Brief items

Medical images and health data belonging to millions of Americans, including X-rays, MRIs and CT scans, are sitting unprotected on the internet and available to anyone with basic computer expertise.

The records cover more than 5 million patients in the U.S. and millions more around the world. In some cases, a snoop could use free software programs — or just a typical web browser — to view the images and private data, an investigation by ProPublica and the German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk found.

We identified 187 servers — computers that are used to store and retrieve medical data — in the U.S. that were unprotected by passwords or basic security precautions. The computer systems, from Florida to California, are used in doctors’ offices, medical-imaging centers and mobile X-ray services.

Even finished code still has problems. Again due to the complexity of modern software systems, "works properly" doesn't mean that it's perfectly correct. Modern software is full of bugs -- thousands of software flaws -- that occasionally affect performance or security. That's why any piece of software you use is regularly updated; the developers are still fixing bugs, even after the software is released.

Bioengineering will be largely the same: writing biological code will have these same reliability properties. Unfortunately, the software solution of making lots of mistakes and fixing them as you go doesn't work in biology.

In nature, a similar type of trial and error is handled by "the survival of the fittest" and occurs slowly over many generations. But human-generated code from scratch doesn't have that kind of correction mechanism. Inadvertent or intentional release of these newly coded "programs" may result in pathogens of expanded host range (just think swine flu) or organisms that wreck delicate ecological balances.

What matters is what you do, not what you believe. You don’t even need to believe in free software to be part of Debian, so long as you’re busy writing or contributing to free software. Whether it’s because you believe in user freedom or because your large company has chosen Debian for entirely pragmatic reasons, your free software contributions are welcome.

I think that is one of our core strengths. We’re an incredibly diverse community. When we try to tie something else to what it means to be Debian beyond the quality of that free operating system we produce, judged by how it meets the needs of our users, we risk diminishing Debian. Our diversity serves the free software community well. We have always balanced pragmatic concerns against freedom.