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RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest Sunday, 13 September 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 36

FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

Contents: Australian Bank Bungles Foreign Exchange Deal (Ken Ross) Computer misses the bus (Doug Barry) Quite a dish subverts Playboy channel (PGN) "Software Glitch Shuts Down Phones in Minneapolis" (Alan) Computer Syndrome (Mark Jackson, Simson L. Garfinkel)

The RISKS Forum is moderated. Contributions should be relevant, sound, in good taste, objective, coherent, concise, nonrepetitious. Diversity is welcome. Contributions to RISKS@CSL.SRI.COM, Requests to RISKS-Request@CSL.SRI.COM. FTP back issues Vol i Issue j from F4.CSL.SRI.COM:<RISKS>RISKS-i.j. Volume summaries for each i in max j: (i,j) = (1,46),(2,57),(3,92),(4,97).

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To: risks@csl.sri.com Subject: Australian Bank Bungles Foreign Exchange Deal Date: Sat, 12 Sep 87 11:20:11 +1000 From: Ken Ross <munnari!mulga.oz.au!kar@uunet.UU.NET>

(Quoted without permission from the Melbourne Age, 11 Sept 87, p3)

KEEP THE CASH, JUDGE TELLS MAN WHO WON $335,000 IN BANK BUNGLE --------------------------------------------------------------

A Fairfield man who made a windfall $335,000 profit after the National Australia Bank made a mistake in quoting an exchange rate on Sri Lankan rupees, won a Supreme Court action yesterday over the money.

Mr Justice Beach dismissed a claim by the bank that Mr Peter George Rogan had taken an unfair advantage of the bank because he must have known the bank had given him the wrong figure.

On 23 December last year, Mr Rogan, who had developed an interest in foreign currency transactions, collected a National Australia Bank list of exchange rates which showed 78.5 Sri Lankan rupees to the Australian dollar. The figure was confirmed in a telephone call to the bank. He bought rupees to the value of $104,500 and sold them to the Commonwealth Bank the next day for $440,258. (...)

Mr Justice Beach said he had found Mr Rogan to be an honest witness who believed than the Commonwealth and not the National had given him the wrong rate.

The manager of the National Australia Bank's international operations section, Mr Bob Farmer, ... told [Mr Rogan] that the bank had mistakenly entered the exchange rate for Central Pacific francs instead of Sri Lankan rupees into its computer on the day Mr Rogan bought the rupees. Mr Farmer asked if the bank could do a deal to rectify the loss, but Mr Rogan sought legal advice and declined to make any payment to the bank.

Mr Justice Beach said he accepted Rogan's belief at the time that the rupee must have been devalued because of internal strife, and that he believed he had been given the correct figure by the National Bank and that the Commonwealth's much different, unconfirmed figure, on the same day was because it had been slow to catch up and adjust its rate. He described Mr Rogan as an amateur in the world of foreign exchange dealings, rather than an experienced professional. He found that although an irregularity in the exchange rate entered into the bank's computer on 23 December was noticed within minutes, and the rate was withdrawn from use by bank staff, the incorrect figure remained on the bank's computer screens, and Mr Rogan had been given the rate on a number of occasions that day, including the three times that he had bought rupees during the morning, at lunchtime and in the afternoon. Mr Justice Beach dismissed the allegation that Mr Rogan had deliberately split his purchases into a number of parcels each below $10,000 to delay scrutiny of the transaction, and found that it was the National Bank which had first advised him to split deals in an earlier transaction. ...

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Date: Sun 13 Sep 87 15:29:13-PDT From: Peter G. Neumann <Neumann@csl.sri.com> Subject: Computer misses the bus To: RISKS@csl.sri.com

30,753 Minneapolis school children were victimized by a misaligned computer merge operation, with almost everyone receiving assignments for the wrong school bus for the new school year. For example, some first-graders were assigned to high school and teenagers were assigned to grade school. In each case the correct bus route for a given name was assigned to the name following in the list. (Thus, just a few children actually received the right assignment -- if two adjacent entries were to be on the same bus for the same school, as in the case of the first one of a pair of twins.) [Source: Minneapolis Star and Tribune, article by Kate Perry, 25 August 1987, contributed to RISKS by Doug Barry, CDC, Bloomington MN 55420]

