The Risk Factor

The US Department of Transportation's Inspector General released its audit of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) oversight of aircraft manufacturers’ quality assurance systems for both domestic and foreign suppliers. The audit found that the FAA's risk-based oversight system "does not ensure that manufacturers regularly audit their suppliers," nor does the FAA "perform enough audits of manufacturers’ suppliers (i.e., supplier control audits) to test how well manufacturers’ quality assurance systems are working."

As a result, substandard processes are being used by some parts suppliers (e.g., at one supplier, "an employee used a piece of paper, scotch-taped to the work surface, as a measuring device for a length of wire on an oil and fuel pressure transmitter") thereby allowing for "substandard parts to enter the aviation supply chain."

The FAA, however, claims that, "There are absolutely no imminent safety issues raised by the report."

If this is true, then I guess the DOT Inspector General is overly worried, correct?

The report made me curious about software-related supply chain issues, but the audit wasn't very forthcoming in this regard. It said that, "In conducting these audits, FAA inspectors review the suppliers’ organizational management structure, procedures for product design control, software quality assurance, manufacturing processes, manufacturing controls (including calibration), and supplier control (how well the suppliers oversee the vendors that supply parts to them)."

No other mention of software is in the report, like, how good these software quality assurance processes are.

For those of you in the business who know - a question. How much, if any, is legacy commercial aircraft system software outsourced to and maintained by third-party suppliers? And if it is, are the risks the same, less or more than what is being found with aircraft parts maintenance that is outsourced?

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said recently that by 2017, consumers and taxpayers will spend more than $4 trillion on health care, accounting for 20% of every dollar spent. According to a story in the Boston Globe, in 2006, individuals and the government spent $2.1 trillion on health care, an average of $7,026 a person, while 2017, health spending will cost an estimated $13,101 a person.

In the face of these huge projected costs, President Bush has reiterated his call in newly proposed legislation for a national inter-operable electronic health record (EHR) system and making electronic personal health records (PHR) available to Medicare beneficiaries. The PHR proposed legislation, according to news reports, could be used as a back door approach to force doctors and hospitals to implement EHRs.

The Bush Administration has consistently viewed EHRs as a critical means for controlling Medicare costs (some in administration believe that EHRs will "save" Medicare), as well as other medical costs that the government pays for. However, if your primary design criterion for a national EHR system is to control costs, then do not be surprised that the quality of patient care is likely to come in a distant second place as a result. This risk and others has not been examined in any detail; at least in comparison to the supposed benefits.

The benefits of EHRs are not unsubstantial, but they shouldn't be seen as magic elixirs. There is serious doubt by many (including me) that EHRs will reduce health care costs as much as expected. As one health care economist told me, "As long as demand for health care outstrips supply, costs are going to continue to increase."

And as the US population continues to age, new medical technology emerges that promises new cures and treatments, and legal liabilities stay the same, to name only a few health care cost drivers, demand and the resultant cost for health care will continue spiraling upward.

UK-based Nationwide Building Society fessed up to an ATM glitch which led to 7,500 of its Northern Ireland customers not being debited for their cash withdrawals from November 2007 to February 2008.

The story in ComputerWeekly said that it appeared that it was an IT-related fault in the building society's connection to the national Link processing system, most likely related to an upgrade performed last year.

In a related BBC story, the Northern Ireland area coordinator for Nationwide is quoted as saying, "In December, the Link organisation upgraded the ATM system. Unfortunately our system didn't pick that up correctly and we apologise for that."

A total of about £400,000 was not debited from customers as it should have been. The Bank now plans to debit the cash from customer accounts on the 10th of March. Nationwide says that overdrawn customers as a result of this action will not be charged.

In an under-reported story, it appears that the large New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) drop of 416.02 or 3.29 percent last 27 February 2007 (which was at the time the seventh largest drop in exchange history) was in part related to a bigger than previously admitted to computer problem at Dow Jones.

According to the AP story, "Part of the Dow's drop turned out to be not a decline, but a miscalculation. ... high volume that day overwhelmed a data-checking program on the company's [Dow Jone's] Financial Information Distribution System, a server that delivers real-time trade data used to calculate Dow Jones index levels."

