There seems to have been a number of high profile failures in computer systems recently.

Banking, O2 etc. I wonder if this is bad luck, bad management or something more sinister?

I've read that the UK as a whole is constantly under cyber attack and maybe this has become the terrorists' weapon of choice?

I'm not paranoid - people are genuinely out to get me.:eek:

SGC

Have had the same thought myself...

Although the RBS fiasco was apparently during a software upgrade...the upgraded software being 'corrupted'.

And all this just weeks before the Olympics...does make one wonder.

If so, who is the culprit?

Maybe the Greek Secret Service...:E

Orange France had a 20 hour failure affecting 20 million mobile users last week.

My brother-in-law was a programming team leader with RBS until 4 years ago. He was good, and he left because they started treating him like dirt. So did others. Thus I would surmise it is bad management creating conditions which have made too many of the good people leave, with the consequent problems.

With the exception of John Lewis/Ocado, I have not had a single friend, relative or colleague have a good word to say about senior management in any company in about 5 years.

I have not had a single friend, relative or colleague have a good word to say about senior management in any company in about 5 years.

Ditto

Lid

A local news (sic) (http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/crikey-weve-been-hacked-20120714-222et.html) site was shut down here yesterday!

These things come and go and half the time nobody takes any notice, but they could well be a cyber attack or a test/probe.

Last week my smart phone which has behaved impeccably for over a year kept reloading its software. Happened for maybe two hours, every time I went to use something on it - not always the same thing, but always routine ops. that I do every day. And after that two hours it was back to its normal happy little self. Strangely enough at exactly the same time but on a different provider Mrs OFSO's non-smart phone played up after years of no problems and finally shut down permanently.

Sure, coincidence.

In the realm of highway engineering, there's a well known saying 'There's no point building yet more motorways and trunk roads, because traffic simply grows to fill the space available'. This is demonstrably true, because many more 'impulse trips' are generated if new and seemingly quicker routes suddenly become available. It may be that a similar principle applies in the world of cellphones, and in IT generally.

This might go something like 'There's no point in creating yet more cellphone capacity way beyond their core function of providing compact and convenient mobile telephones, because customers then demand more and more gimcrack features; cameras, video, internet access, 'apps', 'smart' fol-de-rols, until an initially reliable service is swamped by i-waffle, i-babble and i-drivel'.

There are such things as sensible limits, judged by hard experience and economics (and the available electromagnetic frequency spectrum). It could indeed be that 'techno-terrorism' is behind some system failures, but it seems to me that it is at least possible that it is simply the result of overloading the new technologies with quite unnecessary 'big boy's toys' just because it is possible to do so, in the cut-throat mobile market. At times of likely huge peaks in demand, such as during the imminent Olympics, it would not be too unlikely if some major services 'go down' and cause major embarrassments, as a result of the over-inflated range of clever but pointless features on offer becoming overloaded. We shall see ... :hmm:

When they switched the soccer Cup finals to Cardiff whilst they built the ego-stroking crime of a new Wembley stadium, all the mobile phone Cos networks were massively overloaded. So, very little service.

Just supply and demand. I guess that sheep don't use their phones much. It caused much excessive drinking, as we had to go to lots of pubs to find where our mates were.

I wish all the soccer finals were held in Cardiff. Great pubs, interesting ales and a very hospitable bunch of locals.
Pubs and restaurants around Wembley are worse than useless. (Except the George, of course)

Possibly technology getting too clever for itself. In the last couple of months I and my boss have had problems with our old Sony Ericsson phones.
Happens in the central London area, I've had it at Imperial college, Queen Mary College and Kings college on the Strand. Same symptoms with both phones, when calling new model smart phones they go straight onto voice mail on the receiving phone without that phone ringing and then will not disconnect the call from my phone.
When it happened to me at Kings college I had texted the guy I was meeting that I'd missed the train I was intending to catch, technology again the parking ticket machines were playing up, the text and his reply went through no problem. When I got off the tube I called to tell him I was heading up to the college reception so he could walk down from his office to meet me. It went straight to voice mail. I then made my way to the reception and called him again from there, again voice mail. I was in the process of taking the battery out of my phone to reset it when he came down on spec. He checked his phone and there were the two messages I had left. I tried calling his number again while he was there and it did the same thing straight to voice mail and did not ring, oh yeah it locked my phone up again. :ugh:

Happens in the central London area, I've had it at Imperial college, Queen Mary College and Kings college

Ah, I see where you are going wrong, WM. You are going to the wrong colleges. Try calling at University College, they are always at the forefront of state of the art technology and research, don't waste your time with those other inferior establishments.

603DX (alumnus of UCL) ;)

I've just commissioned a new (cheap) PAYG Nokia 1616-2 on Orange (though it seems to prefer T-Mobile network).

I've had several voice-mails without any ringing-tone (and the notification of the voicemails was significantly delayed (next day!).

I know I'm in a weak reception area (shielded by terrain), but my previous Samsung SGH-C120 coped OK (I'm still using it with the new unregistered SIM for addresses and contacts which are buried within - though obviously it isn't functional as a 'phone).

If this continues I might have to revert to my Samsung (though the display is almost unreadable in daylight now).

