The Surveillance Society
.jpg)
Thousands of US sex offenders, prisoners on parole and other convicts were left unmonitored after an electronic tagging system shut down because of data overload. BI Incorporated, which runs the system, reached its data threshold – more than two billion records – on Tuesday. This left authorities across 49 states unaware of offenders’ movement for about 12 hours.
Two billion records? Two billion?*
* Tech note not in the article: It probably fell over at 2^31 (2,147,483,648), or the maximum number representable by a signed 32-bit integer.
Wouldn’t it be reasonable to have a system which progressively overwrites the oldest data, when the storage becomes full? Just how far back do they need to keep track of prisoners movements?
Don’t give the fuckers ideas.
I don’t think there’s much risk of that. I was merely stating the bleedin’ obvious, they must employ highly qualified technical people who wouldn’t understand….
“shut down because of data overload. ” :'( . Why does this not surprise me? It is the reason why I am not particularly worried about our database society, this sort of thing will happen more and more sure as eggs is eggs.
ps, don’t forget to shut down your comp tomorrow, 10-10-10, 10:10 am or the 1010 worm thingey might get you =-O .
There’s bound to be some belt-and-braces need to store this forever. When alien archaeologists excavate the ruined cities of Old Earth they will find caverns of Government archives.
Files on the truth behind the Moon landings and who really killed JFK will sit alongside data cartridges of Boy George’s ankle tracker records.
Too late for that. It’s flaming torches and pitchforks time soon.
You’re right, it won’t be a bolt from the blue revelation.
But anyway, its a problem with the number of the records in the database (see my propeller-head reference to signed integers) not the data keeping itself. The system would have kept on gathering info, it just wouldn’t have been readable by the operators until someone geeky like me fixed it.
The coming 10-10-10-10 worm thing? I’m hoping it strikes cookers and gets me out of preparing the Sunday roast.