Issue 84: Chips Go Bad, Learn From Our Cyber Mistakes, Automation at the USPS

Issue 84: Chips Go Bad, Learn From Our Cyber Mistakes, Automation at the USPS

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The threads this week:
When Bugs Come from the Chips, not the Code
Learning From Our Cyber Mistakes
Automation at the United States Postal Service
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When Bugs Come from the Chips, not the Code
Imagine for a moment that the millions of computer chips inside the servers that power the largest data centers in the world had rare, almost undetectable flaws. And the only way to find the flaws was to throw those chips at giant computing problems that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago.
As the tiny switches in computer chips have shrunk to the width of a few atoms, the reliability of chips has become another worry for the people who run the biggest networks in the world. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and many other sites have experienced surprising outages over the last year.
—
Tiny Chips, Big Headaches: As the largest computer networks continue to grow, some engineers fear that their smallest components could prove to be an Achilles’ heel
, New York Times, 7-Feb-2022
We have all experienced unexplained computer errors.
The software programmer among us cringe and think about what they possibly did wrong.
Did I use the wrong variable in that loop, did I miss a
hyphen
?
What if the programmer did everything correctly and the computer just «glitched»?
Modern computers have many layers of redundancy built into them—error-correcting memory, multi-drive storage volumes, checksums on blocks of data, and so forth.
This article from the
New York TImes
points to a new cause…the physics of electrons moving over very small spaces.
As the hardware architects press for smaller, faster, more electrically efficient chips, they will more often face this challenge and need to account for it in their designs.
Learning From Our Cyber Mistakes
The new Cyber Safety Review Board is tasked with examining significant cybersecurity events that affect government, business and critical infrastructure. It will publish reports on security findings and recommendations, officials said…
The board, officials have said, is modeled loosely on the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates and issues public reports on airplane crashes, train derailments…