Let's cut the bullshit and spell out a few things. The IT security industry is about as trustworthy as the food supplement and vitamin industry, but somehow they escaped the same reputation. Their products are overwhelmingly based on flawed ideas, and the quality of their software is exceptionally bad. And while not everyone will agree with the harshness of my words, I'll say this: Essentially everyone in IT security who knows anything in principle knows this.
@cpswan And more recently by Ian Levy, who was the techincal director of NCSC at the time. Security vendors have been allowed to dominate the market and control the narrative. Everyone is worried about APTs, but the things most likely to bite you are script kiddies and common garden variety cockups. What we need is the basics like adequate governance. What we're getting is AI-powered bullshit.
Content warning: uspol, this election, actionable advice
Remember: Your friends cannot, by definition, boycott the election. This isn't a marketplace; parties and politicians aren't businesses. Failing to vote or voting in "protest" is just an abdication of their responsibilities as a citizen and gives politicians a free pass to ignore them: https://youtu.be/nSZjlCTyWJ4
That said: Focus on your friends who want to vote but can't because of practical reasons like a lack of childcare. According to a study mentioned above, there are about four "can't" voters to every "won't" voter. A single afternoon of babysitting might be 400% more effective at saving our democracy than any amount of yelling online.
What concrete plans have you made with family, friends, colleagues, and the like to get the willing ones, the ones who still hold out hope, to the polls?
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U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA has acknowledged that while the CrowdStrike outage is *not* a cyberattack, it has observed malicious actors "taking advantage" of the s(h)ituation for "phishing and other malicious activity" and warned organizations to "avoid clicking on phishing emails or suspicious links."
you know how matpat brought the pope a copy of undertale? could someone bring him a copy of linux or something? I want to get the Pope into open source, so that he can petition god to open source humans. I got a lot of patches I need to make
As someone whose job is essentially doing production engineering for wetware hacks, there's a lot more compatibility challenges and code testing concerns for wetware. Not to mention the total lack of documentation, confusing (and closed) APIs and the presence of really arcane security software that hasn't been updated in a few thousand years. All of this means that our reverse engineering can have impacts on unexpected parts of the OS.
As someone who worked in life sciences I can tell you 90% of all research nowadays is "in-silico". So same shit, bits in bits out. Gone are the days of injecting random shit on people and see what happens.
and speaking as a reverse engineer, you have NO IDEA how often I've considered studying medicine instead. I can hack software and hardware all day, why can't I hack wetware?
@shroomie (if you don't know about her, she's really cool. Went from co-founding sirius-XM to curing a previously incurable disease all while being trans)
Maybe a drive-by-confession or transfiguration injection? Cardinal Robert Tables? Evil nun? Spear of Longinus Phishing? NOP Sled? Ministrant-In-The-Middle?
@jackemled frankly if I did figure out how to hack the human body and DIDN'T do tails and animal ears, I think the entire furry internet would be justified in assassinating me.
Channel 4 News, in talking about today's #Microsoft #CrowdStrike fuckup, stated that the expected Y2K effect was imaginary.
No! No! NO!
We* did a massive amount of work to update and ensure systems would keep on working. And more importantly WE TESTED EVERYTHING FULLY BEFORE GOING LIVE.
(* As in everyone responsable for operating computer systems around the world!) (added note: Channel 4 is a UK national television station, not local)
It was an obscure cross-compiler which checked the timestamp on its source and object files whilst deciding what to recompile, and got it wrong after Y2K. In those days it was simple enough to just set the clock back on the one PC that needed to run that compiler (back then it was a pain to set up NTP manually - these days it's the default and I wouldn't know how to start going about turning it off).
@TimWardCam @FurryBeta Yes, the "do this if date now greater than date recorded" switch was a major fault zone.
A previous company used an internal date format of 5 digits, which had reached 99900 when they realised there was a problem. Lots of contractors taken on who joined, looked at the code, and quit.
(I was in the network dept so not responsible, but still left before the rollover)
I personally fixed two consequential instances of the Y2K bug in banking software. This small body count is somewhat noticeable only because *I entered the industry in the year 2007.*
Yeah, they were retrospective calculations that went bad only after loans written in the new millennium started to mature. It really pushed home how many instances of the problem had existed, to have such a long tail years "after."
No. The shitstains that prevent normal working folks from getting to work, or school, or to doctor's appointments are far worse than whatever climate catastrophe they're protesting to prevent. I'm a big supporter of being as green as you can (hell I don't even own a car and take mass transit everywhere I go), but to say the "minor" inconvenience of a bunch of shitty people making themselves a nuisance for the greater good is ok proves that most of these shit piles have more in common with the corporate ass lickers that are doing the earth dirty. You want to camp out in front of a senators house or have a sit in in their office, or chain yourself to a tree in a forest, feel free... but when you start impacting hard working folks from living their lives, you're worse than the corporate shitbags that are destroying the environment.
@calsnoboarder worse than oil execs who's documented plans already kill millions, and will likely kill billions if left unchecked? Okay then. Keep in mind, no disruption happened. There was discussion of doing so on a zoom call, and for just discussing it, the group was sentenced to 5 years.
