(((Big week for snafus. During the European power outage, my Internet service went down and the local wifi hasn't worked properly since. Gotta tinker with it today. I hope I don't lose the connectivity I already have.)))
(((Even ACM RISKS, one of my favorite publications, is catching it. Clearly the collapse of civilization cannot be far behind.)))
Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 11:12:24 PST
From: "Peter G. Neumann"
Subject: Recent RISKS hiatus
"I always regret long gaps between RISKS issues. However, the past two weeks involved attending OOPSLA in Portland OR (with a widespread power failure that triggered evacuation of the entire Convention Center and surrounding area, apparently including stoppage of the light rail system) and the ACM
CCS06 in Alexandria VA, along with staying in contact with various activities at work. In both conferences, hotel wireless systems were massively overloaded by the plethora of participants' laptops, with repeated network crashes and process vanishings that made Net access extremely challenging. Herewith is an attempt to catch up with the RISKS backlog."
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Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 13:17:12 PST
From: "Peter G. Neumann"
Subject: Widespread European power failure
A high-voltage transmission line was shut down over a river to enable a presumably large ship to pass. This is preliminarily being attributed to a propagating outage that affected something like 10,000,000 people in
Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Belgium and Spain. [Source: Danna Avsec,
Power failure hits Europe, Associated Press, 05 Nov 2006; PGN-ed, TNX
to Lauren Weinstein for noting this one.]
http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=58868
Somewhat ironically, my keynote talk at the ACM CCS 06 included discussions on network-propagating outages in power and telephony, how they keep recurring despite efforts to avoid them, and how they might be prevented.
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(((Soon I'll be flying off to Oslo, during which time, hopefully, airborne cyber-chaos of this kind will not occur.)))
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2006 13:17:53 -0700
From: james hughes
Subject: Computer failure causing A320 PA not to work... [Video]
I was on UA 914 from SFO to IAD on October 16th 2006 occupying seat 1B. This is an A320 with a plaque that reads it is the 500th airbus built, with the names of the people that accepted the plane from Airbus to United.
At FL39 approaching Denver, the weirdest thing happened.
It was like a 'B' horror movie.
All of a sudden all the lights in the cabin, including things like seat belt lights, smoking light, call buttons etc. started randomly flashing. The audio system went bonkers also changing channels, alternating static and music, etc... The attached video was taken with my palm cell phone. While this is looking forward, it was even weirder in the back with all the flashing lights.
In the video you can see the lights flashing and the flight attendant trying to get into the cockpit. The PA system flight attendant to cabin and cockpit to cabin did not work. I suspect communications to the cockpit was a problem to judging on how the flight attendant was constantly "ringing the bell" to get the flight crew to open the door...
This went on for 10 minutes. The plane did not descent, turn or otherwise, and even though Channel 9 was not coming through clearly, the chatter on the radio was normal.
After it was over, the pilot said later that he was trying to turn off the evacuation alarm(!) which he said was unbelievably loud and sounding in the cockpit (although I did not hear it). He explained that he had never heard this in flight before (good thing) and this was something that they heard in training.
During that 10 minutes he had been in contact with the UA maintenance people.
The explanation was that the passenger control system had failed. He said it was the system that controls the "creature comforts" in the back of the airplane including the lights and toilets (and a bit more I might add! I am a little surprised that the PA, and crew to cockpit communications can be so easily trashed.)
The pilot claimed to have been flying the A320 for 8 years and was taken totally off guard by this.
My kudos to the crew for taking care of this. False alarms are at least distracting, which can contribute to larger issues.
At the end the video, unbelievably, a passenger just had to get up and go to the bathroom really bad. I told him to sit back down, but after the end of the video he went anyway, right in the middle of this mess.
[Video omitted here. Contact Jim to view it. PGN]
