Yenta is still under active development, but this particular page is not. If you're interested in current research papers about Yenta, or obtaining a copy of Yenta, please start here instead. This page is one of many that were written in late 1994 and early 1995, and are being preserved here for historical purposes. If you're viewing this page, you probably found it via an old link or are interested in the history of how Yenta came to be. These pages have not been actively maintained since 1995, so you'll find all sorts of older descriptions which may not match the current system, citations to old papers and old results, and so forth. |
Many such instances lead to denial of service failures. For instance, the entire ARPAnet, predecessor of the current Internet and composed of hundreds of Interface Messages Processors (IMPs), suddenly collapsed one Sunday morning in 1973 when one IMP got a double-bit error in a critical routing table. The planned every-15-seconds routing update flood then contaminated every IMP on the network with the bad routing information, collapsing the net. (This is reported in RFC528, J. McQuillan, "Software checksumming in the IMP and network reliability", June 20, 1973, although none of the half-dozen primary RFC repositories appear to have a copy of this RFC online anymore...)
The cause of the above failure was a simple hardware error, compounded by overly forgiving software (which lacked an error check in a crucial spot). The nail was driven into the coffin by the lack of diversity in programming in IMPs---they all ran the exact same program and hence were as vulnerable to this error as a single strain of wheat would be to a virus.
Other failures include simple carelessness, such as the incident described by this marvelous quote:
The whole thing was an accident. No saboteur could have been so wildly optimistic as to think he could destroy an airplane this way.which was taken from a book called Excuse Me, What was That?, subtitled "Confused Recollections of Things that Didn't Go Exactly Right." The book is a collection of anecdotes by an optical engineer, drawn from various fields of life, but mostly about engineering.
The particular story from which the quote is drawn is about how a bomber was accidentally destroyed on a friendly airfield in WWII when a bunch of people ignored or circumvented all the safety measures and connected a mislabeled bottle of hydrogen gas to the plane's oxygen system. This book is also the source of this gem:
"Mud wasps had built nests inside these nice little holes."For more of the same, of course, consult Risks Digest.
"Inside our hydrogen bomb?"
"Well, as I say, inside these nice little holes."
Lenny Foner Last modified: Tue Dec 13 03:07:13 1994