What is Digg?50 Comments
- D3koy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+79I watched Aeon Flux on a plane, I contemplated walking out of the theater...
- WallnutBoy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+58Hell yeah same here...
{poof} goes the plane as it hits the sea. =) - Linkage155, on 10/12/2007, -2/+44Text Cache (hopefully not too big):
One of the most interesting examples of a software "abuse case" came to me rather abruptly on an airplane flight from Las Vegas to Orlando in mid 2005.
Each seat in the airplane had a small touch screen monitor built into the head rest of the chair in front, and on this particular airline, passengers could watch a variety of television channels and play a few simple games. One such game looked remarkably similar to the classic strategy game Tetris, where players use their skills to manipulate falling blocks on a screen to try and form horizontal lines. I'm a big fan of Tetris; for a few months in 1998 I was borderline obsessed with it. I would start looking at everyday objects and start mentally fitting them together with other tings in the room to form weird line configurations. One of the options on this particular airborne version of Tetris was to alter the number of blocks one could see in advance on the screen before they started falling.
To give myself the biggest advantage in the game, I pressed the + control as many times as it would allow and got to the maximum value of 4. I then put on my "bad guy" hat on and asked: How *else* can I change the value in this field? Near my armrest was a small phone console; you know, the one where you can make very important calls for a mere $22 per minute. I noticed that the phone had a numeric keypad and that it also controlled this television monitor embedded in the seat in front of me.
I then touched the screen in front of me to highlight the number "4" in the options configuration shown in Figure 1. I tried to enter the number 10 into that field through the phone keypad with no luck: it first changed to the number "1" followed by the number "0". Frustrated, I then made the assumption that it would only accept single digit values. My next test case was the number "8"; no luck there either, the number didn't change at all. I then tried the number 5: success! '5' is an interesting test case, it's a "boundary value" just beyond the maximum allowed value of the field which was '4'. A classic programming mistake is to be off by 1 when coding constraints. For example, the programmer may have intended to code the statements:
0 < value < 5
When what actually got coded was
0 < value = 5
I now had the software exactly where I wanted it, in an unintended state; the illegal value 5 was now in my target field. I then turn my attention back to the screen and hit the + button which, to my complete surprise, incremented the value to 6! Again, an implementation problem, the increment constrain probably said something like "if value = 4 do not increment." In this case, the value wasn't 4 but 5 so it happily incremented it to 6! I then continue to increment the value by pressing the + button until I get to 127 and then I pause for a moment of reflection. 127 is a very special number; it is the upper bound of a 1 byte signed integer. Strange things can happen when we add 1 to this value, namely that 127 + 1 = -128! I considered this for a moment as I kicked back a small bag of peanuts and in the interest of science I boldly pressed the + button once more. Suddenly, the display now flashes -128 just for an instant and then poof...screen goes black.
Poof...screen of the person next to me goes black.
Screens in front of me and behind me go black.
The entire plane entertainment system goes down (and thankfully the cascading system failure didn't spill over to the plane navigation system)!
After a few minutes of mumbling from some of the passengers, a fairly emotionless flight attendant reset the system and all was well. I landed with a new-found respect for the game of Tetris and consider this to be the most entertaining version of it I have ever played. - HemlockUltimate, on 10/12/2007, -2/+43Then you can sit there for the rest of the flight with only a book to read. Sounds like a great idea. At least wait until just before you land.
- Roger, on 10/12/2007, -5/+35They'd probably call you a terrorist and send you to Gitmo.
Look what happened to the ATHF LED guys... - voyetra8, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20"How to crash a crap webserver"
- LexisNexis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18Why in the hell did you turn a comment about weed into a patriotic pissing contest?
- joshjx, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16duggmirror doesn't have the page, why does everyone freaking post to it ?
- alteratti, on 10/12/2007, -13/+22do you think your username "makes you look cool" or somethin?
- GeekedAtBirth, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Kinda funny how...maybe HALF the posts here are for mirrors...guess you can't really make a relevant comment if you can't read the article, eh? Whould've thought it...apparently not me since I'm making a totally irrelevant comment, and now I'm just babbling, so...
*SHUTS UP* - Bozodog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Sorry,
I ment to digg you up, but the beer missed. - crh3f, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9severing?
- primehifi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I spent nearly an entire 1.5 hr flight once, while listening to my ipod, pressing and holding on certain points on the main screen of the in-flight entertainment trying to get into the secret menu which I thought existed. The person next to me must of thought I was just a bit strange.
- nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8*****
- AndrewJC, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9You think that's bad? I actually bought it sight-unseen, figuring that the cartoon was so good the movie must be good too.
- lcmatt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Why post Duggmirror when the sites still online and it never caught it?
- JavertHolmes, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Brilliant!
- iamdegenatron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5If you do manage to crash the in-flight entertainment, demand that the flight crew fix it/reboot it, then crash it again. Rinse and repeat and act pissed off and try to win a seat in business class. Trust me, it'll definately work on transcontinental flights at least.
