Software disaster

The purchase was part of a strategic Soviet plan to steal or covertly obtain sensitive U. When the CIA discovered the purchase, they sabotaged the software so that it would pass Soviet inspection but fail in operation. Disaster: The Soviet early warning system falsely indicated the United States had launched five ballistic missiles.

Cause: A bug in the Soviet software failed to filter out false missile detections caused by sunlight reflecting off cloud-tops. Cause: Because of a subtle bug called a race condition , a technician could accidentally configure Therac so the electron beam would fire in high-power mode without the proper patient shielding.

Thanks for the knowledge.. Among 20 the most shocking is the Mariner Bugs Out and Hartford. It made me think a lot about computer programming and its defects. Anybody tell me of a good open source project that provides security over software piracy.

Thanks In advance, Shaun. Ariane Rocket Goes Boom […]. Mistakes cannot be prevented from happening. DevTopics has a list of the twenty most famous software disasters. Thanks, Arjan. I am contacting you through this contact form as there was no email address available. We would be interested in purchasing advertising on your blog. Please get back to me using the email address I have entered if you would be interested in discussing this further.

Although the impact of failure […]. After a year of asking, we got permission to launch two war shots at a drone using the mode. We no sooner launched the missiles when the radars slewed to their stowed position and turned themselves off, thanks to a bug in the program for the then-new Mk computers.

Our two missiles, having lost all return signal, self-destructed. Our tech-reps looked a little bit harried for the rest of that trip…. Your digital memory, […].

Or it involves someone digging into Academia and giving an obscure topic exposure […]. Similar examples are everywhere. Cause: A programmer incorrectly transcribed a handwritten formula into computer code, missing a single superscript bar.

Without the smoothing function indicated by the bar, the software treated normal variations of velocity as if they were serious, causing faulty corrections that sent the rocket off course.

Disaster: Just hours after thousands of fans had left the Hartford Coliseum, the steel-latticed roof collapsed under the weight of wet snow. Cause: The programmer of the CAD software used to design the coliseum incorrectly assumed the steel roof supports would only face pure compression.

But when one of the supports unexpectedly buckled from the snow, it set off a chain reaction that brought down the other roof sections like dominoes. Cause: CIA operatives allegedly planted a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased by the Soviets to control their gas pipelines. The purchase was part of a strategic Soviet plan to steal or covertly obtain sensitive U. When the CIA discovered the purchase, they sabotaged the software so that it would pass Soviet inspection but fail in operation.

Disaster: The Soviet early warning system falsely indicated the United States had launched five ballistic missiles. Cause: A bug in the Soviet software failed to filter out false missile detections caused by sunlight reflecting off cloud-tops.

Cause: Because of a subtle bug called a race condition, a technician could accidentally configure Therac so the electron beam would fire in high-power mode without the proper patient shielding. This was the greatest loss Wall Street ever suffered in a single day. Cause: A long bull market was halted by a rash of SEC investigations of insider trading and by other market forces.

As investors fled stocks in a mass exodus, computer trading programs generated a flood of sell orders, overwhelming the market, crashing systems and leaving investors effectively blind. Cause: A single line of buggy code in a complex software upgrade implemented to speed up calling caused a ripple effect that shut down the network.

The missile destroyed an American Army barracks. Cause: A software rounding error incorrectly calculated the time, causing the Patriot system to ignore the incoming Scud missile. For example, dividing Although the bug affected few users, it become a public relations nightmare. With an estimated 5 million defective chips in circulation, Intel offered to replace Pentium chips only for consumers who could prove they needed high accuracy. Eventually Intel replaced the chips for anyone who complained.

Cause: The divider in the Pentium floating point unit had a flawed division table, missing about five of a thousand entries and resulting in these rounding errors. Cause: Shutdown occurred when the guidance computer tried to convert the sideways rocket velocity from bits to a bit format. The number was too big, and an overflow error resulted. When the guidance system shut down, control passed to an identical redundant unit, which also failed because it was running the same algorithm.

Cost: 6 billion dead, near-total destruction of human civilization and animal ecosystems fictional. Disaster: Human operators attempt to shut off the Skynet global computer network.

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