32 ms·

The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

785 points by srijan4 3y ago

nottorp 3y ago
Is this a mastodon instance? Mastodon is a twitter clone that doesn't allow long posts? All the posts but the first come collapsed and I have to click on each to read it. Is someone measuring engagement?
- Angostura 3y ago
  Yes it’s Mastodon, designed for short posts. I doubt anyone is measuring engagement
- Ndymium 3y ago
  This can be configured in the instance settings and I've seen some support up to 5000 characters.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Well if 1 line is the default, it leaves a bad taste. There was no need to clone twitter.
    - Ndymium 3y ago
      The default post size limit on Mastodon is 500 characters, there is no line limitation. I suppose the message split here is mostly influenced by the user's desire or familiarity carried over from Twitter.
lynx23 3y ago
[flagged]
- givot 3y ago
  It's also quite annoying how the piece is split up into small chunks, due to tweets or toots or whatever they're called being limited in size.
  - jmprspret 3y ago
    I agree. I've always hated the twitter-style threads people write. I can't stand it. There are websites that compile a thread into a better reading blog style format however.
    - givot 3y ago
      That's a good point, at least Twitter has third-party tools like Thread Reader to mitigate this annoyance. I wonder if there is an equivalent for Mastodon?
      - 4ggr0 3y ago
        You can use this unroller: https://unroller.zachmanson.com/ https://unroller.zachmanson.com/
        givot 3y ago
        Thank you, that is just what I was hoping for. It works very nicely on the linked thread: - https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https://octodon.social/@jalefkowit/111490485825183949 https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https://octodon.soci... And archives well too: - https://archive.ph/kFoT9 https://archive.ph/kFoT9 - https://web.archive.org/web/20231129105248/https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https:/octodon.social/@jalefkowit/111490485825183949 https://web.archive.org/web/20231129105248/https://unroller....
  - proactivesvcs 3y ago
    Mastodon is a microblogging service, so not meant for large bodies of text. This is why the text entry box is small, the columns are somewhat narrow (especially in deck mode) etc. Platforms like https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/ , which are designed to be for blogging and long-form writing, are the place to write this. Write Freely federates so one can follow accounts and interact with posts via Mastodon etc.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
  > Mastodon is apparently at least as bad as Meta. Wow. Such a comparison is mindblowing. You are apparently unaware that the default Mastodon web client is only one way of many which you can use to interface with a Mastodon instance. If you feel that there should be a plain HTTP(S) interface to its open API, feel free to advocate for one — or to create it yourself!
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    Don't care, the link goes to a site requiring JavaScript to read plain text and I don't want to build any workarounds for that.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    Nope, sorry. I am too old and frustrated by modern web accessibility issues that I am not going to waste my time and "contribute" to this mess. A few years back, I would have tried to make the world a better place. These days, I have learnt that we blind people are no longer a factor for anything anymore. I bet LGBTQ people have a way higher chance to get what they want/need then people with disabilities hurt by the digital divide.
    - agentgumshoe 3y ago
      Not all LGBTQ people mind you, just the latest more minority group within (or appended to). It gets to the point of absurdity when we expect to add more complexity with new workarounds to make things simple again.
    - klez 3y ago
      If you made this about accessibility in the first place, (and avoided the useless war between the poor with the LGBTQ people here) I bet your post would have been better received. By the way you make a very good point about accessibility and the fact that you basically need two operating systems (the actual OS running on your PC and a modern Web Browser) to read simple text that should have been rendered as such in the first place.
- throwaw33333434 3y ago
  The tragedy of Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by the USS Vincennes in 1988, highlights significant user interface (UI) flaws in the Aegis Combat System used by the U.S. Navy. Here's a breakdown of the key UI problems that contributed to this incident: IFF Console Operation Flaw: The aircraft identification friend or foe (IFF) system, crucial for distinguishing between civilian and military aircraft, had a critical operational flaw. Although Flight 655's IFF correctly identified it as a civilian airliner, the Aegis system required operators to manually follow the contact with a cursor. In this instance, the operator did not "slave" the cursor to Flight 655, causing the system to query the IFF of a different aircraft, an Iranian F-14, from the same location. Dashboard Design Issue: Aegis' large displays, used for senior decision-making, failed to show critical information like altitude. This omission made it challenging to assess the intent of an approaching aircraft. Flight 655's climbing trajectory, a non-threatening maneuver, wasn't immediately apparent to the captain from these displays. Tracking Number Confusion: Aegis' feature of unifying data across multiple ships led to a fatal misunderstanding. Both the Vincennes and its escort, USS Sides, tracked Flight 655 but assigned it different tracking numbers. When Aegis unified these contacts, it chose one tracking number and recycled the other, which was then assigned to a U.S. bomber. This led to confusion about the altitude of Flight 655, as the captain, unaware of the tracking number change, received data about the wrong aircraft, believing it was descending rapidly. These UI issues, combined with the high-stress environment and other factors, contributed to the crew's misunderstanding of the actual situation, ultimately leading to the tragic decision to fire on the civilian airliner. This case underscores the critical importance of intuitive, clear, and comprehensive user interface design, especially in high-stakes environments like military operations.
- bmacho 3y ago
  I tried to feed it to archive.ph but they actively hide the content with javascript too. Mastodon folks really don't like people without javascript.
  - immibis 3y ago
    Mastodon folks don't seem to like anyone. They've removed discoverability features before because they don't like discoverability. Thankfully, there's Pleroma and other alternatives.
- blondin 3y ago
  i also had a hard time reading that piece about bad UX on my phone. i don't know about the desktop experience but you made a valid point.
  - Nullinker 3y ago
    I gave up on trying to read it on the desktop. I have Firefox with JavaScript enabled but after expanding every paragraph by clicking on it, it automatically collapses when I try to scroll using the cursor keys and completely disoriented me while the content I was trying to read dissapears from my view and the page stutters and different collapse paragraphs light up. I guess I'll never know the details of the greatest user interface disasters in history but at least got to experience a smaller one myself.
- vanderZwan 3y ago
  It's not a text article though, it's a public microblogging forum like Twitter, implemented with a protocol for which this just happens to be a web interface. And a forum with more features than the one we're on, most of which would be quite inconvenient to implement in a purely static website. Now, maybe what you're actually trying to say is that the content of the Mastodon thread should have been static website instead. That might be your preferred method of consuming this information, and that would be a valid desire. I can't say I'm a fan of twitter-style threads either. Having said that, that does not take into account what the author of the thread wanted to accomplish. In all likelihood they're on Mastodon precisely because they want interaction with strangers. Otherwise they would have written the static website version. So it's a matter of misaligned needs. Also, note that Mastodon is built on a protocol - it does not need a web app. So you could build a thread unroller or use an existing one to meet your static website needs, although I have to warn you: current implementations use JavaScript for that[0]. [0] https://unroller.zachmanson.com/ https://unroller.zachmanson.com/
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    There’s a big gap between “static website” and “requires JS to render anything”. All you need is “serves meaningful HTML which it then enhances with JS”, possibly in the form of server-side rendering (I think it uses React?).
- ben0x539 3y ago
  Hi yeah I also hate web things that should be documents and want to be apps instead but I think it's still pretty hard to make the case that this is as bad as Facebook's impact on like everything.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    Well... There used to be m.facebook.com for a long time. One might argue that Mastodon never even tried t care...
mattszaszko 3y ago
I'm so conflicted reading this story. On one hand, yes, there were choices made during the design of the system that directly contributed to this tragedy. And a lot of innocent lives were lost, so saying that's "shit happens, it's an edge case" rings very hollow. On the other hand, this was a very peculiar set of circumstances, very much an edge case. Is it reasonable to expect designers of combat systems to triple check their choices and run more test scenarios to identify and address such edge cases? I'd say yes. However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  Sorry, I don't see where's the edge case. In a given area there are going to be lots of planes. If there is risk of confusing them and making decisions based on non-reconciled information, it seems a pretty critical flaw.
  - Maxion 3y ago
    Hard agree here. There are so many small things there that could be improved. One simple one is identifier re-use, if it is necessary for some reason, then at the very least it shouldn't happen within a specific time frame, so that you may have the same identifier used again as in the scenario.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    I agree, the described scenario could just be another day at any airport and surrounding airspace (I guess any airport that is dual purpose military and civilian).
- rkagerer 3y ago
  Reusing identifiers after such a short time was a pretty galactic design cockup. I'm a consultant and if I came across that in a design doc or while analyzing a system to form an understanding in my head of how it works, it would have immediately screamed out to me as asking for this kind of trouble. Operator punched the ID in for (civilian) aircraft A, and unknowingly got the trajectory data for (military) aircraft B. Coding for the 90% common conditions are easy, it's the edge cases where things get hard and true engineering talent shines through. Ignoring them is simply incomplete design. It's not tolerated in other fields of engineering (eg. civil) and it shouldn't be in ours either.
mike503 3y ago
[flagged]
- harha 3y ago
  Nothing beats concur - the app made so only people with an assistant can file expenses
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Nothing beats it, really? Not even the tragedy that cut 290 human lives on which you are commenting?
