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Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

nytimes.com

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Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#211

Post by ghaff »

ImSkeptical wrote: post #194
ghaff wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always a bit shocked at the number of people here calling for someone's head in this sort of situation. I imagine the same people would downvote to oblivion anyone who came on here and wrote something like: "The only way we're going to get better software is by firing people who write bugs and make sure they never work in the industry again."

I'd say we just don't have enough information. It's possible someone deserves to be fired for this - e.g. if the alarm was intentional or negligent. It's also possible it was a misclick, confusing UI, etc, in which the person or people who should be fired are those who designed the system such that a simple mistake could set it off. There is a third possibility too - that some unpredictable alignment of factors means…

That's fair and I'm not suggesting that every screw up should just be shrugged off with an "to err is human" and it must be a systems problem. But for a one-off error, the person responsible probably already feels terrible and if they didn't grossly violate established protocols or did something as a joke or whatever, the result should be more along the lines of "Don't do this again!" and making it harder for it to happen.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#212

Post by iends »

coldtea wrote: post #75
iends wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, because putting your head down against an interior wall or under a desk is going to make any difference.

It's going to make a huge difference is the blast is far enough away for you to not be in the "obliterate everything" zone, but still close enough to be dangerous.

Is this the same area where you will die of radiation over the weeks following the attack?

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#213

Post by baddox »

macintux wrote: post #162
throwacide wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misguided. Circumstances are that he either is or is not qualified for a single point of failure job like that. If not it’s management failure. If the human is “qualified” for a single point of failure responsibility like that, he’s now fired.

I suspect that if your criteria is “you can never make a mistake” that no one is qualified for a single point of failure responsibility.

Clearly some mistakes are bigger than others. Simply counting mistakes is overly simplistic. I’m not suggesting that this single mistake is necessarily big enough to deserve an immediate firing, but there certainly are mistakes that do.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#214

Post by rrix2 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #197
nradov wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play devil's advocate, in some cases the point of firing an employee in a situation like this isn't about that one employee but more pour encourager les autres . So the remaining employees will see that management takes the issue seriously and they need to be diligent about following procedures. In this particular case no real harm was done and firing would probably be excessive.

> no real harm was done I wish to believe, but probably there was real harm, probably someone will come up with some million figures. Statistically, probably someone died during those minutes of terror and someone will try to attribute to this incident. What is interesting that employee probably meant no harm, but compare this to that SWAT murder a month earlier. The prankster meant no harm either, but he's going to…

> The prankster meant no harm either,

Are you kidding? The people who were involved in this didn’t do it to introduce the swattee to new friends. They did it to terrorize someone who made them mad.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#215

Post by nradov »

smacktoward wrote: post #198
nradov wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play devil's advocate, in some cases the point of firing an employee in a situation like this isn't about that one employee but more pour encourager les autres . So the remaining employees will see that management takes the issue seriously and they need to be diligent about following procedures. In this particular case no real harm was done and firing would probably be excessive.

Which is ironic, since pour encourager les autres in this context comes straight from the pen of a great satirist making fun of a dumb, blunt, broken institutional culture -- specifically Voltaire, mocking the British in Candide for responding to the loss of a naval battle not by training their admirals better but by executing one of them "to encourage the others." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide#Satire

Yes I'm well aware of the irony and not advocating this as a general management practice. Just pointing out that it's a complicated decision and there are rare cases where firing is the least bad decision for the organization as a whole.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#216

Post by grivescorbett »

ronald_raygun wrote: post #205
packetslave wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was in 2012. Let's just say that a router config only getting partially applied (because of a software bug) can cause a LOT of traffic to suddenly go places it's not supposed to go.

Oh wow, I was a noogler there 4ish years ago, and they still tell that story as an example of "its okay to break things, we care about fixing them after so they dont break in the future"

Was a noogler about a year ago. Story still told.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#217

Post by azernik »

sorenbs wrote: post #153
dmix wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they tested the nuclear/missle attack warning sirens in Hawain cities for the first time in a very long time last month. Just because the sirens were installed during the cold war doesnt make the new attention and urgency being given to them is any less new. Same with the underlying infrastructure behind cell phone alerts being old while the systems on top are being newly revised and tested. Clearly there is a w…

I'm surprised the sirens aren't tested more frequently. In Denmark we have a national system of sirens. They are tested once a year at a specific date and time. In the cold war era they used to test them every Wednesday at noon, but it has been scaled down since then :-)

The US has no national siren system; there are just state and local ones. I've heard siren tests every once in a while living in San Francisco, but there's zero public education about their meaning or appropriate responses.

(This false alarm was a push alert sent to cell phones. What about people who don't have a cell phone on them when the alert comes? ... good luck)

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#218

Post by EliRivers »

joering2 wrote: post #135
makecheck wrote: post #85

An interesting Reddit comment described a chaotic traffic situation for 20 minutes (people running lights, wrong-side-of-the-road driving, extreme speed, etc.). Human nature in these moments is very “Tragedy of the Commons” apparently.

Just recently I spoke to my friends that literally are living in LaLa land. They are making fun of me prepping and saving dry food, water, stacking up on legal guns and munition. I took upon challenge last xmas to meetup with them and they brought my prepardness as one of laughing subjects. It really saddens me when they believe that when gloves of society are off, we all gonna be happy singing kumbaya and respecting…

What maddnes?

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#220

Post by azernik »

anigbrowl wrote: post #132
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd think the people who "pressed the wrong button" would be able to press the same button again? Absolutely not. Once you say “fire” you need official confirmation to say “no fire”. That means certification from the military. The official needed being in a meeting or tending to something of greater importance could easily introduce delays. In any case, I presume the system’s designers didn’t build in an “oops, f…

If you're engaged in a drill that's a completely predictable failure mode which you should have a standby plan for. This happened on a week-end. The coders could have very well been at home. Again, why would you perform a drill involving mass emergency mobilization and not manage that risk? What if this had happened during a morning commute or in some part of the country where people are more easily panicked? With gr…

This was not a planned drill. It was a mistake by an operator during shift change.
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