What’s really insane is that sometimes the second identical test actually works.

Never say never - unless you’re writing clickbait.

The BBC still uses it to break news, I’m saddened to say.

Or at least, those influencing in favour of Trump and general chaos.

By its own shareholders?

Are they just trying to get some money out before class actions from its customers decimate the company?

Maybe, but it’s not going to happen soon. Any malware type insurance requires effective AV on all devices, and C-levels do love their insurance.

Not just Crowdstrike - any vendor that does automatic updates, which is more and more each day. Microsoft too big for a bad actor to do as you describe? Nope. Anything relying on free software? Supply chain vulnerabilities are huge and well documented - its only a matter of time.

Why would you want another year of their software for free?

Because AV, like everything else, costs a fortune at enterprise scale.

And yeah, I do understand your real point, but it’s really hard to choose good software. Every purchasing decision is a gamble and pretty much every time you choose something it’ll go bad sooner or later. (We didn’t imagine Vmware would turn into an extortion racket, for example. And we were only saying a few months ago how good value and reliable PRTG was, and they’ve just quadrupled their costs)

It doesn’t matter how much due diligence and testing you put into software, it’s really hard to choose good stuff. Crowdstrike was the choice a year ago (the Linux thing was more recent than that), and its detection methods remain world class. Do we trust it? Hell no, but if we change to something else, there are risks and costs to that too.

I lost a day’s holiday, and our team spent 8 man days on this entirely preventable mistake.

$10? Try extending our licence by another year for free, that might start going towards it.

It has a privileged service running locally - csagent.sys - that was crashing causing the BSOD.

It seems to be crowdstrike reacting to the new update.

We have got ours up by the very manual process of:

1 Boot into safe mode.

2. Navigate to C:\windows\system32\drivers\crowdstrike

3. Delete C-00000291*.sys

4. Reboot normally

I’m pretty sure he’s using Twitter as some sort of home project science experiment.

The amount of sheer hate and vitriol I was getting ramped up hugely in recent months - the algorithm is definitely promoting hate, despite my almost never replying/posting. Lots and lots of far right political content also, it really didn’t feel random.

I bailed a couple of weeks ago.

I think you’ll find some ISPs will be reluctant to let go of CGNAT - they’re doing quite nicely by charging extra for ‘commercial’ services where it’s not in the way.

Fortunately, many of us know about cloudflare tunnelling and other services, so NAT really isn’t a problem to self hosters and even SMEs any more.

That’s great optics.

Not sure how workable it is to define how you would define “confidential information” without having already viewed the content. But the whole thing isn’t very clever on a technical level anyway. Technically competent people will always find a way around such censorship.

No, and never did - but I don’t understand your point. Facebook started only a year after Myspace did.

I think you’re reading more into that than there is.

Hopefully they escalate it to our MPs, who certainly have plenty to worry about when it comes to not wanting others seeing what they’re doing online and might actually do something to protect privacy for once.

“We’re shocked” - nobody.

But companies are crawling everything like mad - I’ve noticed a 400% upturn this year alone in bot traffic on a low traffic web forum and a few sites I host, so much so that I’m having to do some fairly heavy filtering upstream to keep them out. (They don’t resepect robots.txt, obviously)

When bot traffic outnumbers legitimate traffic at least 10x, it makes you wonder why you’re paying to host stuff.

obfuscation should be done for FUN by PROGRAMMERS to SCARE python programmers. It should NOT be a MANDATORY feature of a language.

<snorts in perl>

To be fair, Emacs has had a package for that for years.