    - airtonix 3y ago
      [dead]
  - zaphar 3y ago
    Deltek timekeeping is worse. By a long, long mile. I wish Deltek was as good as Concur.
- girishso 3y ago
  and I was wondering if it was Digg
quickthrower2 3y ago
I wonder how this compared to plain air traffic control technology of that era? Were ATC doing it better? (Obviously there are a lot of ATC-driven disasters of that era too).
locallost 3y ago
Everything's possible, but there would be no debate about UI mistakes if it was Iran shooting down a US plane. They would've done because they are evil by nature, or at least perceived as such. In that case the media and the public buys into its own reality, but of course the UI discussion could be a distraction from the public maybe starting to question if that's actually the reality. Also from the Wiki page about this shootdown: In 1991, political scientist Robert Entman of George Washington University compared U.S. media coverage of the incident with the similar shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Union five years earlier by studying material from Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS Evening News. According to Entman, framing techniques were used to frame the Korean Airlines incident as sabotage while framing the Iran Air incident as a tragic mistake,[67] stating "the angle taken by the U.S. media emphasized the moral bankruptcy and guilt of the perpetrating nation. With Iran Air 655, the frame de-emphasised guilt and focused on the complex problems of operating military high technology."[68][a] By "de-emphasizing the agency and the victims and by the choice of graphics and adjectives, the news stories about the U.S. downing of an Iranian plane called it a technical problem while the Soviet downing of a Korean jet was portrayed as a moral outrage."
- CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
  One only has to see the differences between NATO bombing of serbian power stations vs the russians doing the same with Ukraine, or Israel killing children in gaza vs russian killing children vs the US killing afghan or Iraqi children. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/25/us/crew-of-cruiser-that-downed-iranian-airliner-gets-a-warm-homecoming.html https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/25/us/crew-of-cruiser-that-d...
  - tpm 3y ago
    NATO bombing of serbian power stations was done in response of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, after the horrible crimes against humanity perpetrated by serbian forces in Bosnia. "russians doing the same" is a blatant lie. What the russians are doing is a genocide.
    - 3y ago
rglullis 3y ago
Aside: it is the second day in a row that a thread from Mastodon ends up on the frontpage of HN. When was the last time I Twitter thread did the same, and does anyone else doubts that Twitter is no longer at the center of tech-related conversation?
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front for the last ten days: one today, one five days ago, three seven days ago, two nine days ago.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  A lot of the recent OpenAI events that were posted here were links to Twitter and I’ve seen plenty of people point this out as evidence that Twitter still is at the centre.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    The OpenAI saga was such an outlier in the usual news cycle, it is hard to use it as a measure of anything.
    - subtra3t 3y ago
      You can't call any piece of evidence that happens to not support your theory as being an outlier. And even then the OpenAI saga is probably the most important development in tech in the last 10 years (conservatively).
      - wizzwizz4 3y ago
        Perhaps, in terms of how much it's affecting Silicon Valley; though I'd say iPhone adoption, the tail-end of Flash, the death of ActiveX, the destruction of libraries, and the growth of Amazon were all more impactful, there. Probably not, in terms of how much 2040s tech will be based on this stuff. Language models are good for machine translation, and real-time image transcription, but everything else I've seen them do has better solutions (which have been around for decades in many cases, but don't have much funding).
saltserv 3y ago
[dead]
Aissen 3y ago
Pro-tip to those unused to mastodon web-ui: you can click the eye on the top right of the center column (next to Back) to expand all posts at once.
- 4gotunameagain 3y ago
  How ironic, a post about a user interface disaster needing an explanatory pro-tip for its UI.
  - Aissen 3y ago
    Luckily, this one will have less dire consequences.
    - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - Aissen 3y ago
        Less dire direct consequences then. If we go down this path, I'm sure there must be other UIs that have much higher use that the one in the article that might have even worse impact at scale. Or even niche use (but more users) in critical (medical…) systems.
  - dsego 3y ago
    That's objectively terrible UX.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gpderetta 3y ago
  Maybe my expectations are very very low at this point. But I thought it was ok.
  - 3y ago
vkaku 3y ago
I first thought this was a post about flat design, then went and read the whole toot. Man, who'd expect UI to be bad enough for life and death operations. Someone should post more details about the actually confusing UI that lead to this event. Would be a good lesson to most of us. It also appears that Lockheed won a contract for using this system in 2023 [1]. Can someone share if they actually fixed the UI issues with it recently? 1 - https://news.clearancejobs.com/2023/03/13/lockheed-martin-wins-contract-for-aegis-combat-system-support/ https://news.clearancejobs.com/2023/03/13/lockheed-martin-wi...
- jansan 3y ago
  I thought it was about Chrome's new sidebar by just reading the title.
  - vkaku 3y ago
    I actually had to Google what that looked like. It's been a while. Haha.
- jgilias 3y ago
  The details are in the posted thread. Basically, heading and location came from one plane, identification from another plane, and altitude yet from another one for reasons.
  - vkaku 3y ago
    Thank you. Did go through the whole thing. Talk about complicated systems, lack of documentation, work stress and then branding it a personnel failure. Totally unlike most systems today (not!)
wruza 3y ago
Tl;dr - some friend/foe “cursor” was not locked to a jet trajectory - a fighter jet flew through it later, classifying it as a threat - dashboard shows no altitudes - identifier reuse led to invalid ascent/descent check - captain decided it’s a classic attack profile
squirrel23 3y ago
What an insane story. Crazy to think that some of these engineering errors led to such a disastrous outcome... I do resonate with someone's comments in the above sections reflecting on whether or not such a narrative would be given if it was say, a UI mistake from an enemy country.
cies 3y ago
Very impactful mistake, but apparently not a mistake worth apologizing for. From Wikipedia: "the U.S. government did not admit legal liability or formally apologize to Iran" Pinnacle arrogance/exceptionalism. Disgusting. Oh, and the US back then supported Iraq in its horrific attack on Iran. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...
- gifvenut 3y ago
  You forgot to mention that Ronald Reagan apologized to the Iranian government and the US paid $60 Mil in compensation to the families.
  - ben0x539 3y ago
    After having become an expert on the incident from having skimmed half of the wikipedia article, I note that it mentions both Reagan considering his letter an apology and the US government not having made a formal apology, so I imagine there is some clever political distinction between the two.
    - cies 3y ago
      There also has been no apology for US' use of agent orange in Vietnam, nor has there been a payment of compensation. Why not formally apologize for such a fuck up (Iran aircraft), except for arrogance/exceptionalism?
      - ben0x539 3y ago
        I guess because they think it doesn't benefit them and will make future diplomacy harder? I don't know if that falls under arrogance, but I also don't know how to ascribe comprehensible motivations to the state department or whoever is in charge of that.
      - sitkack 3y ago
        The US is still pressuring Vietnam to “pay it back for the Vietnam war“.
xkbarkar 3y ago
What a terrible platform to present an interesting story. What wrong with a good old fashioned article style blog ? I admit I am so turned off by the format I only made it hlf way throught the thread.
- subpixel 3y ago
  User interface disaster indeed
- lgrapenthin 3y ago
  I gave up when I realized that I have to click on each "tweet" to read more
  - athesyn 3y ago
    the horror
  - emsixteen 3y ago
    Likewise. There is apparently an extremely unintuitive "Show more for all"[1] button at the top of the initial post. [1] https://i.imgur.com/5l15SM8.png https://i.imgur.com/5l15SM8.png
    - degenerate 3y ago
      navigate the UI disaster to read about the UI disaster... I don't consider this story a UI disaster. Generating different 4-digit codes across terminals for the same object, and recycling those codes regularly... that's a data handling disaster.
  - RheingoldRiver 3y ago
    That kinda seems feature-rather-than-bug honestly - I read the entire thing because I'm fascinated by UI/UX stories like this, and clicking to open each tab is nbd, but if it had been a topic I wasn't that interested in, I wouldn't've read it. Which means I'm less likely to fall into an attention-grabbing rabbit hole on social media.
m463 3y ago
I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this. I'm not talking about autopilot. I'm talking about the continuous (past ridiculous) removal of physical controls from their vehicles. For example, the original model S/X had dedicated controls for lots of functions - turn signals, gear shift, wipers, autopilot, steering wheel tilt, etc. On the steering wheel, there were two buttons and a scrollwheel on each side of the steering wheel. Press the center of the steering wheel for the horn. The door had mirror adjustment and windows + lock Unfortunately a few critical controls were on the touchscreen - defrost front and back were big ones, but all the climate controls, and other nonsense too - all pretty much hidden with multiple taps, or small targets or both. not all of this is bad - putting lots of detailed but non-critical settings like miles vs km are the perfect thing to have on a touchscreen. but it needed more dedicated controls. When the Model 3 came out, it started removing controls. There are two stalks, the turn signal also sort of controls headlights and wipers, the shifter is overloaded with autopilot. It has two scrollwheels without buttons, you have to push them left and right. all other controls are on the touchscreen. It really needs dedicated controls for important things. And then the updated model S/X came out. wow. there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers. the scroll wheels do different things at different times. shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go. many more things involve the touchscreen, like going into park. (there is also a touch drive selector in the center console, but you have to look down and touch it to wake, then to select) Just a mess. It makes you a worse driver.
- ksjskskskkk 3y ago
  I'm more worried when spacex "pivots" to iron dome like products. you will get a barrage of missiles raining down from space on top of some kindergartens because the autofire ai correlated a bunch of Toyota suvs moving to the same point with terrorists
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
