Yesterday's IT outage was serious and debilitating. It clearly had an effect on some readers of this blog because traffic was well down early in the day, but recovered later.
It has reinforced an already reached conclusion from the thinking, training and planning Thomas and I have been involved in (between other duties) this week. We have been looking at how to take video, audio and other production forward and the conclusion we have reached is that buying the latest or highest specified kit will not be necessary in all cases.
There are better cameras and lenses than we have. The same is true of microphones. But what we have is very good, and that is good enough. What is more, if we need a second camera (and we think we will, simply to extend recording times, if nothing else, because mirrorless cameras have a habit of overheating) then the second camera may not need to be as fully specced as the main one.
What has this to do with that outage? It is simply that by pushing things to the limit they can more easily go wrong.
As we build ever more complex systems the likelihood of that grows.
There is an obsession amongst politicians and Silicon Valley for tech-led growth, which seems to be intimately related to far right thinking. But is that whole logic pushing us all in the wrong direction, and not just politically? Is growth that is undoubtedly dependent on trashing the planet worth having? Or is there something else that is ‘good enough' that would actually be much better for us?
It is a question worth asking.
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We can say goodbye to the idea of the cashless society too for now obvious reasons. Similarly CBDCs for those same reasons. Without the sort of reliable digital infrastructure we don’t have and clearly have little idea of how to establish and maintain, both ideas are dead in the water. So, I might add, is IDS and his ludicrous “Digital by default” theories of social security distribution, bad at the best of times & wholly inadequate at others. One cynically wonders though whether the new teams at the relevant departments will take this observation to heart as much as they clearly should.
Well you and your son engaged in some critical thinking clearly Microsoft have not in terms of ensuring a “dummy-run” takes place in regard to third-party software forming part of their “Windows” software. The same problem occurred in the UK in regard to the Covid pandemic which I would argue was a product of group think in the Tory Party in regard to fiat money reality. No alternative thinking was allowed in regard to this reality namely the importance of stopping to think how money can be safely created for use as a national currency or rather medium of account. This resulted in judging that government spending was the spawn of the devil especially on something that might not happen or be very serious in its impact like a virus based global pandemic!
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/18/covid-inquiry-hallett-prescribes-red-teams-as-antidote-to-flawed-thinking
Might « growth » without active attention to its effects on the generality of people, and other forms of our environment, be distorted, and so dangerous thinking and, perhaps more relevantly, dangerous attitude misuse?
Might it be a form of « Single Factor Error »?
Growth which is dependent on finite resources is, clearly, itself finite. There can be no other conclusion. Therefore any policies or plans which require growth are limited. Where are the ideas for sustainable existence?
They are starting to happen with consultancies. I know of one British consultancy that advises American farmers how to grow more sustainably.
The planet has already been trashed.
Biodiversity, greenhouse gases, microplastics, toxic chemical waste.
The question is more existential.
Can the ecosphere survive in any reasonable health with continuous predicted and unforeseen environmental crises created by man ?
I’m sure it can, but not with a rapacious and destructive system of social and economic organisation.
Nor do I see any substantial evidence of the system changes needed to restore planetary well being.
In short we might be able to adapt our behaviours, but we won’t. Collapse of human civilisations may be a necessary precursor to re-establishing earth balance.
I probably use less than 5% maybe just 1% of the capabilities supplied in my smart phone. The rest of it just sits there and watches me and consumes electricity. It sends adverts based on that watching.
Interesting that Chinese and Russian banks didn’t suffer or Apple and Android systems. Something very strange there.
@DunGroanin. That doesn’t strike me as strange. In fact it’s more or less what I would expect. The problems only directly affected people or organizations that were foolish enough to use Micro$oft systems. Of course there would be knock-on effects for other organizations, but why would anyone expect Russian or Chinese banks to be affected?
If you don’t like your phone watching you, as either a standard Android phone or an Apple portable surveillance device will do, there are plenty of other options available. I suggest you start looking here: https://e.foundation/
In respect of the videos, the content is the most important thing, the quality of the picture is very much secondary.
For CrowdStrike, this is just a harbinger of what is to come — Europe (including the UK) has effectively outsourced it’s telecommunications network to China & the US, which leaves us incredibly vulnerable if China gets aggressive and the US turns inward.
More on this problem here: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-security-pre-war-reality-check/
It seems particularly difficult to stop Chinese surveillance. I know for a fact that they can break into Zoom and WhatsApp communications. Incidentally, I was flabbergasted when I first heard of cabinet ministers communicating with each other using WhatsApp. Are these people complete idiots?