- slackerexpress, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Hugh Thompson is getting some mileage out of this. He told this same story to several thousand of us at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco this past Friday. The guy's a character, although I had never heard of him before this.
- soupcancooloff, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4does anyone know what airline has this system in place?
I'm taking a trip on Jet Blue in 2 weeks and I am excited to try it out. - Avalontor, on 10/12/2007, -15/+18marijuana is one of the more common surnames where I come from. http://www.scottmcleod.org/didyouknow.wmv it's a must see for wankers like you. US is not the only nation in the world.
- spartan018, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-35,GGGL:en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fblogs.csoonline.com%2Fhow_to_crash_an_in_flight_entertainment_system
enjoy - D3koy, on 10/12/2007, -7/+9What in the hell is that supposed to be?
- jusme, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1False. I work with one of the two suppliers for In-Flight Entertainment systems on any airplane you will fly in the world. There was a story last week about how IFE systems run Linux, which was interesting (because it was all true) and the comments were interesting enough to me to post my own.
In the interest of truthiness I feel I must chime in. It may be possible to crash the program currently running on top of Linux on your particular seat, which is highly likely. But you have to remember each seat is like its own computer, they are only connected to other computers via Ethernet. If you run Linux at home and you play Tetris and manage to crash it, are you going to crash all the other Linux computers in your house as well? Give me a break.
Also, IFE and the Avionics systems are segmented in such a way that they are not even on the same network. They can't even talk to eachother directly without going through several intermediary hosts depending on the type of communication. This stuff is all pretty much common sense I thought. - ridgelawrence, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Continental, Had the same system on an 8 hour flight to Hawaii, The system is pretty sweet on keeping the boredom level down.
- Aquashark, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1!ekaf
- stevetures, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://blogs.csoonline.com.nyud.net:8080/node/151?repost
(working mirror... well it worked for me at least) - Spr0k3t, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I have respect for finding the problem. I hope they don't "fix" it.
- TailGunner, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Let's hope they do a better job coding their navigation software...
- darlyn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I found this article surprisingly interesting. Thanks for posting!
- bradleyland, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Does this really sound plausible? This is Tetris running on a large, multi-station entertainment system. It's probably an off-the-shelf port (Java maybe) of the game intended to run in embedded systems. Not to mention that the mere act of incrementing the counter value inside a text field is unlikely to have many consequences. In most programs, the interface values aren't persisted to any meaningful state until some other event is fired, like exiting the screen, or clicking "ok".
It does appear that the author knows something about programming though, because if you increment a one byte signed integer with the value 127 (01111111), you do get -128 (10000000). - submariner, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Could be either, I guess
- nick0909, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2My god 8 hours to Hawaii? I thought the 4 hours from LA was nearly unbearable.
- sensia3, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Sound fairly BS to me. But if it really does so, it sucks. I know for sure that onboard entertainment system runs on soem flavor of Linux/Unix. Once, on my way back to home in an A340 flight I had my system crashed in front of me and to my surprise I watched how *nix start booting up.
- bootle, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3pic or it didn't happen
- submariner, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Judging by airlines in that market crossed with the likeliness of having such an in-flight entertainment system, It is safe to conclude it is jetBlue he speaks of.
- Rumsfeltcher, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1I thought they stopped severing peanuts on planes?
- crh3f, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0mispost...oops
- shimbob, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1I've crashed the entertainment screen on a SFO-CDG flight before. Not once, twice: on the return flight too.
Seems that if you watch a movie in fast forward (because the movie sucks so bad it's just as interesting in fastforward and in normal speed), the system will eventually lock up.
But this only affected my own seat, not the whole system. - marcuschi, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Pics or it didnt happen
- orangekid13, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1the first 3 times i clicked it it didn't work... maybe their servers can't handle the traffic but haven't crashed yet....
think ahead dumbass - RubyTuesday, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2Why would you do that? It is a relatively cheap, uninteresting, little thrill and you and everyone else on the flight loose out. The focus here being on everyone else who did screw around with the in-flight entertainment system.
- anagos, on 10/12/2007, -24/+19Definitly gonna try this next time i fly
- thefreshbeats, on 10/12/2007, -11/+3How to crash a blog...
- GuyOnOatmealBox, on 10/12/2007, -12/+2more like, how to crash a website!
edit: damn, beat to it by voyetra8 - PhrosTT, on 10/12/2007, -25/+1http://www.duggmirror.com
- duke, on 10/12/2007, -29/+1duggmirror.com
- Marijuana, on 10/12/2007, -38/+5http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://blogs.csoonline.com/how_to_crash_an_in_flight_entertainment_system
- bking, on 10/12/2007, -37/+1^^ *****, beat.
www.duggmirror.com
:rolleyes: - Marijuana, on 10/12/2007, -43/+2Woops, double posted.
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