Black Out

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy
or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy


On the recommendation of a clever German friend, I recently read Marc Elsberg’s Black Out.

It’s a bestseller about the effects an outage of power has on a swath of European countries and the US. Without giving away the plot, it was a coordinated attack which could have been by industry insiders, terrorists, or a rogue state.

It’s a gripping storyline, so I will let you find out by yourself!

With the current suspicion of external actors such as North Korea, China, Russia and others closer to home, it puts an interesting spin on how without secure and constant electrical supply, our interconnected and largely segmented & privatised society, could literally grind to a halt in days or a few short weeks.

Increasingly, we rely on embedded software code to enable access to homes and buildings, regulate our environments and supply our amenities. Stuxnet showed us how vulnerable our software is, when in 2010, over 200,000 machines were affected. It had been five years in development, longer than the planning that goes on behind some revolutions!
You might remember the London & South East electricity outage in Aug 2019, crippled 300,000 customers and brought some rail services to a standstill. That showed how fragile our systems can be.

With the rise of IOT (Internet of things), which overall is a positive thing I believe, how can security be guaranteed? Programmers love black doors and Easter Eggs. While perhaps a bit of (harmless) fun, these all add vulnerabilities, often at firmware level. Apart from the ‘published methods & functions’ in our devices, how many lay dormant, waiting to be activated by activists, terrorists, a foreign power, or even our own governments? In the recent turn that Brexit has taken in the UK, some info has been leaked about the powers, being prepared, just in case of civil unrest.

Any programmer knows that one persons bug, can be another’s ‘feature’. I am sure some readers of this will have experienced this phenomenon in the past where an upgrade removed an old bug, that was being used productively. Its certainly happened to me.

How good will QC (Quality Control) be, as IOT makes even greater use of AI? Potentially daily, Gigabytes or more of data is going to be being processed from each of our homes. How will that be protected, whether running through home assistants/Smart Speakers etc, or protected in the very core of the new (Huawei or not) 5G networks?

The point is that we layer software on software to run our world and increasing farm it out to the cheapest bidder. Good QC is expensive, often 2-3 times more that writing the original code if done seriously well. You only have to see some of the bugs that I encounter, from a variety of #SocialHousing systems each month, to see that cutting corners on quality testing costs everyone more in the long run. That includes keeping those software suppliers help desks staffed up with (in some cases) hundreds of calls to chew through daily.

It might be the right time now to think hard and deep about our software vulnerabilities. Do read the book, Black Out by Marc Elsberg. If you work in or rely on embedded software, it might just be your wake up call 🤔

Related Post: Beware Alexa, she listens all the time you know....  

 

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

David Bowie – Blackout.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.
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. . . . . . . . . . .

We Have a Technical Helpdesk

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK
or LinkedIn here uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/




Have you ever worked on a technical support desk? You will have certainly had to deal with or log calls on one at some stage, I am sure. They can be very irritating to work with and it's got to be said, dealing with it from the other side of the fence, as irritating too.

I have worked on a couple of helpdesks at two different software organisations, so I have been around the block on this one. You experience people meddling with data, doing unauthorised raw updates, breaking stuff and also find some of the most obvious bugs, that you would have expected any half decent QA or system testing would have revealed.

On the former, often users are not aware of their contract which pretty comprehensively will forbade them doing those raw updates. That's not suppliers being peevish, its protection for them and the client. If you scramble your data making it corrupt or unloadable in the application, your contract does not support it. Consequently, a charge will be certainly quoted to sort it out.

Equally, if your users do something slightly crazy, like run the annual/quarterly leaseholder debit twice, that's not technical support either and its unlikely that your software supplier will clean up all the transactions, from your accounts for free. Maybe for something like that, reach for last nights' system backup, restore and lose some up-time. It all depends on the severity of the mistake. Perhaps getting admin to manually reverse out (or mitigate the) changes, is the best way.

One example recently I heard about was a large RSL accidently raising 1,200 gas service works orders, when they were not required. The housing system had not error-ed, it had done exactly as designed & instructed.  It was far cheaper to have an admin resource chew through them all to cancel, than ask the system supplier to automate a one off fix to do the same task.  it is often costly for the supplier to bespoke something like this, as one cancellation may impact eight or more tables and other related contextual updates.

All types of things can be done to make systems more foolproof, however in my experience, fools can be pretty damned ingenious!

If you have never worked on a technical support helpdesk, here's a useful snapshot, in the event your system supplier offers you a job on one. Something I am told that can happen a lot in the social housing system sector. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG7hYnMyxyY 

Related Post: What sort of waste do you generate & tolorate inside your organisation?

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.


Gary Numan - We Have A Technical.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here
Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.
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