From: risks@CSL.SRI.COM (RISKS Forum)
Newsgroups: comp.risks
Subject: RISKS DIGEST 13.67
Date: 22 Jul 92 22:49:44 GMT
Reply-To: risks@csl.sri.com
Distribution: world
Organization: The Internet

RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest  Wednesday 22 July 1992  Volume 13 : Issue 67

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

  Contents:
More identical name confusion (plus Scientific American item) (Mark Bergman)
A computer as a criminal tool (Peter D. Junger)
American Airlines software development woes (Randall Neff)
RISKS of Antilock Braking Systems (David Palmer)
RISKS of BBS ownership (David R. Cohen via Scott Bailey)
The role of expertise in technological advances (Bertrand Meyer)
Telephone wiretapping (E. Kristiansen)
Bellcore threatens 2600 with lawsuit over BLV article (Emmanuel Goldstein)
Re: Export of 40-Digit RSA (Dorothy Denning)
Re: Qantas airliner challenged by US Pacific fleet (Leonard Erickson)
Re: Nuclear reactor control (Rusty Teasdale)
Re: Airbus -- Countering Urban Myths (Bjorn Freeman-Benson)
AVIATION restructuring in progress (Robert Dorsett)

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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 22 Jul 92 1:03:51 EDT
From: bergman@panix.com (Mark Bergman)
Subject: More identical name confusion (plus Scientific American article)

Here is another story from the AP wires about health service computers and name
collisions.  (There is also an article in this month's Scientific American,
"Achieving Electronic Privacy," by David Chaum, about encryption and smart card
transactions to ensure privacy _and_ verify each side to the transaction.)  I
don't feel qualified to comment, but I'd like to hear other people's thoughts.
Mark Bergman 718-855-9148         {cmcl2,psi,uunet,apple}!panix!bergman

      Computer Confuses Babies With Same Name, Denies Benefits to One

PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) - A Pensacola woman says her 5-month-old daughter cannot
get state social service benefits because a computer has her child confused
with a St. Petersburg baby with the same name.	The children, both named
Samantha Marie Morris, were born only eight days apart but are linked by a maze
of computer glitches haunting the Florida Department of Health and
Rehabilitative Services.  The Pensacola baby isn't getting food stamps or
Medicaid benefits, her mother, Tina Morris, said Monday.  "If my daughter had
an emergency, got sick or something, some places might take it, but they
wouldn't pay for it," she said.  "I've been real lucky. She hasn't been sick."
	The HRS' balky new $104.2 million computer thinks she is the St.
Petersburg Samantha, eligible for the same benefits and listed with the same
Social Security number, the Pensacola mother said.  HRS District Administrator
Chelly Schembera said she was unfamiliar with the case. She said the computer
problems that have been affecting the agency across the state exceeded normal
start-up glitches for a new system.  
        Ms. Morris said she spent two days at the local HRS office trying to
clear up her daughter's problem without success and that her case worker has
been trying since April.  The computer problems have caused Ms. Morris and
other HRS clients to wait in long lines.  She said she waited 20 minutes
outside under a hot sun to get food stamps last week for the rest of her family
and once in the building was told it would take another hour.
	Schembera said the agency is considering lemonade stands, extra chairs,
awnings, baby changing tables and play rooms to help clients bear the long
waits.
	One man already has capitalized by setting up a snack stand outside an
HRS building in Pensacola, accepting food stamps as payment.  "This guy could
be fairly wealthy by the time the crisis is over," Schembera said.

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 22:19:05 GMT
From: Junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu (Peter D. Junger)
Subject: A computer as a criminal tool

In the Cleveland Plain Dealer for July 21, 1992 a story appears with a
headline nearly worthy of the National Enquirer.

The headline is:  POLICE PULL PLUG ON COMPUTER IN MORALS STING
The byline is:  By DEBORAH A. WINSTON, PLAIN DEALER REPORTER
The venue is:  MUNROE FALLS

    [I've lived in Cleveland for over twenty years and have never heard of
    Munroe Falls--that's how small it is.  It turns out that it is in Summit
    County, Ohio, near Akron.]

	The story suggests that there is an especial risk to having 
computers in a very small, Midwestern town.
        According to the story, the Munroe Falls police received a
complaint that a local electronic bulletin board "containing sexually
explicit material might be accessible to children."
        So the police set up a sting operation, using a local 15
year-old boy as their agent.  The story goes on to say:  "After the
youth was able to hook into the bulletin board, police arrested Mark
Lehrer, 22, owner and operator of Akron Anomaly, a 1,000 member bulletin
board."  And the police also seized all of Lehrer's computer--apparently
on the ground that it was "criminal tools."
        [From talking to the reporter and Lehrer's lawyer, I found out 
that Lehrer was indicted today "of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles 
and possession of criminal tools,"  with the criminal tools being the 
computer.]
        It seems that Lehrer's bulletin board included some gif files
containing pictures of James Bond and Captain Kirk and subjects like that,
which could be downloaded by subscribers.  There were also some gif files that
were supposed to be accessible only by adults over the age of 18.  The article
reports, however, that: "when police seized Lehrer's records they found that
even the `clean' files contained images that were not entirely wholesome."
[Lehrer's attorney told me that these were files that had been uploaded to the
bulletin board and had not yet been seen by Lehrer.]
        The article then quotes the Munroe Falls Police Chief as saying
of these "not entirely wholesome files":  "One was Bugs Bunny eating a
carrot, one was Bart Simpson riding a skateboard and one was called (a
slang term for oral sex), and that was in the clean file."  There were
apparently also some pictures of naked women and of "naked women engaging
in sexual acts" that were not in the adult category.
        According to the article, the Police Chief also said that "it's
possible that some of the games and movies are being accessed in
violation of copy right laws."
        And then there is a final direct quote from the Police Chief: "I'm not
saying it's obscene because I'm not getting into that battle, but it's
certainly not appropriate for kids, especially without parental permission."

