And there’s a better reason for wanting to delay definition updates: this outage.

Seems like you should be more mad at the International Date Line.

You posted this 14 hours ago, which would have made it 4:30 am in Austin, Texas where Cloudstrike is based. You may have felt the effect on Friday, but it’s extremely likely that the person who made the change did it late on a Thursday.

Was it actually pushed on Friday, or was it a Thursday night (US central / pacific time) push? The fact that this comment is from 9 hours ago suggests that the problem existed by the time work started on Friday, so I wouldn’t count it as a Friday push. (Still, too many pushes happen at a time that’s still technically Thursday on the US west coast, but is already mid-day Friday in Asia).

Does your web server run windows? Or is it dependent on some systems that run Windows? I would hope nobody’s actually running a web server on Windows these days.

With all the aircraft on the ground, it was probably a noticeable change. Unfortunately, those people are still going to end up flying at some point, so the reduction in CO2 output on Friday will just be made up for over the next few days.

Is it still at all Austiney though? With all the companies moving to Austin, I wonder how much of the original Austin is left.

Theoretically, this could hit Linux too. You could run a Linux kernel mod containing closed source stuff from a third party vendor which causes the system to kernel panic. The difference is really cultural. Linux admins would howl at that kind of setup, whereas for Windows it’s more standard.

Code review, QA team, hours of being baked on an internal test network, incremental exponential roll out to the world, starting slow so that any problems can be immediately rolled back. If they didn’t have those basics, they have no business being a tech company, let alone a security company who puts out windows drivers.

No they won’t, not if they’re in the slightest bit competent.

Blameless post-mortem culture is very common at big IT organizations. For a fuck-up this size, there are going to be dozens of problems identified, from bad QA processes, to bad code review processes, to bad documentation, to bad corner cases in tools.

There will probably be some guy (or gal) who pushed the button, but unless what that person did was utterly reckless (like pushing an update while high or drunk, or pushing a change then turning off her phone and going dark, or whatever) the person who pushed the button will probably be a legend to their peers. Even if they made a big mistake, if they followed standard procedures while doing it, almost everyone will recognize they’re not at fault, they just got to be the unlucky person who pushed the button this time.

AFAIK it was a Thursday night push for people in US mountain time / pacific time. But, that ends up being Friday early morning in Europe and Friday mid-day in Asia.

It would have to be a big loss. If it’s at all close, there’s going to be a lot of violence.

The only other thing I could think of that could end things without a lot more violence is if a scandal finally stuck to him and resulted in him losing support. Like, the Epstein stuff. The right has spent years getting their base riled up against pedophiles and groomers. If people believed that Trump really was a pedophile, it could finally sink him. But, nothing seems to stick to him.

Whatever happens, I hope scholars can study him and figure out why he’s so charismatic to so many people. I don’t get it. I look at him and I see a dumb, fat blow-hard who lies constantly and can’t even string a sentence together. Yet, for some reason, other people look at that and see a hero.

After thinking about this REALLY REALLY HARD…offing him will do nothing to stop the creep of [fascism]

Who would step in to replace Trump? Trump has worked hard to discredit anybody who could potentially challenge him. Strongmen often groom a son to take over for them, but only after they’ve been in power for many years. Trump might want Junior to take over, but I doubt even Trump’s hand-picked yes-men would accept Junior at this point.

Instead you’d almost certainly get a power vacuum with various Republican factions trying to take over.

You cut one head off and 3 more will pop up

And those 3 would start snapping at each-other trying to become the dominant head. And, as long as they’re distracted snapping at each-other, they’re not going to be focusing on us.

IMO, Trump is also the only thing holding this right-wing coalition together. As soon as he’s gone the factions are going to turn on each-other. The bad thing is that they’ve already shown that they’re going to get violent when they feel their grip on power is slipping. I’m sure this assassination attempt is going to lead to right-wing violence, and if it had succeeded it would have been a lot more violence.

The most dangerous thing about Trump is that he’s he’s got almost half the US behind him. There are probably more cruel Republicans, and probably some who would be more effective at implementing their cruel policies. But, not many who would be able to get so much support and keep the coalition together.

The Republican base is getting smaller each year as old people die. It’s not a popular platform with the younger voters. If the US can avoid a Trump win this year, the MAGA version of the Republican party will probably fall apart. Then it will be back to the regular corporatocracy that the US has been dealing with for decades. If he does win… well I’m glad I don’t live in the US.

Honestly, just google it. Tons of people have that problem and if you search for it you get pages and pages of results.

No, it isn’t.

Linux on a laptop can’t even reliably wake the system when you close then open a laptop lid. There are some basic things that need to work 100% of the time before Linux can be considered ready for casual everyday use.

Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.

Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, “Downloads” is a pretty obvious place to look.

Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to “Program Files” doesn’t seem too unusual, although adding “x86” bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.

The directory structure for system files is bad, but that’s true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.

Doubleclick has been Google for decades now. The difference is that (at least these days) most companies wouldn’t accept it if doubleclick ads had obnoxious pop-ups. But, they choose to have a Google sign-in form that has an obnoxious pop-up. Yes, it’s annoying that Google made an annoying login pop-up. But, much worse is that places like Reddit choose to go with that obnoxious pop-up instead of saying “we don’t want to force that on our users”.

What I mean by it not being a Google thing is that it doesn’t just appear there on its own, like it might if it were a Doubleclick ad or something.

This is something that companies like Reddit see and think “Yes, I want that obnoxious thing on my site”.

Worth noting, this isn’t really a Google thing. It’s something other websites do to allow you to login with various other credentials: Facebook, Google, Amazon – Twitter used to be common. It’s just that Google is obnoxious because when say Reddit allows you to login with your Google account, the login widget Google uses is an obnoxious pop-up.