Wednesday, July 08, 2015

The IT is failing in too many instances.

A United Airlines (click here) computer fault that disrupted travel for thousands of fliers began with a router malfunctioning and prevented the carrier from ticketing passengers and dispatching crews.
Wednesday’s two-hour failure was separate from other recent digital mishaps, United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy said. But United’s persistent travails raise the prospect that customers may pick other carriers, according to consultants such as IdeaWorksCompany’s Jay Sorensen....

In testimony to Congress the CEO of CSX stated the software for the Positive Train Control was defective. If that went into operation the nightmare would be surreal.

At a US Intelligence Committee (click here) hearing this afternoon, Sen. Barbara Mikulski confronted FBI Director James Comey with some real talk about the strange shitstorm of tech failures today: The New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines, and the Wall Street Journal all went down, citing technical difficulties.

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Mikulski said. “Is the FBI investigating these as breaches?”...

Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (click here) was fined 56 million pounds ($88 million) by British regulators for the 2012 collapse of its computer system that left millions of customers without access to their accounts for weeks. 

US based soft drink company Coca-Cola's IT (click here) system was hacked by Chinese hackers three years ago, but the company kept the cyber attack secret.
According to Bloomberg, the hack came when Coca-Cola was looking to acquire the China Huiyuan Juice for about $2.4bn in 2009.
Bloomberg claimed that the deal, which was collapsed three days after the cyber-attack, would have been the largest foreign takeover of a Chinese firm at the time....

Let's not forget the failure of the federal health care exchanges. 

There is the military problems as well. The number of problems experienced with military IT is an assault on national security. The incompetence in the IT industry is considerable. 

Every year that goes by there are more and more computer engineers coming out of universities across the globe. The number of computer experts do not think alike as their computers are made to do. The variety of computer engineers find their work interacting with other computer programs created by other engineers. The interface is horrible. 

Today United Airlines went down. It was not long after that Wall Street was experiencing problems. That would be a very interesting coincidence and I don't believe in coincidence. 

19 November 2013
By Paul Rubens

...In the height of the summer, for example, the Sabre reservation system used by more than 300 airlines crashed for several hours, resulting in flight cancellations and delays, with some airline staff resorting to paper and pen to check in passengers manually....

...Making the software (click here) more reliable would undoubtedly be possible, but to do so the developers would have to invest so much more time and money that the price of the product would end up having to be unacceptably high....