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

Re:Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA t... by hastradamus on Monday February 08, 2021 @10:39AM (#26065922)

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.

This is hilarious. As if you need to read every damn line and you can’t skip blank lines? You can skip whole files that aren’t relevant. Weak excuse

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Re:Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA t... by heavyset_go on Monday February 08, 2021 @01:58PM (#26068557)

"It could take too long :(" is an interesting excuse not to examine the evidence that could put someone behind bars for the rest of their life.

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Re:Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA t... by jariel on Monday February 08, 2021 @02:57PM (#26069311)

The statement is odd, at the same time, it's not outrageous for him to make in the sense that - lines of code notwithstanding - the underlying science i.e. the application of the product is the thing in question.

It's a pretty interesting case.

At least the core nature of the algorithm should be made public if we're going to use it for public inquisition.

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Re:Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA t... by astura on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @07:52AM (#26076887)

This is a stupid "argument", I've personally participated in an audit of a program that has 5-6x as many lines of code.

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Re:Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA t... by sudosysgen on Monday February 08, 2021 @08:14PM (#26072651)

And of course, as soon as you find an issue (which you probably will given that it's 170k lines of MATLAB), you can stop then and there.

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