English Recordings

"I think there is a real issue of civil liberties. All the evidence suggests that governments simply aren't very good at very big high-tech endeavours of this kind," she said.
Mark Littlewood of the civil rights group Liberty said: "We need to guard against ID cards being introduced by stealth. Whilst we warmly welcome the cabinet's decision to put off a decision on making the cards compulsory, a muddled compromise is no way to proceed."
The chancellor's insistence that the scheme could only go ahead if it was self-financing means that the combined passport/ID card which will come in from 2007 is likely to cost £77, with a plain ID card costing £35. Every 16-year-old will be given their card free on reaching that age, but will have to renew it every 10 years.
The results of the Home Office consultation published yesterday claimed 61% public support for the idea, with many people feeling it would "mark a return to more secure times". But the results also showed that while the police think the cards would be valuable in combatting identity and credit fraud, they believe the scheme will only have limited value in tackling illegal immigration and other forms of crime.

Mr Blunkett has been forced to accept a 12 month delay in the legislation setting up his identity card scheme until next autumn, but he can press ahead with the preparatory work in the meantime.
A pilot scheme developing the new "biometric" eye and fingerprint scans will start next month. Mr Blunkett has also had to promise there will be a further cabinet decision and parliamentary vote in 2013 when it is fully implemented, before it becomes compulsory in the sense that anybody without the card is denied access to public services such as medical treatment or housing.
The ID card scheme will be one of the largest technology projects ever attempted by the government. It will eventually entail a national database of 60 million people, including Britons living overseas, including electronically scanned images of their eyes and fingerprints.
"An ID card scheme will help tackle crime and serious issues facing the UK, particularly illegal working, immigration abuse, ID fraud, terrorism and organised crime," said Mr Blunkett.
"An ID card is not a luxury or a whim, it is a necessity," he said. "I know some people believe there is a sinister motive behind the cards, that they will be part of a Big Brother state. This is wrong."
But one indication of the split that exists across government came when the former Home Office immigration minister, Barbara Roche, warned that its introduction would be chaotic.

The full extent of Mr Blunkett's victory in the cabinet battle over identity cards only really became clear yesterday when he announced his detailed plans for its two-stage implementation.
The home secretary could not resist chuckling over how the cabinet ID card revolt led by the chancellor, Gordon Brown, and the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, had been faced down. "That's the beauty of collective decisions. When you make a collective decision, they apply collectively," he said.
Earlier, Mr Blunkett had even claimed that the government had avoided his "becoming the Barbara Castle of 2003" - referring to a cabinet revolt in 1969 which led to the decision to ditch her trade union reforms.
Few cabinet ministers turned up in the Commons to support Mr Blunkett, but the prime minister, an enthusiast for the carefully crafted proposals, gave his personal support, saying: "If we are going to have the right security and the right systems within our public services for the future we do need to contemplate things that maybe a few decades ago we wouldn't."

Millions of people in Britain will start receiving their compulsory national identity cards in only four years time under the detailed plans unveiled by the home secretary, David Blunkett, yesterday.
Under legislation to be published in January, the five million people who apply each year for a passport or driving licence will automatically be issued with an identity card and their personal details stored on a new national identity computer database.
Mr Blunkett made clear yesterday that they will also have to undergo hi-tech electronic eye and fingerprint scans to ensure that the new combined ID card/passport or driving licence cannot be forged.
The identity card will also be compulsory from 2007 for a further 4.6 million foreign nationals living in Britain.
"We anticipate we can get the database up and running within three years and we will start with passports and foreign nationals," said Mr Blunkett yesterday.
He expects that within a further five years more than 80% of the population will have the new identity cards.

“MCDC testing is not removing any significant numbers of bugs,” says Thomas. “It highlights the fact that testing is a completely hopeless way of showing that software does not contain errors.” “The criteria currently used to evaluate the dependability of electronic systems for many safety-related uses are way too weak, way insufficient,” says Peter Ladkin, a computer scientist specialising in safety engineering at the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

Instead of focusing on testing, Ladkin and Thomas want to see a change in the way safety-critical software is written. Neither Boeing nor Airbus responded to questions about exactly which programming languages their software systems are written in, but according to Les Dorr, spokesman for the FAA, which certifies US commercial software systems, it is a mixture of the languages C, C++, assembler and Ada, which was developed by the Pentagon. Some of those languages, such as C, allow programmers to write vague or ambiguous code, says Thomas, which is the kind of thing that often leads to bugs.