At present, China seems to use Bytedance to track people – for example if you try to register to attend seminars on China run by academic institutions you can find that someone is attempting to load a Bytedance tracker on your machine. I am not sure how they do it, but I suspect that some of the companies who are “providing security” for organizations have been compromised.
For some reason people will not take responsibility for the security of their computing devices. The usual attitude is like going on holiday leaving all your doors and windows open and trusting that the nice man from the cloud will ensure that anyone who turns up when you are away has a legitimate reason to be there.
“There is an obsession amongst politicians and Silicon Valley for tech-led growth, which seems to be intimately related to far right thinking.”
Technological growth comes from market processes. That as rapid as possible exploration of the technological envelope. Thus, if you want technological led growth you’re going to be in favour of market proicesses –” far right” is what you choose to call it Whether that’s a bad idea or not is another thing of course.
“Is growth that is undoubtedly dependent on trashing the planet worth having?”
One possible definition of technological growth is being able to achieve the same result with less resource use…..
A modicum of balance to your discussion is clearly needed..
Well, that’s naive.
“Market processes” are about control to extract rents these days. You seem to not understand that.
And “less resource use” means creating unemployment to leave people on the edge.
I just broke your code, or you believe a lot of economist’s tosh.
If full employment is dependent on ever increasing resource use then we haven’t decoupled from the Jevons paradox at all.
The idea underlying footprinting, ecological or carbon, is that we can do more with less. Better design efficiency , waste reduction and a fully circular economy ought to help.
Flaring 3% of North Sea gas is hardly resource efficient.
A new type of NiCad battery that requires one gram less of non ferrous metal is not necesssrily going to create unemployment as it represents an efficiency and materials use efficiency gain too.
Read Mazzucato’s Entrepreneurial State for the more rational view. Tech development predominantly motivated by profit has no inherent societal benefit, and certainly no automatic environmental value.
But her opinion is driving Labour…..
The question is not whether there is less resource use, but what you do as a result of that. For instance, if you install self checkout machines in a supermarket then should you sack the checkout staff and have the shareholders pocket the savings, or should you keep them on, and pay them the same wages for shorter hours? The technology is neutral with respect to such choices, but the market will always favour the former.
Agreed
Is growth that trashes the planet worth it? NO… obviously. Sustainability is essential… but sustainability comes in two flavours.
First, are we burning (both literally and metaphorically) through all our resources so that either we run out or fry as temperatures rise. But growth does not have to use (large amounts of) resources. If a teach a class GDP rises by the fee that I am paid and few resources are used… certainly compared to (say) the latest electronic gadget. In addition, my class might benefit from what I teach (unlikely, I know… but possible!). This is “good growth”. Filling our landfill sites with old “stuff” to be replaced by new “stuff” is “bad” growth. We must distinguish between these two… and focus policy on encouraging the former.
Also, it is unreasonable to expect the huge portion of the global population that is in/close to poverty to restrain their energy usage…. surely they have the “right” to energy usage of at least a quarter/half of what I use in order to lead better lives. So, we high energy users MUST restrain use and produce more sustainable energy… but until we stop the adulation of wealth/excess consumption it won’t happen. On this, I am afraid, I see little progress.
Second, resilience. Is our system able to handle the inevitable failures that occur in complex systems (CrowdStrike).
As an old man I often fail to see the point of a lot of new technology… but I do accept that younger folk will see things differently. So, I really want the smart folk to focus on making the stuff we already have run well rather than keep offering new stuff… but how do we encourage this rather unglamorous activity?
(As a footnote. I am a keen sailor and obsessed about redundancy – things ALWAYS go wrong. A month ago the youngsters I sail with were intrigued by the “old school” navigation kit – paper charts, Walker Log, sextant, sight reduction tables and celestial almanac. 3 days out of port off the northern tip of Norway the engine failed. Sure, we have sails so could sail the 3 days back…. but our engine is also our generator, too. We were able to preserve our batteries by “switching off” everything bar VHF and navigate using traditional means….. but I wonder how most of us would manage in our everyday lives if we lost all power for a week? How resilient are we in our everyday lives?)
I have become intrigued by people photographing using older kit as a result of my research
It is not the kit, but the photographer, who sees the picture
The IT outage was due to the “outsourcing” of “a range of security services”. Mealy mouthed nonsense phrases such “cloud-based software” dsiguse what is happening – your computers are being transformed from quasi-independent computing platforms to terminals a la the old mainframe days.
