For the week of June 13 - June 19, 2001

Digital moths: 
a cautionary tale

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Sometimes the Digital Age doesn’t live up to its promise. Sometimes, its failures are downright scary.

Last week, readers of the Idaho Mountain Express opened their papers hoping to find out who was getting married, who’d been born, who had died and who had gone to court. What they found on the pages containing the News of Record was columns of what looked like moth-eaten type.

Some readers blamed their glasses. Others blamed fat-fingered typists for the "typos." Some blamed proofreaders. Techies blamed a power glitch.

Here at the newspaper, we would have been happy to find that an epidemic of "typo flu" had caused the errors. We would have chortled with joy to learn that a power glitch had produced the digital moths.

The real cause was far more alarming because of its implications.

Finding the answer to the mystery was not easy. It took the help of an expert in Great Britain. He gave us a clue. What followed was hours of examination and re-examination of every step in the electronic assembly of newspaper pages. It took hours of sifting through messages posted on three different software web sites. It took hours of systematically going through software manuals until a techie found an arcane and barely readable footnote that contained another clue.

So, what was it?

A software programmer in a place far away, probably after having had a seriously bad day, had decided not to follow a basic industry standard for generating the letters you see on this page. The "glitch" lay waiting like a submerged log in a cascading stream of bits and bytes.

Rafters and kayakers call submerged logs and branches "strainers."

We got strained, and it got our attention.

The nation is like this newspaper. We have embraced technology like a new best friend. And why not? Computers have made us more productive and the Internet has made the world one big information exchange.

Unfortunately, our new best friend is an indifferent one. Silicon chips don’t give a whit about us.

Yet, the nation has become utterly dependent on computers for things like power grid management, air traffic control, national security, and financial transactions—to name a few. Computerization has proceeded with little thought to what a little glitch here or a little glitch there might do—not to mention what could happen when cyberterrorists come knocking.

Computers rely on billions and billions of lines of code—all subject to human error or tampering. It’s mind-numbing to contemplate the fact that critical system failures could be caused by something as simple as a typo or a simple homemade computer virus.

What’s the solution? If we knew, we’d have been lobbying for it yesterday. For now, it may be enough to begin to face the downside of technology—and prepare for it.

Digital moths that create havoc in a newspaper are just an annoyance. But people with any kind of imagination would not be crazy to be scared out of their socks.

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.