Article from CBS on a national failure of the notam system yesterday, blamed on its age and not cyberattack. My biggest shock is that notams have been renamed to (gender-neutral?) Notice to Air Missions.
What I thought was amusing was my non-pilot European friends emailing me in shock that the entire US air transportation system had collapsed due to an IT problem, along of course with hoping that our house is still intact after the torrential rains (we’re had a bit more rain than usual so far this year). So goes the modern media and its endless fear based drama and disinformation campaign.
Re ‘Notice to Air Missions’, the first time I heard it on the ATIS I didn’t have a clue that they meant NOTAMs. Then after a while I realized it’s just the same old thing, still providing very limited utility for airmen like me 
Capitaine wrote:
My biggest shock is that notams have been renamed to (gender-neutral?) Notice to Air Missions.
EASA still calls it “Notice to Airmen.” ICAO seems to have eliminated the readout entirely and regards NOTAM as a word and not an acronym.
Woke FAA.
Woke FAA idiots, doing their worst under pressure to avoid providing useful services to what they themselves call Airmen.
Not to worry, Mayor Pete is on it!
Capitaine wrote:
Notice to Air Missions.
Just be happy the woke bs crowd did not adopt the idiotic German system, or would you like Notice To Air Missioningenden:In:en:div:es*whatsoever … ?
It is quite interesting they continue to de-personalise everything, shift accountability from people to some bubbly anonymous thingy so in the end “The System” or “The Technology” is “guilty”, instead of somebody:in:en:es*div takes the blame. I don’t like it, as it surrenders our earthly life to some religiousoide spheres better taken for afterlife. Why not NOTAP Notice To Air People, or do the fully exploded bs and do NOTAM Notice To Air Men as well as NOTAW Notice To Air Women and NOTAD Notice to Air Diversissis, so everybody can life in their own bubble?
Won’t comment on the ancient technology at FAA which just broke after so many years, finally.
blamed on its age and not cyberattack
I don’t believe the first one. Software doesn’t degrade over time. There are many jokes like that among coders but it doesn’t actually happen.
The most likely explanation is somebody screwed up. IT is a neverending job (great if you need bread on the table at home, a real PITA if you own the business which has to run an online shop, various online services, etc) because things regularly break. Perhaps the most common example is HTTPS certificates: due to the “misguided civil liberties” crowd, lead by the “self appointed guardian of civil liberties” known as “google”, we have “HTTPS-everything” and each site now needs a certificate. These expire periodically. The current fashion (97.5% of server-side coding is fashion-driven, because that generates the largest amount of regular work → bread on the table at home) is to have a short expiry on these, and renew them with an automatic process. Of course this breaks every once in a while. And you have to call up “the IT man” to dig around and fix it (yet again). Eurocontrol once lost both the main site (Brussels) and the backup site (Paris) because some certificate(s) expired, and … we all know the story
Probably, nobody had the job of maintaining the certificates.
The more real problem is hacking. If you have not updated your servers for 15+ years (possible but very unlikely for the FAA) they will be easily hackable. Open source software is the most vulnerable because everybody knows where to hit it. Hence every PHP-BB forum has been hacked many times. The admins usually suppress the info…
ATC etc software is antiquated everywhere. US and Europe… Partly because the profession recruits people who are “captured by the system” and think what they have is brilliant. Partly because the software vendors are weird companies writing weird code which is designed to be hard to maintain because they get paid a lot of money.
Re PC, well, it’s a ratchet
It goes only one way: forwards. It takes real balls to push back, you get hammered by a load of virtue signallers people (while the ~95% who agree with you stay silent) and most people have lost interest. So we silently watch mankind walk to the edge of the cliff – at which point mankind invariably decides to step back. That is why homo sapiens is still here, but we aren’t there yet when it comes to PC and especially some of the more disturbing aspects.
Peter wrote:
I don’t believe the first one. Software doesn’t degrade over time. There are many jokes like that among coders but it doesn’t actually happen.
Of course you’re right in that software doesn’t literally degrade. But the environment in which the software operates in almost all cases changes over time and that may cause issues.
Peter wrote:
The more real problem is hacking. If you have not updated your servers for 15+ years (possible but very unlikely for the FAA) they will be easily hackable. Open source software is the most vulnerable because everybody knows where to hit it. Hence every PHP-BB forum has been hacked many times. The admins usually suppress the info…
Peter, if you don’t update the software, then anything would happen, but with OpenSource you at least have a chance to install a free update. If the software is not maintained, you could hire a freelancer. With the vendor you are truly and completely stuffed. For example, if the vendor decides that they don’t want to support something, you have no choise but to throw it away now. And that kind of crap happens with the world leading vendors for existing products with known exploits in the wild, for example Cisco – https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/13/cisco_smb_critical_router_flaw_no_fix/
