I wasn't sure where to put this, it's kind of a "current events" story, but it wasn't political and it wasn't computer science, so this seemed like the logical place.

 

Check out this Forbes story:

http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/09/08/ual-tribune-bankruptcy-biz-media-cz_ja_0908ualstory2.html

 

To break it down, apparently this morning at 10:53am some financial analyst happened across a 6-year-old story about UAL declaring bankruptcy, and thought it was a NEW news story, so he published it to his financial subscribers. Within ten minutes 24 million shares of UAL stock had changed hands, with the stock crashing from $12.45 to $3! NASDAQ halted its trading at 11:06am, just 13 minutes after the error, but of course by then the damage was done. Yowsa!

 

Wired has a shorter story on it here:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/six-year-old-st.html

 

I think it's an interesting story about the pitfalls of hyper-connected information sources in the digital age.

It also shows how you can manipulate prices for or against personal favor. Interesting.

Well, that's got to be embarrassing.