On 20 Jul 2024 18:42:21 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> Stated honestly a large part of my college statistics course involved
> determining how many widgets you need to test to insure only N% of the
> output is defective, where N is determined by the cost of repairing/
> replacing the defective widgets balanced against the QA costs.

A certain William Edwards Deming comes to mind. He was shunned (at least
to begin with) in his homeland of USA, but he found a willing audience for
his ideas on quality control in Japan. Which, if you remember, became an
economic powerhouse that took away so many manufacturing jobs from that
same USA.

Which is why Japan declared a national holiday in his honour.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote in comp.os.linux.misc:
>On Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:34:06 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>>Which is why governments should
>>never ever be in charge of running anything
>
>Ummm … the legal system, public roading, clean air and water,
>healthcare?
>
>After all, Socialist healthcare is the only kind of healthcare that works!
>
>Not to mention economic market regulation, to ensure that free markets
>remain free … not something that happens by itself …

Yes and yes. PSE discuss the meaning of “running” for some time. I
am sure there is no contradiction.

On 21/07/2024 08:10, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:04:19 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> The IT managers career is best served by spending shitloads of money
>> with a company like crowdstrike which offers impressive legal guarantees
>> in its contracts.
>
> Um ... *WHAT* legal guarantees?

A service contract that guarantees things like downtime being below a
certain level etc.

Plus penalties if it isn't.

A contract is a legal document...

--
WOKE is an acronym... Without Originality, Knowledge or Education.

On 21/07/2024 08:12, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:34:06 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> Which is why governments should
>> never ever be in charge of running anything
>
> Ummm ... the legal system, public roading, clean air and water,
> healthcare?
>
They are not in charge of those. They are in chare of funding possibly,
but hte work is contracted to others

> After all, Socialist healthcare is the only kind of healthcare that works!
>

Not really.

> Not to mention economic market regulation, to ensure that free markets
> remain free ... not something that happens by itself ...

Governments prevent free markets. They do not maintain them

--
I was brought up to believe that you should never give offence if you
can avoid it; the new culture tells us you should always take offence if
you can. There are now experts in the art of taking offence, indeed
whole academic subjects, such as 'gender studies', devoted to it.

Sir Roger Scruton

Hi there

On 20/07/2024 09:06, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Jul 2024 15:31:00 +0200, Sirius wrote:
>
>> They offer a quite capable security solution.
>
> CrowdStrike’s security products cover Mac and Linux clients, too. But it
> was only the Windows one that got screwed up.

The problem isn't CrowdStrike. Or even Windows. The problem is
unattended automatic updates.
With a manual update, if things don't work quite the way they should,
you just revert back to the previous situation. And with enough
redundant systems, the whole just keeps working while you fix this
particular computer.
With unattended automatic updates on a vast scale, half the world just
crashes.
It's a bean counter thing: Why spend money on IT staff when the software
can do the IT thing for you.

Regards,
Rob

On Sun, 21 Jul 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 21/07/2024 08:12, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> On Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:34:06 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> Which is why governments should
>>> never ever be in charge of running anything
>>
>> Ummm ... the legal system, public roading, clean air and water,
>> healthcare?
>>
> They are not in charge of those. They are in chare of funding possibly, but
> hte work is contracted to others
>
>
>
>> After all, Socialist healthcare is the only kind of healthcare that works!
>>
>
> Not really.
>
>> Not to mention economic market regulation, to ensure that free markets
>> remain free ... not something that happens by itself ...
>
>
> Governments prevent free markets. They do not maintain them
>

Don't bother. Lawrence is an extremely well indoctrinated socialist, so
he'll only continue to throw up his garbage. Should you present him with
an argument or a text proving your point, he will just ignore it and
continue.

In article <v7du6n$30rop$1@dont-email.me>, jmccue@hairball.jmcunx.com
(John McCue) wrote:
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> > Pardon my ignorance, but what has crowdstrike got to do with
> > Windows?
>
> My understanding, Microsoft "outsourced" somekind of
> security function to croudstrike, so just about all
> corporate Windows systems may have this binary from
> croudstrike.

Not so. Crowdstrike is a commercial product, and in no way compulsory. At
my employer, Windows servers have it, and some got hit, but Windows
laptops and desktops do not, and were unaffected.

