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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.
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.