Our fragile computerized world.

Many areas of a person’s daily life have become dependent on the exact workings of complex — and often vulnerable — computer systems. A simple computer crash may not just destroy the presentation you were working on — it can do much more serious things.

Think of a computer program that, on February 27, in one minute dropped the Dow Jones Industrial Average 178 points down - this is just one reminder of how dependent people have become on computers - and not only on 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 on August 14, 2003, have lost their light for two days due to a programming error.
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Imagine 13 domain name root servers, two of which are served by VeriSign and that 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 3.3 billion inquiries from the USA alone were made in January, almost half of their total number, and which provides email services to tens of millions of people. This happened on July 26, 2004, when the speed of computer networks slowed down due to the rapid spread of the MyDoom virus.

Or think about weather forecasts. Meteorological forecasts from the US National Weather Service are essential information not only for local newspapers, but also for aviation and agriculture. All calculations are performed on two leased IBM supercomputers. One is located in Guitersberg (Maryland) and the other in Fairmont (Virginia). Every day, the system processes 240 million units of surveillance data, and every 6 hours gives a 16-day weather forecast. The importance of these predictions became clearly visible in 1999, when a fire put one of the computers out of operation, just at the time when Hurricane Floyd hit North Carolina, which made it difficult for meteorological services.

And to better understand how much modern civilization relies on information stored and processed by computers, think about this: a recent study by IDC computed the amount of data produced by the digital universe last year — 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 books ever published in the entire history of mankind. By 2010, as predicted by the results of this study, humanity will produce almost 6 times more information in digital form - about 988 exabytes, or almost one zettabyte.

Yes, human society today places control of many things on computers. Every day they make sure that electricity is transmitted by wire, that planes fly and that the Internet works. Much more depends on computers, such as simulated nuclear weapon tests. How important it is therefore not to allow their work to be interrupted. Our world is really fragile.

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