The strange tale of Jerry's new jail, revisited

I contributed the Bug of the Month to the January Between The Lines newsletter. I first blogged about it at the start of the year in a piece about two bugs . One was a system failure at the Seattle New Year fireworks, requiring human intervention to run the show. The story was carried by media around the world. The video of the whole incident is even available .

The story of the unlucky prison beta tester remained local news. It was a rare curious bug that deserved to be known at least within the testing community. I wrote it up for BTL as a context based puzzle and hope it will now live on. I didn’t anticipate the discussion started around whether it was a just a communication breakdown. While I respect the communication breakdown point of view, this was more than a misunderstanding. A user attempted to use a system (specialist hardware in the form of the prison) before the software was ready. Had he not been able to ring the police, he may have been stuck there for days (possibly more than a week over the Christmas/New Year break). Any subsequent hospitalization could have been very serious. A “closed” or “keep out” sign on the entrance could have avoided the situation.

There is also a lesson in design here. It is often impossible to anticipate all the ways a system could be used, so design should to try to prevent access by default. This is just as true for uncommissioned prisons, as it is for software that allows input attacks resulting in buffer overflows that crash programs and let hackers loose on computers. While we don’t have pictures of the prisoner, we do have pictures of the jail.