Why things like the CloudStrike outage and the NPD breach happen

[Loren Pechtel]

The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness - Schneier on Security

www.schneier.com

(Note that he's not addressing the NPD breach as that came later.)

Preparedness and layers of defense are costs. Markets drive out costs.

Remember with the takeover of Shitter how Musk was complaining because he could take out systems and the system continued to operate, thus proving the systems weren't needed? Yet another example of the same thing.

 

[bilby]

It's what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification".

Once a software business reaches a certain size, it can no longer grow by aquiring new customers, because everyone is either already a customer, or is somebody who has decided never to become a customer.

"Nobody sat down and said, 'Let's make Google worse,'" Doctorow suggested.

"You often hear people at Google being very sincere and saying, like, 'we're not deliberately making Google worse'. And they're not setting out to make Google worse. They're just only finding growth from raising costs, reducing value, and cutting back on internal structures."

More at: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/30/tech_monopoly_doctorow/

Google Search is just an example, of course. He could just as well have used Window OS, or Facebook, or Twitter - the latter two even dropped perfectly good names in pursuit of doing something, because executives cannot tolerate low growth without doing something.

Something must be done; This is something; Therefore this must be done.

And we get "Meta" and "X".

FFS.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

There is one other thing, which is driving me up the fucking wall. Software is no longer finished. My field has an issue where one company pretty much bought up all the competition and forgot how to program themselves. Now an important type of program doesn't exist in the market right now, at least that is high quality. Things are trying to fill in, but the problem as I was told by an idiot running one of the competitors is 'this is how software develops today'. I refused to thumbs up one of the alternatives because it wasn't even beta stage yet. They effectively wanted us to pay them to Beta their software. The owner of the company was taken aback by my refusal to okay that. And he indicate this was how it works today.

This is the example of software never being finished. Windows is always updating. It is so big that it is destined to fail! Crowdstrike and what not keep updating because they keep finding fuck ups and vulnerabilities in Windows! But that is okay. Well, these days. Software isn't supposed to be completed. Video games almost always have Day One updates! And that is what causes these problems.

More at: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/30/tech_monopoly_doctorow/

Google Search is just an example, of course. He could just as well have used Window OS, or Facebook, or Twitter - the latter two even dropped perfectly good names in pursuit of doing something, because executives cannot tolerate low growth without doing something.

In those two cases, I don't believe either is true. Meta came about because Facebook kept getting into trouble for security issues with their shit platform. They switched names to reset the Brand value.

Elon Musk loves individual letters. So he switched Twitter to X. Not because it was to do something, but because he thought it's cooler.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

I read this op article, too, but I think it's also true that causes of things are multi-variate most often. We may not like Musk and so we might focus on how the profit motive helps to minimize testing, for example, but there's at least another issue: the greater connectivity we all have as years progress. Each new technological connection is a security risk and the global nature of things and how basically cartels hold everything (there are only two main cloud companies, for example) means that it's way easier for bigger more impactful things to happen. They have layer upon layer of backup strategies, one layer backed up on top of another if something fails, and so failures are rare, but when they happen, the outcome can be huge.

 

[Gospel]

If you think things are bad now, just wait until the big players decide it's a good idea to let some cloud-based AI handle bugs and security updates. The future is a plane with no pilot, a boat with no captain, and a car with no driver.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

If you think things are bad now, just wait until the big players decide it's a good idea to let some cloud-based AI handle bugs and security updates. The future is a plane with no pilot, a boat with no captain, and a car with no driver.

That reminds me of the other day when I tried to help my son get his lab test results. The only support the company had was AI chatbot. You can't talk to a person to tell them that for some reason his lab test result does not appear in his online account or in the app. It took an hour to figure this out. Then, we finally got a phone number but it was for billing and we had to sit through elevator music and deliberately misclick numbers and stuff to error out of the automated billing payment system to talk to a person who said they were just the billing department and we had to pay his bill. Paying a bill...but no known result...and it didn't go to his doctor either.

Testing, support, other humans being replaced, while simultaneously getting larger and more connected than ever...

Let's also add more and more sophisticated disinformation tactics...

Our capabilities are getting better and becoming super awesome, but our quality isn't scaling to these changes.

It's what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification".

Sounds about right.

 

[ZiprHead]

It's what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification".

Sounds about right.

I gotta remember that word.