John

Ant wrote:

> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> I remember the US Robotics 'lifetime guaranteed' modems When mine
>> got struck by lightning, they simply sent me a new one. It was
>> cheaper than repairing the old
>
> I wonder if you can still get a new replacement today. :P

If it's a USR Courier, then yes

<https://www.usr.com/products/usr3453c-ref>

On Sun, 21 Jul 2024 11:11:41 +0200, Rob van der Putten <rob@sput.nl>
wrote:

>On 20/07/2024 09:06, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> CrowdStrike’s security products cover Mac and Linux clients, too. But it
>> was only the Windows one that got screwed up.
>
>The problem isn't CrowdStrike. Or even Windows. The problem is
>unattended automatic updates.

That is indeed a problem, and not just with corporate users.

Some years ago I was about to leave a b&b in a faraway town to go on
the next stage of my journey. I needed to be out of the room in ten
minutes, but I thought that give me enough time to check my email
before I left, by three hours later I was still waiting for it to
finish downloading and installing Service Pack 3.

I cursed Microsoft more on that day than on any other. So the fault is
Windows. Unattended automatic updates are a feature of Windows. There
may be a way of turning it off, but that is quite hard t find.

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

On 2024-07-21, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> On 20 Jul 2024 18:42:21 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>
>> Stated honestly a large part of my college statistics course involved
>> determining how many widgets you need to test to insure only N% of the
>> output is defective, where N is determined by the cost of repairing/
>> replacing the defective widgets balanced against the QA costs.
>
> A certain William Edwards Deming comes to mind. He was shunned (at least
> to begin with) in his homeland of USA, but he found a willing audience for
> his ideas on quality control in Japan. Which, if you remember, became an
> economic powerhouse that took away so many manufacturing jobs from that
> same USA.
>
> Which is why Japan declared a national holiday in his honour.

That reminds me of the joke about the American firm that ordered parts
from a Japanese supplier, specifying a 1% defect rate. When the crate
arrived, they found a small plastic bag containing a few parts lying
on top of the main shipmenet. They asked the supplier about this, and
the Japanese told them: "We don't know why you want 1% defective parts,
but for your convenience we've packaged them separately."

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

On Sun, 21 Jul 2024 10:53 +0100 (BST), John Dallman wrote:

> In article <v7du6n$30rop$1@dont-email.me>, jmccue@hairball.jmcunx.com
> (John McCue) wrote:
>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> > Pardon my ignorance, but what has crowdstrike got to do with Windows?
>>
>> My understanding, Microsoft "outsourced" somekind of security function
>> to croudstrike, so just about all corporate Windows systems may have
>> this binary from croudstrike.
>
> Not so. Crowdstrike is a commercial product, and in no way compulsory.
> At my employer, Windows servers have it, and some got hit, but Windows
> laptops and desktops do not, and were unaffected.

And to expand, CrowdStrike claims a 18.5% market share so the majority of
servers with an EDR solution weren't affected.

On Sun, 21 Jul 2024 12:19:48 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:

> I cursed Microsoft more on that day than on any other. So the fault is
> Windows. Unattended automatic updates are a feature of Windows. There
> may be a way of turning it off, but that is quite hard t find.

Checking the 'metered connection' box helps.

On Sun, 21 Jul 2024 09:37:09 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> Governments prevent free markets. They do not maintain them

Unregulated markets, left to themselves, fall prey to anticompetitive
practices, deceptive advertising, price-fixing, and just plain fraud.
That’s why we need laws, and a Government to enforce them. Freedom
requires order; anarchy is not freedom.

Case in point: the introduction of mobile phones. The Europeans decided
that there had to be a common standard, rather than having every carrier
build its own proprietary network. So they came up with a Government-
mandated spec called “GSM”. Yes, it was a complex. bureaucratic spec, but
it was a proper spec, with compliance tests and everything. So you had
proper interoperability. The only thing that tied you to a particular
carrier was that you got your SIM card from them. So switching carriers
was as easy as getting a new SIM card.

Meanwhile, in the USA, the prevailing ideology was “let the market
decide”. So each carrier created its own proprietary network, and its
customers were locked into that network.

And so you had the interesting situation where, in Europe, you could buy
your phone first, then decide which carrier to sign up to, whereas in the
USA, you first chose your carrier, and then you had to buy your phone from
them.

And not only was the European system successful in Europe, it became
popular in most of the rest of the world, too. So you had the situation,
in the early days of Android, where a new model from Samsung or HTC or
whomever would be available across the entire GSM-using world within a
matter of days, while customers in the US had to wait another couple of
weeks, for carrier-specific versions to come out for their particular
carriers.

On Sun, 21 Jul 2024 09:33:08 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 21/07/2024 08:10, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:04:19 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> The IT managers career is best served by spending shitloads of money
>>> with a company like crowdstrike which offers impressive legal
>>> guarantees in its contracts.
>>
>> Um ... *WHAT* legal guarantees?
>
> A service contract that guarantees things like downtime being below a
> certain level etc.
>
> Plus penalties if it isn't.
>
> A contract is a legal document...

