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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

#371

Post by JBlue42 »

packetslave wrote: post #117

Just watched an interview on CNN with the Governor of Hawaii and their director of emergency management. Pretty impressed that the director didn't throw anybody under the bus. He basically said "An employee pushed the wrong button. It's my responsibility, so this is my fault. We're going to make procedure and technical changes to make sure this doesn't happen again."

>We're going to make procedure and technical changes to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Must be reading some DevOps blogs about blameless post-mortems.

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

#372

Post by packetslave »

ceph_ wrote: post #361
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.

db31.lpp01 lol

When they decommed it, I asked if I could have db31 to go Office Space on. They said no :-(

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

#373

Post by gtcode »

gtcode wrote: post #357

I received a second alert just over an hour ago. https://i.imgur.com/Rc8cfO7.jpg

Nobody else besides me has received a second alert, that I know of, I've posted it like 30 times on twitter under #Hawaii and #MissileAlert etc

Context: I tweeted to someone who was upset about it all, "All your alert are belong to us", then immediately received the second false alarm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXGnAMp9Nvk

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

#374

Post by r721 »

"Amid public outcry over the incident, the Hawaiian government also released a timeline of what transpired after the false alarm:

Approx. 8:05 a.m. – A routine internal test during a shift change was initiated. This was a test that involved the Emergency Alert System, the Wireless Emergency Alert, but no warning sirens.

8:07 a.m. – A warning test was triggered statewide by the State Warning Point, HI-EMA.

8:10 a.m. – State Adjutant Maj. Gen. Joe Logan, validated with the U.S. Pacific Command that there was no missile launch. Honolulu Police Department notified of the false alarm by HI-EMA.

8:13 a.m. – State Warning Point issues a cancellation of the Civil Danger Warning Message. This would have prevented the initial alert from being rebroadcast to phones that may not have received it yet. For instance, if a phone was not on at 8:07 a.m., if someone was out of range and has since came into cell coverage (Hikers, Mariners, etc.) and/or people getting off a plane.

8:20 a.m. – HI-EMA issues public notification of cancellation via their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

8:24 a.m. – Governor Ige retweets HI-EMA’s cancellation notice.

8:30 a.m. – Governor posts cancellation notification to his Facebook page.

8:45 a.m. – After getting authorization from FEMA Integral Public Alert and Warning System, HIEMA issued a “Civil Emergency Message” remotely. The following action was executed by the Emergency Alert System (EAS): 1. EAS message over Local TV/Radio Audio Broadcast & Television Crawler Banner. “False Alarm. There is no missile threat to Hawaii.” “False Alarm. There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. False Alarm.” 2. Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) “False Alarm. There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii.”

9:30 a.m. – Governor makes initial media notification.

9:34 a.m. – Governor’s message posted to his Facebook and Twitter accounts."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hawaii-releases-timeline-o...

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

#375

Post by Renaud »

sa46 wrote: post #366
packetslave wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BINGO. If someone makes a mistake like this, unless it was deliberate or negligent (e.g. he/she didn't follow established procedures), you don't fire them! You fix the technical or procedural failures that allowed them to make the mistake in the first place. Heck, you should probably THANK them for making the system better by uncovering a bug! When I was still mostly a Noogler, I took a large portion of Google comple…

An interesting variation to this thought is: When is appropriate to fire someone for making a mistake? Some ideas: - gross negligence / malice - ethics - publicity damage / internet pitchforks Additionally, it doesn't seem like the forgive mistakes approach meshes well with the startup advice of "it's never too early to fire."

Incompetence should probably be number one.

There is a big difference between someone making a mistake due to unclear or incomplete process and someone doing that mistake because they are not competent to perform that task.

This then raises the issue that hiring and leaving incompetent people in place is itself proof of an organisational incompetence...

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

#376

Post by newfoundglory »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #240
rrix2 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

He didn’t mean the outcome (murder), terrorize is probably better word than a prank tho. What I meant is that “oh I didn’t mean it” going to be interpretted differently. Edit: if you downvote me thinking that I somehow support prank swatters - you are wrong. Otherwise you fail to see the paradox of intended vs unintended outcomes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea (as I understand it's interpreted very different…

I expect that the downvotes are because you are arguing that “he didn’t mean murder” is equivalent to “he didn’t mean harm”.

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

#377

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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

The prankster intentionally sent a false alert and intended, at a minimum, to cause emergency response resources reserved for use in circumstances that pose a grave danger to be misallocated and to cause terror in the intended target; that involves both a diffuse but significant public harm and a narrowly focussed private harm.

It is not at all a case where no harm was intended.

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

#378

Post by kregasaurusrex »

userbinator wrote: post #319
blantonl wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.

It reminds me of this story from Thomas Watson of IBM: A young executive had made some bad decisions that cost the company several million dollars. He was summoned to Watson’s office, fully expecting to be dismissed. As he entered the office, the young executive said, "I suppose after that set of mistakes you will want to fire me." Watson was said to have replied, "Not at all, young man, we have just spent a couple o…

I'd spoken with Rob Hall of the Watson project during my freshman year of college at a technical talk having seen it Jeopardy! but not knowing much about the technical aspects of what goes into generating an answer based on natural language processing. He took the time to explain to me and a small group of students who stayed for about an hour afterwards about how to go about attacking problems that require both expertise and parallelization on a scale such that confidence levels could be established for each logical answer generated from a tree of possibilities. A great man and team who know the value of educating potential future employees and sharing the knowledge that went into solving a hard problem. I'd typed this up before realizing you were talking about the former CEO rather than the project so I'd thought to post it anyway.

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

#379

Post by trumpsamerica »

packetslave wrote: post #117

Just watched an interview on CNN with the Governor of Hawaii and their director of emergency management. Pretty impressed that the director didn't throw anybody under the bus. He basically said "An employee pushed the wrong button. It's my responsibility, so this is my fault. We're going to make procedure and technical changes to make sure this doesn't happen again."

This was Trump he needs to be in peached

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

#380

Post by Simulacra »

matt4077 wrote: post #78
Simulacra wrote: post #43

Serious question: for those of you reading this, how would you have responded in those 30 minutes?

I would seek shelter in a subway station. It’s not perfect in terms of protection, because the ventilation system would pump in radioactivity as long as there’s still power. But it would allow me to get to any place 20km away from city center without going above ground once. Or, you know, a vodka soda.

Forgive me, but does Hawaii have a subway?
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