Our fragile computerized world.

Original author: Arik Hesseldahl
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A laptopMany areas of human everyday life have become dependent on the precise operation of complex - and often vulnerable - computer systems. A simple computer crash can not only destroy the presentation that you just worked on - it can do much more serious things.

Think of a computer program that dropped the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 178 points in one minute on February 27 - this is just one of the reminders of how addicted people are to computers - and not just to their laptops and PDAs.

Imagine a computer network that is responsible for the uninterrupted power supply of 15 states and one Canadian province. More than 50 million people died on August 14, 2003 due to a software error.

Imagine 13 root domain name servers, two of which are operated by VeriSign and which receive more than 25 billion requests every day. This system often becomes the target of computer attacks, during one of which, on February 6, three servers did not respond to 90% of all requests within 12 hours.

Or imagine your life without Google, the search giant through which in January 3.3 billion requests were sent from the United States alone, almost half of their total, and which provides email services to tens of millions of people. This happened on July 26, 2004, when the speed of computer networks decreased sharply due to the rapid spread of the MyDoom virus.

Or think about weather forecasts. Meteorological forecasts from the US National Weather Service are crucial information not only for local newspapers, but also for aviation and agriculture. All calculations are performed on two rented IBM supercomputers. One is located in Gaithersburg (Maryland), and the other in Fermont (Virginia). Every day, the system processes 240 million units of observation data, and every 6 hours gives a weather forecast for 16 days. The importance of these forecasts became clearly visible in 1999, when a fire disabled one of the computers, just at the time when Hurricane Floyd hit North Carolina, which greatly complicated the work of the meteorological service.

And to better understand how much modern civilization relies on information stored and processed by computers, think about this: a recent study by IDC calculated the amount of data produced last year by the “digital universe” —that is, all computers, digital cameras and other electronic devices in the world - 161 billion gigabytes, or 161 exabytes , which is 3 million times the volume of all ever published books in the entire history of mankind. By 2010, the results of this study predict that humanity will produce almost 6 times more information in digital form - about 988 exabytes, or almost one zettabyte.

Yes, human society today places computers in control of many things. Every day they make sure that electricity is transmitted through the wires, so that airplanes fly and the Internet works. Many other things depend on computers, such as, for example, simulated tests of nuclear weapons. How important is therefore not to let their work interrupt. Our world is really fragile.

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