From: thangolossus@gmail.com

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/

“There’s 100 million lines of code in cars now,” Leveson says. “You just cannot anticipate all these things.

In September 2007, Jean Bookout was driving on the highway with her
best friend in a Toyota Camry when the accelerator seemed to get
stuck. When she took her foot off the pedal, the car didn’t slow down.
She tried the brakes but they seemed to have lost their power. As she
swerved toward an off-ramp going 50 miles per hour, she pulled the
emergency brake. The car left a skid mark 150 feet long before running
into an embankment by the side of the road. The passenger was killed.
Bookout woke up in a hospital a month later.

The incident was one of many in a nearly decade-long investigation
into claims of so-called unintended acceleration in Toyota cars.
Toyota blamed the incidents on poorly designed floor mats, “sticky”
pedals, and driver error, but outsiders suspected that faulty software
might be responsible. The National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration enlisted software experts from NASA to perform an
intensive review of Toyota’s code. After nearly 10 months, the NASA
team hadn’t found evidence that software was the cause—but said they couldn’t prove it wasn’t.

It was during litigation of the Bookout accident that someone finally
found a convincing connection. Michael Barr, an expert witness for the plaintiff, had a team of software experts spend 18 months with the
Toyota code, picking up where NASA left off. Barr described what they
found as “spaghetti code,” programmer lingo for software that has
become a tangled mess. Code turns to spaghetti when it accretes over
many years, with feature after feature piling on top of, and being
woven around, what’s already there; eventually the code becomes
impossible to follow, let alone to test exhaustively for flaws.

Using the same model as the Camry involved in the accident, Barr’s
team demonstrated that there were actually more than 10 million ways
for the onboard computer to cause unintended acceleration. They showed
that as little as a single bit flip—a one in the computer’s memory
becoming a zero or vice versa—could make a car run out of control."

This will be the apocalypse. This is also why the entire US nuclear
arsenal of ICBM's is still based on floppy disks and old, old code.
Far more reliable.


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