A great 13 year old book about major incidents related to computer failures

The Heathrow titsup reminded me about a book I have on my shelf. I went to search for it and finally found it covered in dust. It is a hard cover published in '95, called Fatal defect, chasing killer computer bugs, by Ivars Peterson. It made me wonder what lessons, if any, IT practitioners have learnt in the intervening 13 years. IT has no concept of safety officers and no body like the FAA to report and independently verify IT major incidents, even fatal ones.

The book references these events:

Ray Cox overdosed by Therac-25 radiation therapy machine: Original Accident Investigation Paper (by Nancy Leveson)
Darlington emergency shut down system software: Finding fault: the formidable task of eradicating software bugs.
Voyager 2
Tandem CLX failure in 1992: Don Stokes. More time related faults.
William M. Kahan: How important is numerical accuracy?
Phobos 1
A320 Airbus crash in 1992.
STS-1
Patriot missile failure
The AT&T Network crash of 1990.

Comments

easywall - Web interface for easy use of the IPTables firewall on Linux systems written in Python3.

Firewalls are becoming increasingly important in today’s world. Hackers and automated scripts are constantly trying to invade your system and use it for Bitcoin mining, botnets or other things. To prevent these attacks, you can use a firewall on your system. IPTables is the strongest firewall in Linux because it can filter packets in the kernel before they reach the application. Using IPTables is not very easy for Linux beginners. We have created easywall - the simple IPTables web interface . The focus of the software is on easy installation and use. Access this neat software over on github: easywall

No Scrubs: The Architecture That Made Unmetered Mitigation Possible

When building a DDoS mitigation service it’s incredibly tempting to think that the solution is scrubbing centers or scrubbing servers. I, too, thought that was a good idea in the beginning, but experience has shown that there are serious pitfalls to this approach. Read the post of at Cloudflare's blog: N o Scrubs: The Architecture That Made Unmetered Mitigation Possible

Thinking problem management!

Search This Blog