- IanHalbwachs 3y ago
grotorea 3y ago
Since we're on the topic, you know how much HN complains about touchscreens on cars? Now find out how replacing old school analog controls with software touchscreens UI partly led to the USS John S. McCain colliding: https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...
- xp84 3y ago
  This is a fascinating article. I feel like I am in my life constantly fighting against either haphazard UI like the one featured there, and the Apple-style UIs which attempt to optimize for beauty by shoving nearly everything (regardless of usefulness) into layers of "••• junk drawers" or little (i) icons. On a ship worth hundreds of billions of dollars, it was never considered that the Big Red Button should have a plain English red sign saying "Emergency Take-Control-Here Button. Press to return control to THIS station." The software designers as well could have used plain and direct language too, and made it easy to do the right thing, and require deliberateness to do a weird thing. If it's wildly irregular to have 2 people independently doing port/starboard thrust control, the process should be like "Transfer Thrust Control", followed by a modal with a giant "BOTH SIDES" button and two tiny "Port only" "Stbd Only" buttons. Also when you are moving around something as important as control of your ship, why not have a simple voice announcement, what does a loudspeaker cost, 20 dollars a piece? "The Thrust control has been transferred to the Lee Helm" or "All Controls were transferred to the Bridge because the Red Take-Control Button was pressed at that station." Sometimes I think only thoughtless people and Jony Ive-worshipers are doing UI design.
  - dralley 3y ago
    > On a ship worth hundreds of billions of dollars Hundreds of millions perhaps, but even a brand new nuclear aircraft carrier only costs ~13 billion.
  - Nekhrimah 3y ago
    What's the bet that there was no single approved requirements document covering this design.
spacecadet 3y ago
Had family members on the Aegis design team... I got another UI disaster... y'all had a chance to end this insane twitter thread UX and you chose to continue it. Why on earth do people post content like this... how much effort do you want me to put in? all that extra energy clicking, making requests...
- immibis 3y ago
  Twitter thread UX makes sense for Twitter, but why do people post things on Twitter, the social media for short messages, that are so long they need threads?
  - marvin 3y ago
    It’s the place where both the audience and all the interesting authors are.
- dang 3y ago
  "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (What would be interesting is hearing more about the Aegis design team, if you want to share)
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    Nice try, but my complaint illustrates the issue. Im not complaining about white button text, Im complaining about the awful UX of "twitter threads", which all of the twitter clones seem to have blindly adopted, instead of taking the opportunity to improve on it.
    - dang 3y ago
      We have the rule because people often complain about UI annoyances and there isn't any new information in that—especially after it has been repeated countless thousands of times. I rather agree with you about the UI annoyance stuff but HN threads get super boring when things like this are repeated all the time instead of discussion focusing on the interesting parts of an article.
cryptos 3y ago
This could have been an article worth reading, instead it is chunked in tweets (or whatever they are named now) on X. I'd be interested in the topic, but hate the reading experience to much to read it.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  But it's about bad UI. Irony.
d3w4s9 3y ago
Sarcastically, on a mobile phone, a persistent sidebar takes up valuable space from the content. Somehow Mastodon thinks this is good UI.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
Not reading your 20-post twitter vomit - just make a blog post dude.
- immibis 3y ago
  In other good news, Mastodon is now so good a Twitter clone that you think it's Twitter.
  - FinnKuhn 3y ago
    until you try and follow or like the post and learn that the instance this was posted on has blocked your instance...
    - immibis 3y ago
      If it was Twitter, you'd be completely banned.
  - bogantech 3y ago
    People use the name Coke generically for cola too but it doesn't mean RC cola is any good
shallmn 3y ago
[flagged]
subroutine 3y ago
Interesting to see this on HN. I currently work for the company that redesigned the HMI/UI following this incident. Or rather, it's how my company was founded. In the aftermath, the US Navy Command in San Diego contacted several UCSD professors in the Cognitive Science and Psychology department who specialized in high-impact decision making under stress and cognitive load. The Navy was apparently impressed with the detailed analysis and recs provided by these faculty and continued to collaborate with these folks on this an other projects. Eventually they were getting so much work from the Navy they founded a company focused on human factors engineering and interface design for complex systems. The two original founders recently retired and our new CEO is a former Captain of the USS Zumwalt.
- astrobase_go 3y ago
  I think your company is PSE, correct?
  - smcl 3y ago
    I think if they wanted to name the company they would have done so in the comment
    - gchamonlive 3y ago
      Or at least frame it in a more passive tone like "would you be comfortable disclaiming the name of the company where you work?"
    - krisoft 3y ago
      There have been only 5 "former Captain of the USS Zumwalt". That is a very small subset of humans. There have been more humans walking on the moon than former Captains of the USS Zumwalt. Their names are a matter of public record and one can answer which works as a CEO with 5 simple google searches. If they didn't want to name the company they shouldn't have identified it willingly and precisely.
      - 3y ago
2-718-281-828 3y ago
When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism. When the US kills foreign civilians it's collateral damage or a UI disaster ... business as usual.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism No, it’s an act of war if deliberate. As this would have been. It is unusual (though not unprecedented) to refer to the actions of states’ militaries as terrorism.
- vitiral 3y ago
  Intent is important. If I accidentally step on your toe it doesn't necessarily say anything about my character. If I I intentionally step on your toe you know I'm an asshole. Intent and regret tells you what someone will do in the future.
- jakobnissen 3y ago
  That's a completely unreasonable take. There is no reason to believe that the killing was intentional, so it can't possibly be terrorism. Equating an accidental shootdown of a civilian plane during a war, with the intentional killing of civilians as a stategy employed by e.g. jihadist is deeply disingenuous.
quietbritishjim 3y ago
Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent Admiral Cloudberg blog: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-the-story-of-the-shootdown-of-iran-air-flight-655-ef7bdf1e9f75 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t... Another article in that series is also related to a UX mistake: Air France Flight 447. This crashed, in part, because the inputs from two control sticks (one for pilot and other for copilot) were averaged if they disagreed, unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place, and you'd feel the other pilot fighting you. When the plane stalled, one pilot correctly pushed down to come out of the stall (after which they would be able to pull back up) while the other pulled up instead (which is wrong but does feel like the instinctively correct thing to do). The inputs cancelled out so had almost no effect. By the end both pilots were pulling up, but that hadn't been the case earlier on when the problem could have been resolved. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-crash-of-air-france-flight-447-8a7678c37982 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr... The captain had been on a rest brake and only re-entered the cabin at the last moment. He finally figured out the problem but it was too late to do anything. > “Go on, pull,” Dubois said. Was this comment a sardonic resignation to fate?
- gregsadetsky 3y ago
  The tragic AF447 flight comes up somewhat regularly on the site — see this recent conversation [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089363
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    CFIT is a particularly spectacular form of failure. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain>
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  It's not something that can be changed on airbus cockpits, since the nature of side sticks makes them impossible to be mechanically linked, unless there was some very complex motor system built into each stick that provided force feedback equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it.
moritz64 3y ago
A quite recent UX disaster at Paypal. The Paypal iOS app used to behave strange with numbers. The interface was designed that you had to type in the amount you wanted to send in cents. If you wanted to send USD 50, you had to type 5000. Paypal then would add a comma after the second digit from the right. What made it even stranger: The numbers were aligned right, so it had the feeling of typing backwards. I never really got used to it. A few weeks ago, without a note, the whole interface changed. Now you HAVE to fill in the comma. If you just type in 5000 like you did before, you would send USD 5000 instead of USD 50. I personally know of one person who send way to much money and I suspect it is because of this UX change. Thoughtful design matters!
- _giorgio_ 3y ago
  Always felt wrong. Now it's even more wrong.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  The price in cents is the way "it was always done" in retail, back when POS terminals were not directly connected to cash registers and the worker had to manually type in the amount. But yeah, sudden change in US design will causemany errors everywhere.
  - dmix 3y ago
    I find gas station pumps 25% are with the cents approach but usually if you type in 60 and press enter it will work It’s definitely one of those UI concepts that’s different depending on context. similar to password with some websites making up random rules that vary sufficiently enough where automated password entry doesn’t work nor does using a reusable password for sites you don’t care about
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
upofadown 3y ago
Admiral Cloudberg has a detailed discussion of the incident, including the user interface behaviour: * https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-the-story-of-the-shootdown-of-iran-air-flight-655-ef7bdf1e9f75 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t... Reading the different takes on the incident leaves one with the impression that there was a lot more going on there than just the stuff with the user interface.
century19 3y ago
If I remember correctly, the Lockerbie / Pan Am attack was in response to this.
swader999 3y ago
Ironic that a decent article about UX is splattered across a bunch of Twitter posts.
smcl 3y ago
> they saw this contact heading towards them labeled as an F-14 fighter. What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. Was there no moment where they thought "maybe there has been a mistake?" - like where Stanislav Petrov chose to interpret the Soviet early warning system telling him an ICBM was incoming as being a result of some faulty instruments. Granted the stakes were slightly different - downing one airliner is less severe than risking starting a global nuclear annihilation.
