If I stop posting...
... after the 24th of October, you may assume the patch killed me.
It's probably the most crucial patch of the year: Abbott Laboratories' reworked firmware for its St Jude pacemakers has won the US Food and Drug Administration approval to ship. According to the regulator's statement, the upgrade should go smoothly, nearly all the time. Its statement says “installing the updated firmware …
Out of curiosity, how do they calculate those risks? The precision of the figures suggests they have identified a number of scenarios in which things might go wrong - so why haven't they fixed those scenarios? Surely we're getting into unknown unknowns territory here - which is inherently rather hard to quantify.
And what if someone has rooted their pacemaker to speed it up during rumpy-pumpy?
"Transmitter may initiate a software reset resulting in backup operation in some implanted St. Jude Medical Radio Frequency (RF) enabled Implantable Cardioverter Assura, Unify Assura, and Quadra Assura ICDs and Assurity and Allure Pacemakers."