Techdirt. Stories filed under "crash" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "crash"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Mon, 25 Feb 2013 05:39:14 PST NASCAR Abuses DMCA To Try To Delete Fan Videos Of Daytona Crash Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130224/22411222089/nascar-abuses-dmca-to-try-to-delete-fan-videos-daytona-crash.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130224/22411222089/nascar-abuses-dmca-to-try-to-delete-fan-videos-daytona-crash.shtml Joseph M. Durnal was the first of a whole bunch of you to send in a version of this story showing how NASCAR abused copyright to take down some videos. You may have heard that there was a big NASCAR crash at Daytona that sent debris flying into the stands. Well, a video from those same stands, which shows a wheel lying in the seats next to someone injured, was deleted from YouTube via NASCAR claiming copyright on it and issuing a takedown. Obviously, that's a bogus claim, because the copyright would belong to the guy who filmed it.

As the press started calling, NASCAR gave what might seem like a perfectly reasonable response:
The fan video of the wreck on the final lap of today’s NASCAR Nationwide Series race was blocked on YouTube out of respect for those injured in today’s accident. Information on the status of those fans was unclear and the decision was made to err on the side of caution with this very serious incident.—Steve Phelps, NASCAR Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
Sounds great, except it's totally bogus. NASCAR may well be concerned about those injured by the crash, but that does not give them the right to automatically remove someone else's video, nor does it allow them to abuse the DMCA takedown process for that purpose. The DMCA only applies to copyright.

Of course, once again, we're seeing how when our laws make it easy to censor via copyright claims, many people seek to do exactly that. Thankfully, all of the attention on the takedown has resulted in YouTube doing what appears to have been an expedited review, and have put the video back:


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]]> that's-now-how-copyright-works http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130224/22411222089 Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:03:00 PDT United Airlines Massive Computer Crash Leads To Handwritten Boarding Passes Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120829/03043320206/united-airlines-massive-computer-crash-leads-to-handwritten-boarding-passes.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120829/03043320206/united-airlines-massive-computer-crash-leads-to-handwritten-boarding-passes.shtml massive computer crash, which caused chaos at many airports. These kinds of things aren't new, but this one did seem quite impressive in terms of how much it impacted. Still, what interests me is that the airline sought to deal with no computers by handwriting boarding passes, some of which people started photographing and putting on Twitter.

Moira Forbes got one that at least looked kinda sorta like a normal boarding pass, done on a boarding pass blank:
A James Fortune got a similar one that was a bit messier with the handwriting:
And, finally, someone going by the name jmeg on Twitter didn't even get a boarding pass blank, but just sheet of paper.
A few months ago, I ended up flying on the day that Virgin America chose to "switch over" its computer system. While they warned us a week ahead of time, they still suggested we show up early and noted that getting boarding passes would be more manual. In that case, they had pre-printed them all out before the systems were shut off, and then had to flip through the stack to find the right one. Even that took more time than usual, so I can only imagine the mess of having to do boarding passes by hand.

But what fascinates me about this is how people figure out how to cope when computer systems go down. Every so often we have these fear mongering stories about computer crashes, and we learn about how the Y2K bug could lead to the end of society or some computer hackers could create havoc by attacking key computers. And while there are computers that run some critical systems, even in situations like this -- where the computers are incredibly important -- when they go down it may create a major pain in the ass for some, but it's not the end of the world. People figure out ways to cope and to use alternative systems, such as handwriting boarding passes. It's not perfect, and there were plenty of people who didn't get to fly at all, but it's not like civilization broke down. Computer systems fail, people deal with it, and everyone gets on with their lives.

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]]> so-retro http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120829/03043320206 Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:22:34 PDT Is Malware To Blame For Plane Crash That Killed 154? Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100823/00510610722.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100823/00510610722.shtml may have been caused -- at least in part -- by malware on a computer that failed to detect three technical problems. Apparently, the computer which monitored those things got some sort of trojan horse, and may have failed to set off the necessary alarms because of this. As for how the computer got infected... it sounds like investigators still are not sure, but someone sticking in an infected USB stick or some other remote network connection seem like the most likely culprit. Of course, the reports seem woefully lacking in details. It's unclear how a trojan would block some software from alerting the crew that there was a problem with the aircraft. Honestly, the report seems to raise a lot more questions than it answers, and if it's actually true, it makes me wonder why we're relying on software that can be disabled via some random malware to watch for life-and-death safety issues on airplanes...

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