Software that supports your body should always respect your freedom — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software
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Software that controls your body should always respect your freedom. This article is a recap of scandals of medical devices, like hearing aids, insulin pumps, bionic eyes, and pacemakers, and what we can learn from them. It’s astonishing: you wouldn’t expect these devices to be run by software in such a way that they can leave you completely helpless.

  • @[email protected]English
    3•8 months ago

    You say it’s far from reality, but I’m speaking from experience. I was responsible for maritime life safety systems. When those systems were implemented, they were tested and qualified for use. It didn’t matter how many updates came out, if they weren’t qualified, they didn’t get deployed. If I had deployed an update that hadn’t been qualified, it would have put lives at risk, such as by causing issues with ship detection or man overboard alerts not going off.

    If you want to get really into it, like the systems that run aircraft and nuclear reactors, look up formal verification.

    • Black616Angel
      2•8 months ago

      Okay,so you are talking professional equipment with software patches to be applied by professionals.

      The article (and also the comments as I understood them) was about end users updating software themselves. Those are two very different things.

      Yes, we also only update needed patches on systems we handle, but as an end user I do not check all updates that I apply on my private PC.
      Why would I?