It occurred to me while reading today's Suitor Armor this morning (which, incidentally, was being very nicely trans-positive today!) that many of the fictional characters I most like are, in fact, AIs (or a fantasy equivalent):
- Modeus from Suitor Armor - Rambley from Indigo Park - Wall-E and EVE - Astro from Astro Boy - SecUnit from The Murderbot Diaries - Ronb1n5cat5co from Ron's Gone Wrong - R Daneel Olivaw from an awful lot of Isaac Asimov's books - Baymax from Big Hero Six - Bender from Futurama - 9 from… well, 9 - Alpha 5 from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers - Chappie - Chip from the Not Quite Human book series - D.A.R.Y.L. - etc.
And I realised a little while ago when I remembered to actually write this post, that the reason for this may be that AIs are probably most likely to be Ace.
Later on during my run I took another pic, this time showing some old gasometers (not sure if they're even still in use, but I suspect not) with dramatic sunlight. This one should be titled something like "Solar Eclipses Gas" or "Solar Leaves Gas in the Shade".
@Aatheus I remember seeing them at different heights when I was young, but that was back in the 1970s/80s and it's a very different world now. Hopefully the whole concept of burning hydrocarbons will soon be a historical mistake that we've moved on from.
The buildings actually rose and fell within the frame as they filled up with gas...and then emptied as it was burned. Very simple mechanical system, replaced by pressurized pipelines
@Aatheus Yep, they are basically like a bell jar upside down in a circular trough of liquid, to seal it. The weight of the jar maintains the pressure in the gas pipes.
I went for a run earlier this week and actually paused long enough to take some photos. These are the local tower cranes being used to build some new tower blocks (in an area where there are no tall buildings, so they'll stick out like a sore thumb, but anyway). When I see them at night, I mentally refer to them as the eyes of Sauron, because of the red lights on the top.
I took these pics because the light was pretty good. First pic I tried to get all the cranes in the frame and yeah, that worked, but it looks bland. Second pic doesn't really show the cranes properly, but the dramatic lighting works!
My fan theory for today's disaster is that the reason they pushed out this change to everyone, bypassing their staging release process, and possibly the reason it was half-baked in the first place, is that the update was to fix a zero-day vuln that has not yet been disclosed, possibly one that was already being exploited in the wild. Better yet, maybe even a vulnerability in Falcon itself.
I'm not putting money on this because if it turns out to be true that will be a delicious enough reward in itself.
@ppxl CNC machines are never updated. I used to regularly get alerts for machine that just left production that were still loading designs off floppy disks
I can understand many of them, but not the various "patient health monitors". Why the hell are things like that running a general purpose operating system at all, much less Windows? (I guess something buildroot Linux based I wouldn't count as general purpose if trimmed properly)
I wonder what it was like this morning where I worked. (When I retired, my group had barely moved to Win7. They have to test all the specialized software with the OS to make sure it will still work. It's the specialized stuff that we really needed.)
I feel bad for the police officers. They're the stooges being set up to incriminate innocents, under huge pressure to lie, cheat, and steal to get a confession. None of what you say should be admissible in court, and instead it is considered incontrovertible evidence. The lawmakers wrote it that talking to police can be used against you, while talking to a lawyer can give you some modicum of protection against that. It prevents cops from solving crime, and leaves them nothing to be but crazed inquisitors, torturing confessions out of bystanders.
I mean I feel "bad" in the sense that I still want the one who wilfully tortured out confessions to be pulled out of his cozy retirement and hung somewhere by his nipples for a few weeks. But the system is rigged against any cops who aren't trying to do that, too.
lord the only thing I ask of you is for someone to discover and report that the bsod crowdstrike update was developed using copilot or otherwise had some jank-ass AI integration, that shit would be the funniest thing in the world
It's great how in the endless sequence of fascists coming for various groups of ppl, every person when their group comes up will say "first they came for [my group], you could be next!" while all the members of the previous groups look on like "if you didn't notice them coming for anyone before you, what makes you think anyone next in line is going to care about them coming for you?"
Henry – I'm sorry to cut you off but we're going live to CrowdStrike headquarters, where they are demonstrating a new process for testing product updates.
Uh, oh, customers are now reporting a blue screen in their eyes.
Oops, they did it again. Early this morning, McAfee released an update to its antivirus definitions for corporate customers that mistakenly deleted a crucial Windows XP file, sending systems into a reboot loop and requiring tedious manual repairs.
Thoughts and prayers go out to all those experts who have to explain the background of today's clownstrike oopsie to the befuddled press.
It takes some non-trivial mental contortion to explain the whole "people installing a backdoor on their computers for some company to execute privileged code, written in an unsafe language, in order to make their computers more secure" thing.
While not exactly the same, remember that what is happening with #CrowdStrike could also easily happen with kernel level #anticheat software. Giving proprietary software vendors permission to insert whatever they please into your kernel, especially with the ability to auto update it, means giving up all control of your system to that software vendor. One day CrowdStrike, the next Riot Vanguard. Don't let this garbage into your system! A game is not worth losing your system or your data over.
