When Information Technology Attacks?

After several decades of computerization, most people enjoy a life that is almost free from problems with the information technology that is administered by others on their behalf. Public institutions and private companies have improved systems and processes to the point where glitches and mistakes are pretty rare.rnWhen they do occur, the reactions can range from agony to mirth to bemusement at the fate of those unfortunate enough to be affected.rnOver a decade ago, in Portland, Oregon, a strong candidate for mayor was given the freedom as council member to decide which firm was going to build the new billing system for the water bureau. A year later, as the system came on line, people started seeing their water bills triple. They would complain and then the city would state that they had to pay or lose service. A couple of months later, the city admitted that the new system had overcharged certain people, not charged others, and generally did not have the capability to provide accurate billing for any customer. The mayor-to-be never became mayor and the people that were affected still check their water bills carefully each month.rnSeveral years later, when consumers were getting excited about the joys of cloud computing, Microsoft's new Danger division muffed an upgrade process, temporarily wiping out the online data of several hundred thousand T-mobile customers. Given that the customers were tied to a phone that required that they store their contacts online, it became even more of a problem when the backups proved to be initially incomplete, leaving many customers with gaps in their address books for a significant time period. The event took some of the wind out of the sails of the cloud computing movement.rnIt was a couple of years after that that the IT department for the City of San Francisco was almost completely shut down after a network administrator that worked their started to have problems with his boss. The administrator set the city's network so that only he could access parts of it before being asked to leave. He refused to give control back to anyone except the Mayor, on the grounds that if he gave control to his bosses, they would sabotage the systems and then blame him. He was lodged in jail at 5 million dollars bail, a pretty high amount for a computer crime. Eventually, the Mayor visited him and retrieved the password, averting continuing problems for the city and its network.rnLast year, in an horrible tragedy that underlines how interconnected technology is to us, a premature baby in Chicago died when the medical administrator that was programming the infant's formula into a drug dispensing system accidentally entered the wrong numbers into a field, inadvertently creating a lethal dose of formula.