Feel free to let us know what kind of “guarantees” CrowdStrike were
offering their customers. And whether they were worth the paper they were
written on.

On Sun, 21 Jul 2024 11:11:41 +0200, Rob van der Putten wrote:

> On 20/07/2024 09:06, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> CrowdStrike’s security products cover Mac and Linux clients, too. But
>> it was only the Windows one that got screwed up.
>
> The problem isn't CrowdStrike. Or even Windows. The problem is
> unattended automatic updates.

If a company has thousands of machines needing an antimalware update every
day, or even several times a day, do you really think they are going to
devote very much staff time to doing those manually?

Think of how much that adds to the TCO for Windows. It would render
Microsoft’s entire platform uneconomic to use!

On 21/07/2024 22:46, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> And so you had the interesting situation where, in Europe, you could buy
> your phone first, then decide which carrier to sign up to, whereas in the
> USA, you first chose your carrier, and then you had to buy your phone from
> them.
It didn't work that way in practice though.

My phone had to be bought from my supplier, because only then would it
have WiFi Calling.

But think of all the other non legislated common standards that arose
because people need common standards.
VHS
Cassette audio tape.
Metric threads.
in te end governments dont need to run these as industries, merely work
out which is the mostr common and ubi quitous, and say 'this is te legal
onbe'

You may recall the Government and big businesses supported X networking
propcols. X400. X 25. That were destined to doom TCP/IP . That worked
well didnm't it?

The point is that conservative governments regulate as little as is
reasonably sensible, the left wing ones as much as they can get away with.

Back in the day the British Post Office and the German Deutsch
Bundespost were both government run dinosaurs in charge of telecoms. The
Post Office was split and British Telecom was privatised, and a
regulator set up to try and ensure it did not anuses its monopoly.

But not in Germany, not until much later, where whilst the UK was
getting broadband speeds with dozens of ISPS up in the tens of MBPS,. In
Germany you got a supplied ADSL router from the German monopoly ISP,
that might to a few Mbps on a good day.

This is all down to the fact that its not who owns or runs it, its down
to how well a monopoly is *regulated*, that counts.

Conservatism accepts that de facto monopolies like railways, roads,.
bridges, wires to your house, water to you house and sewage out of it,
*are* de facto monopolies. And therefore need to be regulated to prevent
abuse, but history has shown that state ownership is just as bad as
poor regulation.

--
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the
greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most
obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of
conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which
they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by
thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

― Leo Tolstoy

On 21/07/2024 22:48, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Jul 2024 09:33:08 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> On 21/07/2024 08:10, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:04:19 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>
>>>> The IT managers career is best served by spending shitloads of money
>>>> with a company like crowdstrike which offers impressive legal
>>>> guarantees in its contracts.
>>>
>>> Um ... *WHAT* legal guarantees?
>>
>> A service contract that guarantees things like downtime being below a
>> certain level etc.
>>
>> Plus penalties if it isn't.
>>
>> A contract is a legal document...
>
> Feel free to let us know what kind of “guarantees” CrowdStrike were
> offering their customers. And whether they were worth the paper they were
> written on.

I have no idea, bit if they weren't offering any, why would anyone buy
their service, and why would their share price collapse 30% this week?

There is at least one on their web site

"CrowdStrike is offering a warranty to Falcon Complete™ customers that
will cover up to $1 million in breach response expenses if there is a
security incident within the environment protected by CrowdStrike Falcon
Complete."

The trouble with you Lawrence, is that you never ever accept that your
off the cuff un thought out remarjs might in fact be wrong.

--
"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have
forgotten your aim."

George Santayana

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> My phone had to be bought from my supplier, because only then would it
> have WiFi Calling.

That's not universally true though, and is becoming less true over time.

> The Post Office was split and British Telecom was privatised, and a
> regulator set up to try and ensure it did not anuses its monopoly.
Paging Dr. Freud ...

