Jul 272024
Mike Meredith
Jul 272024
If you turn on Youtube, you could easily be swamped by videos poking fun at dumb Americans. But why?
Well it is certainly true that there are dumb Americans – the existence of a political party that has been hijacked by a conman who previously won the presidential election pretty much conclusively demonstrates there is plenty of stupidity in America.
But many of the examples are not stupidity (or “dumb”) but ignorance. And ignorance about Europe, Asia, or Africa – not their home continent. Such ignorance is perhaps unfortunate but reasonable.
There are plenty of folk from all over the world that are dumb – both ignorant and stupid. The average person isn’t too bright and half of us are dumber than that. No, dumb Americans are simply more noticeable simply because they’re speaking English.
English is by far the widest spoken (and read) second language to make it the most widely understood language in the world – even exceeding Mandarin (which is by far the largest first language).
And yes that means the dumb British also stand out, but not to quite to the same extent – Americans simply outnumber us.
Having said that, all those Trump voters do kind of undermine the notion that Americans aren’t really dumber than anyone else in the world.
Jul 212024
Jul 202024
This is a bit of rant poking fun at the sheer quantity of misinformation about CrowdStrike’s little issue yesterday (to clarify when this post was written – more information will come out).
Microsoft
Some of the earliest symptoms of the issue were some Microsoft services having issues. Oddly enough I wasn’t using many of those yesterday (I usually do) except for Teams which didn’t seem to suffer … at least not as much.
It appears that Microsoft may run CrowdStrike Falcon on at least some of their servers (although the jury is still out on this one – some are saying it was an independent outage). Despite Microsoft having their own security tools (Defender), this isn’t quite as unlikely as it may seem – particularly safety conscious organisations may well run two of more anti-malware products.
And CrowdStrike is more mature than Defender at least in the fancy “behavioural analytics” area.
The Internet
… wasn’t broken at all. Many services were broken true enough, but probably more were working just as well as normal. Microsoft’s platforms are very widely used, and CrowdStrike is a big name in cybersecurity, so it is hardly surprising that there was so much disruption.
But to say this broke the Internet is a bit of an exaggeration. Kind of what you would expect from mainstream media.
Who Are CrowdStrike?
Not surprisingly, many people just haven’t heard this name before. It is very widely known in the cybersecurity community with a wide variety of security focused services, including top-flight anti-malware products.
But they don’t sell to individuals so they are not well known amongst the general community.
The product at the centre of all this is CrowdStrike Falcon, an anti-malware agent that goes a bit beyond “anti-virus” in that it attempts to go beyond blocking known viruses and attempts to block behaviours known to be malicious.
As such, it receives very frequent updates – up to every hour (although probably many hours) which puts this sort of catastrophic failure at a rate of somewhere in the order of 0.001%.
What Went Wrong?
This starts to get a bit technical …
Some of this was informed by CrowdStrike’s update; some by educated (I work in this field although I’m not familiar with CrowdStrike’s product) common sense.
First of all, this was not a kernel driver update (although the relevant filename made it appear so) but a content update. As previously mentioned, these are sent out very frequently. The content update triggered a bug in the kernel driver and caused a “blue screen of death“. This would repeat after every reboot until the relevant update was removed or updated (the crash doesn’t occur immediately which sometimes allows the agent to download a fixed update).
Secondly this update was tested before being released (do you really believe that an approximately 0.001% failure rate is achieved without testing?), but something went wrong with the testing process. We don’t know what, and CrowdStrike don’t either. Yet.
Why Was It So Widespread?
Simply because although generally unknown to the general public, CrowdStrike Falcon is generally regarded as an excellent security product and is very widely used. Perhaps more widely used than previously suspected.
But the whole Internet? Clearly not, but it’s in the mainstream’s media to be a bit ‘click-baity’ in their reports.
Jul 142024
Having just spent a couple of nights in a cheap hotel (which is my own choice so no complaints about that), I have a few suggestions with regards to hotels. Most of which would be cheap to implement, make life easier for both you and your guests.
Sure some will cost money, but still worth considering.
Beds
Beds are rather critical to what we’re there for – if anything that is the only reason we’re there. A place to sleep overnight without being squished into strange contortions in a car, or under a bush hoping it doesn’t rain.
You do fine with the beds themselves, but the bedding?
I’m sure how you make beds is very impressive at an exhibition and if you want to make an exhibition of how you make the beds, stick it in the fucking lobby.
I don’t want to struggle for half an hour to untangle the bedding to get into bed; in fact on my latest stay I just didn’t bother. I slept on top of the duvet with the addition of a few towels.
Just don’t tuck that shit in. It’ll save your staff time, and it’ll save your guests time.
“For Your Safety”
Oh please! We know that those window chains preventing them from opening far enough aren’t really for our safety. They’re a legal safety belt so that if someone does something really dumb like crawling through the window, you’re legally covered.
Replace the notice with “For our legal protection”, and allow us to unscrew the safety cable (“On your own head be it”). Most of your guests are adults and have been successfully dealing with the dangers of open windows for years; sometimes decades.
Nicotine Addicts
… don’t disappear in a cloud of smoke just because smoking is now prohibited in hotel rooms. And how many fire alarms have been triggered because vaping triggers ‘smoke’ alarms? Or by especially steamy showers?
Let’s face it, those smoke alarms are just a bit shit – they should be looking for smoke particles not all particles.
But ignoring that, making some sort of arrangements for nicotine addicts might well make sense – not only for those who are addicted, but also those who aren’t. Smokers usually exit the hotel and smoke somewhere on the ground floor which often seems to climb into hotel rooms. Certainly the room I was in caught the occasional whiff of smoke.
Give the smokers a balcony on every floor with an active ventilation system that ejects the smoke at roof level. More convenient for the smokers, and less nasty smells for the other residents. And a separate balcony for vapers; despite what you might think, vapers don’t necessarily enjoy cigarette smoke.