- ghaff 3y ago
  In the moment, it's really hard to step back and ask yourself "Does this make any sense?" when you're primed to react in some particular way.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Especially with an element of "I might personally get blown up" involved.
    - graphe 3y ago
      Yet the Cuban missile crisis with the stake of the entire world didn't escalate.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        1. More time to think. An incoming F-14 is a minutes/seconds scenario; the Cuban crisis lasted 10 days. 2. "X did not happen" does not mean "Y was not a factor in X". The "about to get blown up" factor was part of the reason the Cuban missile crisis happened; it's also probably part of the resolution.
      - Cyph0n 3y ago
        There were some close calls during the Cold War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
a-dub 3y ago
i wonder if ideas like side by side deployments were on their radars back then. maybe pretty expensive, but it seems like with systems of people and machines that complicated you'd want live validation of everything before cutting over.
architect01 3y ago
The whole thing would have been avoided if the US didn't push their Navy around Iran why the hell is there a US navy ship there to begin with and why the hell is it that easy for them to shout at whatever is moving in the sky yes it might have been a UI issue but the root of the problem is "a US navy ship next to iran's border"
- arp242 3y ago
  It was protecting neutral shipping traffic during the Iraq-Iran war.
jimmySixDOF 3y ago
That time when a badly implemented government contract drop down menu UI design was blamed for the false alarm Hawaiian incoming ballistic missile emergency sms [1] only for it later to turn out to have been caused by regular old human communication error and poor safeguards [2]. [1] https://blog.prototypr.io/dangerous-drop-downs-%EF%B8%8Fbad-ui-design-caused-%EF%B8%8Fhawaiis-false-missile-alert-5209cbc17f8c https://blog.prototypr.io/dangerous-drop-downs-%EF%B8%8Fbad-... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_alert https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_al...
throw555chip 3y ago
It's important to note there are misrepresentations in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 For the most truthful view of what happened that day: https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655 https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655
aristofun 3y ago
It’s not a ui problem per se. it is a problem of shitty developers responsible for critical decisions. Unfortunately they are everywhere. Every a little bit advanced internet user face the pain 12 times a day.
GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
"I hope it's not a civilian flight" -- low ranking guy in the CIC who was ignored.
duckhelmet 3y ago
[dead]
timbit42 3y ago
Is this related to Reagan firing over 11 thousand air traffic controllers?
next_xibalba 3y ago
> every large aircraft in the world is equipped with a device called an IFF -- "identification friend or foe." This is weird, I'm sure I don't have all the facts. In a conflict, why would a military aircraft ever want to identify itself?
- proaralyst 3y ago
  So you don't get shot down by your own air defense
  - monetus 3y ago
    - as demonstrated by more than one aircraft since the war in Ukraine began.
  - next_xibalba 3y ago
    Why would it need to be interoperable then? Presumably it tells adversaries that you’re friend OR foe though. The friend bit is obvious. The foe… still not seeing the logic.
    - aerostable_slug 3y ago
      There's a difference between civilian transponders which generally squawk all the time and military IFF, which typically only responds to a coded challenge (called an IFF interrogation). If a military IFF doesn't receive a valid interrogation, it remains silent. It is Very Bad if an enemy can either spoof a valid "friend" IFF response or cause IFFs to respond and give up one's position. The latter was done with great effect in both WW2 and the Vietnam War.
      - gpderetta 3y ago
        > spoof a valid "friend" IFF Tricking an enemy plane to respond seems "fair", but would a plane disguising itself as friendly count as perfidy?
    - simne 3y ago
Johnny555 3y ago
There seems to be a lot of trust in IFF in this incident, what would stop Iran from reprogramming their F-14's IFF to identify as as civilian aircraft (or if reprogramming isn't feasible, retrofitting a stolen civilian airliner's IFF system into an electronics pod on their F-14, I'm sure the Iranian government wouldn't have any trouble getting an aircraft from Iranian Airlines)? Do warships do any verification beyond reading the IFF ping aside from looking for attack patterns like climbinb/decending, etc, it still seems possible for an attacker to get within missile range while still appearing on radar to be a civilian craft.
- function_seven 3y ago
  I immediately thought of RFC-3514. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514
- toast0 3y ago
  > what would stop Iran from reprogramming their F-14's IFF to identify as as civilian aircraft If you do that, you paint a target on civilian aircraft launched from your country's airfields. Especially if your airfields are military and civilian dual-use like the airfield in this case.
  - Johnny555 3y ago
    Sure, it might only work once, but it sure would complicate war efforts if the "good guys" kept shooting down civilian airliners carrying passengers of various nationalities.
- edrxty 3y ago
  First, very slight correction to the thread, most civilian craft have transponders, not IFF. They're kinda the same thing in practice but transponders just give out a static number, IFF is a cryptographic challenge response. I don't know how the navy does it when abroad, but anything entering or leaving a sensitive area will generally be on an ICAO style flight plan (entering US ADIZ/TFRs/DC SFRA etc) and it's a simple matter of checking to see if the thing responding with "hi I'm mode c or s (civilian aircraft) 1234" is doing what it should be. There are also some other sidebands that get used like NCTR which looks at the radar return to attempt to identify the type of aircraft but they weren't well developed in the 80s. If the aircraft is not responding at all to transponder interrogations you can assume it's hostile and presently attacking you or the pilot is forgetful and didn't flip the switch (choose wisely). You can obviously put a mode c/s civilian transponder on a cruise missile or better yet fill a remotely piloted 747 full of explosives if you're feeling especially squirrelly and that's totally been done. That's also part of why these events keep happening, everyone's kinda understandably jumpy.
WheatMillington 3y ago
When Americans shoot down an airliner they get to describe it as a "user interface error". After denying they did it for a long period first, of course.
- digging 3y ago
  This event was not officially described as a user interface error, though.
- arp242 3y ago
  > After denying they did it for a long period first, of course. Lies. Reagan acknowledged and apologized within days.
simne 3y ago
Greetings from Ukraine, country at war. You may wonder, but computers extremely important in our life, I bet, you don't release how we depend on high tech now (was not such before war). I will list how I remember, not by importance. 1. Electric grid is core of infrastructure, and it depend on computers. Even if in many cases could use decentralized power sources, but need it to feed bank networks for money payments; water supply, heating, also need electricity. And Russians actively use hacker attacks to turn off power in Ukraine. 2. Air defense. God bless America and developers of Patriot! After last spring we received this wonderful tech, we could feel much safer, just periodically hear "Citizens may hear explosion, as system automatically intercept ballistic missile. Alarm siren was not triggered". 3. For our people in trenches, information is literally life, because Russians have large number old, but dangerous tech, like artillery and air approx 1960s. And now also got cheap new tech from East - most annoying drones (UAV). So if one side got knowledge, where some opponent military unit, they immediately fire on it if possible. Even become usual thing, artillery duels, when artillery units on each side, try to destroy each other. And as they are long distance units, they don't see opponent, just know from intelligence, that on some coordinates appear opponent.
- lebed2045 3y ago
  that's truly incredible how much lives can be saved with good electronics and it-systems. I wish the war ends asap, before the autonomous ai-powered drones comes into play... because at that point this might become complete skynet-like hell.
  - simne 3y ago
    Thank you! Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic about terms of war in Ukraine. Unfortunately, war in Ukraine looks not like war of one country against another country, but this war like Democracy and free market against Communism. And rumors said, military support for Russia from North Korea is larger, than support for Ukraine from US. Just now military power of Ukraine is near to equal to Russian, but this is not sufficient to return occupied Ukrainian territories in some overseen time. I'm not sure, if we could afford Korean variant of large part of country sacrificed to communists to end war, because Russia will not stop there, they want to occupy territories of other countries - Poland, Baltic states. So, we working hard, to make Ukrainian military more powerful with new technologies. All possible to save people lives. And yes, we use robotic units at real war, but their intelligence extremely limited, even GPT-3 is too resource demand to be useful, only image recognition technology now is practical at field.
thr0w__4w4y 3y ago
Would just like to jump in and remind folks of the Therac-25 incident just a couple years before this (1985 and 1987), and the user interface was also identified as a contributing factor. https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse470/Public/Handouts/Therac/Side_bar_Y.html https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse470/Public/Handouts/Therac/Side_...
egberts1 3y ago
Touch LCD screens are a no-no for navy ships because there are no tactile feedback mechanism for your finger to feel as the ship slaps down after every giant waves.
cannabis_sam 3y ago
I’m guessing it’s not a popular opinion around here, but what’s described is so insanely dog shit I would have been fired and sued if I had been responsible for developing anything even close to how stupid this system was. I know people who have worked with military systems, and as dumb as the process around developing these things tend to be, due to the asinine cluelessness of the decision makers, none of them would have accepted even a fraction of the idiocy on display here. I mean, not “slaving” the cursor still feeds garbage data into the system, immediately reusing 4 digit codes in a way that is pretty much guaranteed to create confusion, no real cooperation or coordination between the same system running on ships in the same battle group, supposedly essential data displayed without the actual essential details shown to decision makers in charge of death and destruction… It would be laughable if it was the worlds strongest military we were talking about. The people in charge of deciding to make this “system” in this way should be in prison.
silexia 3y ago
The Wikipedia article on the incident reads like it was written by an Iranian government employee.

