The Swedish police's alcohol measurement equipment has been giving wrong results since December 2007, according to articles in Swedish newspapers earlier this month. Up to 5,000 people may have been falsely fined or even imprisoned.

As a result, the police stopped all use of their alcohol measurement tool, "Evidenzer," manufactured by Nanopuls. "The matter concerns people just near the limit for drunk driving or serious drunk driving," police spokesperson Mattias Andersson told Swedish news source The Local. The issue appears to have begun with a software update on December 1, 2007. Sweden's criminal-technical lab is now rechecking about 5,000 cases where people have been fined or imprisoned. At least 100 of those cases showed values above the limit for drunk driving caused by the software bug.

A routine check of the measurement values found the bug. The values are always kept by the lab, and in its evaluation it got strange results.

In the December 2007 bug fix, an interface bug between the measurement equipment and the computing unit was corrected. The bug that caused the equipment to register incorrectly was either introduced by the fix or a regression. There may not have been enough retesting or regression testing, or the evaluation of test results may have been sloppy.

Nanopuls has not commented on the cause.

Swedish police, who conduct 67,000 alcohol tests per year, previously used blood tests to determine blood-alcohol content. They now consider two breath-based measurements sufficient. The boundary value for drunk driving is a blood-alcohol level of 0.02 percent. Fines are high and many people serve three weeks in prison.

Related Articles
Dozens Wrongly Accused of Drunk Driving
Faulty Breathalysers Show Higher Drunk Driving

If you come across a bug that you think can compete for the title of the Bug of the Month, send it to Joey McAllister at jmcallister@sqe.com for possible inclusion in the next Between the Lines.

Looking for training without travel and time constraints? Experience interactive lessons in a multimedia format delivered right to your desktop. Register now and receive a copy of the reference book "A Practitioner's Guide to Software Test Design," written by Lee Copeland, along with a complimentary PC audio headset. Try the Online eLearning Demo! Get started today!--> http://sqe.com/go?eMTDeLetter1

The XP-philes of Windows XP
There's a certain connotation that goes with the term "Mac user." It brings up images of the die-hard fan, someone who will stand by his product no matter what. And for a long time, many serious Windows users have cast sideways glances at this sort of logic. More recently, a similar sort of group mentality has grown up in the Linux user community.

But those Windows users have preferred to think of themselves as the norm--the control group against which others are judged. Until now, that is.

There's a group of Windows XP users who are so underwhelmed by Microsoft's latest OS offering, Vista, that the users are banding together around Infoworld's "Save XP Web Petition" in an effort to fight the software giant's plans to discontinue Windows XP, which first hit the shelves way back in 2001. Microsoft initially planned to halt sales of XP at the end of last year, but it then granted XP an extention to June 30 of this year. It intends to phase out technical support over the next few years.

For some, the six-month reprieve isn't nearly enough.

Some of the primary complaints about Vista have included its burdensome hardware requirements and a general lack of Vista-compatible device drivers for many popular printers and other pieces of hardware. That Windows XP doesn't have these issues has been of particular importance to businesses that would rather be conducting their business than sorting out company-wide hardware upgrades and puzzling which printers will talk to their new OS and which ones won't.

Signees of the Save XP Web Petition, begun by technology journalist and Infoworld executive editor Galen Gruman, "demand that Microsoft not stop OEM and shrinkwrapped sales of Windows XP as planned on June 30, 2008, but instead keep it available indefinitely." As of the morning of April 18, the petition had 164,817 signatures.

Related Articles
Users Fight to Save Windows XP
Windows XP Fans Don’t Want It to XPire
Users Don't Want Window to Close on XP

The Internet: Abuse It and Lose It?
On April 15, after months under federal investigation for allegedly slowing down the Internet access of subscribers using file-sharing software such as BitTorrent, Comcast announced that it wants a "bill of rights" for file sharers and ISPs.

