Examples of Programming Gone Wrong?

LightForce3 asks: "I'm a beginning CS student, and in my studies I've come across examples of programmer error causing very large problems, such as the Ariane 5 failure and the Therac-25 accidents, often as tales of caution to beginner programmers such as myself. My (morbid?) curiosity has been piqued, and I'm looking for other examples of programmer error leading to serious problems. After all, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others than from your own, right? ;) What programming-related accidents, incidents, and failures, both well-known and obscure, do Slashdot readers know about, and are there any good resources for researching these?"

Comments

I got one!

[cornjchob]

Win9x kernel, anyone?

RISKS digest

[Mr. Slippery]

Read the RISKS digest, as comp.risks or at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks. Everyone who works with computers should read this regularly, it is much less painful to learn from other people's mistakes.

PGN put a bunch of the classic items together in a book a few years ago, called Computer-Related Risks.

Re:Y2K ?

[Cyno01]

yeah, months of crappy sensationalist news reports

Re:not true

[StuffYourReligion]

Whether or not NT was responsible for this particular glitch, according the above article, the engineers involved were not too impressed with NT {emphasis added}:

But according to DiGiorgio [a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk], who in an interview said he has serviced automated control systems on Navy ships for the past 26 years, the NT operating system is the source of the Yorktown's computer problems.

NT applications aboard the Yorktown provide damage control, run the ship's control center on the bridge, monitor the engines and navigate the ship when under way.

"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said.

....

Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office, said there have been numerous software failures associated with NT aboard the Yorktown.

...

The Yorktown has been towed into port several times because of the systems failures, he said.

"Because of politics, some things are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do, like Windows NT," Redman said. "If it were up to me I probably would not have used Windows NT in this particular application. If we used Unix, we would have a system that has less of a tendency to go down."

Oh, yes. Personally, I'm am very glad our military has placed its faith (and the lives of our mariners) in such reliable technology.

Windows

[x0m3g4]

If you think about it, Windows is just a big programming blooper.