To solve this problem, he suggests using specialised computer languages that can be verified as the programmer is coding. Such languages include B, developed at Bell Labs, and SPARK, a version of Ada. These languages and their compiler software have strict controls within them, so it is very difficult for programmers to write vague or ambiguous code.

To test for bugs, most aircraft manufacturers use a set of guidelines called the DO-78 B standard, which was created by the US-based Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, a collection of government, industry and academic organizations, and the European Organization for Civil Aviation Equipment. Recognized by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the standard rates software on how seriously it would compromise safety were it to fail, and then recommends different levels of testing depending on that rating.

The most rigorous “level A” test, reserved for software whose failure would cause a catastrophic event, is called ‘modified condition/decision coverage” (MCDC), and it places the software in as many situations as possible to see if it crashes or produces anomalous output.

But it isn’t clear whether the MCDC test includes enough different conditions to provide any greater protection than the level B tests done on less safety-critical software. So in 2003, UK Ministry of Defense contractor Qinetiq ran both levels on a range of software that is deployed in military transport aircraft. The MCDC should pick out many more flaws than the level B tests, but the Qinetiq team found that there was “no significant difference” between them.

Now Boeing is planning to get rid of the hydraulic wheel brakes on its 787 in favour of lighter electrically actuated ones and to shift from using pneumatic engine starters and wing de-icers to electrical ones. Airbus will also be adopting a “more electric” approach in its forthcoming A350, says the plane’s marketing director. “The addition of more electric systems will mean even more computer control,” says Martyn Thomas, a systems engineering consultant based in Bath, UK, and a member of the NAS panel that produced the software report last year.” It will mean more wires or shared data lines and so still more possibilities for errors to arise.

Why do software bugs arise and why can’t they be removed? Bugs are sections of code that start doing something different to what the programmer intended, usually when the code has to deal with circumstances the programmer didn’t anticipate. All software is susceptible to bugs, so it must be tested under as many very different circumstances as possible. Ideally, the bugs get discovered at this time and are removed before the software is actually used. This is very difficult in complex systems like aircraft because the number of possible scenarios —such as different combinations of air densities, engine temperatures and specific aerodynamics — is huge.

But the addition of software led to different problems. Some of these are documented in a report completed last year by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) . It lists a number of instances in which software bugs caused frightening problems during flight. In one instance in August 2005, a computer in a Boeing 777 presented the pilot with contradictory reports of airspeed. It said the aircraft was going so fast it could be torn apart and at the same time that the plane was flying so slowly it would fail to generate enough lift to stay in the air. The pilots managed to control the aircraft nonetheless, but it was a stark illustration of what can go wrong.

In another instance in 2005, this time in an Airbus 319, the pilots’ computerised flight and navigation displays as well as the autopilot, auto-throttle and radio all lost power simultaneously for 2 minutes. Another time, what the NAS calls “faulty logic in the software” meant that when the computer controlling fuel flow failed in an Airbus A34o, the back-up systems were not turned on.

In early aircraft, moving parts such as the rudder and wing flaps were linked to controls in the cockpit either by a system of cables and pulleys or by hydraulics. In the 1970s, aircraft makers realized they could get rid of much of this very heavy equipment and replace it with lightweight wiring and systems driven by electric motors in the wings and tail. Such “fly-by-wire’ (FBW) systems vastly increased fuel efficiency.

FBW had another advantage too: because it uses electrical signals, for the first time it allowed a computer to be placed between the pilot and the moving parts. The computers were programmed to modify the pilots’ instructions in certain instances: for example, to stop them moving the rudder too far or too quickly and so damage the plane. They also allowed the plane’s aerodynamics to be finely adjusted during flight in response to wind conditions, further improving fuel economy.

All software can, as does, go wrong and with aircraft containing even more of it, can we really be sure they will fly safely?
Cockpit displays plunged into darkness,engines that throttle back during take~off and then contradictory airspeed readings-----are just some of the problems caused in recent years by inexplicable failures in the software that controls aircraft. So far there are no known cases of such failures alone causing an accident.

Speculation that software problems led to the crash landing of the British Airways Boeing 777 at Heathrow airport, London, on 17 January 2008, remain unconfirmed. While software was implicated in the Korean Air jumbo jet crash in August 1997 on Guam, which killed 228 people, human error, not software design, was to blame. Software failures remain a risk, though, and with aircraft makers set to increase the proportion of aircraft functions controlled by software, experts are warning that they will become more frequent, increasing the chance that one will cause an accident.