The Associated Press recently bemoaned the ancient computer technology the federal government is using in, among other things, defense command systems. The report cited was produced by the Government Accountability Office.
Here are three reasons why "upgrading" some of these systems is a really bad idea:
1) The systems are still doing their job.
2) There are no back doors for computer hackers, our own or other nation's intelligence agencies, to climb in through.
3) We don't have programmers smart enough to reproduce the code in a more "modern" computer language.
Let's look at these objections in more detail.
There is a widespread perception created by advertising departments that the latest and greatest version of "Meglomania version 9.8" is far superior to Meglomania 2.0. This keeps the founders of Meglomania rolling in cash and their customers toiling and in debt to buy the next new version. If it does what you wanted, why upgrade?
Back doors are access points to a system those responsible for running the system don't know about (or are told to ignore). They are created by corporate management, hardware or software design teams, hostile or homegrown intelligence agencies, rogue programmers or deeply embedded intelligence assets. The purposes of these back doors could be data access, data modification, system control or system destruction.
Programming is demanding work. A lot of American kids simply don't think it is worth the educational cost when compared to the paycheck size. Of course, a lot of American kids don't have the intellectual horsepower programming demands, either. That's why contract programming houses love to employ Chinese, East-Indian, or Russian programmers. They have a more complete understanding of the work and the mathematical building blocks necessary for quality programming. But are these really the people we want to rebuild our missile defense systems?
As Healthcare.gov demonstrated, whether you get the quality or not is another matter. Corporate America is addicted to making big bucks fast. Quality, reliability and stability are further down management's the wish list. Security and back doors, I fear, are just another potential profit center to bump up next quarter's earnings.
"Does the product work as promised?"
"Well, not exactly. You have to upgrade to the next version, which fixes those problems."
It won't, of course, because every new feature introduces new bugs that have to be squashed with the release after that, and so on – forever. In short, if you have a system that's working, just leave it alone. We don't have anybody smart enough to rewrite it in today's "modern" computer languages. Or honest enough to trust to write it at all. Leave it alone until we don't need the nukes anymore.
Absolution: The Singularity. Does the end of the world require computers?
Media wishing to interview Craige McMillan, please contact [email protected].
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