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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   39205 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Ok this might just be funny to me, but the CloudStrike Crowdstrike worldwide outage is the funniest thing to happen in computer security this decade.

If you haven't caught up, 100+ million (billion?) computers around the world were simulatenously broken in an instant. It's black comedy for sure. Hospital & emergency systems around the world have crawled to a halt, and there will be a few hundred deaths that will be traced back to this event. Millions of $$ will be lost. But, the humor comes from the cause of it.

Here is how things panned out:

  • CloudStrike Crowdstrike is a 100 billion valuation tech company that provides security services to a bulk of the world business.
  • Most sensitive organizations (govt, military, healthcare) will refuse to work with you unless you are compliant & all your machines have this installed.
  • It is effectively an anti-virus that sits 1 level below your operating system, 'protecting' your organization from 'bad outcomes'.
  • On Friday afternoon (which we all know is the best time), CloudStrike Crowdstrike deployed a software update that began this outage
  • For any other software this would be a simple restart or uninstall away, but since CloudStrike Crowdstrike is a 'trusted' secuirty tool, it sits under the OS layer, bricking the whole device.
  • Alright, so how do they fix it ?...... THEY CANT !
  • The beauty of bricked device, is you can't send any more software updates to it. You must do it manually. Raw dog it like the 90s.....all 100 million of these computers.
  • That's bad, but surely they can give those instructions to people and each person can fix their laptops themselves. Divide the labor.....
  • NOPE !
  • This software is used in vending machines, kiosks, tablet displays....and all sorts of devices that sometimes don't have keyboards and other times haven't been looked at for years. But at least there is a fix right ?
  • Yes....... but it needs you to start the computer in safe mode....which you can't because 'Bitlocker'.
  • Ah yes, Bitlocker. Turns out, another security measure, makes it so that 99% of a company's employees can't open safe mode.
  • So yes, a few hundred IT people will be responsible for fixing hundreds upon hundreds of laptops, daily, for weeks !

This is the Y2k that was promised.

The world spends billions in computer security every year, and no virus has managed the kind of world-wide disruption caused by one simple bug by the premier security company in the world.

No direct culture war implications, but goes to show just how much of a house-of-cards the tech ecosystem is. 1 little, simple, stupid bug can bring the whole world to a halt. Yet, the industry continues quarterly-earnings chasing.

Jobs keep getting cut, senior members get aged out, timelines get thinner and 'how many features did you deploy' remains the only metric for evaluation.

In tech, staying at a job for more than 3 years is seen as coasting. Devs are increasingly expected to do everything, because 'everyone should be full stack' and everything that isn't feature development (testing, staging, canaries) get deprioritized. Overworked novices means carelessness, carelessness creates mistakes.

At the same time, devs get zero agency. Random HR types make list of regulations mandating certain checkboxes for compliance, while having near-zero knowledge of the risks-and-benefits of these technical decisions. Therefore, the implications of a mistake are opaque to decisions makers. So by being compliant, you've suddenly given CloudStrike Crowdstrike a button to shut your entire business down.

This kind of error should literally be impossible in a company of the size of CloudStrike Crowdstrike . If such an error happens, it should be impossible for giant corporations to crumble zero backup. Incompetence on display, on all sides. Having worked in 'prestigious tech companies', especially in 2024, it isn't surprising. At times, the internal dysfunction is seriously alarming, other times it's a tuesday.

I'm not going to hope for much out of this. Just like Spectre & Solar , people will cry about it for weeks, demand change and everyone will get collective amnesia about it as the next quarter rolls around.

End of the day, tech workers are treated as disposable labor. Executive bean counters are divorced from the product. And the stock price is the only incentive that matters.

As long as tech is run by MBAs and smooth talkers, this will go on.

Some choice photos:

It's already over. The biggest non-crisis ever even if it was the among the most widespread.

No direct culture war implications, but goes to show just how much of a house-of-cards the tech ecosystem is. 1 little, simple, stupid bug can bring the whole world to a halt. Yet, the industry continues quarterly-earnings chasing.

