Don't Blindly Trust Technology

With all the scams out there today, we try to hammer home the concept of not trusting every pop-up and message on your screen. But technology is so pervasive in our day-to-day lives that we may not even give a second thought to some messages. You may remember the humorous incident in 2009 where someone discovered how to hack into a traffic message board above the IH-35 in Austin and displayed “Zombies Ahead”. (I use the word “hack” here because it’s likely the City of Austin never changed the default password on their signage system.) But that incident wouldn’t have been as funny if the modified sign said “Tornado – Take Shelter” or “Russian Missiles Imminent”, would it? Going back even farther to the mid-80s, there is the example of the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine. Due to a number of factors, but primarily attributed to poor software design and assumptions, some patients received lethal doses of radiation during routine cancer treatment sessions. Jumping back to April 2025, we have the example of someone in California who wirelessly modified crosswalk buttons to mimic Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. Thankfully these were virtually harmless audio clips, but can you imagine the danger if the indicator told you to walk into oncoming traffic? The moral of these stories, in my opinion, is that we shouldn’t forget that software is developed by humans, and humans are fallible. If a digital message being presented to you doesn’t make sense, trust your gut and demand validation from source.