This isn’t a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn’t log in.
Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)
Seems insane to me that one company’s messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.
I love how everyone understands the issue wrong. It’s not about being on Windows or Linux. It’s about the ecosystem that is common place and people are used to on Windows or Linux. On windows it’s accepted that every stupid anticheat can drop its filthy paws into ring 0 and normies don’t mind. Linux has a fostered a less clueless community, but ultimately it’s a reminder to keep vigilant and strive for pure and well documented open source with the correct permissions.
BSODs won’t come from userspace software
While that is true, it makes sense for antivirus/edr software to run in kernelspace. This is a fuck-up of a giant company that sells very expensive software. I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, but I mostly see this as a cautionary tale against putting excessive trust and power in the hands of one organization/company.
Imagine if this was actually malicious instead of the product of incompetence, and the update instead ran ransomware.
If it was malicious it wouldn’t have had the reach a trusted platform would. That is what made the xz exploit so scary was the reach and the malicious attempt.
I like open source software but that’s one big benefit of proprietary software. Not all proprietary software is bad. We should recognize the ones doing their best to avoid anti consumer practices and genuinely try to serve their customers needs to the best of their abilities.
That’s precisely why I didn’t blame windows in my post, but the windows-consumer mentality of “yeah install with privileges, shove genshin impact into ring 0 why not”
Linux can have the same issue. We have to keep the culture on our side here vigilant and pure near the kernel.