785 points by srijan4 3y ago

Is this a mastodon instance? Mastodon is a twitter clone that doesn't allow long posts? All the posts but the first come collapsed and I have to click on each to read it. Is someone measuring engagement?

Angostura 3y ago
Yes it’s Mastodon, designed for short posts. I doubt anyone is measuring engagement
Ndymium 3y ago
This can be configured in the instance settings and I've seen some support up to 5000 characters.
- nottorp 3y ago
  Well if 1 line is the default, it leaves a bad taste. There was no need to clone twitter.
  - Ndymium 3y ago
    The default post size limit on Mastodon is 500 characters, there is no line limitation. I suppose the message split here is mostly influenced by the user's desire or familiarity carried over from Twitter.

lynx23 3y ago

[flagged]

givot 3y ago
It's also quite annoying how the piece is split up into small chunks, due to tweets or toots or whatever they're called being limited in size.
- jmprspret 3y ago
  I agree. I've always hated the twitter-style threads people write. I can't stand it. There are websites that compile a thread into a better reading blog style format however.
  - givot 3y ago
    That's a good point, at least Twitter has third-party tools like Thread Reader to mitigate this annoyance. I wonder if there is an equivalent for Mastodon?
    - 4ggr0 3y ago
      You can use this unroller: https://unroller.zachmanson.com/ https://unroller.zachmanson.com/
      - givot 3y ago
        Thank you, that is just what I was hoping for. It works very nicely on the linked thread: - https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https://octodon.social/@jalefkowit/111490485825183949 https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https://octodon.soci... And archives well too: - https://archive.ph/kFoT9 https://archive.ph/kFoT9 - https://web.archive.org/web/20231129105248/https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https:/octodon.social/@jalefkowit/111490485825183949 https://web.archive.org/web/20231129105248/https://unroller....
- proactivesvcs 3y ago
  Mastodon is a microblogging service, so not meant for large bodies of text. This is why the text entry box is small, the columns are somewhat narrow (especially in deck mode) etc. Platforms like https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/ , which are designed to be for blogging and long-form writing, are the place to write this. Write Freely federates so one can follow accounts and interact with posts via Mastodon etc.
ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
> Mastodon is apparently at least as bad as Meta. Wow. Such a comparison is mindblowing. You are apparently unaware that the default Mastodon web client is only one way of many which you can use to interface with a Mastodon instance. If you feel that there should be a plain HTTP(S) interface to its open API, feel free to advocate for one — or to create it yourself!
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  Don't care, the link goes to a site requiring JavaScript to read plain text and I don't want to build any workarounds for that.
- lynx23 3y ago
  Nope, sorry. I am too old and frustrated by modern web accessibility issues that I am not going to waste my time and "contribute" to this mess. A few years back, I would have tried to make the world a better place. These days, I have learnt that we blind people are no longer a factor for anything anymore. I bet LGBTQ people have a way higher chance to get what they want/need then people with disabilities hurt by the digital divide.
  - agentgumshoe 3y ago
    Not all LGBTQ people mind you, just the latest more minority group within (or appended to). It gets to the point of absurdity when we expect to add more complexity with new workarounds to make things simple again.
  - klez 3y ago
    If you made this about accessibility in the first place, (and avoided the useless war between the poor with the LGBTQ people here) I bet your post would have been better received. By the way you make a very good point about accessibility and the fact that you basically need two operating systems (the actual OS running on your PC and a modern Web Browser) to read simple text that should have been rendered as such in the first place.
throwaw33333434 3y ago
The tragedy of Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by the USS Vincennes in 1988, highlights significant user interface (UI) flaws in the Aegis Combat System used by the U.S. Navy. Here's a breakdown of the key UI problems that contributed to this incident: IFF Console Operation Flaw: The aircraft identification friend or foe (IFF) system, crucial for distinguishing between civilian and military aircraft, had a critical operational flaw. Although Flight 655's IFF correctly identified it as a civilian airliner, the Aegis system required operators to manually follow the contact with a cursor. In this instance, the operator did not "slave" the cursor to Flight 655, causing the system to query the IFF of a different aircraft, an Iranian F-14, from the same location. Dashboard Design Issue: Aegis' large displays, used for senior decision-making, failed to show critical information like altitude. This omission made it challenging to assess the intent of an approaching aircraft. Flight 655's climbing trajectory, a non-threatening maneuver, wasn't immediately apparent to the captain from these displays. Tracking Number Confusion: Aegis' feature of unifying data across multiple ships led to a fatal misunderstanding. Both the Vincennes and its escort, USS Sides, tracked Flight 655 but assigned it different tracking numbers. When Aegis unified these contacts, it chose one tracking number and recycled the other, which was then assigned to a U.S. bomber. This led to confusion about the altitude of Flight 655, as the captain, unaware of the tracking number change, received data about the wrong aircraft, believing it was descending rapidly. These UI issues, combined with the high-stress environment and other factors, contributed to the crew's misunderstanding of the actual situation, ultimately leading to the tragic decision to fire on the civilian airliner. This case underscores the critical importance of intuitive, clear, and comprehensive user interface design, especially in high-stakes environments like military operations.
bmacho 3y ago
I tried to feed it to archive.ph but they actively hide the content with javascript too. Mastodon folks really don't like people without javascript.
- immibis 3y ago
  Mastodon folks don't seem to like anyone. They've removed discoverability features before because they don't like discoverability. Thankfully, there's Pleroma and other alternatives.
blondin 3y ago
i also had a hard time reading that piece about bad UX on my phone. i don't know about the desktop experience but you made a valid point.
- Nullinker 3y ago
  I gave up on trying to read it on the desktop. I have Firefox with JavaScript enabled but after expanding every paragraph by clicking on it, it automatically collapses when I try to scroll using the cursor keys and completely disoriented me while the content I was trying to read dissapears from my view and the page stutters and different collapse paragraphs light up. I guess I'll never know the details of the greatest user interface disasters in history but at least got to experience a smaller one myself.
vanderZwan 3y ago
It's not a text article though, it's a public microblogging forum like Twitter, implemented with a protocol for which this just happens to be a web interface. And a forum with more features than the one we're on, most of which would be quite inconvenient to implement in a purely static website. Now, maybe what you're actually trying to say is that the content of the Mastodon thread should have been static website instead. That might be your preferred method of consuming this information, and that would be a valid desire. I can't say I'm a fan of twitter-style threads either. Having said that, that does not take into account what the author of the thread wanted to accomplish. In all likelihood they're on Mastodon precisely because they want interaction with strangers. Otherwise they would have written the static website version. So it's a matter of misaligned needs. Also, note that Mastodon is built on a protocol - it does not need a web app. So you could build a thread unroller or use an existing one to meet your static website needs, although I have to warn you: current implementations use JavaScript for that[0]. [0] https://unroller.zachmanson.com/ https://unroller.zachmanson.com/
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  There’s a big gap between “static website” and “requires JS to render anything”. All you need is “serves meaningful HTML which it then enhances with JS”, possibly in the form of server-side rendering (I think it uses React?).
ben0x539 3y ago
Hi yeah I also hate web things that should be documents and want to be apps instead but I think it's still pretty hard to make the case that this is as bad as Facebook's impact on like everything.
- lynx23 3y ago
  Well... There used to be m.facebook.com for a long time. One might argue that Mastodon never even tried t care...

mattszaszko 3y ago

I'm so conflicted reading this story. On one hand, yes, there were choices made during the design of the system that directly contributed to this tragedy. And a lot of innocent lives were lost, so saying that's "shit happens, it's an edge case" rings very hollow. On the other hand, this was a very peculiar set of circumstances, very much an edge case. Is it reasonable to expect designers of combat systems to triple check their choices and run more test scenarios to identify and address such edge cases? I'd say yes. However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.

gpderetta 3y ago
Sorry, I don't see where's the edge case. In a given area there are going to be lots of planes. If there is risk of confusing them and making decisions based on non-reconciled information, it seems a pretty critical flaw.
- Maxion 3y ago
  Hard agree here. There are so many small things there that could be improved. One simple one is identifier re-use, if it is necessary for some reason, then at the very least it shouldn't happen within a specific time frame, so that you may have the same identifier used again as in the scenario.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I agree, the described scenario could just be another day at any airport and surrounding airspace (I guess any airport that is dual purpose military and civilian).
rkagerer 3y ago
Reusing identifiers after such a short time was a pretty galactic design cockup. I'm a consultant and if I came across that in a design doc or while analyzing a system to form an understanding in my head of how it works, it would have immediately screamed out to me as asking for this kind of trouble. Operator punched the ID in for (civilian) aircraft A, and unknowingly got the trajectory data for (military) aircraft B. Coding for the 90% common conditions are easy, it's the edge cases where things get hard and true engineering talent shines through. Ignoring them is simply incomplete design. It's not tolerated in other fields of engineering (eg. civil) and it shouldn't be in ours either.

mike503 3y ago

[flagged]

harha 3y ago
Nothing beats concur - the app made so only people with an assistant can file expenses
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Nothing beats it, really? Not even the tragedy that cut 290 human lives on which you are commenting?
  - airtonix 3y ago
    [dead]
- zaphar 3y ago
  Deltek timekeeping is worse. By a long, long mile. I wish Deltek was as good as Concur.
girishso 3y ago
and I was wondering if it was Digg

quickthrower2 3y ago

I wonder how this compared to plain air traffic control technology of that era? Were ATC doing it better? (Obviously there are a lot of ATC-driven disasters of that era too).

locallost 3y ago

Everything's possible, but there would be no debate about UI mistakes if it was Iran shooting down a US plane. They would've done because they are evil by nature, or at least perceived as such. In that case the media and the public buys into its own reality, but of course the UI discussion could be a distraction from the public maybe starting to question if that's actually the reality. Also from the Wiki page about this shootdown: In 1991, political scientist Robert Entman of George Washington University compared U.S. media coverage of the incident with the similar shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Union five years earlier by studying material from Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS Evening News. According to Entman, framing techniques were used to frame the Korean Airlines incident as sabotage while framing the Iran Air incident as a tragic mistake,[67] stating "the angle taken by the U.S. media emphasized the moral bankruptcy and guilt of the perpetrating nation. With Iran Air 655, the frame de-emphasised guilt and focused on the complex problems of operating military high technology."[68][a] By "de-emphasizing the agency and the victims and by the choice of graphics and adjectives, the news stories about the U.S. downing of an Iranian plane called it a technical problem while the Soviet downing of a Korean jet was portrayed as a moral outrage."

CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
One only has to see the differences between NATO bombing of serbian power stations vs the russians doing the same with Ukraine, or Israel killing children in gaza vs russian killing children vs the US killing afghan or Iraqi children. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/25/us/crew-of-cruiser-that-downed-iranian-airliner-gets-a-warm-homecoming.html https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/25/us/crew-of-cruiser-that-d...
- tpm 3y ago
  NATO bombing of serbian power stations was done in response of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, after the horrible crimes against humanity perpetrated by serbian forces in Bosnia. "russians doing the same" is a blatant lie. What the russians are doing is a genocide.
  - 3y ago

rglullis 3y ago

Aside: it is the second day in a row that a thread from Mastodon ends up on the frontpage of HN. When was the last time I Twitter thread did the same, and does anyone else doubts that Twitter is no longer at the center of tech-related conversation?

chrismorgan 3y ago
Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front for the last ten days: one today, one five days ago, three seven days ago, two nine days ago.
JimDabell 3y ago
A lot of the recent OpenAI events that were posted here were links to Twitter and I’ve seen plenty of people point this out as evidence that Twitter still is at the centre.
- rglullis 3y ago
  The OpenAI saga was such an outlier in the usual news cycle, it is hard to use it as a measure of anything.
  - subtra3t 3y ago
    You can't call any piece of evidence that happens to not support your theory as being an outlier. And even then the OpenAI saga is probably the most important development in tech in the last 10 years (conservatively).
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      Perhaps, in terms of how much it's affecting Silicon Valley; though I'd say iPhone adoption, the tail-end of Flash, the death of ActiveX, the destruction of libraries, and the growth of Amazon were all more impactful, there. Probably not, in terms of how much 2040s tech will be based on this stuff. Language models are good for machine translation, and real-time image transcription, but everything else I've seen them do has better solutions (which have been around for decades in many cases, but don't have much funding).

saltserv 3y ago

[dead]

Aissen 3y ago

Pro-tip to those unused to mastodon web-ui: you can click the eye on the top right of the center column (next to Back) to expand all posts at once.

4gotunameagain 3y ago
How ironic, a post about a user interface disaster needing an explanatory pro-tip for its UI.
- Aissen 3y ago
  Luckily, this one will have less dire consequences.
  - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Aissen 3y ago
      Less dire direct consequences then. If we go down this path, I'm sure there must be other UIs that have much higher use that the one in the article that might have even worse impact at scale. Or even niche use (but more users) in critical (medical…) systems.
- dsego 3y ago
  That's objectively terrible UX.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gpderetta 3y ago
Maybe my expectations are very very low at this point. But I thought it was ok.
- 3y ago

vkaku 3y ago

I first thought this was a post about flat design, then went and read the whole toot. Man, who'd expect UI to be bad enough for life and death operations. Someone should post more details about the actually confusing UI that lead to this event. Would be a good lesson to most of us. It also appears that Lockheed won a contract for using this system in 2023 [1]. Can someone share if they actually fixed the UI issues with it recently? 1 - https://news.clearancejobs.com/2023/03/13/lockheed-martin-wins-contract-for-aegis-combat-system-support/ https://news.clearancejobs.com/2023/03/13/lockheed-martin-wi...

jansan 3y ago
I thought it was about Chrome's new sidebar by just reading the title.
- vkaku 3y ago
  I actually had to Google what that looked like. It's been a while. Haha.
jgilias 3y ago
The details are in the posted thread. Basically, heading and location came from one plane, identification from another plane, and altitude yet from another one for reasons.
- vkaku 3y ago
  Thank you. Did go through the whole thing. Talk about complicated systems, lack of documentation, work stress and then branding it a personnel failure. Totally unlike most systems today (not!)

wruza 3y ago

Tl;dr - some friend/foe “cursor” was not locked to a jet trajectory - a fighter jet flew through it later, classifying it as a threat - dashboard shows no altitudes - identifier reuse led to invalid ascent/descent check - captain decided it’s a classic attack profile

squirrel23 3y ago

What an insane story. Crazy to think that some of these engineering errors led to such a disastrous outcome... I do resonate with someone's comments in the above sections reflecting on whether or not such a narrative would be given if it was say, a UI mistake from an enemy country.

cies 3y ago

Very impactful mistake, but apparently not a mistake worth apologizing for. From Wikipedia: "the U.S. government did not admit legal liability or formally apologize to Iran" Pinnacle arrogance/exceptionalism. Disgusting. Oh, and the US back then supported Iraq in its horrific attack on Iran. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...

gifvenut 3y ago
You forgot to mention that Ronald Reagan apologized to the Iranian government and the US paid $60 Mil in compensation to the families.
- ben0x539 3y ago
  After having become an expert on the incident from having skimmed half of the wikipedia article, I note that it mentions both Reagan considering his letter an apology and the US government not having made a formal apology, so I imagine there is some clever political distinction between the two.
  - cies 3y ago
    There also has been no apology for US' use of agent orange in Vietnam, nor has there been a payment of compensation. Why not formally apologize for such a fuck up (Iran aircraft), except for arrogance/exceptionalism?
    - ben0x539 3y ago
      I guess because they think it doesn't benefit them and will make future diplomacy harder? I don't know if that falls under arrogance, but I also don't know how to ascribe comprehensible motivations to the state department or whoever is in charge of that.
    - sitkack 3y ago
      The US is still pressuring Vietnam to “pay it back for the Vietnam war“.

xkbarkar 3y ago

What a terrible platform to present an interesting story. What wrong with a good old fashioned article style blog ? I admit I am so turned off by the format I only made it hlf way throught the thread.

subpixel 3y ago
User interface disaster indeed
lgrapenthin 3y ago
I gave up when I realized that I have to click on each "tweet" to read more
- athesyn 3y ago
  the horror
- emsixteen 3y ago
  Likewise. There is apparently an extremely unintuitive "Show more for all"[1] button at the top of the initial post. [1] https://i.imgur.com/5l15SM8.png https://i.imgur.com/5l15SM8.png
  - degenerate 3y ago
    navigate the UI disaster to read about the UI disaster... I don't consider this story a UI disaster. Generating different 4-digit codes across terminals for the same object, and recycling those codes regularly... that's a data handling disaster.
- RheingoldRiver 3y ago
  That kinda seems feature-rather-than-bug honestly - I read the entire thing because I'm fascinated by UI/UX stories like this, and clicking to open each tab is nbd, but if it had been a topic I wasn't that interested in, I wouldn't've read it. Which means I'm less likely to fall into an attention-grabbing rabbit hole on social media.

m463 3y ago

I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this. I'm not talking about autopilot. I'm talking about the continuous (past ridiculous) removal of physical controls from their vehicles. For example, the original model S/X had dedicated controls for lots of functions - turn signals, gear shift, wipers, autopilot, steering wheel tilt, etc. On the steering wheel, there were two buttons and a scrollwheel on each side of the steering wheel. Press the center of the steering wheel for the horn. The door had mirror adjustment and windows + lock Unfortunately a few critical controls were on the touchscreen - defrost front and back were big ones, but all the climate controls, and other nonsense too - all pretty much hidden with multiple taps, or small targets or both. not all of this is bad - putting lots of detailed but non-critical settings like miles vs km are the perfect thing to have on a touchscreen. but it needed more dedicated controls. When the Model 3 came out, it started removing controls. There are two stalks, the turn signal also sort of controls headlights and wipers, the shifter is overloaded with autopilot. It has two scrollwheels without buttons, you have to push them left and right. all other controls are on the touchscreen. It really needs dedicated controls for important things. And then the updated model S/X came out. wow. there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers. the scroll wheels do different things at different times. shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go. many more things involve the touchscreen, like going into park. (there is also a touch drive selector in the center console, but you have to look down and touch it to wake, then to select) Just a mess. It makes you a worse driver.

