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The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

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Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#211

Post by acdha »

jim_dow_jones wrote: post #90
uptown wrote: post #37

"Days after Hawaii alert gaffe, Japan issues false alarm about a missile launch" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-japan...

Wow, that's a pretty big coincidence. What would be the purpose of both states intentionally setting off false alarms?

Consider the odds that the current tension has had a lot of people thinking they should test their emergency alert systems really soon, and we're hearing about each case where someone had a bad user-interface which they tried to compensate for with training rather than fixing it.

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#212

Post by logfromblammo »

astura wrote: post #199
Y_Y wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which Person would be Identified by such a Number?

I misspoke, PIN would be the wrong term, it would be an activation code. The codes would be per action not per person. So the "send missile threat" activation code would be, for example, 98790 for everyone and the "test send missile threat" would be 16289 for everyone. You'd have to look up what the code was for your message you wanted to send. All test message start with 1 while all real messages start with 9. They…

I think Y_Y was trying to convey that PIN expands to Personal Identification Number, which does not apply if no specific person can be identified.

In any case, your proposal suffers from the flaw that in a real emergency, nobody will have the extra seconds to spare to look up a code, because that would literally be thousands of people dying per lost second, so the emergency codes will all rotate from '99999' through '99999'. And an employee would actually be responsible for changing the codes from '99999' to '99999' every time they are required to rotate.

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#214

Post by Chaebixi »

tarmstrong wrote: post #144

This is a great teaching moment for anyone who works in UX or observability, but it's worth keeping in mind that the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (who operate the Emergency Alert Service (EAS)) has a yearly operating budget of around $17MM this year. The system itself was launched in 1997. This is a legacy software (and hardware!) system with a relatively small budget and number of employees that…

> I think the most interesting lessons to learn from this have to do with long term software maintenance.

Yes! And with re-engineering too! When you redevelop a system, you need to build up historical knowledge of its antecedents, and teach it to the current operators and maintainers. You shouldn't just start from scratch from the requirements.

In this case, there was an even older legacy system that had a similar incident in 1971, which they then mitigated. Apparently that lesson was lost.

http://conelrad.blogspot.com/2010/09/code-word-hatefulness-g...:

> …In the past three tapes, one for the test and two for actual emergencies, were hanging on three labeled hooks above the transmitter… In the future only the test tape will be left near the transmitter. The two emergency tapes [will be] be sealed in clearly marked envelopes and placed inside a nearby cabinet.

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#215

Post by astura »

rmc wrote: post #163
Daycrawler wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also jet pilots have years of training whereas users are presented to "intuitive" interfaces where they have no reason not to push every button just to test them out.

I really hope the people who are looking for intercontinental missles have some training.

The military monitors for intercontinental ballistic missile launches.

If they detect one then they assess it. If after assessment they determine there is a threat to anyone they notify the appropriate agencies.

A civilian in a totally different government agency is the one who pushes the notification button.

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#216

Post by dilyevsky »

fyfy18 wrote: post #205
hopeless wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot we can learn from aviation: accident retrospectives, checklists, master caution alarms, crew relationship management, human factors research, etc. However, my knowledge of these things is a bit piecemeal and anecdotal. Does anyone know a good book on these things?

> crew relationship management At least with airlines this seems to be largely abandoned now. My wife worked for a large middle eastern airline for a few years, and the crews were just assigned randomly. Well I guess there is a complicated algorithm that figures it out, but given the company has nearly 15,000 cabin crew it’s unlikely you’ll see someone you flew with again on another flight. Also from the stories I he…

op probly meant Crew Resource* Management which has nothing to do with crew assigment and is alive and well (on non-shit airlines that is).

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#217

Post by Kesty »

pc86 wrote: post #71
whatever_dude wrote: post #19

It's easy to see how this is bad, and I bet dozens of designers are now creating alternatives for their dribble and Twitter appreciation, but the problem is probably what led to this, not this specifically. I can see it: a contractor started with a link that triggers a push notification, then someone requested another link, then another, then it grew from there, never having the ability to stop and rethink this from…

As a government contractor who did not work on this, I can say I'd bet a lot of money that this is how this screen came about. Initially launched 2-10 years ago with 1-2 links, fast forward a bit and we have this. I can hear a forward thinking developer saying "hey should we at least have colored buttons or something on this screen so it's easy to see what is a test and what is not?" and the product owner/business ow…

Biggest issue is that the system probably doesn't have a flag Test /Not Test.

The Test Records probably do the same thing just to a smaller list than the real one.

So there is no real way to separate them.

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#218

Post by alkonaut »

seanalltogether wrote: post #119
jacobush wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many assumptions... first, inject twice as many levels. Then make the output text go through a system which makes it impossible to add any formatting. Add a legacy system and some procurement. Mix well. Oh and the person signing off likely never actually sees the output.

Right, and the developer who was at the bottom of the chain might want to clean up the page a bit, but the person above him can't sign off on something like that, nor the person above him. Approval for any modifications has to come from the woman who wrote the business spec that was contracted by your boss's boss's boss and her company has allocated her to another project right now and won't be able to shift hours to…

I’d just make the smallest change that “fixed” the problem (in this case for example including the action title in the comfirmation, and calling the non-test vs test action something more clear etc.)

My superior would just have to solve the problem of getting the spec change cleared or find another developer. If that was somehow even seen as a problem by the superior - same thing - they’d have to find another developer.

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#219

Post by acdha »

sydd wrote: post #169
zimpenfish wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a forward thinking developer saying "hey should we at least have colored buttons Accessibility becomes an issue for colourblind people then.

I am not an expert, but you should not hire colorblind people to operate a nuclear warning system.

You're saying that people should be prevented from getting jobs they're capable of performing because the alternative is to crack open decades old usability texts? There are multiple suggestions in this thread which could be easily implemented at little-to-no extra cost without sacrificing accessibility.

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#220

Post by delecti »

pavement wrote: post #151

Holy shit. That is not even a "pull down menu" as previously reported. Good to know. This means that in Hawaii, you should only think about taking action if the magic FALSE ALARM notice never appears. If the FALSE ALARM notice doesn't appear within an hour, it might just be that the false alarm guy is on lunch break. If it doesn't appear in 8 hours, it might mean that a shift change occurred without proper hand-off.…

I suspect you're joking, but an actual ICBM attack would have likely struck before the false alarm message was issued.

There was a 38 minute delay before the false alarm message: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/0...

Meanwhile an ICBM would likely impact less than 35 minutes after launch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_mis...

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