Topic: Computer Crash

The term "glitch" is being used by government officials to explain various systemic failures, including a computer crash in Houston that led to the release of 280 criminal defendants. President Obama also used the term to describe a regulation fix for insurance premiums. Critics argue that "glitch" is an unacceptable excuse for major technical outages and system vulnerabilities.

The Environmental Protection Agency reported a computer crash in 2010 that resulted in the loss of emails belonging to former employee Philip North. North is a key figure in a House Oversight Committee investigation regarding the veto of the Pebble Mine project in Alaska. Critics allege the EPA's decision was based on political influence rather than sound science, while the agency claims the records are unrecoverable.

The IRS claims that a computer crash resulted in the loss of an untold number of emails from Lois Lerner, a key figure in the tea party targeting scandal. White House spokesperson Josh Earnest dismissed concerns, asking reporters if they had "never heard of a computer crashing before." Critics argue that no professional IT operation would fail to have backups or would "recycle" hard drives containing subpoenaed data.

Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak open the program from Surrey, UK, and Northern California respectively. Dvorak describes a catastrophic hard drive failure on his primary computer and his subsequent struggle to find Windows Vista installation disks. The hosts compare the reliability of Windows XP and Mac systems following Dvorak's recent rant on the Tech 5 podcast.