Miscellaneous News

[Sinnavuuty]

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Here’s why China was largely unaffected by Friday’s IT outage​

️ While businesses in the US and Europe woke up on Friday to a global IT outage that disrupted airports and hotels, China entered its weekend largely unchanged.

️ “The impact of Friday's CrowdStrike incident in China was very small, almost no impact on domestic public life,” said Gao Feng, senior research director at Gartner, in Chinese, translated by CNBC. “Only a few foreign companies in China were affected.”

️ “This is in part because many of the security threats that CrowdStrike is designed to protect against originate in China,” said Rich Bishop, CEO of AppInChina, which publishes international software in China.

️ Microsoft products are widely used in China – Windows accounted for about 87% of personal computer shipments on the mainland last year, according to Canalys. That's up from the 79% share for the rest of the world in the first quarter of this year, the research firm said.

️ “There has been very little impact because CrowdStrike is barely used in China,” said Rich Bishop, CEO of AppInChina, which publishes international software in China.

️ “This is in part because many of the security threats that CrowdStrike is designed to protect against originate in China,” he said, adding that Chinese companies typically use products from Tencent, 360 and other companies.

️ CrowdStrike said in its latest annual cyber threat report that over the past year, “China nexus adversaries continued to operate at an unparalleled pace across the global stage, leveraging stealth and scale to collect surveillance data from targeted groups, strategic intelligence and intellectual property”.

 

[coolgod]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1815807299723620519

Turns out Biden is still alive

 

[valysre]

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On this topic, I heard from the grapevine that it was a single null pointer dereference that caused the Crowdstrike outage.
It's a fairly easy mistake to make, but it's also a very easy mistake to catch during testing, because it's practically guaranteed failure.
Brings to question the competence of whoever Crowdstrike has got working for them, if they couldn't catch such an obvious bug during testing.

 

[HereToSeePics]

Not only did Crowdstrike bug cause computers to crash, the BSOD error happens during startup, so people couldn’t even boot into Windows to roll back the bad update.

There were tens of thousands of system administrators across the globe working nights and weekend to manually boot individual computers in safemode to undo the bad update.

 

[GZDRefugee]

On this topic, I heard from the grapevine that it was a single null pointer dereference that caused the Crowdstrike outage.
It's a fairly easy mistake to make, but it's also a very easy mistake to catch during testing, because it's practically guaranteed failure.
Brings to question the competence of whoever Crowdstrike has got working for them, if they couldn't catch such an obvious bug during testing.

So my segmentation fault joke was actually right on the money? Wild.

 

[cookiez]

So my segmentation fault joke was actually right on the money? Wild.

Real programmers test in production on a Friday.

 

[valysre]

So my segmentation fault joke was actually right on the money? Wild.

I'm not absolutely convinced that it is true, because there are many compile-time tools that will alert you of this, but it doesn't seem improbable. There are only so many things that could go so catastrophically wrong at this level.
Anyways, good luck to anyone who has "Crowdstrike 2024" in their resume. They will probably be rejected out of hand, without even interviewing.

 

[siegecrossbow]

On this topic, I heard from the grapevine that it was a single null pointer dereference that caused the Crowdstrike outage.
It's a fairly easy mistake to make, but it's also a very easy mistake to catch during testing, because it's practically guaranteed failure.
Brings to question the competence of whoever Crowdstrike has got working for them, if they couldn't catch such an obvious bug during testing.

Boeingfication of a nation… When you value shareholder profit above all else…

 

[GZDRefugee]

I'm not absolutely convinced that it is true, because there are many compile-time tools that will alert you of this, but it doesn't seem improbable. There are only so many things that could go so catastrophically wrong at this level.
Anyways, good luck to anyone who has "Crowdstrike 2024" in their resume. They will probably be rejected out of hand, without even interviewing.

Well they gave a devblog update to the issue.

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TLDR: They claim the issue is due to logic error in named pipe execution. I can't verify unless I can get my hands on the stacktrace.

Alas, it seems the outage isn't because of a NULL->xyz mistake. So I can't claim to be a prophet.
It would have been really funny though.

 

[gelgoog]

China is a lot more powerful than Russia though. Even if the amount of nukes are similar, Russia only has a doubtful ability to consistently make Avangard, while only China's own decision to avoid threatening first strike prevents them from putting tactical nukes on every DF27/17.

Russia still has like an order of magnitude more nuclear warheads than China. And it is not like Russia only has Avangard. They also have the Zircon. Which is a 1000-1200km range Mach 9 hypersonic cruise missile that can carry a >200kt nuclear warhead. Russia thus far is the only country which has operational hypersonic cruise missiles.
They have literally dozens of ships which can carry the Zircon. Each Project 885M Yasen-M SSGN can carry like 32 Zircon missiles. Russia has four such submarines operational and is meant to build a dozen of them. That will be up to 384 hypersonic missiles each carrying a warhead with an order of magnitude more destructive power than the bomb the US dropped at Hiroshima. That is enough to hit all US cities with over 100,000 population. And this will be just the SSGNs. In practice the SSGNs would be used to strike command nodes and other such in theater targets while the SSBNs would obliterate the major cities.

But what boosts China the most ultimately is that they have much more conventional muscle to back up the last resort of nukes than what Russia has.

This much is true. Russia is not the Soviet Union. Their doctrine is way more based on using nuclear weapons defensively since they are totally outnumbered. In this way it is similar to NATO doctrine against the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War.

Ironically this was what US projected that NK would do, use it's nukes to blackmail its enemies into giving them international legitimacy, because they know conventional route doesn't work for them.

Actually I would say NK having nukes will probably help save their economy in the long term because it will allow them to reduce the amount of conventional forces they need to defend themselves. While nukes are extremely expensive having conventional weapons capable of similar effects are way more expensive to build, man, and maintain.

There are no direct easy answers because nukes are easy to build while defenses are expensive and have poor success rates. The only thing China can do to mitigate nuclear blackmail is to keep up the fake appearance of "mutual disarmament" while in secret building and researching technologies that could win a peer nuclear war.

China needs to ensure Mutually Assured Destruction it is as simple as that.