On 2024-07-22, Andy Burns wrote:
>
> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> My phone had to be bought from my supplier, because only then would it
>> have WiFi Calling.
>
> That's not universally true though, and is becoming less true over time.
>
>> The Post Office was split and British Telecom was privatised, and a
>> regulator set up to try and ensure it did not anuses its monopoly.
> Paging Dr. Freud ...
I was not expecting that, thank you, new keyboard please ;-)

--
Simon

RLU: 222126

On 2024-07-22, Simon <SimonJ@eu.invalid> wrote:

> On 2024-07-22, Andy Burns wrote:
>
>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> My phone had to be bought from my supplier, because only then would it
>>> have WiFi Calling.
>>
>> That's not universally true though, and is becoming less true over time.
>>
>>> The Post Office was split and British Telecom was privatised, and a
>>> regulator set up to try and ensure it did not anuses its monopoly.
>>
>> Paging Dr. Freud ...
>
> I was not expecting that, thank you, new keyboard please ;-)

At a PPOE (we were a Sperry->Unisys shop), we found that the
WordPerfect spelling checker didn't like "Unisys"; one of its
suggested alternatives was "anuses".

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

On 2024-07-21 02:11, Rob van der Putten wrote:
> The problem isn't CrowdStrike. Or even Windows. The problem is
> unattended automatic updates.
> With a manual update, if things don't work quite the way they should,
> you just revert back to the previous situation. And with enough
> redundant systems, the whole just keeps working while you fix this
> particular computer.
> With unattended automatic updates on a vast scale, half the world just
> crashes.
> It's a bean counter thing: Why spend money on IT staff when the software
> can do the IT thing for you.

I slightly disagree: At a certain scale, automatic updates are the only
feasible option. But there are good and bad ways to do automatic
updates, and Crowdstrike (and the IT departments that deployed it)
seemingly went with bad.

The good way to do this would be like how big tech companies roll out
new versions of software to their fleets of servers: In gradual stages,
with comprehensive monitoring and an automatic halt if important metrics
start to tank.

Assuming Crowdstrike collects any sort of telemetry from its
deployments, they should have been able to gradually roll their updates
out across customers, and then notice when those customers weren't
coming back online. Likewise, assuming Crowdstrike provides any knobs
for IT departments to control its updates, individual IT departments
should have been able to control this update's deployment and react
accordingly. This can all be done automatically, especially with such a
black-and-white metric as "is the client online".

So I agree that manual updates would have prevented this. But I don't
think manual updates are feasible in many circumstances, and this could
have been prevented even with automatic updates.

On Sat, 20 Jul 2024 18:04:19 The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 20/07/2024 14:44, rek2 hispagatos wrote:
>> On 2024-07-19, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, 19 Jul 2024, Woozy Song wrote:
>>>
>>>> Curiously, when I made a post to Reddit linux group, it got deleted
>>>> immediately. I thought they would be gloating that Windows got shafted.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I'm gloating! I repeatedly tell a potential customer to change from
>>> windows, and I think so far they asked me for an offer and an opinion 3
>>> times (they had 3 security incidents), and yet they have never purchased
>>> my services and they keep running into these problems. I'm gloating so
>>> much. Sadly I don't think they will ever switch from their beloved
>>> Microsoft though.
>>>
>>> I do use them often as an example of what happens if you have a crappy
>>> IT-manager so I do derive benefits from their incompetence though! =)
>>>
>>
>>
>> +1 I hope this serves as a lesson.
>
> No, it wont.
>
> You dont understan middle management in a company.
> The IT managers career is best served by spending shitloads of money
> with a company like crowdstrike which offers impressive legal guarantees
> in its contracts.

After looking closer at 8.6 in these impressive legal guarantees
https://www.crowdstrike.com/terms-conditions/
some middle managers might want to reconsider.

--
M.O.

On Mon, 22 Jul 2024 13:37:00 -0700, Mark Shroyer wrote:

> So I agree that manual updates would have prevented this.

Note that specifying manual updates only stops the main part of the
software from updating itself. The bug was in a rules file, and these get
updated automatically regardless.

On Mon, 22 Jul 2024 10:07:09 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> You may recall the Government and big businesses supported X networking
> propcols. X400. X 25.

No, I don’t recall any Government “supporting” those. Big businesses, yes.
Existing comms monopolies, yes.

X.25 et al did fill a need for some years (I used it myself, and knew of
others who did). X.500 became the basis for directory services from a
number of vendors. Only the protocol was more commonly run over TCP/IP
networking rather than the regular OSI stack, and so “DAP” became “LDAP”.
You may have heard of it.

On Mon, 22 Jul 2024 10:11:22 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 21/07/2024 22:48, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> Feel free to let us know what kind of “guarantees” CrowdStrike were
>> offering their customers. And whether they were worth the paper they
>> were written on.
>
> I have no idea, bit if they weren't offering any, why would anyone buy
> their service, and why would their share price collapse 30% this week?

Because Dindows users. Because the sharemarket doesn’t have much long-term
memory.

> There is at least one on their web site

And here I thought you said you had “no idea”.