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Date: Sun 13 Sep 87 15:15:18-PDT From: Peter G. Neumann <Neumann@csl.sri.com> Subject: Quite a dish subverts Playboy channel To: RISKS@csl.sri.com

The Playboy Channel was hit on the evening of 6 September with an attack reminiscent of the Captain Midnight case, when someone ``stepped on their transponder'', i.e., uplinked through the satellite dish antenna. The cable TV program interjection warned viewers to ``repent your sins.'' [Source: San Francisco Chronicle, 10 Sept 87, p. 21]

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Date: Sat, 12 Sep 87 13:10:36 CDT From: alan@umn-rei-uc.arpa To: risks@csl.sri.com Subject: "Software Glitch Shuts Down Phones in Minneapolis" [Unspecified Local newspaper headline, 12 Sept 1987]

Thirteen telephone exchanges in downtown Minneapolis went dead about 4 a.m. when a computer program for the Northwestern Bell switching system malfunctioned. About 50,000 customers were affected.

Although some service was restored by 8:35 a.m., Bell spokesman John Walker said the company was electronically limiting use of the troubled exchanges because of a surge in customer demand. That meant that calls were interrupted in some cases by a recorded message explaining all cir- cuits were busy, in other cases by a continuous busy signal.

Walker said the situation was not unlike a freeway traffic jam. "At this point, the wreckage has been cleared, but traffic is still moving slowly because lane use is limited," he said.

The exchanges involved were 332-6, 330,2,3,4,8, 370,2,5. The 348 exchange covers Minneapolis police and fire, but Paul Linnee, directory of emergency communications, said there were no emergency calls that went unanswered.

Walker said the glitch developed while the company was making what he described as a routine equipment modification in one of two computers. Employees were changing computer software that was to extend limits of customer service and add new features, he said.

"We don't know what went wrong with the new software," Walker said. He acknowledged there have been other service interruptions this year, "but nothing of this magnitude."

Walker said Northwestern Bell will continue to limit use of various exchanges "until we are satisfied the system is again stable."

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Date: 11 Sep 87 09:21:08 EDT (Friday) From: MJackson.Wbst@Xerox.COM <Mark Jackson> Subject: Computer Syndrome To: Risks@csl.sri.com

The first occurrence of this that I have heard of involved the tab equipment used on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. The following account is from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" (Richard P. Feynman, W. W. Norton & Co., 1985); does anyone know of an earlier incident?

Anyway, we decided that the big problem -- which was to figure out exactly what happened during the bomb's implosion, so you can figure out exactly how much energy was released and so on -- required much more calculating than we were capable of. A clever fellow by the name of Stanley Frankel realized that it could possibly be done on IBM machines. The IBM company had machines for business purposes, adding machines called tabulators for listing sums, and a multiplier that you put cards in and it would take two numbers from a card and multiply them. There were also collators and sorters and so on.

So Frankel figured out a nice program. If we got enough of these machines in a room, we could take the cards and put them through a cycle. Everybody who does numerical calculations now knows exactly what I'm talking about, but this was kind of a new thing then -- mass production with machines. We had done things like this on adding machines. Usually you go one step across, doing everything yourself. But this was different -- where you go first to the adder, then to the multiplier, then to the adder, and so on. So Frankel designed this system and ordered the machines from the IBM company, because we realized it was a good way of solving our problems...

Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches -- if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that -- and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly -- while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then "bitsi, bitsi, bitsi", and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease -- the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.

I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease. ...

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Date: Fri, 11 Sep 87 12:21:32 EDT From: Simson L. Garfinkel <simsong@cunixc.columbia.edu> To: risks@csl.sri.com Subject: "Computer Syndrome"

This happened to me once, two summers ago, when I was in the middle of a development effort that was taking up about 75 hours of time a week. One day, I was talking to a friend of mine and wanted to change the subject, to what we were doing tomorrow. Almost subconciously, I said the words "cd calendar" (cd being the unix comand to change directory) and saw the letters glowing in light green at the bottom of my visual field.

It started happening a lot. It scared me. Finally, I gave up computers.

-simson

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End of RISKS-FORUM Digest ************************