FAA says computer failure was caused by 2 contractors who introduced data errors

Re:FAA says computer failure was caused by 2 contractors who... by gojomo on Sunday January 15, 2023 @11:56AM (#34390851)

Of course any major RDBMS would have no problem with the data. If the reports here are accurate, you could fit the last 5-20 years of all NOTAM messages into the RAM of a Raspberry Pi running SQLite.

But if that's enough, why hasn't the FAA solved the problem already?

And even a "major RDBMS" is vulnerable to stodgy management leaving design in a state where it's vulnerable to a single central point of failure, where "2 contractors who introduced data errors" (!) can bring it down.

Modern highly-distributed consensus systems are not vulnerable to that. Neither accident nor malice from 2 government contractors could prevent all authorized updates worldwide in a distributed consensus system like Ethereum.

DC & northern Virginia (or wherever the FAA's systems hosted) could even spontaneously disappear into a lava pit and the official consensus set of NOTAMs would continue to update.

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Re:FAA says computer failure was caused by 2 contractors who... by tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa on Monday January 16, 2023 @01:42AM (#34397596)

Because this was all standardized back when interoperability meant standard fixed-length data formats that everyone had to understand rather than versioned API's and the inertia of the established file formats is too great.

Hell, if you _really_ wanted to insist on an exchange data format, XML would work just fine.

[ Parent | on HN ]