ksjskskskkk 3y ago
I'm more worried when spacex "pivots" to iron dome like products. you will get a barrage of missiles raining down from space on top of some kindergartens because the autofire ai correlated a bunch of Toyota suvs moving to the same point with terrorists
- networkchad 3y ago
  [dead]
IanHalbwachs 3y ago

grotorea 3y ago

Since we're on the topic, you know how much HN complains about touchscreens on cars? Now find out how replacing old school analog controls with software touchscreens UI partly led to the USS John S. McCain colliding: https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

xp84 3y ago
This is a fascinating article. I feel like I am in my life constantly fighting against either haphazard UI like the one featured there, and the Apple-style UIs which attempt to optimize for beauty by shoving nearly everything (regardless of usefulness) into layers of "••• junk drawers" or little (i) icons. On a ship worth hundreds of billions of dollars, it was never considered that the Big Red Button should have a plain English red sign saying "Emergency Take-Control-Here Button. Press to return control to THIS station." The software designers as well could have used plain and direct language too, and made it easy to do the right thing, and require deliberateness to do a weird thing. If it's wildly irregular to have 2 people independently doing port/starboard thrust control, the process should be like "Transfer Thrust Control", followed by a modal with a giant "BOTH SIDES" button and two tiny "Port only" "Stbd Only" buttons. Also when you are moving around something as important as control of your ship, why not have a simple voice announcement, what does a loudspeaker cost, 20 dollars a piece? "The Thrust control has been transferred to the Lee Helm" or "All Controls were transferred to the Bridge because the Red Take-Control Button was pressed at that station." Sometimes I think only thoughtless people and Jony Ive-worshipers are doing UI design.
- dralley 3y ago
  > On a ship worth hundreds of billions of dollars Hundreds of millions perhaps, but even a brand new nuclear aircraft carrier only costs ~13 billion.
- Nekhrimah 3y ago
  What's the bet that there was no single approved requirements document covering this design.

spacecadet 3y ago

Had family members on the Aegis design team... I got another UI disaster... y'all had a chance to end this insane twitter thread UX and you chose to continue it. Why on earth do people post content like this... how much effort do you want me to put in? all that extra energy clicking, making requests...

immibis 3y ago
Twitter thread UX makes sense for Twitter, but why do people post things on Twitter, the social media for short messages, that are so long they need threads?
- marvin 3y ago
  It’s the place where both the audience and all the interesting authors are.
dang 3y ago
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (What would be interesting is hearing more about the Aegis design team, if you want to share)
- spacecadet 3y ago
  Nice try, but my complaint illustrates the issue. Im not complaining about white button text, Im complaining about the awful UX of "twitter threads", which all of the twitter clones seem to have blindly adopted, instead of taking the opportunity to improve on it.
  - dang 3y ago
    We have the rule because people often complain about UI annoyances and there isn't any new information in that—especially after it has been repeated countless thousands of times. I rather agree with you about the UI annoyance stuff but HN threads get super boring when things like this are repeated all the time instead of discussion focusing on the interesting parts of an article.

cryptos 3y ago

This could have been an article worth reading, instead it is chunked in tweets (or whatever they are named now) on X. I'd be interested in the topic, but hate the reading experience to much to read it.

JKCalhoun 3y ago
But it's about bad UI. Irony.

d3w4s9 3y ago

Sarcastically, on a mobile phone, a persistent sidebar takes up valuable space from the content. Somehow Mastodon thinks this is good UI.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

Not reading your 20-post twitter vomit - just make a blog post dude.

immibis 3y ago
In other good news, Mastodon is now so good a Twitter clone that you think it's Twitter.
- FinnKuhn 3y ago
  until you try and follow or like the post and learn that the instance this was posted on has blocked your instance...
  - immibis 3y ago
    If it was Twitter, you'd be completely banned.
- bogantech 3y ago
  People use the name Coke generically for cola too but it doesn't mean RC cola is any good

shallmn 3y ago

[flagged]

subroutine 3y ago

Interesting to see this on HN. I currently work for the company that redesigned the HMI/UI following this incident. Or rather, it's how my company was founded. In the aftermath, the US Navy Command in San Diego contacted several UCSD professors in the Cognitive Science and Psychology department who specialized in high-impact decision making under stress and cognitive load. The Navy was apparently impressed with the detailed analysis and recs provided by these faculty and continued to collaborate with these folks on this an other projects. Eventually they were getting so much work from the Navy they founded a company focused on human factors engineering and interface design for complex systems. The two original founders recently retired and our new CEO is a former Captain of the USS Zumwalt.

astrobase_go 3y ago
I think your company is PSE, correct?
- smcl 3y ago
  I think if they wanted to name the company they would have done so in the comment
  - gchamonlive 3y ago
    Or at least frame it in a more passive tone like "would you be comfortable disclaiming the name of the company where you work?"
  - krisoft 3y ago
    There have been only 5 "former Captain of the USS Zumwalt". That is a very small subset of humans. There have been more humans walking on the moon than former Captains of the USS Zumwalt. Their names are a matter of public record and one can answer which works as a CEO with 5 simple google searches. If they didn't want to name the company they shouldn't have identified it willingly and precisely.
    - 3y ago

2-718-281-828 3y ago

When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism. When the US kills foreign civilians it's collateral damage or a UI disaster ... business as usual.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism No, it’s an act of war if deliberate. As this would have been. It is unusual (though not unprecedented) to refer to the actions of states’ militaries as terrorism.
vitiral 3y ago
Intent is important. If I accidentally step on your toe it doesn't necessarily say anything about my character. If I I intentionally step on your toe you know I'm an asshole. Intent and regret tells you what someone will do in the future.
jakobnissen 3y ago
That's a completely unreasonable take. There is no reason to believe that the killing was intentional, so it can't possibly be terrorism. Equating an accidental shootdown of a civilian plane during a war, with the intentional killing of civilians as a stategy employed by e.g. jihadist is deeply disingenuous.

quietbritishjim 3y ago

Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent Admiral Cloudberg blog: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-the-story-of-the-shootdown-of-iran-air-flight-655-ef7bdf1e9f75 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t... Another article in that series is also related to a UX mistake: Air France Flight 447. This crashed, in part, because the inputs from two control sticks (one for pilot and other for copilot) were averaged if they disagreed, unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place, and you'd feel the other pilot fighting you. When the plane stalled, one pilot correctly pushed down to come out of the stall (after which they would be able to pull back up) while the other pulled up instead (which is wrong but does feel like the instinctively correct thing to do). The inputs cancelled out so had almost no effect. By the end both pilots were pulling up, but that hadn't been the case earlier on when the problem could have been resolved. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-crash-of-air-france-flight-447-8a7678c37982 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr... The captain had been on a rest brake and only re-entered the cabin at the last moment. He finally figured out the problem but it was too late to do anything. > “Go on, pull,” Dubois said. Was this comment a sardonic resignation to fate?

gregsadetsky 3y ago
The tragic AF447 flight comes up somewhat regularly on the site — see this recent conversation [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089363
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  CFIT is a particularly spectacular form of failure. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain>
MichaelZuo 3y ago
It's not something that can be changed on airbus cockpits, since the nature of side sticks makes them impossible to be mechanically linked, unless there was some very complex motor system built into each stick that provided force feedback equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it.

moritz64 3y ago

A quite recent UX disaster at Paypal. The Paypal iOS app used to behave strange with numbers. The interface was designed that you had to type in the amount you wanted to send in cents. If you wanted to send USD 50, you had to type 5000. Paypal then would add a comma after the second digit from the right. What made it even stranger: The numbers were aligned right, so it had the feeling of typing backwards. I never really got used to it. A few weeks ago, without a note, the whole interface changed. Now you HAVE to fill in the comma. If you just type in 5000 like you did before, you would send USD 5000 instead of USD 50. I personally know of one person who send way to much money and I suspect it is because of this UX change. Thoughtful design matters!

_giorgio_ 3y ago
Always felt wrong. Now it's even more wrong.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
The price in cents is the way "it was always done" in retail, back when POS terminals were not directly connected to cash registers and the worker had to manually type in the amount. But yeah, sudden change in US design will causemany errors everywhere.
- dmix 3y ago
  I find gas station pumps 25% are with the cents approach but usually if you type in 60 and press enter it will work It’s definitely one of those UI concepts that’s different depending on context. similar to password with some websites making up random rules that vary sufficiently enough where automated password entry doesn’t work nor does using a reusable password for sites you don’t care about
  - Scoundreller 3y ago

upofadown 3y ago

Admiral Cloudberg has a detailed discussion of the incident, including the user interface behaviour: * https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-the-story-of-the-shootdown-of-iran-air-flight-655-ef7bdf1e9f75 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t... Reading the different takes on the incident leaves one with the impression that there was a lot more going on there than just the stuff with the user interface.

century19 3y ago

If I remember correctly, the Lockerbie / Pan Am attack was in response to this.

swader999 3y ago

Ironic that a decent article about UX is splattered across a bunch of Twitter posts.

smcl 3y ago

> they saw this contact heading towards them labeled as an F-14 fighter. What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. Was there no moment where they thought "maybe there has been a mistake?" - like where Stanislav Petrov chose to interpret the Soviet early warning system telling him an ICBM was incoming as being a result of some faulty instruments. Granted the stakes were slightly different - downing one airliner is less severe than risking starting a global nuclear annihilation.

