On Thu, 25 January 2001, "Steven M. Bellovin" wrote:

In message <E14LpXc-0000ET-00@roam.psg.com>, Randy Bush writes:

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I'd love to see a detailed description of what went wrong, and I hope that those in the know will be allowed to post it or present it in Atlanta.

was it not don knuth's turing aware lecture which consisted of a detailed analysys of some recent bugs in his code?

We all learn much more from failures than from successes. To quote Alfred E. Neuman, "Learn from the mistakes of others; you'll never live long enough to make them all yourself."

Donald Knuth has tenure. He can give all the lectures he wants about his greatest mistakes. Although all the "experts" say honesty is the best policy, the PR people at publically traded companies feel less is more. When the net was mostly operated and managed by academics, there was a reward in publishing the resultes of your mistakes. In today's net, you are likely to be punished or fired for publically discussing what happened. Ebay has never publically explained what went wrong with their equipment, Abovenet has never publically explained what went wrong with their router configuration, Worldcom has never publically explained what went wrong with their switches. Juniper and Cisco have been trading router interoperability bugs for a while, but they aren't publically discussed. Sometimes you might get a little information under NDA, but publish a "white paper?" Never! Admitly, there are exceptions. AT&T did release a fairly detailed analysis when they lost most of their 5ESSs switches due to a software bug. But it is so rare, we remember them because they are so rare.