History's Worst Software Bugs

bharatm writes "Wired has an article on the 10 worst sofware bugs.. From the article 'Coding errors have sparked explosions, crippled interplanetary probes -- even killed people. Here's our pick for the 10 worst bugs ever, but the judging wasn't easy.'"

Comments

Airbus Crash

[CruddyBuddy]

Here is video of an Airbus crashing into the trees because the autopilot didn't like the landing conditions. IIRC (remember), the pilot's pull-up was ignored because the flight conditions weren't optimum despite an obvious life threatening situation. If this isn't a software bug, what would you call it? (Maybe the software considered crash modes and this configuration allowed the black box to survive intact.)

http://www.alexisparkinn.com/photogallery/Videos/A irbus320_trees.mpg/

(Let the slashdotting begin! (poor servers))

All things considered, I don't know if the pilots survived.

Re:Airbus Crash

[be-fan]

I actually know why this happened. We learned about it in our flight dynamics class. The problem was the result in a mistmatch between what the pilot thought the airplane was doing, and what it was actually doing. The A320 had software that prevented the pilot from stalling the airplane during flight. However, the protection only kicked in above 90', because the software assumed that if you were below that, you wanted to land (which involves a stall right at touchdown). The pilot was trying to do a flyby, and was supposed to be above 100', but for whatever reason he came in at around 30'. Now, the reasons he didn't pull up and ramp up the engines are debatable, but the equitable explanations suggest that he assumed that the airplane's stall protection would kick in, while the airplane had disabled them because it thought it was about to land.

Re:This bug reminds me of a Dilbert comic

[Lucan_UK]

Here is the Dilbert Strip... Enjoy
http://www.geocities.com/raptorred42/Dilbert0001.j pg

Re:Predictions are hard

[Jason Ford]

Several recent studies lend support to this observation. From an article at the American Pyschological Association:

We've all seen it: the employee who's convinced she's doing a great job and gets a mediocre performance appraisal, or the student who's sure he's aced an exam and winds up with a D.

The tendency that people have to overrate their abilities fascinates Cornell University social psychologist David Dunning, PhD. "People overestimate themselves," he says, "but more than that, they really seem to believe it. I've been trying to figure out where that certainty of belief comes from."

Dunning is doing that through a series of manipulated studies, mostly with students at Cornell. He's finding that the least competent performers inflate their abilities the most; that the reason for the overinflation seems to be ignorance, not arrogance; and that chronic self-beliefs, however inaccurate, underlie both people's over and underestimations of how well they're doing.

Well, they're ok, but not quite the worst

[douthat]

I think the two worst computer bugs of all time are the two that quite possibly could have wiped us all out. More inforation here.

(Copied from the article:)
        * November 9, 1979, when the US made emergency retaliation preparations after NORAD saw on-screen indications that a full-scale Soviet attack had been launched. No attempt was made to use the "red telephone" hotline to clarify the situation with the USSR and it was not until early-warning radar systems confirmed no such launch had taken place that NORAD realised that a computer system test had caused the display errors. A Senator at NORAD at the time described an atmosphere of absolute panic. A GAO investigation led to the construction of an off-site test facility, to prevent similar mistakes subsequently. A fictionalized version of this incident was filmed as the movie WarGames, in which the test system is inadvertantly triggered by a teenage hacker believing himself to be playing a video game.

        * September 26, 1983, when Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov refused to launch ICBMs, despite computer indications that the US had already launched.

        If it weren't for two humans who said "fuck what the computer says!", we might be in a very different place right now.