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The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#171

Post by 999900000999 »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #85
999900000999 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't know what you're doing you can strip a screw. Getting it out won't be fun.

if you're at home, with no other tools, it could be painful. but in a shop unless you can't take it out using other means (pliers for example or a nut split remover), you can simply weld a bolt on the screw's head and use a wrench to unscrew it. or drill a hole through it after removing the head and use another screw to take out the moncone from the other side. Bad screws are more common than bad screwdrivers and eve…

Let's just keep going off this hypothetical, it would still be a better idea to have working screwdrivers.

All the steps you outlined risk damaging the part you're working on, or wasting time. Let's just say you only value your time as a mechanic at $30 an hour if getting that screw out takes you another 20 or 30 minutes, you would have been better off buying a $5 screw bit

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#172

Post by iancmceachern »

cainxinth wrote: post #165

So is society. When you’re a kid, it seems like everything is incredibly well organized and orchestrated. As an adult, you realize the world is a patchwork of semi-functioning systems and it’s a miracle the whole thing works as well as it does.

I've been thinking along these lines a lot recently. When young I thought everything was all carefully architected, thought out and planned. I've come to realize it's all chaos, interactions between the disparate desires of various individuals and groups randomly acting constructively and destructively with eachother creating random results.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#173

Post by peoplefromibiza »

999900000999 wrote: post #171
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you're at home, with no other tools, it could be painful. but in a shop unless you can't take it out using other means (pliers for example or a nut split remover), you can simply weld a bolt on the screw's head and use a wrench to unscrew it. or drill a hole through it after removing the head and use another screw to take out the moncone from the other side. Bad screws are more common than bad screwdrivers and eve…

Let's just keep going off this hypothetical, it would still be a better idea to have working screwdrivers. All the steps you outlined risk damaging the part you're working on, or wasting time. Let's just say you only value your time as a mechanic at $30 an hour if getting that screw out takes you another 20 or 30 minutes, you would have been better off buying a $5 screw bit

not hypothetically speaking, it takes a couple of minutes

but what the original post said it's not that you shouldn't buy a new screwdriver, but that it you know something will break, you learn how to fix it.

if your brand new screwdriver ends up stripping that screw anyway and you don't know what to do next because you thought that it would never happen using a working screwdriver, well. you're screwed :)

sometimes there are no good solutions, only bad solutions

that's what keep things working.

if everyone believed that spit and bailing wire was a no go, because they are bad solutions and there's a better one - there always is - (i.e. fixing the root cause, after having identified it) there would be no internet as we know it today.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#174

Post by a9h74j »

illwrks wrote: post #119

Value less comment... but I've always had a thought in the back of my head that it will only take some catastrophe for us to be back in the dark ages. I hope I'm wrong.

As a less all-or-nothing scenario, one relevent concept comes from Joseph Tainter as a theorist of collapse. He proposes that eventually complexity reaches a point where it not sustainable (either in general or at the margin), and a society collapses back to a configuration of less complexity.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#175

Post by Nevermark »

h2odragon wrote: post #6

It's Anti-Fragile. If it breaks all the time, everybody is highly experienced at patching together new workarounds, mechanisms for fail over are in place and regularly tested, and there's whole classes of corner case bugs that get flushed out to be stomped (or nurtured as cherished pets) instead of breeding in the dark and jumping out at you all at once. How can the "Internet routes around failure" be trusted without…

I would call the Internet resilient, in that lower level failures are often reliably re-routed, healed, etc., but at higher levels the same kinds of failures happen over and over.

Anti-Fragile would imply that each doh-inducing failure resulted in internet wide improvements. Something that famously is not happening.

The Internet: "It's Anti-Fragile!" (looking up)

The Internet: "It's Duct Tape all the Way Down" (seen from above)

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