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How CrowdStrike Stopped Everything

cacm.acm.org

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Re: How CrowdStrike Stopped Everything

#21

Post by jajko »

jmclnx wrote: post #10

I know people many suffered with this and in some cases the suffering was real. For most people it was just an inconvenience. And I am a bit ashamed to say, the panic from users users who could not get to Office 365 or their Windows PC cannot boot still brings a bit of a smile to my face. I think there is a German word for this :) A relative worked from my house for those days because their internet was also broken.…

If frustration or suffering of other people brings a good smile on your face, just because their employer has different IT policies compared to yours, that's not really cool or something to brag about, rather contrary.

Re: How CrowdStrike Stopped Everything

#22

Post by efitz »

dhdiajaxbsjsj wrote: post #9
nine_zeros wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When do we get rid of the traditional finance mental models from history like we are religious mental models from history? Customers need to stop buying from companies that are publicly listed. Publicly listed companies are designed for the next quarter - cutting corner is the name of the game. Also see: Boeing, GE, IBM, and recently Meta products that are basically unusable.

> Customers need to stop buying from companies that are publicly listed This is not going to happen. It’s much easier for a smaller group to coordinate than a larger group. It’s the same reason democracy is so easily exploitable. “Just vote them out” and yet the US has been involved in wars for the entirety of many of our lives. Fixing our culture and installing elites that uphold it is the only answer. Not that thos…

If you think about it, you can broadly classify (at least in US politics) right vs left as “which large groups you trust”.

For example, republicans tend to trust corporations of any size and tend to distrust large government. The opposite is true of Democrats; they tend to want to centralize power in government and tend to distrust large corporations.

The fallacy on both sides is that the problem isn’t the kind of organization, it’s the centralization of power.

Personally I distrust any large group with any sort of power, be it economic or monopoly on use of force or whatever.

The solution for government is “give the government less things to control” - easier said than done but the Constitution laid it out for us.

I have been thinking about solutions for corporations, and I have come up with two ideas:

1. A progressive tax on corporations based on number of employees and/or contractors of any sort contributing to the corporation.

2. A progressive tax on corporations based on economic power, eg market capitalization and/or gross revenue and/or subscribers or interactive users.

Or all of the above.

The idea is to make corporations naturally less profitable as they grow, which would make centralization/monopolization financially unattractive for investors.

In such a tax regime maybe we wouldn’t even need to take antitrust actions anymore as it would become self-regulating if we got the rates right.

Just a thought.

Re: How CrowdStrike Stopped Everything

#23

Post by Jtsummers »

duxup wrote: post #20
moffkalast wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These sort of things happen occasionally despite all the possible safeguards you can set up. It's just gonna be something else you didn't predict and frankly the wrong thing to focus on. The real problem this exposed is that somehow it's apparently the law for corporations to introduce a single point of failure into their entire IT system with absolutely zero fallback capacity or any workarounds at all. It's just ent…

My understanding is this update crashed very consistently.

Yep. Every Windows machine in our company that was online during the update period was brought down. The only ones to survive were offline for some reason (off, sleep mode, people traveling with them, on an air gapped network, etc.).

Re: How CrowdStrike Stopped Everything

#24

Post by moffkalast »

duxup wrote: post #20
moffkalast wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These sort of things happen occasionally despite all the possible safeguards you can set up. It's just gonna be something else you didn't predict and frankly the wrong thing to focus on. The real problem this exposed is that somehow it's apparently the law for corporations to introduce a single point of failure into their entire IT system with absolutely zero fallback capacity or any workarounds at all. It's just ent…

My understanding is this update crashed very consistently.

Yeah it probably could've been caught. Major disasters are always this way, someone does something they shouldn't have, two people that should've checked were on vacation and the third one was asleep, and a manager saying let's goooo because we're in a hurry and way behind! Come on, just skip the checklist this once, it'll be fine.

It's always a perfect storm and it will always happen, we can just reduce the frequency with more and more safeguards. If something is so critical that people will die if it doesn't work, it needs backups and probably secondary backups, end of story. Hospitals that were brought down with this have no excuse.

Re: How CrowdStrike Stopped Everything

#26

Post by mindslight »

The article didn't even touch on the social factor of insurers and other types of middle managers uniformly pushing everyone to install an unnecessary RCE-based piece of software to check off their finely crafted bullet points that demand centralized legibility at the expense of everything else. When Microsoft does something that knocks some large amount of systems out, it's at least understandable why such a monoculture exists. But this state of affairs was entirely self inflicted. And an article in CACM should really be addressing these factors, because everybody already knows Crowdstroke itself was supremely incompetent. The question is not how Crowdstroke can prevent this type of software bug from happening again, but rather how we as a society can prevent the creation of more centralizing companies like Crowdstroke, especially ones that leverage the regulatory apparatus to drive adoption of their top-down version of "security".

Re: How CrowdStrike Stopped Everything

#27

Post by nine_zeros »

letmeinhere wrote: post #17
nine_zeros wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When do we get rid of the traditional finance mental models from history like we are religious mental models from history? Customers need to stop buying from companies that are publicly listed. Publicly listed companies are designed for the next quarter - cutting corner is the name of the game. Also see: Boeing, GE, IBM, and recently Meta products that are basically unusable.

Private equity owned businesses are run in an even more predatory manner, not for next quarter's profits but just to extract every dime of equity as fees and services for their parent or as loan principal that can never be paid back. And then venture-backed companies are ticking time bombs that abruptly close shop when they run out of money or are acquired, or at best themselves turn into the publicly traded companie…

I hear what you are saying about PE backed and VC backed companies. Not wrong.

But there is a whole another world of companies whose investors are not shooting for next quarter extraction. Their horizons are larger and their returns are calculated beyond FCF and gross margins.

These kinds of companies are the local businesses, trying to upstart and grow for a smaller set of towns around their geographic location.

Obviously not all companies can work with such small scale and such investors. In such cases, stick to non-public ones. At least their horizons are beyond the next quarter.

Re: How CrowdStrike Stopped Everything

#28

Post by lucianbr »

efitz wrote: post #22
dhdiajaxbsjsj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Customers need to stop buying from companies that are publicly listed This is not going to happen. It’s much easier for a smaller group to coordinate than a larger group. It’s the same reason democracy is so easily exploitable. “Just vote them out” and yet the US has been involved in wars for the entirety of many of our lives. Fixing our culture and installing elites that uphold it is the only answer. Not that thos…

If you think about it, you can broadly classify (at least in US politics) right vs left as “which large groups you trust”. For example, republicans tend to trust corporations of any size and tend to distrust large government. The opposite is true of Democrats; they tend to want to centralize power in government and tend to distrust large corporations. The fallacy on both sides is that the problem isn’t the kind of or…

You say you distrust government, but you propose to tax large corporations out of existence. The government would do that, who else.

What's worse, any single rule against large corporations will be worked around. You will have a loose association of just-the-right-size corporations. They will find a way to work together as one, while legally being many and each small enough to have small taxes.

Look at the recent software for rent collusion. Without an active powerful government to attack this new invention, they would claim there is no price agreement. Actually they do claim that. There is none formally, but the same effects are somehow achieved. If you want the government to be limited to applying some simple rules, this would go unpunished. This requires the government to adapt and use judgement and discretion.

You need an active powerful entity to balance the power of economic behemoths. We don't appear to have any other way, yet. I think the key is balance.

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