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Windows for Submarines (2008)
- Osiris30 10y agoNews article - http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a19061/britains-doomsday-subs-run-windows-xp/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a19061/brit...
- ZenoArrow 10y agoBrings a new meaning to 'Blue Screen of Death'. ;-)
- vostok 10y agoVery interesting choice. I work on mission critical systems that aren't as mission critical as nuclear submarines. I don't think we'd ever consider anything other than an open source *nix.
- cperciva 10y agoI would have expected qnx or vxworks rather than any open source UNIX personally.
- vostok 10y agoFair point. When I said "mission critical systems that aren't as mission critical as nuclear submarines" I meant that a mistake can result in us losing $400 million in 30 minutes rather than the destruction of civilization as we know it. I don't know what people in the latter case use, but it sounds like they use Windows for Submarines.
- noir_lord 10y ago> $400 million in 30 minutes You write systems to autoplay Free to Play games?
- Pyxl101 10y agoHigh frequency trading, more like! Or just trading. Mistakes such as selling 610,000 shares at 1 yen, instead of 1 share at 610,000 yen. Clash of Clans only makes on the order of ~$2M-$8M per day, according to estimates, so it'd be tough for a Clash of Clans outage to cost $400M. Only when playing with money, or with equipment worth $400M can you lose that much in 30 minutes. (What kinds of equipment costs $400M and can be ruined in 30 minutes? Offshore oil rigs, I'm guessing. According to Quora, the least-expensive offshore rigs are $200M, while average is $360M. Ruining one of those with a software error would be a very bad day. Another option might be equipment in space such as satellites, though I imagine those are relatively harder to ruin.)
- snovv_crash 10y agoAlso think stuff like tunnel boring machines, or a dragline from a coal mine. Autopilot software for cruise liners. Power station control software. I think there is another side as well, software that may incur a liability if it fails due to loss of human life or recall costs. Eg bridge control, pharmaceutical QA, even electronic manufacturing (think Galaxy Note 7 design phase).
- tibbetts 10y agoI've worked on high frequency trading software infrastructure, including having been involved in serious bugs which lead to a lot of broken trades and lost money, and would have said with anything like proper architecture and governance you can't lose $400 million in 30 minutes. But Knight Capital did manage to lose $440 million in 45 minutes, due in large part to what I would call improper architecture and governance. So there you go. https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/amp/ https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution...
- user5994461 10y agoAdd life-critical systems to the list. The damages/insurance/claims can be in this order of magnitude. Just need to kill enough people at once, like a big plane or a big boat or a big building. By the way, trading [should] have fail safes (i.e. stop after some amount of losses). A plane doesn't have fail safe, when the plane goes down, there is never enough parachutes =D
- ptero 10y agoVxworks, IME, is the option of choice for hard real time components. For other (e.g., soft real time) critical components a solid Linux distribution works better -- smaller code, easier checks. I have seen implementations as Linux systems with a few dedicated vxworks boards for specific small components.
- wycx 10y agoRTEMS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTEMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTEMS
- ptero 10y agoVxworks, IME, is the option of choice for hard real time components. For other (e.g., soft real time) critical components a solid Linux distribution works better -- smaller code, easier checks. I have seen implementations as Linux systems with a few dedicated vxworks boards for specific small components.
- ksk 10y agoIts a good thing you said open source * nix because a lot of the early commercial UNIXes were buggy and unstable. Also I hope you are not using Plan 9 or Open Solaris or MINIX or a few of the other opensource *nixes which are also not suitable. So maybe it looks like you just meant Linux? :)
- tbrownaw 10y agoOr one of the BSDs.
- linksnapzz 10y agoUnsuitable, how? Solaris has had realtime capability for fifteen years, and most recently has been the embedded OS of choice for Sun/Oracle storage appliances. plan9 not being Unix (at all) nonwithstanding, Coraid's AoE products have used plan9 as an embedded OS in the past. Certainly in the recent past, US destroyers had embedded signal-processing systems built by a well-known HPC vendor running a derivative of INRIA ChorusOS. Green Hills Software's Integrity RTOS && development environment are also quite commercial, and have many successful deployments. Any insinuation that military or embedded applications should be Linux (or Windows) deployments, or even necessarily free software, is ahistoric and, IMO, under-informed.
- foldr 10y agoI don't see the big deal with this. Building a command system on top of a general purpose operating system seems like a reasonable cost-saving decision. It has attendant risks, but so do all of the alternatives. Security issues are moot, I would have thought, since these systems are not connected to the internet, and the main threat is from people who have physical access to the hardware.
