MImikewarot·Jul 22, 2024
I'm a grumpy old man on the internet.... let's just get that out of the way
The root cause is NOT capitalism, nor is it users, Microsoft, or even CrowdStrike. You can't legislate, regulate, or "be more careful next time" your way out of this. Hell, blaming the users won't even work.
Here are 3 stories:
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Imagine yourself as an inspector for the Army. The 17th Fortress has exploded this month, and nobody can figure out why. You've checked all the surviving off-site records, and are reasonably sure that the crates of dynamite that used to make up the foundations and structure of the cart were properly inspected, and even updated on a regular basis.
You more closely inspect the records, looking for any possible soldier or supplier who might have caused this loss. It might possibly be communist infiltration, or one of those pacifists!
You
Read the rest
encounter an old civilian, who remembers a time when forts were built out of wood or bricks, and suggests that. But he's not a professional solder, what could he know.
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Imagine you're a fire inspector. You've been to your 4th case this month of complete electrical network outage. This time, the cause seems to be that Lisa Douglas at Green Acres had Eb Dawson climb the pole, and he plugged in one too many appliances to the electricial.
If only there were a way to make sure that an overload anywhere couldn't take down the grid, and ruin so many people's days. You desperately want a day without house fires, and so many linemen being called out to test and repair circuits before connecting them back to the grid.
It will take some time before the boilers and generators get back on line from their cold re-start. In the mean while, business in town has ground to a halt.
The paperwork and processes to track and certify each appliance doesn't seem efficient.
There's this grumpy old guy who talks about fuses and circuit breakers, but he's just a crank.
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The United States found itself embedded in yet another foreign entanglement in VietNam. There was a severe problem planning air strikes, because there were multiple sources required to plan them, and no single computer could be trusted with both of them. The strikes themselves were classified, but the locations of the enemy radar installations couldn't be trusted to the computers, because they were occasionally accessed by enemy sources. Thus the methods and means of locating the enemy radar equipment could become known, and thus rendered ineffective.
A study was done[1], and the problems were solved. There were systems based on the results of these studies[5], and they worked well.[2] Unfortunately, people thought that it was un-necessary to incorporate these measures, and they defaulted to the broken ambient authority model we're stuck with today. Here's some more reading, if you're interested.[3]
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If you're bored... I've even got a conspiracy theory that explains how I think we actually got here, it it wasn't simply historical forces (which I think it was, 95% certainty).[4] If true, those forces would still be here today, actively suppressing any such stories.
[1] https://csrc.nist.rip/publications/history/ande72.pdf
[2] https://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-02.pdf
[3] https://github.com/dckc/awesome-ocap
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40107150
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20120919111301/http://www.albany...