Over my many years at Salon — in my role as the geekiest of our editorial management team — I found myself often being asked whether some particular problem we were having with our site or our email system or something else might be the result of “hackers.”
Most of the time, I spared my inquisitors the lecture on the history and proper use of that term. Except in a tiny number of cases where there was specific evidence suggesting at least the possibility of some sort of foul play, I’d simply remind everyone how many different things could go wrong on any digital network, argue that the odds favored the likelihood of some sort of malfunction rather than malfeasance, and suggest that everyone should relax (except for our sysadmins, of course, who were busy trying to diagnose the problem).
Bugs are many, break-ins are few. John Schwartz had a good piece in the Times earlier this week offering further reinforcement of that perspective, looking specifically at the transportation system and the slow-motion train wreck of the effort to computerize our voting systems.
…Problems arising from flawed systems, increasingly complex networks and even technology headaches from corporate mergers can make computer systems less reliable. Meanwhile, society as a whole is growing ever more dependent on computers and computer networks, as automated controls become the norm for air traffic, pipelines, dams, the electrical grid and more.
“We don’t need hackers to break the systems because they’re falling apart by themselves,” said Peter G. Neumann, an expert in computing risks and principal scientist at SRI International, a research institute in Menlo Park, Calif.
It was this tension between our social dependence on complex software systems and our continuing inability to produce software in a reliable way that motivated me to write Dreaming in Code.
[tags]complexity, john schwartz, software development, dreaming in code[/tags]
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