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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   39196 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:

No direct culture war implications, at least not directly left/right. However, this was easily predictable by readers of Michael Crichton or Ayn Rand, both names in the “up/down” culture war (to coin a phrase).

Crichton’s most famous work, Jurassic Park, was largely about chaos theory. When working with a complex system, that is to say one driven by logic and rules, an outlier can bring down a house of cards through emergent effects. John Hammond not paying for a team of programmers led to dinos eating people. Today’s a mundane version of that.

Rand had a lot to say about innovative producers versus free riders, and apropos to today, about smart people who can create or repair machines versus everyday people who can just use their interfaces until something goes wrong. When it does, the cynical cry of, “Who is John Galt?” escapes their lips.

In the classic book “Atlas Shrugged”, the phrase Who is John Galt is a cry of despair and hopelessness. It describes a situation wherein the pistons are removed from an engine making that whole metal mass of a car useless.

The pistons form a small part of a vehicle’s mass, but provide the entire reason for a (petrol) car’s existence. Similarly most great organisations and societies are moved by a small group of people — the innovators. When those are removed, the entire thing falls apart. And the engine is usually among the last parts of the car to give up. And when the engine gives up, usually you don’t find a replacement — you just sell the vehicle to scrap. When the small minority of truly creative, entrepreneurial, risk-taking people are removed from a society, the society completely falls apart.

John Galt is a symbol of that risk taking, entrepreneurial guy. And when he gives up, the despair sets in. “Who is John Galt” is a cry from the masses who are confused about what is happening and who are despairing to get back the people in charge [the people who can take charge of reality through reason and bend it to their will].

And the truly creative, entrepreneurial guy need not be a rich industrialist. He can be a worker. He can be an artist. He can be a banker. He can be a professor. It is not about their wealth, but about how much they move the status quo.

The American IT industry was hit hard by COVID. Businessmen, C-suite execs, saw their people remoting in from home and trying not to return to the office. These execs, many of them free riders, realized they could halve their costs by hiring remote MSPs from out of country for IT and relying on Crowdstrike to be their security bottom line. A flood of IT layoffs happened this past year, deflating IT wages and making entry level jobs scarce.

Then today, only people with the admin password or a modicum of critical thought could restore the most well-protected systems. Today, companies across the globe learned who their John Galts were, their Eddie Willers, their Dagny Taggarts.

Although, as to the left/right culture war, imagine if this or worse had happened on Election Day and all the votes had to be hand-counted.

The American IT industry was hit hard by COVID. Businessmen, C-suite execs, saw their people remoting in from home and trying not to return to the office. These execs, many of them free riders, realized they could halve their costs by hiring remote MSPs from out of country for IT and relying on Crowdstrike to be their security bottom line. A flood of IT layoffs happened this past year, deflating IT wages and making entry level jobs scarce.

I do think that it is slightly more complicated than that. First off all the lay offs of 80% of Twitter showed everyone that you don't need that many people to run a website. It was predicted by multiple of people that if Twitter didn't stop working other big tech companies would follow. Then there is the whole deal with Section 174 also that has affected the bottom line. Tech isn't unaffected by higher interest rates, when money was cheap they could amass people to be ready for "initiatives". Well not anymore.

I can give you the point of the free riders. The worst thing about them is that they actively make our tech worse to promote some number go up on their OKRs. Google is making search worse so people stay longer trying to find what they came to google for and watch more ads. Windows search always hits Bing when you do a search locally on your computer, just that it increments a number so a free rider can get a bonus. Just to take examples of search.

Your Section 174 link was fascinating. I feel that it underplayed the back story. It was sketched very briefly, but appears to go like this:

There are fiscal responsibility rules. If the US government passes a tax cut, the law should also include a tax increase in the future to balance the budget over the longer term. Legislators game this by writing a future tax increase that is stupid. Yes, it is in the law, but there is a nudge and wink that it will be repealed before it takes effect. This time the repeal never happened, so the deliberately stupid tax increase goes into effect.

This compounding disfunction bodes ill for the future of the US.

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