"That meant the readings of the Dow were delayed, and therefore misleading, beginning at about 12:50 p.m., but the discrepancy was not caught until 2:20."

"At 2:56, Dow Jones employees flipped on a backup system, which wasn't running the data-checking program. At 2:59, the Dow's calculation caught up with the previous trades, falling 170 points almost instantaneously."

The NYSE claims that the problem didn't have much effect on the market that day, but I would be surprised that a 170 point instantaneous drop wouldn't have some effect on somebody.

Dow Jones promises that it will be quicker in the future than the 36 minutes it took to switch on the backup system the last time.

About two weeks ago, it was reported that US and European customs officers seized more than 360,000 counterfeit computer chips and network components bearing more than 40 trademarks in a joint operation last November and December.

Last week, US and Canadian seized 400 counterfeit Cisco network hardware components and labels with an estimated retail value of more than $76 million, the US Justice Department announced. Now ComputerWeekly is reporting that there is a worry that counterfeit Cisco hardware may be on corporate and government networks, and thus possibly posing a security risk.

Computer Weekly also suggests in its story that Cisco may be hesitant to spell out in detail how to spot a fake, since it will let counterfeiters know what to correct.

Cisco, however, has published an internal guide to help spot fakes, which, interestingly enough, is stamped "confidential." More information on uncovering counterfeit Cisco equipment can be found here.

UPDATE: It turns out that IEEE Spectrum had an article on counterfeit chips and electronics in 2006. You can read it here.

The Australian Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon decided it was time to invoke the IT mercy rule and announced that he was terminating the ill-fated Super Seasprite avionics upgrade program after 11 years of futility.

The total amount the canceled program will cost Australian taxpayers is estimated to be about AU$1.3 billion, not counting the costs of procuring a new helicopter or the costs/risks associated with Australia's eight ANZAC class frigates not having helicopters providing anti-surface and surveillance capabilities for probably another 5 years.

Nine of the Seasprites have been delivered to the Australian Navy's 805 Squadron based at Nowra, New South Wales, but have been grounded for safety reasons.

Maybe they can be made into nice flower planters in front of the main gate.

"We have discovered serious problems with the FDCA (Field Data Collection Automation) program and I am personally involved in bringing key issues to the surface and developing a way forward. In short, the current situation is unacceptable. The American people expect and deserve a timely and accurate Decennial Census..."

So testified Carlos M. Gutierrez, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce at a hearing yesterday in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on the status of the 2010 Census. Gutierrez finally awoke to the fact that the 2010 Census is in deep and very deep kimshe.

So serious is the trouble that in a highly unusual mid-session announcement, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) yesterday designated the 2010 Census Project as High Risk, which is in my opinion about 2 years late, since the program is already in trouble, not potentially in trouble.

The cause of the problem which the Census has been trying to paper over for quite some time is that it depends on 500,000 handheld computers to replace its paper-based collection system. As is always the case, it looked very easy to do on paper, but proved to be harder to do in reality.

The Census reasoning seems to have been along the lines of: if Fed Ex can use handhelds to track packages, why can we do the same for collecting Census data - should be dead easy, right? The idea in itself wasn't not outrageous, as long as the risks involved were clearly understood and managed. The GAO report makes clear - as the GAO has several times in the past - that they weren't (and from reading the report still aren't) on both accounts.

In Gutierrez's testimony, he goes on to state that the Census discovered late last year a "gap" as he calls it "between the capacity to get the work done and the amount of time remaining. One of the main reasons for this gap was significant miscommunication concerning technical requirements between the Census Bureau and Harris [the prime contractor]. The lack of clarity in defining technical requirements was a serious problem especially with regard to the testing and functionality of the handheld devices in a full Census environment. For example, discrepancies arose over data upload times, screen change speed and data storage capabilities."

So let me get this straight - with a little more than six months to go before a full scale dress rehearsal of the system, it was discovered that there was still major miscommunication between the Census and the contractor about basic performance parameters for the device to be used by hundreds of thousands of census takers? Weren't these parameters weren't spelled out in detail in the contract? Or did Harris follow the contract, and now the Census has figured out that what it specified won't do? Did Harris tell them there were problems, but the Census didn't listen? What the hell happened here?

