The RISKS Digest
Volume 31 Issue 66

Friday, 10th April 2020

Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems

ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…

Contents

The ancient computers in the Boeing 737 Max are holding up a fix
The Verge via Gabe Goldberg
Boeing 787s must power cycle every 51 days
The Register via John Levine
Privacy Cannot Be a Casualty of the Coronavirus
NYTimes
FTC, FCC crack down on coronavirus robocall scams
WashPost
What about contact lenses?
Paul Wexelblat
Re: Firefox Cloudflare DNS
Dmitri Maziuk
Re: A computer virus expert looks at CoVID-19
Rob Slade
Info on RISKS (comp.risks)

The ancient computers in the Boeing 737 Max are holding up a fix (The Verge)

Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Fri, 10 Apr 2020 00:25:12 -0400

Nothing, it seems, will prompt the FAA to send this particular design back to the drawing board. Instead, Boeing will once again attempt to compensate for a hardware flaw on the 737 Max with slightly rewritten software. It's the same design philosophy that created this catastrophe for Boeing in the first place -” and it's the same philosophy that has failed, so far, to produce a safe and reliable airplane.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/9/21197162/boeing-737-max-software-hardware-computer-fcc-crash


Boeing 787s must power cycle every 51 days (The Register)

John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
9 Apr 2020 19:45:56 -0400

In article <5.CMM.0.90.4.1586470789.risko@chiron.csl.sri.com11844> you write:> [Noted by Tom Van Vleck. > I thought RISKS has noted this before, but I did not find it. PGN]

It's gotten worse. Back in 2015 you needed to reboot only every 248 days: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/01/787_software_bug_can_shut_down_planes_generators/ [JL]

[Tom Russ noted that 51 days is roughly 2^32 milliseconds. Perhaps another integer overflow/wrap-around problem?]


Privacy Cannot Be a Casualty of the Coronavirus (NYTimes)

Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Tue, 7 Apr 2020 19:49:57 -0400

Privacy Cannot Be a Casualty of the Coronavirus https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/opinion/digital-privacy-coronavirus.html


FTC, FCC crack down on coronavirus robocall scams (WashPost)

Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Fri, 3 Apr 2020 16:57:59 -0400

Americans were bombarded with more than 132 million robocalls a day in March as the pandemic worsened.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/03/ftc-fcc-crack-down-coronavirus-robocall-scams/


What about contact lenses?

Paul Wexelblat <wexelblat@gmail.com>
Thu, 9 Apr 2020 22:22:53 -0400

COVID-10 Curiosity ” I have heard nothing about the care which should (must) be taken with contact lenses - Cleaning - Removal - Insertion


Re: Firefox Cloudflare DNS (RISKS-31.65)

dmaziuk <dmaziuk@bmrb.wisc.edu>
Thu, 9 Apr 2020 19:06:30 -0500

I had a bit of a Whaa??? moment on this, thank you Lauren for pointing this out and making me go to settings and change them back to “no proxy”.

Gotta wonder who at Firefox makes these kinds of decisions and what they are smoking.

Changing my network settings behind my back and without notice is bad enough, resolving domain names differently in their product (so a different http client could take you to an entirely different server for the same URL — and with a different chain of built-in “trusted” CA's, both could potentially be “very secure”) is a whole 'nother story.

I guess in Mozilla-verse two wrongs make a right, if one of them's really badly wrong.


Re: A computer virus expert looks at CoVID-19 (RISKS-31.65)

Rob Slade <rmslade@shaw.ca>
Fri, 10 Apr 2020 08:22:58 -0700

Let me say that I absolutely agree with the comments Peter excerpted and posted:

> I will just say please don't allow the high frequency of contribution by > a regular contributor lend a credibility to the quality of the > contribution that isn't there when the topic is outside the > contributor's expertise. (Perhaps this is a RISK in itself? A halo > effect arising from contribution frequency?).

Particularly in a time of crisis, accurate and correct information is vital. Challenging (and, hopefully, correcting) errors is a function which becomes more important, not less, in an emergency situation.

Please report problems with the web pages to the maintainer

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