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by Amezarak 3700 days ago
According to the article, it was the hospital IT that misconfigured the antivirus, not the application developers.

Is there some reason to believe this wouldn't occur on a Linux system? There are plenty of dumb IA requirements that antivirus be installed on Linux, too.
1 comments
zanny 3700 days ago
Hardware involved in heart surgery running a Linux system should have literally the bare minimum of software to run it. That means kernel, init, networks support (dhcpcd, systemd-networkd, if absolutely necessary samba, sshd, etc) and custom software running on top of that as nobody. Not some ~20GB of Microsoft crap driving the system to crash every couple days.
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Amezarak 3700 days ago
> Not some ~20GB of Microsoft crap driving the system to crash every couple days.

I agree the system should be running as few services and as little other third-party software as possible, but let's be fair. Since at least Windows 7 / 2008R2, particularly for an offline system, the OS is not going to crash unless there is a hardware problem. It's not clear the OS crashed even in the article - "the screen went black" (the application went black?) and they "had to reboot" doesn't give us enough information.

A modern Windows system, like a modern Linux or a modern FreeBSD, is stable and will stay up for as long as you need it to, unless as I said before, there is a hardware problem. (Or in the case of consumer Windows, you do an update.)

EDIT: According to the actual report, the OS was not rebooted, the application was. There was no Windows crash.

> On (b)(6) 2016, a customer reported to merge healthcare that, in the middle of a heart catheterization procedure, the hemo monitor pc lost communication with the hemo client and the hemo monitor went black. Information obtained from the customer indicated that there was a delay of about 5 minutes while the patient was sedated so that the application could be rebooted. It was found that anti-malware software was performing hourly scans. With merge hemo not presenting physiological data during treatment, there is a potential for a delay in care that results in harm to the patient. However, it was reported that the procedure was completed successfully once the application was rebooted.

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