IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 85

Airplanes

abled after pressing this foot pedal,
and the horn went on sounding for
four minutes. However, as far as the
vigilance device was concerned,
each blast of the horn meant that
a control had been operated, so
it reset its timer, and thus never
applied the brakes.

In one case the FBI claimed that a
security researcher "exploited/gained
access to, or 'hacked' the [in-flight
entertainment] system" and then
overwrote code on the airplane's
Thrust Management Computer while
aboard a flight [4]. The FBI stated that
the researcher successfully com-
manded the system he had accessed
to issue the climb command, thereby
causing one of the airplane engines
to climb resulting in a lateral or side-
ways movement of the plane during
one of these flights.

Insufficient Awareness
of Context
Many supermarkets provide motor-
ized carts for the physically disabled,
but that doesn't help when the shop-
per needs something on a high shelf,
or if an aisle display blocks access.
Yes, people are usually quite help-
ful in lending a hand, but the prin-
ciple is still there: perhaps provide a
call button on the carts to summon
help? (I have suggested this to our
local supermarket, which is looking
into it!)
There was a recent science fic-
tion story about a robot's killing a
technician who attempted to repair
it because the robot had not been
made aware of the technician's
assignment, and therefore consid-
ered the technician's attempts to
repair as a malicious attempt to dis-
able, and therefore defended itself
from attack. For those with longer
memories, there is the famous Stan-
ley Kubrick movie, "2001," written
by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
in which a spaceship's computer,
called "Hal," murdered several astro-
nauts apparently (at least according
to Clarke's novelization of the movie)
to protect its perception of the suc-
cess of the mission.
Some years ago I was tutoring a
14-year-old female. She showed me
her class roster. She was enrolled in
a course called "Thematic Studies."
I called the Board of Education, sug-
gesting that it was rather inappropri-
ate to have abbreviated this as "Them
Studs." (The person to whom I spoke
would not let me talk with the IT peo-
ple ... she wanted to do that herself!)

Robotics
The June 2015 issue of IEEE Spectrum has a discussion of robotic re-
placement parts for human beings.
In a sidebar [3] there is a brief dis-
cussion of the possibility of such
replacement parts being "hacked"
by an unintended provider. This is
related to an old science fiction story
in which a murder is committed by
the murderer's taking control of the
victim's cardiac pacemaker.

Illicit Provider - Conflating
Modern freight trains are equipped
with a "vigilance device," which is
the modern replacement for the
traditional dead-man control. It is
supposed to sound a warning if
none of the controls in the locomo-
tive cab are operated within a cer-
tain length of time. If the warning
is not promptly acknowledged, the
brakes are applied automatically.
On 2014 August 17 two Union
Pacific freight trains collided head-
on at Hoxie, AR, U.S.A., killing the
engine crew of one train and caus -
ing considerable damage. One of the
locomotives was equipped with a
"horn sequencer" such that a single
press of a foot pedal would repeat-
edly sound the standard level-cross-
ing warning (long-long-short-long)
until the second press of the pedal.
Apparently the engineer became dis-
June 2017

∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

User Fails to Instruct Provider
A manager who specified a program
to be written by a third party for main-
taining a large database for an orga-
nization, realized, after some years,
that some changes were necessary.
However, he had thought that "source
code" and "data base specification"
were all technical things that he, as
a user, didn't have to be concerned
with, had not asked for when the pro-
gram was delivered, and were no lon-
ger available (after eight years) from
the original third party developer ...
and, as a result, the program had to
be rewritten from scratch.

The Provider Misunderstands
the User (Possibly Deliberately)
There is an (unsubstantiated) anec-
dote that illustrates this very nicely.
At the height of the Cold War, a con-
dom manufacturer in the United
States received a very large order for
condoms from the USSR. The order
specified that the condoms were to
be 30cm (12") long and 8cm (3") in
diameter. After careful consideration,
the manufacturer filled the order, but
each of the condoms was stamped
"SMALL." The result, if the story be
true, is that any potential political
advantage to the USSR was lost as a
consequence of the "SMALL" stamp.

Author Information
Peter Zilahy Ingerman is an Inde-
pendent Consultant in Willingboro,
NJ; www.ingerman.org. He can be
reached at syscon@ingerman.org.

References

[1] Consumer Reports, p. 60, June 2015.
[2] UConnect, FCA US LLC, 2016; https://
www.driveuconnect.com/software-update/
[3] K. Fu, "Will bionic bodies get hacked?," IEEE
Spectrum, June 2015, p. 74.
[4] E. Perez, "FBI: Hacker claimed to have taken
over flight's engine controls," CNN.com, May 18,
2015; http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-
hacker-flight-computer-systems/index.htmlhttp://
www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-
computer-systems/index.html.

85
http://www.ingerman.org http://https:// http://www.driveuconnect.com/software-update/ http://www.CNN.com http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight
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