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Verizon's NYC 911 System Shutdown
Dead Nancy writes "A combination of human error and software that didn't anticipate it brought down New York City's 911 emergency line for several hours on Friday night."
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And to think everyone was worrying about the terrorists, fer chrissakes.
Considering Slashdot doesn't write their own articles and it is basically an aggregate of postings from other sites, I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
:P
Technically, any news on Slashdot is old news since it has been reported already.
Verizon began taking steps yesterday to better protect New York City's 911 emergency line after a data error by an employee brought down the system in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island for about two hours on Friday night, city and Verizon officials said.
Now imagine what a genuinely malevolent person could accomplish. Perhaps a single individual shouldn't be capable of disabling such a critical system.
Do you like German cars?
As I read the article, it is obvious that NYC's system is fraught with deep flaws in its design and management. These include:
1. False redundancy: Although the NYC system has a backup central offices and call centers, it apparently routes all calls from the affected area through a single Verizon subsystem. Their system is fully redundant except where its not.
2. Organizational silos in a coupled system: The City claimed that its 911 system was fine because "an error like the one made by Verizon could not necessarily have been prevented because it was not a flaw in the 911 system itself." Yet the Verizon circuits, systems, and procedures are an integral part of the 911 system. The City (and Verizon) maintain a fiction that they are independent entities when, in fact, they are tightly coupled. This division of responsibility is fine for playing the CYA Blame Game, but does not create a robust system.
3. User Interface Flaws I don't know what kind of user interface that technician was using, but it obviously has some terrible flaws if it did not warn him of the implications of the data entries. I also suspect that he was manually retyping some numbers off a computer print-out when he should have had some mechanism to download a set of proofread, verified, double-checked entries.
I don't fault NYC or Verizon in particular, they are probably no worse that anyone else. I only get angry that these types of structural insecurities are probably more widespread than anyone realizes.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Posting login info in /. doesn't work, because some asshole always goes and changes the password.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
</troll> please.
And, ummm, stop reading Phrack from 1985.
First off, these days, most lines are served off 'digital loop carriers (DLCs),' which take the analog lines from your home, and multiplex it onto high-capacity lines (often running over fiber-optic SONET loops) back to the central office.
Even if your 220 volts made it back to the DLC (which is fairly unlikely, considering 220 VAC at any dangerous ampreage will probably overheat and melt the copper, anyway), the worst you'd do would be to burn out the service area the DLC is handling.
And even if your unlikely scenerio of getting 220 VAC back to a central office, and through the fuses, and the main distribution frame, and even if you hit the switch, you wouldn't affect anything more than that local exchange. Central offices aren't "daisey chained" down copper lines.
(and yes, I do work for a telco)
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
It may have been someone who recently moved to the area and didn't know about the tornado warning system. I'm old enough that when I hear a test of civil defense sirens, the first thing that comes to mind is "Oh shit. We're going to be nuked by the Russians."
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Remember, everytime a stupid person dies the average intelligence of the world goes up.