ghaff 3y ago
In the moment, it's really hard to step back and ask yourself "Does this make any sense?" when you're primed to react in some particular way.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Especially with an element of "I might personally get blown up" involved.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Yet the Cuban missile crisis with the stake of the entire world didn't escalate.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      1. More time to think. An incoming F-14 is a minutes/seconds scenario; the Cuban crisis lasted 10 days. 2. "X did not happen" does not mean "Y was not a factor in X". The "about to get blown up" factor was part of the reason the Cuban missile crisis happened; it's also probably part of the resolution.
    - Cyph0n 3y ago
      There were some close calls during the Cold War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

a-dub 3y ago

i wonder if ideas like side by side deployments were on their radars back then. maybe pretty expensive, but it seems like with systems of people and machines that complicated you'd want live validation of everything before cutting over.

architect01 3y ago

The whole thing would have been avoided if the US didn't push their Navy around Iran why the hell is there a US navy ship there to begin with and why the hell is it that easy for them to shout at whatever is moving in the sky yes it might have been a UI issue but the root of the problem is "a US navy ship next to iran's border"

arp242 3y ago
It was protecting neutral shipping traffic during the Iraq-Iran war.

jimmySixDOF 3y ago

That time when a badly implemented government contract drop down menu UI design was blamed for the false alarm Hawaiian incoming ballistic missile emergency sms [1] only for it later to turn out to have been caused by regular old human communication error and poor safeguards [2]. [1] https://blog.prototypr.io/dangerous-drop-downs-%EF%B8%8Fbad-ui-design-caused-%EF%B8%8Fhawaiis-false-missile-alert-5209cbc17f8c https://blog.prototypr.io/dangerous-drop-downs-%EF%B8%8Fbad-... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_alert https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_al...

throw555chip 3y ago

It's important to note there are misrepresentations in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 For the most truthful view of what happened that day: https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655 https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655

aristofun 3y ago

It’s not a ui problem per se. it is a problem of shitty developers responsible for critical decisions. Unfortunately they are everywhere. Every a little bit advanced internet user face the pain 12 times a day.

GartzenDeHaes 3y ago

"I hope it's not a civilian flight" -- low ranking guy in the CIC who was ignored.

duckhelmet 3y ago

[dead]

timbit42 3y ago

Is this related to Reagan firing over 11 thousand air traffic controllers?

next_xibalba 3y ago

> every large aircraft in the world is equipped with a device called an IFF -- "identification friend or foe." This is weird, I'm sure I don't have all the facts. In a conflict, why would a military aircraft ever want to identify itself?

proaralyst 3y ago
So you don't get shot down by your own air defense
- monetus 3y ago
  - as demonstrated by more than one aircraft since the war in Ukraine began.
- next_xibalba 3y ago
  Why would it need to be interoperable then? Presumably it tells adversaries that you’re friend OR foe though. The friend bit is obvious. The foe… still not seeing the logic.
  - aerostable_slug 3y ago
    There's a difference between civilian transponders which generally squawk all the time and military IFF, which typically only responds to a coded challenge (called an IFF interrogation). If a military IFF doesn't receive a valid interrogation, it remains silent. It is Very Bad if an enemy can either spoof a valid "friend" IFF response or cause IFFs to respond and give up one's position. The latter was done with great effect in both WW2 and the Vietnam War.
    - gpderetta 3y ago
      > spoof a valid "friend" IFF Tricking an enemy plane to respond seems "fair", but would a plane disguising itself as friendly count as perfidy?
  - simne 3y ago

Johnny555 3y ago

There seems to be a lot of trust in IFF in this incident, what would stop Iran from reprogramming their F-14's IFF to identify as as civilian aircraft (or if reprogramming isn't feasible, retrofitting a stolen civilian airliner's IFF system into an electronics pod on their F-14, I'm sure the Iranian government wouldn't have any trouble getting an aircraft from Iranian Airlines)? Do warships do any verification beyond reading the IFF ping aside from looking for attack patterns like climbinb/decending, etc, it still seems possible for an attacker to get within missile range while still appearing on radar to be a civilian craft.

function_seven 3y ago
I immediately thought of RFC-3514. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514
toast0 3y ago
> what would stop Iran from reprogramming their F-14's IFF to identify as as civilian aircraft If you do that, you paint a target on civilian aircraft launched from your country's airfields. Especially if your airfields are military and civilian dual-use like the airfield in this case.
- Johnny555 3y ago
  Sure, it might only work once, but it sure would complicate war efforts if the "good guys" kept shooting down civilian airliners carrying passengers of various nationalities.
edrxty 3y ago
First, very slight correction to the thread, most civilian craft have transponders, not IFF. They're kinda the same thing in practice but transponders just give out a static number, IFF is a cryptographic challenge response. I don't know how the navy does it when abroad, but anything entering or leaving a sensitive area will generally be on an ICAO style flight plan (entering US ADIZ/TFRs/DC SFRA etc) and it's a simple matter of checking to see if the thing responding with "hi I'm mode c or s (civilian aircraft) 1234" is doing what it should be. There are also some other sidebands that get used like NCTR which looks at the radar return to attempt to identify the type of aircraft but they weren't well developed in the 80s. If the aircraft is not responding at all to transponder interrogations you can assume it's hostile and presently attacking you or the pilot is forgetful and didn't flip the switch (choose wisely). You can obviously put a mode c/s civilian transponder on a cruise missile or better yet fill a remotely piloted 747 full of explosives if you're feeling especially squirrelly and that's totally been done. That's also part of why these events keep happening, everyone's kinda understandably jumpy.

WheatMillington 3y ago

When Americans shoot down an airliner they get to describe it as a "user interface error". After denying they did it for a long period first, of course.

digging 3y ago
This event was not officially described as a user interface error, though.
arp242 3y ago
> After denying they did it for a long period first, of course. Lies. Reagan acknowledged and apologized within days.

simne 3y ago

Greetings from Ukraine, country at war. You may wonder, but computers extremely important in our life, I bet, you don't release how we depend on high tech now (was not such before war). I will list how I remember, not by importance. 1. Electric grid is core of infrastructure, and it depend on computers. Even if in many cases could use decentralized power sources, but need it to feed bank networks for money payments; water supply, heating, also need electricity. And Russians actively use hacker attacks to turn off power in Ukraine. 2. Air defense. God bless America and developers of Patriot! After last spring we received this wonderful tech, we could feel much safer, just periodically hear "Citizens may hear explosion, as system automatically intercept ballistic missile. Alarm siren was not triggered". 3. For our people in trenches, information is literally life, because Russians have large number old, but dangerous tech, like artillery and air approx 1960s. And now also got cheap new tech from East - most annoying drones (UAV). So if one side got knowledge, where some opponent military unit, they immediately fire on it if possible. Even become usual thing, artillery duels, when artillery units on each side, try to destroy each other. And as they are long distance units, they don't see opponent, just know from intelligence, that on some coordinates appear opponent.

lebed2045 3y ago
that's truly incredible how much lives can be saved with good electronics and it-systems. I wish the war ends asap, before the autonomous ai-powered drones comes into play... because at that point this might become complete skynet-like hell.
- simne 3y ago
  Thank you! Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic about terms of war in Ukraine. Unfortunately, war in Ukraine looks not like war of one country against another country, but this war like Democracy and free market against Communism. And rumors said, military support for Russia from North Korea is larger, than support for Ukraine from US. Just now military power of Ukraine is near to equal to Russian, but this is not sufficient to return occupied Ukrainian territories in some overseen time. I'm not sure, if we could afford Korean variant of large part of country sacrificed to communists to end war, because Russia will not stop there, they want to occupy territories of other countries - Poland, Baltic states. So, we working hard, to make Ukrainian military more powerful with new technologies. All possible to save people lives. And yes, we use robotic units at real war, but their intelligence extremely limited, even GPT-3 is too resource demand to be useful, only image recognition technology now is practical at field.

thr0w__4w4y 3y ago

Would just like to jump in and remind folks of the Therac-25 incident just a couple years before this (1985 and 1987), and the user interface was also identified as a contributing factor. https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse470/Public/Handouts/Therac/Side_bar_Y.html https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse470/Public/Handouts/Therac/Side_...

egberts1 3y ago

Touch LCD screens are a no-no for navy ships because there are no tactile feedback mechanism for your finger to feel as the ship slaps down after every giant waves.

cannabis_sam 3y ago

I’m guessing it’s not a popular opinion around here, but what’s described is so insanely dog shit I would have been fired and sued if I had been responsible for developing anything even close to how stupid this system was. I know people who have worked with military systems, and as dumb as the process around developing these things tend to be, due to the asinine cluelessness of the decision makers, none of them would have accepted even a fraction of the idiocy on display here. I mean, not “slaving” the cursor still feeds garbage data into the system, immediately reusing 4 digit codes in a way that is pretty much guaranteed to create confusion, no real cooperation or coordination between the same system running on ships in the same battle group, supposedly essential data displayed without the actual essential details shown to decision makers in charge of death and destruction… It would be laughable if it was the worlds strongest military we were talking about. The people in charge of deciding to make this “system” in this way should be in prison.

silexia 3y ago

The Wikipedia article on the incident reads like it was written by an Iranian government employee.