Interestingly, back in November 2005, the Government Communications Systems Division (GCSD) of Harris achieved "a Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) Maturity Level 3 rating. The Level 3 rating denotes superior process maturity within the division's program management, engineering, quality assurance, and other disciplines, and achievement of this rating has become a competitive differentiator on many government programs." I wonder if this rating helped Harris win the Census contract?

At the very least, I think the division's CMMI rating may need to be re-evaluated, or maybe better, the US government better start looking at what, if anything, SEI CMMI Level 3 actually means in practice.

Alas, the Census provided Harris with an updated set of requirements in mid-January 2008; hopefully they are the correct and technically feasible ones.

In the testimony yesterday, it came out that it may cost another $2 billion to "ensure" that the 2010 Census actually can succeed, on top of the $11.5 billion already allocated to the Census (of which $3 billion was for the IT portion of the Census). It also appears the probability of completing the Census on time is dropping rapidly unless there is a marked turnaround. The dress rehearsal in May will give better indication of the true risk status of the situation.

Gutierrez' also said yesterday, "There is no question that both the Census Bureau and Harris could have done things differently and better over the past couple of years."

No kidding?

What I really want to know is who in management is going to be held accountable for this excess level of risk mismanagement, incompetent communication, and rank amateurism in program and contract management. Or is it business as usual, with "mistakes were made," "we have learned from this experience," blah, blah, blah.

The folks at Government Executive have been following this slowly unfolding big time blunder in the making closely, and you can read more about it here, here and here.

Dennis Clem, the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s (OSD) chief information officer, reportedly said last week at the Information Processing Interagency Conference that the June 2007 network hack into defense computers stole an “amazing amount" of information, according to Government Executive magazine.

According to the magazine Clem said, “We don't know when they'll use the information they stole, [which was] an amazing amount, [including] processes and procedures that will be valuable to adversaries.”

While Clem didn’t say who the attackers were, the speculation has been that it was Chinese government sponsored hackers, a charge the government vigorously denies. CNN posted a story yesterday interviewing a number of Chinese hackers that suggests that the Chinese government was indeed behind the attack.

According to Government Executive, after the intrusion was discovered and the network shut down, it took OSD three weeks, $4 million, and the introduction of a boatload of new security processes before recovery was complete. The US Department of Defense gets some 70,000 intrusion attempts per day.

In a case of good timing, according to a story in yesterday’s Washington Post, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is next week going to conduct a follow-on to its Cyber Storm I exercise. The Post says that Cyber Storm II is planned to be “the largest-ever exercise designed to evaluate the mettle of information technology experts and incident response teams from 18 federal agencies, including the CIA, Department of Defense, FBI, and NSA, as well as officials from nine states, including Delaware, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In addition, more than 40 companies will be playing, including Cisco Systems, Dow Chemical, McAfee, and Microsoft.” Also involved will be government agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

The exercise is needed none too soon, according to another Government Executive story this week that quotes National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell that the US is not prepared to deal with threats against military and civil networks and information systems.

In an Ars Technica story pointed out to me by IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Joshua Romero, there is some data that suggests that the drop in university and college student enrollment in computer science has bottomed off, at least for the moment. Information gathered from the Computing Research Association shows that for the past three years, newly declared CS majors has remained in the vicinity of around 7,500 or so. This is still about half as many as those who declared a CS major in 2000.

Computer science professor Jacob Slonim from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada blames the media instead of computer science professors for some of the decline in enrollment the past few years, at least in Canada. Slonim is quoted in ITWorldCanada as saying, “Every time Nortel lays off employees, it makes major headlines. But when CGI says it’s looking for 2,500 new people, we never hear about it. The fact that I’m forecasting the need for 80,000 new IT people by 2010 hasn’t made headlines either.”

Last week, a Goldman Sachs analyst warned in a research report is likely to slip another three to even six months due to continued difficulties with getting parts. Boeing refuses to comment directly to the report, other than saying, “Boeing is in the process of conducting an assessment of its 787 delivery schedule and will communicate it to customers around the end of first quarter, as previously indicated in January.”

From previous Boeing comments, a slip looks more and more likely.

