[tantalor]

> which it blamed on a "technical error"

It's not a technical error at all!

Technical errors are faults caused by technology, like a software or hardware bug. That's not what happened here. WordPress behaved exactly as it was supposed to.

The true cause is revealed later in the article,

> staff thought they had applied safeguards to prevent early publication, there were two errors in the way in which they were set up

The problem was the staff. It's a human error.

[chriswarbo]

I don't think that's a worthwhile distinction. All software bugs are human errors, since the machine is correctly following the human programmer's incorrect instructions; whether that's at the level of assembly instructing the CPU; or a higher level like Wordpress instructing the PHP interpreter; or an even higher level of a document hosting solution instructing Wordpress.

[diordiderot]

Eh, I think the distinction is broken tool vs improper use of the tool or in this case, the wrong tool all together

[graemep]

A well designed system would reduce the risk of human error.

Given the importance of keeping this information confidential, they really ought to have a custom system for releasing it, not just configuring a third party Wordpress plugin.

[_dain_]

"Human error" is not the end of an explanation, it's the start of an explanation.

As an industry we should know this by now. Defaults matter.

https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/fileadmin/lusa/Sidney_Dekker...