tech-realism

What does it mean when we say that developers spend most of their time figuring the system out? Why is it important? And how else could we look at this problem?

“Justice Wendlandt hits the nail on head: "How is that not arbitary?...the use of a risk assessment tool whose algorithm is entirely unknown, it's proprietary, could be (for example) a random number generator as far as I know...how is that not arbitrary?"”

Viasat says it has suffered a "cyber event" that has caused hit its KA-SAT satellite broadband services. Wind farms are among those affected.

Whether the shutdown lasts beyond Tuesday wasn’t clear, the car maker said, after one of its suppliers cited a possible cyberattack or malicious email for the problem. The factories represent roughly a third of Toyota’s annual production.

This Post Office trial has revealed what is likely the largest miscarriage of justice in UK legal history. Hundreds of individuals who operated Post Office branches (subpostmasters) were convicted on fraud and theft charges on the basis of missing funds identified by the Horizon accounting system. Thousands more subpostmasters were forced to pay the Post Office back for these shortfalls. But the Post Office trial concluded that Horizon was “not remotely robust”, and the supposed shortfalls might never have existed in the first place and, where they did, they might not have been due to the fault of the subpostmaster. This scandal resulted from insufficient information being disclosed in the process of prosecuting subpostmasters, poor oversight of the Post Office (both by its management and by the government) and a failure of the legal system to view evidence generated by Horizon with appropriate scepticism. These matters have been discussed elsewhere, but what’s been talked about less are the technical failures in Horizon and associated systems that might have caused the supposed shortfalls. I spoke to the Computerphile YouTube channel about what we’ve learned about Horizon and its failures, based on the Post Office trial. What seems to be a simple problem – keeping track of how much money and stock is in a branch – is actually much harder than it appears. Considering the large number of transactions that Horizon performs (millions per day), inevitable hardware and communication failures, and the complex interactions between systems, it should have been obvious that errors would be a common occurrence.

Over 100 Teslas have slammed on their brakes while driving even though nothing is in front of them

For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a ...

Many military radars interfere with open source satellite imagery when they're turned on. A new tool lets anyone monitor when and where these radars are deployed.

Russian hackers exploited gaps in U.S. defenses and spent months in government and corporate networks in one of the most effective cyber-espionage campaigns of all time. This is how they did it.

Coding errors spark explosions, cripple interplanetary probes -- even kill people. Here are our picks for the 10 worst bugs ever. (The judging wasn't easy.) First of a three-part series by Simson Garfinkel.

Pedestrian warning systems in 578,607 cars affected, including model S, X and Y

Faulty computer systems are prompting class-action lawsuits by disgruntled car owners, a symptom of automakers’ bumpy transition to the digital age.

The early morning hours of August 16, 2019 began with the whirring and burping sound of computer printers. The scratch and screech echoed along the empty corridors of the Borger, Tex. administrative offices, paper sliding from tray to ink jet to tray and then back again.

If you’re working on IT or service delivery projects in public sector organizations, I have one very specific rule for you to follow: avoid vendor lock-in. To do that, you should own your data, own your front-end interfaces, own your software source code, and avoid long-term contracts. This post dives into why vendor lock-in is a problem, and how those strategies can help prevent it.

The fate of the country's nukes is in the hands of an obsolete operating system.

A new generation of collaborative software that allows users to retain ownership of their data.

What exactly was the 1202 program alarm that could have killed Apollo 11’s landing?

The role of software within systems has fundamentally changed over the past 50 years. Software's role has changed both on mission-critical DoD systems, such as fighter aircraft and surveillance equipment, and on commercial products, such as telephones and cars. Software has become not only the brain of most systems, but the backbone of their functionality. Acquisition processes must acknowledge this new reality and adapt. This blog posting, the second in a series about the relationship of software engineering (SwE) and systems engineering (SysE), shows how software technologies have come to dominate what formerly were hardware-based systems....

I spent a lot of last year urging people to work on stuff that matters. This led to many questions about what that stuff might be. I've been a bit reluctant to answer those questions, because the list is different for everyone. I thought I'd do better to start the new year with some ideas about how to think about...

An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog

I’ve come to believe that most organizational design questions can be answered by recursively applying a framework for sizing teams. Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to team sizing into a bit of a framework, and even changed my mind on several aspects, especially the viability of small teams. This post describes how I now size teams