Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

Re:Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage by envyac on Thursday January 19, 2023 @10:39AM (#34441454)

You mean besides the last three years of reduced on-site staffing, and employee travel to support maintenance and modernization? No.

$5 says this is the XKCD for this. Corrupted DB file was the culprit, as announced the FAA. It's a system that relies on user inputs, often manual, and it's all being put into a database. My bet is a user decided to put in a bunch of "fun characters" to make their input easier to read. You can't account for and sanitize all levels of stupidity on user inputs.

https://xkcd.com/327/

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Re:Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage by krisoft on Thursday January 19, 2023 @11:11AM (#34441879)

> You can't account for and sanitize all levels of stupidity on user inputs.

That is false and a defeatist attitude.

Sanitization is not the right solution anyway. If you are working with any form of a database and don't know from the top of your head how to avoid query injection attacks then you should look up in the manual of your database. The solution is most often called "parameterized query" or something similar.

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Re:Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage by NavinF on Thursday January 19, 2023 @12:47PM (#34443211)

Of course you can account for that. They're just byte strings. That xkcd is poking fun at incompetent programmers, not stupid users.

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