In addition, All Nippon Airways (ANA) is demanding clarification of Boeing's 787 delivery schedule. According to the story in today's Sydney Morning Herald, the airline is very unhappy: " 'The longer we wait, the more servicing of the 767s we will need to do,' said Mr Shinobe, an executive vice-president at All Nippon. 'Some of them may become unfit for flying.' "

The story says that in February Japan Air said that it was considering buying Airbus A350 XWB planes to help increase its fleet's fuel efficiency last month after Boeing announced the delay in the 787-3 version of the Dreamliner.

If Boeing isn't careful, the Dreamliner may start getting a new name, like Dreamloser.

IEEE Spectrum Senior Editor Harry Goldstein sent me a link to a ZATZ Publishing article titled, Where Have All the E-Mails Gone?" that discusses in detail what can only be called the appalling and absolutely amateurish IT practices at the White House in regard to its email system and its legal requirement to preserve them.

Currently, tens of thousands or more of White House e-mail messages that span a period of up to two and a half years may (or may not) be missing - no one seems, however, to be able to provide a definite answer.

The White House claims that "there is no evidence" of missing any e-mails: it just can't produce them.

If that explanation makes your head hurt, be forewarned - your logic circuits will be overloaded even more after reading the explanations in the ZATZ article as to whey they can't be produced.

It looks like Virginia has decided that it will now charge residents $5 to renew their vehicle, motorcycle or trailer registrations in person at Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices. The reason is to "encourage" residents to renew on-line, by mail, or over the phone because the expected wait times at DMV offices in Virginia when REAL ID gets implemented next January are expected to climb at least 200%. The DMV is also asking the state government for an additional $7 million to hire new employees to cope with the expected increased workload.

Also, a story in Government Computing News indicates that states are quietly complying with the 1st of May REAL ID requirements, rather than fight them, at least at this time. The Department of Homeland Security says that only a handful of states have failed to either obtain waivers or comply with the requirements.

The Sunday New York Times has an interesting story on the continuing saga of the lawsuit against Microsoft by two plaintiffs contending, according to the Times, that "Microsoft’s 'Windows Vista Capable' stickers were misleading when affixed to machines that turned out to be incapable of running the versions of Vista that offered the features Microsoft was marketing as distinctive Vista benefits." The complaint can be found here.

A judge last month granted class-action lawsuit status to the suit, which is scheduled to go to trial in October.

Microsoft, of course, says that this complaint is hokum, as its response explains here.

Unfortunately, 158 pages of internal Microsoft emails by employees like Michael Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management, tends to undercut Microsoft's insistence that there was nothing misleading with Vista. Nash wrote that he "personally got burned" by buying a laptop that was labeled as Windows Vista Capable: "I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine."

The emails make for amusing, but not surprising, reading for anyone who has been in the software business for more than a month. They tell a story of tough design trade-offs, "hold your nose" compromises, broken promises, schedule pressure, vaporware marketing, and so on. In other words, business as usual in any large IT development shop, commercial or government.

In fact, the emails are something every high school or university student should read to understand what it is like out there in the IS&T world. Software development is like sausage making - you don't want to look too closely at what is used as filler or goes on during the process.

In a disturbing article in today's Boston Globe, it appears that there are large security gaps in "implanted devices that help regulate heartbeats and use wireless technology."

Dr. William H. Maisel, director of the Medical Device Safety Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who led a research project into medical device security risks, says in the story:

"With some technical expertise, we were able to retrieve information from the device in an unauthorized fashion. We were able to send commands to the device in an unauthorized fashion and could reprogram settings and even tell the device to deliver a high-voltage shock."

Maisel goes on to say that patients with pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators that have wireless capability shouldn't be concerned because of the high level of technical skill needed to conduct such an attack.

Maisel suggests that device manufacturers and maybe regulators may need to consider adding an audible tone or a vibration that "could let a patient know whenever someone is communicating with an implanted heart device."

While the risk may be remote, I can see all sorts of new television murder mystery plots developing. A person wanting to bump off their spouse or relative who has a pacemaker hires some mysterious hacker to do the job, or a group of young people, fed up with seeing their Social Security and Medicare taxes going up or worried that there won't be any left for them as they grow older deciding to knock off seniors en mass by driving by nursing homes and fooling with implanted medical devices. Tech savvy lawyer, doctor, private investigator, neighbor sets out to solve the case, blah, blah, blah.

