It’s been way too long since I’ve written a blog post. To those kind souls that have written to inquire if I’m still alive and kicking – thank you. The bottom line is that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Anyway in an effort to get back in the groove so to speak, […]
Month: March 2014
A Look Back at the Audi 5000 and Unintended Acceleration
I was in high school in the late 1980’s when NHTSA (pronounced “nit-suh”), Transport Canada, and others studied complaints of unintended acceleration in Audi 5000 vehicles. Looking back on the Audi issues, and in light of my own recent role as an expert investigating complaints of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles, there appears to be a fundamental contradiction between […]
Lethal Software Defects: Patriot Missile Failure
During the Gulf War, twenty-eight U.S. soldiers were killed and almost one hundred others were wounded when a nearby Patriot missile defense system failed to properly track a Scud missile launched from Iraq. The cause of the failure was later found to be a programming error in the computer embedded in the Patriot’s weapons control system. On February […]
Apple’s #gotofail SSL Security Bug was Easily Preventable
If programmers at Apple had simply followed a couple of the rules in the Embedded C Coding Standard, they could have prevented the very serious `Gotofail` SSL bug from entering the iOS and OS X operating systems. Here’s a look at the programming mistakes involved and the easy-to-follow coding standard rules that could have easily prevent the bug. In case […]