While traditional users of file-sharing software have used it to illegally swap copyrighted content such as movie and music files, the service recently has become popular as a cheap way to distribute legal files as well. In addition to trying to quell piracy, Comcast hopes to use a bill of rights to establish "best practices" for file-sharing software, which can be a heavy burden on Internet provders' networks--as well as a leech on the resources of a user's computer as it runs in the background.

Comcast is now working with BitTorrent,as well as software maker Pando, to find a resource-friendly solution.

Meanwhile, with the major television networks and cable channels introducing more and more content to high-bandwidth Internet portals, the broadcasters and the ISPs are trying to sort out who, exactly, ought to pay for all this user convenience. Likewise, multimedia content has found a happy home on mobile devices, but the developers of the next generation of mobile and ISP infrastructure want to know if these content providers--a major reason the Internet needs upgrading--are going to help pay the bill.

Finally, some in Europe have decided that the best way to deal with content pirates isn't to work up a bill of rights at all, but rather to kick them off the Net altogether.

President Nicholas Sarkozy of France announced a "three-strikes" plan in November, which was neogiated with the music industry and Internet service providers and which would give pirates three strikes (or warnings) before their ISP would pull their Internet access altogether. The European Parliament opposes any such three-strikes rule.

And while Comcast may have secretly been filtering its users' Internet access, some providers are choosing to stand firm against the idea of a filter. Charles Dunstone, chief executive of the UK-based Carphone Warehouse, which provides Internet access amongst other things, told The Independent, "We believe that a fundamental part of our role as an ISP is to protect the rights of our users to use the Internet as they choose."

Related Articles
Comcast Calls for 'P2P Bill of Rights'
Video Killed the Internet
Internet Firms Are Wary of New Role as Cybercop

What do you think about the filtering of Internet access? Check out our Survey Says! section below.

Media Spotlight:

Gray Matters: John Engle
At last year's Agile Development Practices conference, John Engle led participants in a collaborative discussion called Open Space. John will be leading Open Space again at STAREAST 2008. In this podcast, Joey McAllister speaks with John about Open Space, its history, and what you can expect to see if you attend Open Space at STAREAST this year. Listen to the April Gray Matters podcast at: http://www.stickyminds.com/podcasts#GM0408.

StickyMinds SoundByte: Early April
In this episode, Naomi Karten details good and bad open door policies and what we all can do to improve relationships between managers and employees. Then Francesca Matteu discusses Johanna Rothman’s column about understanding the difference between project goals and requirements and why we must work on one before the other. Listen to the early April StickyMinds SoundByte podcast at http://www.stickyminds.com/podcasts#SMSB0408a.

Seapine Software Quality-Ready Assessment Vendor: Seapine Software Address: 5412 Courseview Dr.               Suite 200               Mason, OH 45040 Phone: 513.754.1655 Fax: 513-754-1660 Tool URL: http://www.seapine.com/index.php?s=30&k=955&d=550 Description: The Seapine Software Quality-Ready Assessment is a high-level evaluation tool that helps development and QA teams quickly grasp the state of their software development practices. The results of the Web-based survey, which can be completed in less than 15 minutes, reveal how your organization rates in four key ALM technology areas (track, test, automate, change) and are sure to help you fine-tune both the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization. The results will be emailed to you immediately, so find out how your organization rates today.

Weekly Column: Peeling the Performance Onion
By Danny Faught and Rex Black

Performance tuning is often a frustrating process, especially when you remove one bottleneck after another with little performance improvement. Danny Faught and Rex Black describe the reasons why this happens and how to avoid getting into that situation. They also discuss why you can't work on performance without also dealing with reliability and robustness.

Read Peeling the Performance Onion.

- Absolutely not.
- It's the only way to fix the issues of Internet piracy and heavy resource demands.
- As access providers, the ISPs can do whatever they want.

Take our survey now to get counted and see the results of this months poll!

Last Month's Survey Results
In March, we asked, Do you care about security each time you swipe your card at the supermarket? Here's how you responded:

40% said, "Yes, credit and debit card security is a big issue."
32% said, "I worry about security all the time."
27% said, "Nah, that's just paranoia."