I just discovered This Is Broken and couldn’t help but explore the archives.

First I discovered Brill.com’s weird search results. The problem is that a search for bond funds returns a list of stories that have little to do with financial news. It looks like somebody has entered a bunch of bogus stories in their database. They might have been hacked, but I’d be more suspicious of a disgruntled employee. The saddest part is that the problem was reported on September 22, 2004 and they haven’t fixed it yet.

Then there was a story about the risks of running Windows in mission critical environments, like air traffic control. This Techworld UK gives the details on a Microsoft problem that left 800 planes circling the skies of southern California without any communications or ground control.

It seems that the system absolutely cannot run more than 47 days without rebooting, and when a novice engineer missed a scheduled preemptive reboot, the system went down without warning.

Isn’t anything that threatens the safety of the flying public akin to terrorism?

Posted January 24, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. .

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