Bernard A. Hodson

A memorable Yuletide IT tale from the Hodsons My great, great, great, great grandfather emigrated from Cork, in the South of Ireland, to Lancashire in the North of England. Being Irish, he had

Previous articles have discussed program testing and also the difficulties of testing microcontroller software placed on smart cards and embedded systems. One reader wrote to me that an Royal Air Force helicopter crash was probably caused by a software failure and, reading the file on the crash, I believe I agree with him. One or more software errors have probably caused the several failures in Mars exploration vehicles. The forensics referred to here relate to software failure and not to cybercrime.

In computing

We hear lots of comment on the slew of bugs found in the products of Microsoft, Sun and Linux, but very little on the bugs that are almost certainly present in microcontrollers, which have over 90 per cent of the installed computer base.

The IT Industry today is complaining of

My last article discussed the possibility of an IT 9/11 and indicated that Alan Turing had left us a solution. A future article on

The industry today is plagued by a variety of problems, including operating systems that lack security, viruses, worms, spam, theft of identity, intrusion into personal systems, wireless data interception, satellite data interception, hackers, and so on. It is high time that we addressed potential solutions and acted upon those that offer the most promise. This article describes one possible solution and outlines a programming paradigm that could be developed as a standard.

On Sept. 11, 2001 the world watched in horror as terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center (WTC) and other venues, with heavy loss of life. An IT equivalent could destroy businesses and infrastructures, affecting our economy and causing industrial chaos. Some na