Yet Another Computer Glitch Cripples Air Travel
from the too-long-without-one-of-those dept
It was an all too familiar scene at Los Angeles International Airport this weekend, as a computer glitch temporarily left 20,000 passengers stranded. This summer has seen a bevy of glitches and delays, as the civil aviation infrastructure gets stretched to the breaking point. This time, the failure was not on the part of the airlines, but on the US Customs service, which prevented passengers from properly getting screened. Obviously, glitches are going to happen now and then, and so it's not a realistic solution to simply eliminate them. But seeing as every minor ripple ends up creating such a calamity, costing millions in lost time and profits, a greater emphasis needs to be placed on developing systems that fail gracefully.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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I always wonder
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Cyber Terrorism
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Re: Cyber Terrorism
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Are the terrorists that smart? That's probably giving people who strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up to kill a few civilians too much credit...
freak3dot
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freak3dot even though they do have suicide bombers, many of the higher ups have at least a Masters in some computer related field so saying that is giving them a little to much credit is grossly underestimating them.
They just don't do it because it would be too easy to trace with all the security in place.
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the grunts might not be (just like in any good army), but the upper levels are, often educated in the best western schools/universities.
But, to think of that (particular hacking plan and the desired result of customs just letting everyone in as a result) as smart/intelligent, now that is stupid...
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Why even have officers? Let the computer make the decision. Don't pass muster? The floor opens you up and fall down a tube to a room for a more rigorous interview ;)
"Homeland Security officials blamed the malfunction on the fibre optic cables that support the system used to process international passengers"
That would be a hardware glitch. So who severed the cables by 'accident'? Don't these people know anything about backup systems and redundancy? Maybe we should let Google handle the hardware side.
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Can anybody say next week "missing laptops, personal information of thousands leaked"
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24
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You can't have redundancy for every system - garbage collection, for instance. Imagine a week in NY City without garbage collection.
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Also, you have the ultimate redundancy in the Customs officers themselves. They could have processed people the 'old-fashioned' way: by asking questions, looking at ID and looking through suitcases etc. But hey, Customs has become a slave to the machines.
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