Data Error

[Canary42]

In my days in IT, a system rejected duff data. It seems that when it comes to Air Traffic Control, it crashes the system. And Downing Street alleges the data came from France. What BS.

https://uk.yahoo.com/news/flight-disruption-latest-air-traffic-control-meltdown-live-093345069.html

[gulliver1]

Well that makes a change from blaming The Labour Party.

[Old_Geezer]

Surprised something so vital has no back up system running in parallel.

[bhg481]

Canary - if you worked in IT and never had a program crash on you, you are a very lucky person.

[Old_Geezer]

Or that duff data brought anything down. Was it bought from Del Trotter ?

[ToraToraTora]

The problem is that programming standards are falling these days. Poor code poorly tested. The slightest issue causes this sort of thing. Proper resilience would ignore the duff data and sideline it and keep working what is possible to keep working. Now without looking at the issue I can't say for certain what was possible here rather than crashing but in my job I see it everyday. Sadly we have grads who can code but are clueless about programming and it's getting worse. We are heading for an "Orphans of the Sky" Scenario.

[Togo]

//And Downing Street alleges the data came from France.//
No it doesn't!
Your link from the sensationalist site (BS indeed)opines that ""Downing Street on Tuesday refused to rule out the possibility that an inputting error by a French airline could have caused the disruption."" because ""The prime minister’s official spokesman said: “There’s going to be, think you’ll know that there’s going to be an investigation by the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) and a report shared with the government.

“I think (Transport Secretary) Mark Harper confirmed this morning he’ll be getting that in days.""

No one from Downing St referenced Les grenouilles ... just your juveniles site. Stop posting misinformation.

Great Book TTT.

[Togo]

Note that Mark Hooper(Transport Secretary) also said ... " that experts had confirmed it was a “technical issue, not a cybersecurity incident”.
Asked if officials would speak to counterparts across the English Channel, the spokesman said “you would expect them to be speaking regularly” with other countries “but I’m not aware of any specific conversations with French counterparts”.

[tomus42]

It's a clever system that can detect duff data and reject it.

If I gave it a value of 500 when it should have been 300, how would it know the 500 was 'duff'?

[youngmafbog]

It should validate within parameters, especially if breaking those parameters will cause a system crash. The data within the parameters should have been tested for min and max values and some inbetween.

Sadly, as TTT points out there is a dearth of programmers and an increase of coders army of whom are doing coding simply to get to the next level. This is particularly prevalent in India (I once had to do an investigation for a very large true blue IT Company on this) but also seems to be growing in the Western world.

[bhg481]

Unfortunately some of these codes are large and decades old (I don't know that is true of the NATS programs) and are maintained and modified by people 2 and 3 generations down from those who wrote them so don't know the full ins and outs of them. Furthermore they might have been transported onto several computers with different operating systems over their lifetime and these transportations can introduce bugs which may not show up for years, making it difficult to isolate the problem; it's not always the latest mods which have caused a crash.

[Peter Pedant]

//And Downing Street alleges the data came from France.//
No it doesn't!
yes it does ! Times report today. ( I agree - it is a report and not a fact in itself)

[tomus42]

Still not sure an air traffic control system should be designed to ignore data it doesn't like the look of.

It's a bit different from a report on this month's profits at the bank.

[JimF]

Many, many years ago I got a gig to see if the air traffic control software in use at Southampton airport could be supported and upgraded. After signing the Official Secrets Act, I finally got to see the systems. They appeared to be written in 8-bit assembly language and compiled with C/BCPL. There was no documentation. None of the original programmers were still working there. It was a total reverse engineering exercise. The airport was totally reliant on this completely unsupported software. Totally scary.