here were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

Shortly before midnight on April 10, the counter exceeded that number, resulting in chaos. Because the counter was used to generating a unique identifier for each call, new calls were rejected. And because the programmers hadn’t anticipated the problem, they hadn’t created alarms to call attention to it. Nobody knew what was happening. Dispatch centers in Washington, California, Florida, the Carolinas, and Minnesota, serving 11 million Americans, struggled to make sense of reports that callers were getting busy signals. It took until morning to realize that Intrado’s software in Englewood was responsible, and that the fix was to change a single number.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/

As the 184-metre-long tanker was docking in Novorossiysk, Le Meur was on the ship’s bridge overseeing the final approach. Suddenly, the ship’s warning signals started blaring. “As soon as the GPS lost the signal, we had tons of alarms,” he says. “You cannot miss it. Pretty much everything on the bridge started raising alarms.”

Instead of displaying Atria’s actual position, the ship’s systems located it 25 to 30 miles away – at Gelendzhik airport. GPS disruptions aren’t uncommon, Le Meur says, but most of the time when problems happen they’re limited to a few hundred metres.

“In my entire career, it’s my first time I have experienced such a big discrepancy.” To be sure of the failure during the incident in June, the crew restarted both the main GPS and the backup unit, only to find both systems still gave the same incorrect positioning data.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/black-sea-ship-hacking-russia

It may not be the most surprising revelation, given profits are sinking faster than a boat without a hulland big-name partners are jumping ship left and right, but the founder of Microsoft has presumably left Windows Mobile for the greener pastures of Google’s Android.

https://www.neowin.net/news/bill-gates-has-made-the-move-to-android-has-no-love-for-an-iphone

https://www.siammandalay.com/products/serpent-cube

The “notch” on the new iPhone X is not just strange, interesting, or even odd — it is bad. It is bad design, and as a result, bad for the user experience. The justification for the notch (the new Face ID tech, which lets you unlock the device just by looking at it) could have easily been accomplished with no visual break in the display. Yet here is this awkward blind spot cradled by two blobs of actual screenspace.

https://theoutline.com/post/2352/apple-is-really-bad-at-design

What isn’t Telegram saying about its connections to the Kremlin?

The supposedly secure messaging app has employees in St. Petersburg, multiple sources say, in the same building as Kremlin-influenced social network VK.

https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-about-its-connections-to-the-kremlin