iChat had video calling way way back. And I worked at Apple (briefly) during Steve's time, we all used iChat for everything work related, where people would use Slack, IRC, Teams etc now.
...but honestly these types of bugs have been inherent in software since day 1. We have had canary deployment models also for ages - so for this to happen tells us some things about the IT administrators of these companies that were impacted.
I don't think CrowdStrike bears much of the fault here. I recall this similar thing happening with Norton in the early 2000's and many others since then.
Quote: "Multiple sensor versions apparently. I checked we haven't received a sensor update since the 13th so it must be something else they're updating to cause it.
So much for our Sensor Update Policies avoiding things like this..."
Edit to add: Based on the Reddit comment and this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41004103, I would put this on CrowdStrike doing something that was unavoidable by the customer (CrowdStrike could have avoided this). But maybe there are some customer settings that could have prevented this.
IMO the fault lies 100% at CrowdStrike. The software does not only run on mission critical systems, but also one such systems, where a automatic update is okay and even wanted, where the operators maybe just don't have the capacity to run tests before that. Many people trust CrowdStrike, and yeah, sure, everyone should do tests before updates in a perfect world, but in reality (as we now see) this is not always the case. Not because people are actively sabotaging themselves, but often the priorities are somewhere else, that's why they are using high-quality software, and trust their automatic updates to not cause a total blackout.
I install software -> PC crashes and can't recover itself -> it's the Software's fault.
Sure, I could have prevented it, but this doesn't change who's at fault.
Crowdstrike bears the responsibility for the effects their product has on the world. Firms have the responsibility to use canary deployment and other practices to mitigate the potential harms third party products might cause.
Crowdstrike deployed a flawed update resulting in widespread harm. They are responsible for that harm. Companies failing to mitigate that harm through responsible preventive practices are also at fault.
Nothing will change. The people in charge of purchasing and deploying enterprise scale kabuki security software like this aren't interested in accountability or real world efficacy, it's entirely about crafting a narrative sufficient to remain employed. The game isn't security or practicality - box checkers gotta check boxes.
Crowdstrike released a change that should have been caught by automated testing. That does require an explanation, I think, and a change to prevent recurrence.
"Probably" - yet the real calculations of probability say it is not going to happen at all, ever. And then when we observe the natural world...lets take things that are alive and then die. Well, are they not essentially a soup of everything one would possibly need for life to arise, even with external energy source from the sun (think road kill as an example)...and yet we know of no instance in which life, by chance formed out of it; all the dead bodies seem to degrade into dirt. Of course if it did happen even once - how would we know as we can't possibly observe all occasions of such things. Anyway - just some thoughts I had on the matter.
Every dead body you've ever seen is teeming with life. Now, it's probably impossible for a novel life form to arise in a dead body, because the existing life (bacteria) that takes over has been optimized by billions of years of evolution to consume the resources around it better than any novel self-replicator possibly could. But that's not really evidence that a self-replicator couldn't get going if there weren't much better ones already around.
Calculations don't matter if they are based on faulty premises. There is nothing all that special about earth that what happened here couldn't have happened on trillions of planets across billions of years in the known universe. I think that's why biologists and just generic humans like me posit that there has to be life elsewhere in the universe, no woo woo or gods needed.
It is not the tool it is how you use it. I used X-plane with VR and I had a yoke and peddles, etc. Cost me a couple thousand. It more than paid for itself. My training flights were about once a week but sometimes only once a month due to scheduling and weather. Whatever my lesson was one day in the real plane I would go home and do that lesson over and over again, radio calls, etc till next lesson; if I knew what the next lesson was going to cover I would also practice that... My instructor thought I was a flight prodigy and turns out I just practiced a lot...but I couldn't have done that without the sim.
Most off-the-shelf antihistamines are now non-drowsy.
I asked the pharmacist for a drowsy antihistamine the other day and they gave me something from behind the counter (no script required). No idea if it was anticholinergic: most drugs require compromises so if something works better for sleep for me I'll judge the risks for other side-effects.
Normally I use a loratidine if I wake in the early hours and that usually gets me back to sleep, even though it is non-drowsy.
I wanted to try a different antihistamine to see if it worked better: jury's out on that at the moment.
Personally I think it is very important to experiment on yourself, and test a variety of solutions. I will even test alternative medicine for important problems. I strongly avoid dangerous solutions. I am fairly conservative and I especially dislike taking pills, but I believe in the value of trying a bit of science on your problems.
The antihistamines that make you drowsy are first generation antihistamines like benadryl that research has suggested are very bad to take more than occasionally (linked to dementia risk, etc.)
If you need something for sleep I highly suggest you either try melatonin if you want something OTC or talk to your doctor for something that requires a prescription.
Aside from melatonin, pretty much every OTC sleeping drug you can get is an anticholinergic drug which is better to avoid.
ERA5 records go back to 1940. But it could have been supplemented with other records…and it appears that 1936 was hotter than 2023. So NPR could have at least mentioned that.
There is more to it; many companies have security organizations that insist on bringing the same security concepts as they have on prem to the cloud; many regulators do as well, so this requires a lot of what we see in terms of the unnecessary complexity in the cloud in terms of networking.
This European vacation is funded by American workers. If the Europeans had to spend in defense what the Americans give them, they would be forced to work more and give up theirs extended vacations and culture of “summers off”.
This might be overstating it a bit, but Europeans get salty when you note that their generous social safety net is subsidized in part by the fact that most NATO nations don't spend the mandated 2% of gdp on defense.
I often wonder what we could accomplish with even half of the ~ 700B / yr we spend on defense if we actually put it towards the public good. The US has two friendly neighbors and thousands of miles of blue water between us and peer adversaries which have no real ability to project power far from their shores. We could make do with less, but then of course the rest of the world would have to step up responsibility for their defense and not hide behind our coat tails
The problem is those 'benefits' are largely going to the rich vs the average man, and voters are starting to wake up to that fact. You can expect the US to shift more isolationist in the future, even with, or maybe because of the troubles of the world
The US defense industry is a public-private wealth transfer mechanism (or "jobs program", if you don't wish to put so fine a point on it) to force taxpayers (and cash-holders, via inflation) to pay billions of dollars, every day, to the military-industrial complex (and implicitly to transfer value to its shareholders).
It has nothing to do with "making do", or protecting anyone. That's a side effect.
That's an exaggeration. The difference in military spending between the US and the EU is less than 2% of GDP. If all military spending was a complete waste of money, with no economic or social benefits at all, that would correspond to about 4 working days/year. But because military spending contributes to the economy in some ways, the actual cost to the American worker is probably closer to 2 days/year.
