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Tracking the Blackout Bug
Alien54 writes "This earlier Slash story cited a CNN news report on how the August blackout was preventable. But, as seen in this Security Focus article, things are not so simple. 'In the initial stages, nobody really knew what the root cause was,' says Mike Unum, manager of commercial solutions at GE Energy. 'We test exhaustively, we test with third parties, and we had in excess of three million online operational hours in which nothing had ever exercised that bug,' says Unum. 'I'm not sure that more testing would have revealed that. Unfortunately, that's kind of the nature of software... you may never find the problem. I don't think that's unique to control systems or any particular vendor software.' Which leads to a number of other questions."
Realistically none of these problems had to happen and wouldn't have happened if the people in charge were doing their jobs. Maybe they were working on a way to make cold fusion feasible, I don't know but if they were negligent then they need to be removed from their position. If they were just too busy with other aspects of the system then they need to bring more people in so the system can be properly maintained. A power outage is a big deal. Of course, one outage is hardly a trend so probably the whole thing is just blown out of proportion.
No, no it doesn't. I meant software in the sense of "running power plants" or "actually does something". Not "Hello World" samples.
I hate sigs.
Ok, so they found the trigger ... poor maintenance left cables hanging down on trees, and a bug in software failed to set an alarm off when those cables tripped off.
.. the cascade failure.
But They need to deal with the REAL PROBLEM.
The surrounding electrical utilities, when they measured the power fluctuations hours before the cascade, acted soley to protect themselves instead of protecting the system and the customers. They acted to trip off their own systems and shunt the power drain to other utilities.
By doing so, loads too big to fill were thrown on down the line, forcing more and more utilities to trip off. .
The utilities are required by law to act for the system first, before ducking their heads in the sand the way they all did. They could have isolated a small area and left the outage as a minor event never making the news.
Instead in typical dumbass ignorant american fashion, everyone ignored what was happening including Dubya and tried to blame it on a utility in Canada.
The truth is out now, but with their rude american ways and short attention spans, it will never occur to them to even apologize to the Canadian people and systems that they in fact disrupted.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"