[geeks] Powa outage in NY. Blaster worm?

[Brian Dunbar]

adh at an.bradford.ma.us [mailto:adh at an.bradford.ma.us] on Friday, August 15,
2003 12:16 PM said;


> i don't know the details, alas.  but iirc it was a battleship [the
> minnesota?  m-something], and the idea was the electronic warship.
> sadly, they based their computer infrastructure on peecees running
> windows.  the ship crashed - hard - before they even left the harbor.

There are comments in the link below - interesting stuff, including a copy
of a letter published in 'Proceedings' by the CO.

The Yorktown Affair
Thursday, August 16, 2001

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/yorktown.html

"The USS Yorktown had to be towed into the Naval base at Norfolk, Va.,
because a database overflow caused its propulsion system to fail, according
to Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical
Support Center in Norfolk."

'In a letter to the "Comment and Discussion" department, published in the
Aug 98 _Naval_Institute_Proceedings_, page 22, Captain Richard T. Rushton,
then-CO of _Yorktown_, categorically states, "The _Yorktown_ was never towed
as a result of any Smart Ship initiative. During my command, we lost
propulsion power twice while using the new technology. Each time, we knew
what caused the interrupt and were underway again in about 30 minutes. The
September 1997 incident was caused by incorrect data insertion by a
well-trained crewman. The _Yorktown_ returned to port using two FFG-7
emergency control units that specifically had been requested by me, and
supported by other commands as a risk reducer. We knew there were some risks
in the engineering development model propulsion-control system installed
under a rapid prototyping development effort. The bottom line: The data
field safeguards found in production-level systems were not installed yet in
the _Yorktown_ by intention, until complete wring-out was accomplished." '

~brian