That seems overdramatic. I have not noticed any disruption at all; if not for all the headlines this morning I would have never known about this. An upgrade was rolled out and it was fixed. This requires manual intervention of servers, which is why IT exists as a profession in the first place. It's not a crisis like on the order of Covid or 2008, but more like a mass disruption. I think too many people are overreading into this as some sort of harbinger of the awaited collapse, and really it's not.

Airlines were grounded; again, this is a common occurrence. There was a similar incidence as recently as 2023 when many flights were grounded https://www.reuters.com/world/us/why-us-flights-were-grounded-by-faa-system-outage-2023-01-11/

it's bad, no doubt, but the mass-grounding of flights is something that typically happens every 2-3 years.

End of the day, tech workers are treated as disposable labor. Executive bean counters are divorced from the product. And the stock price is the only incentive that matters.

The fact they are paid so well and exhaustively vetted in the hiring process suggests they are not disposable. Companies invest a lot of resources in new hires . There is also a loss of perspective in that people forget the other 3650 days of the past decade in which there is no major failure, but a single failure is suddenly a major indictment on the entire tech industry, as opposed to something more mundane like a mistake.

Crowdstike stock was only down 11% today, which is far less than expected given that it has been implicated in the greatest IT failure ever. By comparison, Meta stock fell 15% in a day last after it missed the highest of earnings estimates. This is reason to believe it's not as bad as the overly dramatic language would suggest.

One would hope such companies learn from past mistakes, but as tech changes, consequently so do the mistakes. So I can expect incidents like this in the future.

I can't help but think about this post that was linked on the SSC reddit a few days ago: https://matt.sh/panic-at-the-job-market

(long, rambly post that I don't fully agree with but it did say a few interesting things) In particular these two quotes:

Modern tech hiring, due to industry-wide persistent fear mongering about not hiring “secretly incompetent people,” has become a game divorced from meaningfully judging individual experience and impact

...

Such job descriptions also means: your job is physically impossible. You will always feel drained and incompetent because you can’t actually do everything everyday. You will always be behind because each of those bullet points can be multiple days of work per week just on their own (plus, how are you supposed to be productive in 35 different areas requiring months to years of experience if you actually want to be good at each task?). So, from day 1, you will already be about 4 months behind on your expected job responsibilities and you’ll never catch up. It turns into an endless game of managers and executives saying you are “underperforming” because you have 18 primary tasks, each primary task requires 4 to 20 hours of effort, and every manager wants their task done within 4 hours. You are setup to fail. What’s the point?

Maybe a point is some companies just shouldn’t exist if they can’t afford the fully staffed professional teams required to build and maintain their products? The worst secret in tech is amateur developers are happy to act like entry level workers across 20 arbitrary roles for years (in the absence of never having enough time to focus on building up long-term experience or best practices). You can’t get gud if you are always rushed from task to task without any chance of leveling up knowledge and capability through “deep work” as we would historically expect of professionals.

I don't think it's like that at every company, or even the majority. But there are certainly some companies like that. They, in theory, care greatly about their tech workers, because the salaries are high and they have a vague understanding that tech is important. But they don't have a good system for actually hiring good tech workers. And then, once hired, they use them all as generalists, moving quickly from one thing to another, with no chance to actually develop expertise or fix deep underlying issues. And they are never given any kind of decision-making authority in the company, only responsibility to "just fix whatever breaks."

I think that behavior happens the most in companies that are not "tech companies," but still use tech. Banks, airlines, large retailers, that sort of thing. They need tech to function, but it's just a cost center to them- they want to just pay a fixed price per month to "handle tech" and then not think about it ever again. And it seems like those are the ones being bitten in the ass by this thing, because it turns out that running a windows server with third-party antivirus on it with automatic updates is not actually very secure! I wonder if we'll see any restructuring, or if this sort of thing is just going to happen every so often forever, as companies get blindsided by tech issues that they don't understand and never cared to try and understand?

i think the culture of secrecy is the bigger problem. they are paid lot and expected to not blabber to the media if they expect to be employed now or in the future by other companies

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