• Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    3 months ago

    Nah, I don’t buy that. When you’re in critical infrastructure like that it’s your job to anticipate things like people being above or below versions. This isn’t the latest version of flappy bird, this is kernel level code that needs to be space station level accurate, that they’re pushing remotely to massive amounts of critical infrastructure.

    I won’t say this was one guy, and I definitely don’t think it was malicious. This is just standard corporate software engineering, where deadlines are pushed to the max and QA is seen as an expense, not an investment. They’re learning the harsh realities of cutting QA processes right now, and I say good. There is zero reason a bit of this magnitude should have gone out. I mean, it was an empty file of zeroes. How did they not have any pipelines to check that file, code in the kernel itself to validate the file, or anyone put eyes on the file before pushing it.

    This is a massive company wide fuckup they had, and it’s going to end up with them reporting to Congress and many, many courts on what happened.

    • suoko@feddit.it
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 months ago

      Even an AI is good enough to avoid (or let someone avoid) pushing a similar bug 🫣

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 months ago

      The Windows ordeal was definitely a fuck-up of their testing pipeline, and no doubt has something to do with the mass layoffs earlier this year. I’m sure they’ll be sued into oblivion (though I wonder what making this company go bankrupt or extracting the money out of it through lawsuits will do to all the businesses that currently have it deployed).

      The channel file wasn’t entirely zeroes, not for every customer at least. The code pages that were mapped as callbacks were empty or garbled, but not the entire file (see this thread, for instance).

      However, society shouldn’t crumble because of something like this. It shows how fragile our critical infrastructure really is. I don’t care about airlines and such, but 911 shouldn’t go down because of CrowdStrike or even because of Windows. Even airlines should’ve been able to fly some planes, it’s not like Boeings run Windows.