Clarification: I don't believe that anyone at Boeing wanted to kill those people - killng people makes a bad press, You know...RU55EL wrote:So, if the software function that killed hundreds of people was not unexpected behavior, Boeing intentionally sabotaged their own plane with the intention of making it crash? And you attribute this to greed? (These questions are rhetorical.) That would be very counter productive to their profit margin. Just look at the financial result!
They have just estimated the probability of airplane crash as being lower than the risk of loss of profits (*).
You may call it a Risk Management - sounds nicer than greed - and yeah, it showed up that the probability calculations were too "optimistic" ... crap happens.
(*) The root cause of this disaster was that AirBus changed the placemnt of jet engines, improving aerodynamics and lowering fuel consumption. Boeing tried to do the same, but they failed - their aiplane was unstable during acceleration. Instead of improving the design, they decided to install a malware which acted against pilots, leading to a crash.
This could be avoided if Boeing would inform the pilots that there is a hidden functionality in the software - but at the same time they would have to admit that the aiplane is defective.
Again: that was not a software bug, but an intentionally installed malicious software designed only to hide physical deficiencies of the airplane and to protect Boeing from financial losses.
Of course it didn't replicate itself - it was just manually copy-pasted to each of the aiplanes - by humans.
I suppose that they are using Linux RT kernel for the airplane flight control OS - and if I'm right, it would mean that Boeing have created the most dangerous malware for Linux.