themeatbridge

There was a movie about this last year. It was based on a true story, but strays a bit from what actually happened. It’s pretty good. It’s called Hitman.

Does the term describe yourself? If not, you haven’t reclaimed it.

Some wealthy people don’t give a shit whether you believe they have wealth. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone until and unless you make an offer. Ask questions, and don’t answer questions. Give vague, short responses and neglect to elaborate.

Why do you think you can’t prove Gengis Khan existed?

Claims need proof when there is a call to action. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re from an island or a small town or a big city, unless you’re giving me directions. If you make an extraordinary claim, and you want me to believe you, then I’ll need proof. If you make a mundane claim, then what the fuck do I care if you’re lying? If you claim to have a disease, I’m going to believe you because I’m not a doctor and it costs me nothing to take you at your word.

If you shout “Run, something bad is coming!” I might feel foolish and angry if I later learn you were lying, but I’d rather be foolish and angry than injured or dead. Proof is a luxury when time is of the essence, doubly so when safety is at risk.

There might be some specific nuances to quibnle over, but generally I think we could reach consensus on the guidelines I described.

It’s a reference to spam callers. For a few years, right around when everyone was realizing they shouldn’t answer the phone for unknown callers, it was really common to get calls that, if you picked up, would play a pre-recorded message along the lines of “Hello! We’ve been trying to get in touch with you regarding your car’s extended warranty. You may be entitled to money and blowjobs, and if your warranty expires, your hair will fall out and your car will be repossessed. To speak to a representative, press 1. Por habla Esperanto, marqué νούμερο 二.”

If you pressed 1, you would ostensibly be connected to a high-pressure sales rep trying to sell you a worthless maintenance contract. Nobody is really certain, though, because despite hundreds of millions of people receiving twelve of these calls each day, not one person every stayed on the line longer than “regarding…” In fact, my memory on the end of that message might be a fabrication, because I don’t think I ever heard it.

Criminals don’t expect to get caught.

I got my SoundBlaster from my uncle who upgraded, and I think it was a Gravis. But that was like 30 years ago, so I might be wrong.

No, but I’m a dad. My last gaming rig had a SoundBlaster card.

I have a PS5 and have never heard of this game. Why are you so keen to talk about it?

Jokes on them, I don’t have any.

Oh. I made myself sad.

Ok, but your “question” was basically “What’s something that makes you mad? Here’s mine:”

… no?

I see a lot of hype for a preferred candidate, but I don’t see anyone saying it’s over or their candidate has already won. I also see a lot of demonizing of opponents, but one party has literally nominated a rapist and convicted felon, and he’s most upset that people are calling him “weird.”

That’s March 14th, Albert Einstein’s birthday. But I don’t celebrate that, because I’m a Tauist.

Excuse you, sir, but you should be keeping the LEM in you hearts every day. And you call yourself an America. For shame.

Microsoft gave CrowdStrike unfettered access to push an update that can BSOD every Windows machine without a bypass or failsafe in place. That turned out to be a bad idea.

CrowdStrike pushed an errant update. Microsoft allowed a single errant update to cause an unrecoverable boot loop. CrowdStrike is the market leader in their sector and brings in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, but Microsoft is older than the internet and creates hundreds of billions of dollars. CrowdStrike was the primary cause, but Microsoft enabled the meltdown.

Even if that’s the case, how is it Crowdstrike’s place to call these other companies out for claiming something similar will never happen to them?

I agree completely, which is why I added that last sentence in an edit. This is a bad look for CrowdStrike, even if I agree with the sentiment.

Thus far, it had only ever happened to CS.

Everybody fucks up now and then. That’s my point. It’s why you shouldn’t trust one company to automatically push security updates to critical production servers without either a testing environment or disaster recovery procedures in place.

I doubt you’ll find any software company, or any company in any industry, that has not fucked up something really important. That’s the nature of commerce. It’s why many security protocols exist in the first place. If everyone could be trusted to do their jobs right 100% of the time, you would only need to worry about malicious attacks which make up only a small fraction of security incidents.

The difference here is that CrowdStrike sold a bunch of clients on the idea that they could be trusted to push security updates to production servers without trsting environments. I doubt they told Delta that they didn’t need DRP or any redundancy, but either way, the failure was amplified by a collective technical debt that corporations have been building into their budget sheets to pad their stock prices.

By all means, switch from CrowdStrike to a competitor. Or sue them for the loss of value resulting in their fuckup. Sort that out in the contracts and courts, because that’s not my area. But we should all recognize that the lesson learned is not to switch to another threat prevention software company that won’t fuck up. Such a company does not exist.

If you stub your toe, you don’t start walking on your hands. You move the damn coffee table out of the pathway and watch where you’re walking. The lesson is to invest in your infrastructure, build in redundancy, and protect your critical systems from shit like this.

It’s not really criticism, it’s competitors claiming they will never fuck up.

Like, if you found mouse in your hamburger at McDonald’s, that’s a massive fuckup. If Burger King then started saying “you’ll never find anything gross in Burger King food!” that would be both crass opportunism and patently false.

It’s reasonable to criticize CrowdStrike. They fucked up huge. The incident was a fuckup, and creating an environment where one incident could cause total widespread failure was a systemic fuckup. And it’s not even their first fuckup, just the most impactful and public.

But also Microsoft fucked up. And the clients, those who put all of their trust into Microsoft and CrowdStrike without regard to testing, backups, or redundancy, they fucked up, too. Delta shut down, cancelling 4,600 flights. American Airlines cancelled 43 flights, 10 of which would have been cancelled even without the outage.

Like, imagine if some diners at McDonald’s connected their mouths to a chute that delivers pre-chewed food sight-unseen into their gullets, and then got mad when they fell ill from eating a mouse. Don’t do that, not at any restaurant.

All that said, if you fuck up, you don’t get to complain about your competitors being crass opportunists.

I was twaching a class on how to use my company’s software, and I used this comic as an example for the class, and someone said “Hey, that’s the password we use!”

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make 'em battery staple.

I read that as “California launches electric trains at US…” and I was confused.

Thank you! It’s been nearly 20 years since I watched the Simpsons regularly.