TV plots aside, I do wonder, though, how soon we'll see hackers in the near future offering software to destabilize medical devices for the right price.

There was a small item over at NASA Watch that references a Times of India story that states that "12% [of the] scientists and 38% [of the] doctors in the US are Indians, and in NASA, 36% or almost 4 out of 10 scientists are Indians."

The story goes on to say, "If that's not proof enough of Indian scientific and corporate prowess, digest this: 34% employees at Microsoft, 28% at IBM, 17% at Intel and 13% at Xerox are Indians."

These statistics were presented by Indian government minister D Purandeshwari, Minister of State for Human Resource Development on Monday to the Rajya Sabha or Parliament of India.

No stats on the percentage that are in the information technology & systems business, but according to Bill Gates, probably not enough. Gates warned Congress today that the U.S. needs to raise the cap on H-1B visas for skilled foreign nationals.

If not, Gates said, then "U.S. companies simply will not have the talent they need to innovate and compete," and all those foreign students receiving their education at U.S. universities will have to leave, to the detriment of US high tech companies.

Today's London Telegraph has a story on the new European Union funded open-source, open-hardware Symbrion project that aims to create, according to the website, "super-large-scale swarms of robots, which can dock with each other and symbiotically share energy and computational resources within a single artificial-life-form."

"When it is advantageous to do so, these swarm robots can dynamically aggregate into one or many symbiotic organisms and collectively interact with the physical world via a variety of sensors and actuators."

The project, which involves researchers from a "swarm" of ten universities, hopes to develop applications that support search and rescue missions, space exploration and medicine.

Prof. Alan Winfield from the University of the West of England, Bristol, is quoted in the Telegraph story as saying:

"A swarm could be released into a collapsed building following an earthquake. They could form themselves into teams searching for survivors or to lift rubble off stranded people. Some robots might form a chain allowing rescue workers to communicate with survivors while others assemble themselves into a ‘medicine bot' to give first aid. The robots have functionality on their own, but they can also combine together or adapt and change as the situation requires. The individual robots won't change physically, but they will adapt and evolve their functionally."

Shades of transformers!

The project is set to complete in 2013.

Speaking of transformers, check out this Toshiba-Softbank model 815T PB transformer cell phone.

Maybe the Symbrion folks and they can get together and create a cell phone swarm for who knows what - any suggestions out there?

Over at Baseline magazine, there is a lengthy article that is drawing a lot of heated discussion on whether there is a shortage of IT workers in the US or not. The article says that claims of an IT shortage are nothing more than a well-publicized myth. In fact, there may even be a slight surplus.

Furthermore, the article points out, if there was a true shortage, IT worker wages would be going up, which they haven't.

The article quotes different folks like Dr. Ron Hira, professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the book Outsourcing America (bits on-line here), who believe that the claims of an IT shortage is to further certain high tech business interests: "the motive is to get the Feds to loosen immigration restrictions for cheap foreign labor, to increase supply of workers in order to reduce labor costs and to justify offshore outsourcing efforts."

You can check out Hira's views expressed before Congress when he was representing the IEEE-USA on the issue of outsourcing high-tech jobs here.

My previous IT job related posts and discussions can be found here, here, here and here.

The Canadian Space Agency's Dextre (Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator) robot apparently needs a software patch to fix a timing problem that is preventing Dextre from fully powering up.

According to CSA's website, "Dextre is an essential tool for maintaining and servicing the space station. With its dual-arm design providing added flexibility, Dextre will remove and replace smaller components on the Station’s exterior, where precise handling is required. It will be equipped with lights, video equipment, a tool platform and four tool holders."

"Dextre is a complex robot designed to perform intricate maintenance and servicing tasks on the outside of the ISS. Dextre will carry out delicate work that, so far, could only be accomplished by astronauts during spacewalk activities. In other words, Dextre will provide an alternative to astronauts, considerably reducing the amount of time that they have to venture out of the ISS to perform demanding spacewalks and providing more time for them to perform science on the ISS."

Engineers are "confident" that the patch will fix the problem (I noticed they didn't say software programmers were confident, though).

I wonder if the engineers are as confident as I am during every Microsoft Patch and Pray Tuesday?