The reason for this is so Microshaft & co can get a recurring income – by offering “software as a service” & you don’t even have the software on your system. The old description was “application service provider” (back in the 2000s) an accurate description of what is provided remotely (a software application of some sort). Slow Internet stopped it taking off then – things have changed now. “Cloud computing” is like “woke” and various other words/phrases designed to disguise not illuminate – “clouds” – white nice and fluffy – sure.
Anybody that depends on ASPs is asking for trouble. Regarding “growth” – the question that needs to be answered – fast – is what energy systems that harvest the sun (either directly or via wind) will be available and which can be sustainably replaced – the rest falls out from that.
Spot on Mike.
Worse still, where I work, we had to wait until Crowdstrike identified the file, before we could remove it. Also, it had to be removed individually, as each machine would not boot up normally. Meanwhile, our production lines are standing idle.
In the old days, we did the updates, we did the testing and we could resolve the issues if there were problems.
As you say, this software is embedded deep within our systems, no longer a service but a controller. Will this slow down the rush to “outsource”?
Not a chance.
Regards
That is the inevitable result of using proprietary software. If you do so it is always the machine that controls you and not vice versa. Using networked systems merely makes it more obvious.
I have never understood why anyone would voluntarily use computer systems running proprietary software. As Richard Stallman put it “Either you control the computer or the computer controls you. There is no third option.”
The interesting thing is that the system is not ‘back to normal’. How do I know? Well, if I access Richard’s site, then it attempts to load the Google analytics tracker onto my phone (btw. it doesn’t succeed). That is not happening at the moment. Incidentally, this probably means any statistics Richard is getting for this site’s current usage is incorrect.
If I were to break into one of Google’s servers and extract information from it I could face a 15 year prison sentence. However, it is apparently OK for Google to break into my computer system and find out all sorts of things about me.
I don’t use Google for stats…..
Then why does it normally try to load Google trackers onto my phone?
– I think I know the answer. I don’t see any icons under: “You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:”
The trackers presumably are meant to load along with the icons. At least that makes them easy to block.
Weird
I really do not know ….
Bernard
While I understand your point I really cannot see a solution. I am a retired person running a small business giving employment law advice and payroll services to small employers. I could not run my business without using a computer. I do not understand how computers work, beyond knowing what to do to achieve what I need to achieve. I doubt that I am alone. I could not write my own software, of any kind. If I am to run my business I MUST use proprietary software. What do you suggest?
@Cyndy Hodgson, All the functionality you need to run a small business can a small business can be obtained from nonproprietary software, including using a nonproprietary operating system. I know people who do this and have done so myself in the past.
Using proprietary software is like having someone work for you where you do not know what the contract of employment is, you have no power to change it, and you cannot ask an independent expert to look at it to see if it is reasonable. The point is not that you ought to be able to program or to understand a program, but that it must be possible for you to have access to independent experts who can understand the code and who can change it if necessary. That is precisely what proprietary software licenses disallow in contrast to licenses such as the Free Software Foundation’s General Pubic License.
Organizations like the FSF have been warning people about the problem for over 50 years. I have absolutely no sympathy for large organizations, such as airlines, that end up losing out because of their willful ignorance.
However I have immense sympathy for you. You have been missold both hardware and software by slick salesmen who often only have a vague idea of what they are selling. Of course it would be difficult for you to start again with a completely different system, but this is one if the things companies like Micro$oft do. They lock you in to their inferior products so they can extract as much rent as possible for as little effort as possible while taking as little responsibility as possible. I don’t expect you to have the time to do anything about it. But for most of us, the most difficult part of solving a problem is admitting there is one in the first place.
In the early 70s I wrote an outline for a book, which I gave the somewhat uninspiring title “The Machine and You” about what I thought were the dangers of the coming digital revolution. At the time the two fashionable approaches were the Marvin Minsky idea that no one would have to work more than 3 hours a week by the end of the century (there was even talk of the coming problem of leisure!) and the equally unrealistic idea that we were about to become slaves to intelligent robots. I like to think I was more realistic. Much of what I thought would happen has come about.
I touted the manuscript around several publishers and the sort of reaction I got was that they didn’t publish science fiction or, if they did, the whole thing was too boring to interest science fiction fans.
But I am a great believer in the possibility of change. For instance the campaigning lawyer Lawrence Lessig, one of the founders of Creative Commons, put himself forward as a presidential candidate for the Democratic party in 2016. He withdrew before the primaries; presumably he had attracted precisely zero funding from tech companies. But the mere fact that many people took his candidacy seriously is encouraging.
