Tough Tasers

Regarding the articles on Taser guns in the December issue [“How a Taser Works”], I suggest that they left out what should have been a very critical part of the analysis. To consider the consequences of not using or having access to a Taser should be a necessary part of such a review.

As a retired peace officer, I was a victim of numerous assaults. For a variety of reasons, it is axiomatic that keeping distance from an assaulting individual is important. In my day, the tools were a gun or a stick. Sticks produce fractured skulls and other broken bones, I assure you. While I do not know any statistics, I am comfortable in asserting that there is much more danger from a fractured skull than from a Taser shot. Had such a tool been available in my day, I would have put fewer people in the hospital.

Glenn Marin

Whittier, Calif.

To say that 1.9 milli­amperes is the average current available from a Taser X26, while nominally and technically correct, completely understates and misrepresents the electrical output from these devices. At pulse durations of 100 to 140 microseconds and a pulse-delivery rate of 19 hertz, the duty cycle of the Taser waveform is less than 0.3 percent. As such, the delivered average current will be relatively low. I recently measured the electrical output from a Taser X26 into a series of precision high-­voltage, noninductive 300-, 1000-, and 4000-ohm loads and found that the median peak currents approach 4 amperes, with maximum peak currents exceeding 8 A. The neuromuscular-incapacitating effects of the Taser are due more to the effects of these peak currents than to the much lower stated average current.

Larry Fennigkoh

IEEE Member

Milwaukee

I was very disappointed with the Taser write-up. The authors are no doubt very talented, but engineer Mark W. Kroll sits on the Taser International board, and electrophysiologist Patrick Tchou received a “gift” of test equipment from Taser. This may explain why Kroll provides no details on the four court cases in which the Taser was found to be the primary cause of death and disparages three of them. Were they thrown out of court on a ­technicality or because the Taser was not to blame? It also may explain why Tchou doesn’t complain about a current level only one-fourth of what triggers fibrillation in pigs and doesn’t report on the four fatalities brought to court. I expect IEEE Spectrum to disqualify such one-sided articles when dealing with issues as controversial as the safety of the Taser.

Martin Lurie

IEEE Member

Newton, Mass.

Playing Clean

I was a bit dismayed to read “Playing Dirty” [December]. What Richard Thurman is doing is against the terms of service of online games. Glorifying such actions in these games is wrong. It has little to do with people buying bling on eBay and more to do with the fact that these people destroy the games. It would have been better to document how to combat this in online gaming and not treat it as the next big thing to make money.

Simon O’Doherty

IEEE Member

Dublin

Catching a Code

In their article “Controlled Chaos” [December], Antonio Nucci and Steve Bannerman described their proposed early-warning detection of viruses and worms by measuring the entropy of traffic on trunk communication lines. That may indeed ­protect the network; however, individual computers would still retain snippets of viral code. The authors do not address the difficult tasks of identifying the signatures of those viral codes after an attack on the network and of purging the malicious code.

Myron Kayton

IEEE Life Fellow, Santa Monica, Calif.