen way too many cases where they in fact are not working correctly. I don't even believe Google Maps when I'm driving, I always sanity check the route and double check street names/exit numbers when it tells me to turn. I've been burned too many times.

Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#8
How does that work? I'm not a lawyer. I'm a lazy programmer.

So, does the defense get to subpoena the logs, and depose a programmer to explain why some random request returned a 502?

Does the defense get, like, red team access?

Although I'm a lazy programmer, I do think a lot about failure modes. If my freedom is on the line, I can probably think up a few (orders of magnitude) test cases. Happy to provide a shell script or python or golang binary to check. Heck, if it comes down to it I'll provide a stack of fortran cards. Do I get to see the source? That "few" is probably going to move a decimal place or 5.

I get volume is not reasonable in the eyes of the court. Scale is how you(I) find problems, but whatever. Gimmie source, gimme access, I doubt I could beat Knuth, but with my freedom on the line I could give him a run for his money.

How do CVE's count? If I find evidence of log4j do I auto win?

This makes me think of the Jepsen tire fire talk. The system probably mostly right. But there's no way it's correct. What's a "fair" level of access to prove that?

Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#9
post #7

As a programmer, it's my experience that the computer itself usually works correctly. It's almost never a hardware bug. But software.... software gets things wrong all the time and the computer hardware just blindly does what the software told it to.

It does happen to Hardware. Here are two older examples:

“The Intel Pentium series of CPUs had two well-known bugs discovered after it was brought to market, the FDIV bug affecting floating point division which resulted in a recall in 1994, and the F00F bug discovered in 1997 which causes the processor to stop operating until rebooted.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_bug

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