I have to say I disagree Bernard.
Try running a payroll or submitting tax returns on non-proprietary software. It is nit possible.
I can’t see why a company should not be able to run its payroll using nonproprietary software. This is just what a 2 minute search on DuckDuckGo turned up and not a recommendation: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/best-open-source-payroll-software/
As for submitting tax returns, that is a matter of what HMRC will accept, not a matter of the functionality of the software. I agree that is a problem and is not confined to the UK. The FSF identifies problems with submitting tax returns as the only significant barrier to business using non proprietary software in many (not all) jurisdictions. In effect it means that in these jurisdictions the state is acting as a software salesperson and compromising its own digital sovereignty.
Real time software submission requires HMRC approval of the software. It will never be non-proprietary as a result .
But that is absurd because without the possibility of independent auditing of the code, and that includes being able to examine, compile, test, test with alterations and run the code, HMRC can have no assurance that the software actually does what it says it does.
If a particular version of a nonproprietary application were approved for submitting tax returns it would be quite easy using a digital signature to ensure that that particular version was being used. Presumably something like that has to be done anyway as, if not, how would HMRC know I had not broken into a proprietary program and altered it in some way?
But the moment this is done it bs ones proprietary, surely? Unless you were a very large company the cost would require you to monetise this. And open source is insecure.
Similar line of thought?
https://www.stornowaygazette.co.uk/news/environment/going-green-buy-less-choose-it-well-and-make-an-item-last-4695369
Looks like it
In the 80s there were shops in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong, that sold seconds from well known fashion houses. I don’t know if any are still there.
Sometimes it was obvious what was wrong with an item – e.g. it might have a sleeve missing, but often you would have to look very hard to find anything wrong with it. The labels were always removed. I was told that they were considered to be more valuable than the items themselves
Nothing was individually priced Instead everything was sold by weight. There were also secondhand/remainder bookshops that used the same system.
One day I found a shoulder bag that was about the size and quality I had been looking for and so I bought it for next to nothing. When I got back I discovered it was extremely fashionable and very expensive. That’s the nearest I have ever got to following fashion. I still have the bag but it’s a bit tatty now.
🙂
Well guess what Luddites you might consider that the internet helps you think out of the box – Alt-Thinking – why else are you here foolishly condemning the internet?
Who was that addressed to?
DunGroanin complaining about the internet consuming electricity! That logic implies you should close down your blog in order to be a true Green! Nonsense in my book that you should!
@Schofield. Despite DunGroanin’s groans, the public network per se is reasonably efficient in its electricity use, although it could be even more efficient if configured differently. The real problems concerning energy use occur with some of the large datacentres connected to the network.
My opinion is that the public internet should be considered as an electronic commons and that there should be conditions attached to the use of this commons. One condition might be that if you want your datacentre to be accessible via this network then you should be able to prove that the energy used to power it is all from renewable sources. There are European companies that can already do this.
The point Mr Parr makes about “your computers are being transformed from quasi-independent computing platforms to terminals” is both perceptive and salient; and Mr Parry’s observations about “redundancy” are telling. There is a pattern here; a pattern not just of error, but of disasters and of catastrophic consequential cost; that visit that visit us through the failure of over-complex digital systems and what I would term the fatal flaw in the redundancy of redundancy.
Indifference to ‘redundancy’ is the product of the thoughtless pursuit of profit (redundancy costs money; and until disaster strikes, nobody ever notices it isn’t there); with no regard for the consequences. We look on them as the unsought, unintended consequences of innovation; but in fact, whether in the form of ‘just-in-time’ and supply chains, or digital system complexity, without spare and unused capacity; both are driven by the governing principle of cost-cutting in pursuit of profit, and of conventional wisdom that asserts the illusion of an equilibrium we can rely on; and the risks are either very low, or non-existent.
Allow me to offer an example of lost redundancy, with catastrophic results. In the NHS many of the problems in hospitals are said to be cause by ‘bed-blocking’; and we immediately focus attention on causes in the provision of post-hospital care. That is very worthy, as far as it goes; but reflect on this:
“The total number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved over the past 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1987/88 to 141,000 in 2019/20, while the number of patients treated has increased significantly.” (The King’s fund, ‘NHS hospital bed numbers’). Notice also, that the population of England rose from circa 48m in 1993, to 57m in 2023. Thus, an 18% increase in population, and half the number of hospital beds.
What could possibly go wrong (in a pandemic, just for illustrative purposes)?