It's All Gonna Melt!

A little blurb from the National Post today:
Computer networks that support Canada's critical services -- from hospitals to banks to power lines -- will undoubtedly crash in the next five years, warns a government-commissioned report that says even immediate action cannot stop the inevitable.

Shoddy software has left the Internet and other parts of our telecommunications systems vulnerable to a massive meltdown, the report concludes. No corrective action can avert "a major failure," but the authors say both the government and the private sector must act quickly if they are to prevent subsequent collapses.

"The stakes are high," reads the report. "This is a challenge that we ignore at our peril as a nation and a society."

The report bases its conclusions on hundreds of written resources and interviews with two dozen high-tech experts, including executives at major computer companies.

"Politicians, almost slavishly, have to do whatever the public is interested in and the public is not interested in emergencies that don't exist yet," said Donald B. Johnston, the report's lead author. "We will not see [a major crash] as a problem until it's a problem. And it will only be a problem as long as it's a problem. And when it stops being a problem, we will stop thinking about it again."

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