Update: At the end of the day, it wasn't a software problem as first thought. The patch was uploaded, but nothing happen. Engineers next thought it was a faulty cable. This was by-passed, and power was restored. You can read more about it here at ComputerWorld.

A small Suffolk County, England town has had to close its website because it was receiving thousands of classified US Air Force emails. According to a story in the London Telegraph, "Documents including sensitive information about presidential flight paths, military strategy and passwords flooded Gary Sinnott's inbox after he set up www.mildenhall.com to promote his home town."

Royal Air Force Base Mildenhall is home to several US Air Force units including the 100th Air Refueling Wing, 352nd Special Operations Group, 95th Reconnaissance Squadron, 488th Intelligence Squadron among others.

Makes you wonder why you need to hack into US defense networks when you can just set up a domain name that is close in name to a US military installation.

The Dutch tax office admitted that 730,000 digital tax returns submitted by early filers to the tax office for some reason erased by their computer system and need to be resent.

Tax office officials assume that those who have had their records lost have their returns on their computer and will be able to easily resend them. They have until 1 April to do so.

According to Radio Netherlands, earlier in February, "another problem with the tax office computers meant that clients were unable to identify themselves properly. For a whole week, nobody was able to submit a tax declaration electronically."

Last June, tax office software that did not function correctly forced over 400,000 companies to resubmit payroll information.

The continuing problems at the Dutch tax office has forced the Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager into reorganizing the office, but admits it will take years to fix.

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) national electronic health record (EHR) program NPfIT (National Programme for IT) has spent £1.5 billion less than expected as of April 2007, ComputerWeekly reports. Part of the reason for the lower spend is that delays caused fewer EHR systems rolled out to UK hospitals, however.

It should be noted that while the UK government spent less, it doesn't mean that the money wasn't spent by someone. Since NPfIT vendors only get paid after delivery and acceptance, much of that £1.5 billion was likely spent, but by vendors. When the NPfIT finally gets rolled out, the total cost of it will be very hard to determine, since there will be an official government cost, and then there will be the large costs incurred by the vendors that they had to eat (which is why some vendors like Accenture bailed out of the program). Anyone looking at the NPfIT as a cost model for a national EHR system needs to be very careful in doing the sums.

The NHS also said that what has been delivered under NPfIT has saved an additional £208 million from the digitalization of x-rays and the decommissioning of legacy IT systems.

Hannaford Brothers supermarket chain disclosed that it had a breach of its computer system beginning last December that exposed 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers, as well as led to at least 1,800 fraud cases, the Boston Globe reported today. The breach affected stores in five states - Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Maine - and 270 of its stores. The breach wasn't suspected until February and continued until March of this year.

Unlike the TJX breach, Hannaford appeared to meet all the industry standards involving how customer data is supposed to be protected.

It hasn't been disclosed how customer information was compromised, but in a more detailed story at ComputerWorld, the speculation is that it was stolen in transit between Hannaford stores and the financial institutions that process the stores' credit/debit card transactions.

I don't know if this qualifies as the first million plus data breach in the US for 2008 since the breach began last year - if it counts, I guess we can ring the bell.

Also, Gregory Kopiloff was sentenced at the U.S. District Court in Seattle, Washington yesterday to four years in federal prison for using file-sharing software to steal at least 83 identities. It is the first federal case against those using file-sharing software for identity theft.

The Wall Street Journal today has a story (subscription may be required) about GPS problems, like one driver that was directed to drive off a 200 foot cliff and another that directed the driver into oncoming traffic. The latter decided to name his GPS unit Christine after the possessed '58 Plymouth Fury in Stephen King's horror novel of the same name because he thinks the GPS is trying to kill him.

I ran a similar post about GPS problems in England a little while ago.

The WSJ story quotes Clifford Nass, a communication professor at Stanford University and author of two books titled, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places and Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship about how humans have a tendency to follow the instruction of machines over their common sense: "Rather than trust our judgment of nature, we let technology tell us what's going on."

I must remember that as it gets closer to the time for my children to learn how to drive, instead of just warning them not to blindly follow their friends' poor judgments, I need to add the phrase, "And if the GPS tells you to drive off a bridge, are you going to do it?"

You can listen to Professor Nass explain how we react to computerized speech here.