Re: xkcd: CrowdStrike

On Tue, 23 Jul 2024 14:55:15 -0400, Mark Jackson
<mjackson@alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:

On 7/23/2024 12:23 PM, Paul S Person wrote:

On 23 Jul 2024 12:23:01 -0000, kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
 

Charles Packer  <mailbox@cpacker.org> wrote:

>
Was anybody here affected by the CrowdStrike Thing?
My nephew's wife flew to Europe that day without incident.

>
Not personally.  Computers were down all day at our youngest son's
workplace (Police Accountability Board); the one person I know who was
flying that day got here from JFK OK (after a series of earlier
cancellations that kept her from getting here from Amsterdam on Monday).
>

People trust computers too much.

>
True, but what's more relevant here is that people *rely* too much on
computers not failing, either through poor risk assessment or the drive
for "efficiency" (see below).
>

A few more of these things and the gummint will step in to /make/
computers trustworthy. Talk about nightmares.

>
Well, absent a countervailing force the capitalist imperative
discourages carrying the cost of robustness, and eventually eliminates
it entirely.  Do you have a suggestion other than regulation?

Nope. I consider it inevitable. Computers are becoming a /utility/ (in
some contexts), and utilities have long been, if not run by the
gummint, then closely regulated by them. Alternately, some aspects of
computing may be seen as exactly as fundamental as a road or a bridge.

Just as I consider it inevitable that some change will be imposed so
that people who threaten public employees (which is a crime in most if
not all cases) can be identified [1]. No matter what changes are
forced on the e-infrastructure.

[1] By law enforcement upon presentation of a Warrant or other Court
Order, not by monitoring. But the e-infrastructure will have to be
there: ISPs and others that should know who their customers are that
respond "we have no idea who it is" will have to be required to have a
very clear idea of who it is. Anonymity will vanish.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"