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"Software isn't engineering unless you're in aerospace" ... I don't agree with this, what about real-time communication systems (ex: 911) ? Banking/financial tr

by guiomie 11y ago

"Software isn't engineering unless you're in aerospace" ... I don't agree with this, what about real-time communication systems (ex: 911) ? Banking/financial transaction systems? I don't think you can flag a discipline as engineering by it's industry, but mostly by the way it is being practiced.

MichaelGG 11y ago
Re: 911 - I've worked in 9-1-1 for VoIP off and on for years, and founded the first VoIP focused 911 provider. There's a massive amount of idiocy in telecom, VoIP, and 911. One company I know of turned off their alarming system that monitored the online database to the 9-1-1 system. The replication link died and no one noticed... for a whole month. And then they only noticed due to billing discrepancies as calls were routed to the wrong place. "Oops". Other proposals I've seen for 911 have put user safety way down the list, to save money. And recently, Intrado, the big 911 company, had their system go off due to a hard coded limit on the number of calls that could ever run through it. Took down 911 for many people for nearly a day. And not to mention how they handled address updates - in short, users would be sent to the wrong state, knowingly, until "data validation" workers manually fixed things. And they thought this was swell. (Bottom line, don't trust 9-1-1 over VoIP until you've verified it.) Even across the US, just the format of some 911 operator consoles' data exchange isn't consistent. One PSAP was complaining that their system would show invalid data for certain calls containing lat/long, just because they were flagged as VoIP. Some dumb vendor made a poor assumption, and wrote a fail-close system that affected real people. Oops. And next gen 911? It's been a while since I've seen the working group plans, but they basically wanted to connect every PSAP (locally underfunded answering points, about 7000 in the US) to the Internet. I don't think anyone knows how to secure such a thing, let alone when each node is autonomous. I'll let you think about how awesomely that can fail. (All this said, the people answering the phones do an incredibly hard job for little compensation. I still almost start crying just remembering a call I audited when they weren't connected right -- company forgot to provision some payphones, panicked woman was literally dying and didn't know where she was (call disconnected with no definitive resolution, but I believe she saw a passing patrol and was able to get assistance). I've no idea how responders can handle that kind of load every day... OTOH the majority of calls are just idiots calling for non emergencies.) The real telco engineering was possible inside a very closed and end-to-end operated system. Even then, we saw fun stuff like inband signaling allowing random end nodes to takeover the system. I'd be shocked if banking was a whole ton better - everything indicates they're just as incompetent.

by guiomie 11y ago

MichaelGG 11y ago

Re: 911 - I've worked in 9-1-1 for VoIP off and on for years, and founded the first VoIP focused 911 provider. There's a massive amount of idiocy in telecom, VoIP, and 911. One company I know of turned off their alarming system that monitored the online database to the 9-1-1 system. The replication link died and no one noticed... for a whole month. And then they only noticed due to billing discrepancies as calls were routed to the wrong place. "Oops". Other proposals I've seen for 911 have put user safety way down the list, to save money. And recently, Intrado, the big 911 company, had their system go off due to a hard coded limit on the number of calls that could ever run through it. Took down 911 for many people for nearly a day. And not to mention how they handled address updates - in short, users would be sent to the wrong state, knowingly, until "data validation" workers manually fixed things. And they thought this was swell. (Bottom line, don't trust 9-1-1 over VoIP until you've verified it.) Even across the US, just the format of some 911 operator consoles' data exchange isn't consistent. One PSAP was complaining that their system would show invalid data for certain calls containing lat/long, just because they were flagged as VoIP. Some dumb vendor made a poor assumption, and wrote a fail-close system that affected real people. Oops. And next gen 911? It's been a while since I've seen the working group plans, but they basically wanted to connect every PSAP (locally underfunded answering points, about 7000 in the US) to the Internet. I don't think anyone knows how to secure such a thing, let alone when each node is autonomous. I'll let you think about how awesomely that can fail. (All this said, the people answering the phones do an incredibly hard job for little compensation. I still almost start crying just remembering a call I audited when they weren't connected right -- company forgot to provision some payphones, panicked woman was literally dying and didn't know where she was (call disconnected with no definitive resolution, but I believe she saw a passing patrol and was able to get assistance). I've no idea how responders can handle that kind of load every day... OTOH the majority of calls are just idiots calling for non emergencies.) The real telco engineering was possible inside a very closed and end-to-end operated system. Even then, we saw fun stuff like inband signaling allowing random end nodes to takeover the system. I'd be shocked if banking was a whole ton better - everything indicates they're just as incompetent.