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This flexibility is software’s miracle, and its curse. Just by editing the text in a file somewhere, the same hunk of silicon can become an autopilot or an inventory-control system. Once you’d built and tested it, you knew exactly what you were dealing with. “We used to be able to think through all the things it could do, all the states it could get into.” The electromechanical interlockings that controlled train movements at railroad crossings, for instance, only had so many configurations a few sheets of paper could describe the whole system, and you could run physical trains against each configuration to see how it would behave. #CHARLIE HUMAN APOCALYPSE NOW NOW VIMEO SOFTWARE#She became known for her report on the Therac-25, a radiation-therapy machine that killed six patients because of a software error. “When we had electromechanical systems, we used to be able to test them exhaustively,” says Nancy Leveson, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been studying software safety for 35 years. Almost more frightening was the realization, late in the day, that it was just a coincidence. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack. #CHARLIE HUMAN APOCALYPSE NOW NOW VIMEO UPGRADE#This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade the front page of The Wall Street Journal’s website crashed and Seattle’s 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. It’s been said that software is “eating the world.” More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. There have now been four in as many years. For the first time, there could be such a thing as a national 911 outage. The rise of cellphones and the promise of new capabilities-what if you could text 911? or send videos to the dispatcher?-drove the development of a more complex system that relied on the internet. Outages were small and easily diagnosed and fixed. Not long ago, emergency calls were handled locally. It took until morning to realize that Intrado’s software in Englewood was responsible, and that the fix was to change a single number. Dispatch centers in Washington, California, Florida, the Carolinas, and Minnesota, serving 11 million Americans, struggled to make sense of reports that callers were getting busy signals. And because the programmers hadn’t anticipated the problem, they hadn’t created alarms to call attention to it. Because the counter was used to generate a unique identifier for each call, new calls were rejected. Shortly before midnight on April 10, the counter exceeded that number, resulting in chaos. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. #CHARLIE HUMAN APOCALYPSE NOW NOW VIMEO FULL#To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. ![]()
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