Peter D. Junger, Case Western Reserve University Law School, Cleveland, OH
Internet:  JUNGER@SAMSARA.LAW.CWRU.Edu -- Bitnet:  JUNGER@CWRU

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 22 Jul 92 09:22:19 PDT
From: neff@mandor.Metaphor.COM (Randall Neff)
Subject: American Airlines software development woes

[San Jose Mercury News, Monday, July 20, 1992  Business Monday section  p. 9F]

                   Software nightmare comes alive for airline
     American finds the pieces of new reservation system do not fit together

[Dallas Morning News]
DALLAS -- AMR Corp. for decades sliced up competition with its Sabre computer
system for making airline reservations.  Last week, the parent of American
Airlines, Inc. said it fell on its sword trying to develop a state-of-the-art,
industry-wide system that could also handle car and hotel reservations.

AMR cut off development of its new Confirm reservation system only weeks after
it was supposed to start taking care of transactions for partners Budget
Rent-A-Car, Hilton Hotels Corp. and Marriott Corp.  Suspension of the $125
million, 4-year-old project translated into a $165 million pre-tax charge
against AMR's earnings in the second quarter and fractured the company's
reputation as a pacesetter in travel technology.

"In an area where we arguably are one of the world's leading companies, it's
particularly disappointing to us when we have to recognize a loss of that
magnitude on that kind of activity," said ARM senior vice president and
treasurer Michael J. Durham.  The disappointment comes after a series of
technical and management missteps that surprised not only AMR, but the entire
industry.  As far back as January, the leaders of Confirm discovered that the
labors of more than 200 programmers, systems analysts and engineers had
apparently been for naught.  The main pieces of the massive project --
requiring 47,000 pages to describe -- had been developed separately, by
different methods.  When put together, they did not work with each other.

The system was based on twin IBM mainframes that stored the two main pieces of
the reservation system, according to project leaders.  One IBM 3090 computer
stored customer records, pricing information, and other "decision support"
data.  The other IBM 3090 kept track of available rooms and cars, managing the
actual transaction.  But the two pieces were developed on different operating
systems.  When the developers attempted to plug the parts together, they could
not.  Different "modules" could not pull the information needed from the other
side of the bridge.  Response times were slow on other requests.

Not until April did officials begin to "recognize the magnitude of the
situation" and begin to realize that the problems might not be under control.
Warnings of lengthy delays -- as much as two years -- began to surface.
"Somewhere in there, you've got a management problem," said Donald Tatzin,
director of Arthur D. Little's travel consulting practice.

AMR Information Services fired eight senior project members, including team
leader John Mott, saying it had "determined that information about the true
status of the project appears to have been suppressed by certain management
personnel."  In late June, Budget and Hilton said they were dropping out.

For the record, AMR said it was not giving up hope of salvaging Confirm, 
although a Coopers & Lybrand market study for AMR is believed to cast doubt
on its viability.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1992 15:56:53 GMT
From: palmer@cco.caltech.edu (David Palmer)
Subject: RISKS of Antilock Braking Systems

The 15 July 1992 Washington Post has an article about one side effect of
Antilock Braking Systems (ABS).

Accident investigators typically estimate how fast the various vehicles
involved in a collision were going by looking at the skid marks left behind.
However, with ABS systems, the skid marks are faint, intermittent, and not as
durable as conventional skidmarks.  (ABS works by releasing the brakes whenever
the tires start skidding.  Therefore, the tires never get a chance to cook a
strip of rubber into the asphalt.)

The skid marks are visible, if you look carefully and get to the
accident site before they've been worn away by rain and other traffic.

Thus, the new technology makes it harder to reconstruct accidents.

The article did, however, quote one investigator as saying (paraphrased
from memory) that he'd rather see faint skid marks for 45 feet than dark
skid marks for 55 feet ending at a wall.

David Palmer, Goddard Space Flight Center/NASA 	 palmer@tgrs.gsfc.nasa.gov

------------------------------

Date: 	Wed, 22 Jul 1992 06:28:00 PDT
From: Scott Bailey <SBAILEY@xcc.mc.xerox.com>
Subject: RISKS of BBS ownership (From David R. Cohen, forwarded)

I found this posted in one of the Star Trek newsgroups (!).  Looks like
interesting RISKS material to me.

  Scott Bailey				Xerox Computer Center
  sbailey@xcc.mc.xerox.com		Webster, NY

X-NEWS: oasis rec.arts.startrek.misc: 1583
Relay-Version: VMS News - V6.0-1 14/11/90 VAX/VMS V5.5; site oasis.xcc.mc.xerox.com