- origami777 10y agoI would have thought the same until stuxnet. Otners know the story better than I but if memory serves, the Iranian nuclear facilities had systems that were not connected to the internet compromised. No internet connection for sure reduces the risk, but for those looking to compromise a sub I don't think it's an insurmountable roadblock.
- foldr 10y agoRight, but my point is that if you have physical access, then the security holes in Windows XP, as compared to more modern iterations of Windows, aren't so relevant. It's not like the sub is going to be compromised via a bug in IE 6. I also sort of suspect (without making any pretence of knowing what I'm talking about) that it's futile to try to make the computer system itself invulnerable to attack, and that human factors are likely to have a far greater influence on the overall security of the system. After all, Stuxnet was propagated via flash drives, and no-one should be sticking a random flash drive in a military submarine's computer systems.
- cryptarch 10y agoI don't recall any *nix OS's having automount and autorun enabled by default? What I'm trying to say is, physical access does not necessarily mean full physical access, and when the virus has to spread through some storage medium connected to e.g. USB the underlying OS certainly matters. I mean, they probably autorun that for the subs, but I think its indicative of the design philosophy behind most MS products. "Made for those who don't need full control, with politics prioritized over security", because what security-minded programmer would ever enable that by default? Edit: inserted middle paragraph + fixed typo
- mdekkers 10y ago> equip the nuclear-propelled and nuclear-armed warship fleet with a Windows-based command system We are all going to die...
- sawmurai 10y agoThe article is 8 years old... thank god :)
- gonzo41 10y agoI don't know why the age of the article is reducing your fear. If anything they probably do more and more this.
- Someone 10y agoAnd the OS is out of service (thank god :)) but the submarines running it aren't (oops)
- yitchelle 10y agoI guess that they can think about upgrading from XP right now.
- Osiris30 10y agoYes it is. I found this link when I googled 'Windows for Submarines' when I read about it in Eric Schlosser's New Yorker essay "World War Three, by Mistake" which was featured earlier on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249976
- FreezerburnV 10y agoDo not assume technology has been rolled out just because an article was a while ago. The military deals with just upgrading a version number of software very seriously and it takes years to happen. I can personally attest to Windows being installed on computers emulating a submarine environment. (it was probably XP)
- jaclaz 10y agoThis blog post is 2008, when the good UK guys deployed a custom made Windows 2000/XP, very UNlike "news". The news article on Popular Mechanics and the actual original Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/16/trident-old-technology-brave-new-world-cyber-warfare https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/16/trident-o... are January 2016, and confirm that they are still running that custom XP.
- walkingolof 10y agoC2/C3 systems have been built ontop of Windows NT since the 90's, nothing really new.
- noir_lord 10y agoYep, I remember a Destroyer been adrift after Windows for Warships crashed at least a decade ago.
- UK-AL 10y agoNot so bad when you consider windows NT is a descendent of VMS. VMS was the system you went to when unix wasn't considered reliable enough. I would imagine for a system like they remove all the crap, and just use the kernel and some well tested custom programs.
- new299 10y agoNit pick: They share the same core designers, but NT wasn't a direct decendent: http://m.windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story http://m.windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-...
- peter_retief 10y agoI for one dont feel safe that Microsoft is running on critical systems. I guess its natures way of dealing with human overpopulation - and merry xmas / happy hanukkah
- mfukar 10y agoIf you're afraid of critical systems running Microsoft software, boy do I have news for you..
- peter_retief 10y agoWhy, does it get worse!
- mfukar 10y agoFor your fears, yes. Overall? No.
- WayneBro 10y agoThe vast majority of businesses run on Windows too. So, Windows is quite obviously a much, much better choice for general purpose computing than whatever hipster-fad OS you prefer :) Also, I thought hipsters-fad followers were natures way of dealing with over-population since they're less likely to ever have kids. Merry Kwanzaa to you!
- peter_retief 10y agoSorry I only speak english and Afrikaans try run that through google translate..
- tim333 10y agoHope they don't install Wordpress on the nuclear control system.
- giosch 10y agoThey don't need to, Windows is already broken on his own.
- idlewords 10y agoDO NOT OPEN THEM
- delegate 10y agoIt saddens me greatly when smart people work on stupid things. However you turn it around, a nuclear submarine is an incredibly dumb thing to invest your intelligence in. Intelligence without wisdom is very dangerous. If you're a young brilliant mind, please stay away from military applications. You're not contributing to anyone, no matter what the (military) propaganda tells you.
- golergka 10y agoDoes this 'wisdom' contradict basic game theory?
- delegate 10y agoWisdom is the capacity to understand the true scope of the 'game'. At that level 'game theory' does not apply.
- golergka 10y agoOnly if you pretend you can control all the players. Prisoners in the classic dilemma can all know what's best for everyobody. But they never be sure others know it too.