Quote:
Happens in the central London area, I've had it at Imperial college, Queen Mary College and Kings college
Ah, I see where you are going wrong, WM. You are going to the wrong colleges. Try calling at University College, they are always at the forefront of state of the art technology and research, don't waste your time with those other inferior establishments.

603DX (alumnus of UCL) http://images.ibsrv.net/ibsrv/res/src:www.pprune.org/get/images/smilies/wink2.gif

The Boss was at UCL when it happened to him! and UCL might be state of the art at technology but they're bloody hopless when it comes to parking. :p

all such improvements are kept secret lest the bad guys figure out they've been had.

That's why you never see any news releases on counter technology

I wonder if this is bad luck, bad management or something more sinister?

How's about "Overreaching"?

The Icarus tale provides some guidance here -- presciently speaking to us from a pre-telcom era.

History of technological innovation is well decorated with sad tales of how everything was going along just peachy.... until the "aha" moment --- or maybe the "aieeeha!!!!!!!!!!!" moment arrives to add new context to the operational envelope and paradigms for usage.

Occasionally I give talks about this sort of thing to audiences of interested folks whose livelihoods depend, to greater or lesser extent, on the continuing magic and growth of this new world where communications, data, and computing access seem ubiquitous and infinitely reliable. Having an endless supply of improvements, enhancements, and extensions to current products is what will keep many in the audience employed in times future, rather than out on the street wondering where the party went wrong. They mostly want to hear more good news about new features, functions, gadgets, tricks, etc. that can grow markets. Few care about the often weak fabric of the cloth we are collectively weaving around our lives and economic institutions.

It were ever thus, one may guess. The older folks tend to listen more carefully to cautious skeptical observations regarding what could go wrong, which is a good thing, since they are often the ones in charge of the money and development plans and similar bits and pieces that can be evolved to have more robustness and flexibility in the face of system-wide adversities. Justifying hard money now for ill-defined future risks is a hard sell in any room, and all the more so in a field of business where the half-lives of products and companies typically can be counted on fingers OR toes.

Most of the consumer and light-business computing and communications technology we depend on now is not very robust in the face of known but moderately infrequent natural phenomena that theoretically can break near everything electronic, everywhere, in the course of a few hours or days or perhaps in one or two very lively seconds. Nobody seems to pay much attention to that, probably because there's no easy fix. For the consequences, however, years of economic and social disruption are not out of the range of likelihood.

A select core of technology users, including governments and some forward-looking businesses, have solidly hardened tools and equipment that can maybe provide a bootstrap path back to modern times. For everyone else, sooner or later, the prospects are to sometime be "up the creek without a signal" for a very long while.

And if that doesn't do the job, growing battalions of skillful criminal hackers appear to be standing by to termite near any local and global information infrastructure we may devise.

The good news is that it mostly all works Great right now. I've got four bars, right here!

Why is everything connected to the bloody internet?,organizations such as gas water electricty schools post offices banks every dammed thing functioned perfectly well before the poxy www.
A power station? a bloke sitting at a table with a phone upon it,
HQ rings up "we are expecting a surge in demand Jimmy, spin em up" simple and unhackable by furriners.
Start disconnecting now, **** the tinternet :=
:rolleyes:

All this cloud business is a pita designed to screw more and more revenue out of us.

When you virtually have to be connected to the net to use a smartphone gps (Nokia excepted), such as Google Navigator then you are using considerable amounts of data.

Similarly with online radio and tv. Internet radio can easily take 1Mb/minute.

Using any of that on roaming? Forget it. My local telcom is about to charge me 25 quid for data roaming in France up to a limit of 35Mb. So I can listen to Radio Caroline for about half an hour.

HQ rings up "we are expecting a surge in demand Jimmy, spin em up" simple and unhackable by furriners.

You'll love this, Drapes:

Had a situation very like your preferred case, just last week. Temps went onto the mid 40's (C), stayed high for a week or so, and gave na much quarter at night for recovering. That's not unknown, at that site, but nighttime cooling usually brings the average down to mid 30;s or better on even the hottest nights. Add to that having all the normal cooling methods disabled or offline for one or another reason (construction underway), so it were hot hot hot... And one still had deadlines that required running a clutch of toasty computers and displays 24x7. It was HOT.

Some small but hardly portable A/C units were pressed into service-- with elaborate ducting crafted out of packing cartons and the like... gave some help. But one heard strange noises... a lot of them, in strange places. Little things popping breakers or going through some other agony because the power co had tweaked up the volts to what read out as about 115% of normal... a bit above the maximum spec, so far as one knows. That was measured off our one transformer, an isolated load on several-miles-long wires to the nearest switchyard. A special case, probably, with the grid cranked up to keep more heavily loaded lines at par.

Part you'll like is the compact-flourescent lights were dropping like flies.. combination of high volts and reflected phase shifts from motorized things on unfamiliar circuits had them on the run. Actually replaced a few, in spots that wouldn't stay alive otherwise, with old incandescents that were saved for contingencies after retirement.

Scary thing was occasional sound of arcs, somewhere in a very densely packed patch of computing things built up archeological-style. One dasn't idly meddle with those patches... except for emergency. Couldn't quite decide that it was one, but trotted out extinguishers in quantity, just in case.