A number of factors and failings came together to make the August 14th northeastern blackout the worst outage in North American history. One of them was buried in a massive piece of software compiled from four million lines of C code and running on an energy management computer in Ohio. To nobody’s surprise, the final report on the blackout released by a U.S.-Canadian task force Monday puts most of blame for the outage on Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp., faulting poor communications, inadequate training, and the company’s failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines. But over a dozen of task force’s 46 recommendations for preventing future outages across North America are focused squarely on cyberspace. Full Story