On Crowdstrike, Presidencies, Critical Points Of Failure, And Malice Versus Accidents
Early Friday, a major internet security firm pushed a broken update on its customers. This shut down airports, banks, news agencies, medical providers, and 911 service across continents. Let's talk.
Hello, friends,
It’s definitely been a while since we’ve spoken. Last week, we talked about how Joe Biden, if truly resolved to continue forward with his candidacy, could come forward with new policy proposals that would energize the people.
To his credit, he did attempt just this, although many of his policies are kind of old hat and should have been done years ago. Bernie Sanders provided an easy-to-scan list, but many of these things - building affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, and restoring the child tax credit, among others - should have been done in 2021, though with secret-Republicans like Joe Manchin in the Senate, that was always going to prove difficult.
Unfortunately for Biden, things have only escalated in terms of the pressure campaign to remove him. ABC News has a list of Congresspeople who have called on Biden to step aside. There are rumors, hard to substantiate due to a barrage of anonymous sourcing, that Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and even Barack Obama have engaged in varying levels of trying to convince Biden to withdraw.
The thing is, there’s a reason for this: The Presidency is an extremely crucial position with a great deal of power. In fact, nearly unlimited power, thanks to the Judicial Coup of 2024 that kick-started this nightmarishly complicated month. The President can, in an official act, order the murder of any American citizen and be immune to legal consequences.
That’s kind of important!
But this past Friday, something extraordinary happened which demonstrates in a different context how a critically important system can, if mistreated, fail so utterly that it provokes a global telecommunications crisis. It also highlights the difference between incompetentcy-driven errors and maliciousness-driven ones.
Today, we’re going to talk about the Crowdstrike update that caused computers worldwide to crash.
But, first a quick request: If you enjoy the cut of my jib, kindly subscribe to The Progressive Cafe for mostly-weekly articles and investigations into ongoing political shenanigans.
What Is Crowdstrike, And How Did It Crash Computers?
Now, fair notice: I am not a computer expert. I have a very limited experience with coding, mostly in Python or HTML, and I have a basic understanding of networking and whatnot.
For those who know more than me - the best, hopefully-accurate (I wouldn’t know) technical explanation I’ve seen came on Twitter from a dipshit who subsequently used the racist term “DEI Engineer,” so take it all with a grain of salt.
But what basically happened is that computer security company Crowdstrike pushed an update to its clients on Friday morning that had a big mistake in it. This mistake caused computers that received the update to instantly enter a crashed state, the legendary Blue Screen Of Death. This situation impacted Windows computers worldwide - Eight and a half million of them, according to the BBC.
To be clear, this was not a cyberattack. It was an accident.
The very oversimplified version of the issue is that the update’s issue manifested any time the computer was booted up normally. Basically, there was bad code in the update that caused impacted devices to attempt to access…Well, I guess the best way to put it is “invalid” memory sectors, but I may be off on that. That means the computers can’t boot up, hence the Blue Screen of Death.
Now, in some cases, this was as ‘easy’ a fix as booting the impacted computer into safe mode and tinkering with some settings to basically bypass Crowdstrike. On an individual level, that isn’t so bad.
However, many ‘work’ computers have extra layers of encryption, meaning even if a user understood how to do this, they couldn’t do it without access to the encryption keys because safe mode and other back-end technical stuff I only have wince-worthy memories of requires special permission to access. That meant that IT specialists were working nonstop just to provide that information.
If that wasn’t bad enough, these machines had to be handled directly - and individually. Imagine being a system operator whose company had ‘just’ a thousand machines go down. Someone has to go to each individual machine, unlock its encryption, then initiate the fix. Even if it somehow only took five minutes per fix, which it likely doesn’t (it likely takes more), that’s 12 machines per hour.
Clearly, this is no small problem.
Here’s Times Square, as photographed by Reddit user u/Joke_Mummy:
The issue impacted all sorts of businesses. Multiple airlines had to ground their planes just in the US, though in a funny twist of fate, those who ran on older technology were relatively unimpacted. 911 services were interrupted - one friend of mine said his husband, who works a 911 center, had to revert to pen and paper and other archaic means to work. My physical therapist’s office is connected to a larger hospital network, and his computers were down for most of the day.
This has been compared to what the Y2K bug would have been, had it not been for oodles of advanced work by IT professionals. Non-urgent surgeries were rescheduled, businesses had to resort to cash payments, and - I cannot stress this enough - emergency services were heavily impacted.
The full consequences of this issue won’t be known for a while, still, but the connection between a broken antivirus update and executive power? That’s a little more obvious.
Presidents, Consequences, And Mistakes Versus Malice
The Presidency is the executive branch of the government See also: Article II of the Constitution.
Ignoring for the sake of this article the hyper-critical issue of our Judiciary being fully captured by Fascist ideologues - who somehow still walk free after executing the Judicial Coup and forcing our nation into an Elected Dictatorship instead of a Democratic-Republic - the Executive Branch has control over emergency response issues, can issue executive orders with wide-ranging impacts, and - perhaps most importantly - is in charge of the administrative state that, while gutted by the end of the Chevron Deference principle, still governs much of how our country is run.
A president who has no idea how to run the country is bad, but a country governed by a malignant narcissist is much worse off.
So, for all of Joe Biden’s poor debate and interview performances, and for all I wish we could easily jump to another candidate as if we’d simply fallen out of a coconut tree, in the end I understand that if Joe Biden is the nominee, we have to vote for him because, frankly, I’d rather incompetence than malice in most cases.
It’s notable that the Crowdstrike failure was, once again, incompetence. Not malice.
Malice would have been far worse!
Again, I’m not a computer scientist, but I’ve squashed my share of computer viruses and adware on my computers before. It is never fun, and absolutely never as easy as going into safe mode and tweaking a file name or two. You aren’t simply bypassing bad code: You’re actively exterminating infectious code that fights back.
It evades some anti-virus if not others, it copies itself into numerous directories, it requires you to boot into safe mode, which is not exactly user friendly, and track down every last trace of its existence. If you miss something, it comes right back.
And you have to hope you don’t get it again in a week.
That, my friends, is the difference between a vote for Sleepy Joe and a vote for Donald Trump: Sleepy Joe may not be at his best, and may not even be close, but Donald Trump is an atrocity waiting to happen.
Project 2025 calls on an incoming Republican administration (so Trump’s) to reclassify as many jobs as possible into politically appointed jobs, allowing Trump to fire them and replace them with ideologues who lack expertise.
Imagine a bunch of ideologically driven, untrained low-level bureaucrats trying to navigate an emergency.
Now, contrast that with the image of a team put together by career experts who have America’s best interests at heart.
Suddenly, the Biden vs Trump debate is pretty simple. Trump wants to reconstruct the government to serve his ends, not the people. Biden himself may not be the best leader, but his team and subordinates are all dedicated to helping people.
Biden’s age and mental state may make him less competent to handle governing the country, but the bottom line is that the team he has assembled around him is the only one that can possibly run this country should a crisis emerge. Again, he isn’t my choice of candidate - he never was! - but he’s probably what we’ve got, so if this current pre-convention dustup clears out with Biden in charge of the ticket, well, Biden has every chance to win.
After all, Trump isn’t exactly mentally sound, either. In fact, he’s at least as out of it as Biden is, he’s just so evil that he knows how to manipulate that to his advantage.
It’s a bullshit situation, but it’s one we need to be prepared to accept and move forward from.
In Other News
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, known as a notorious fighter for civil rights, including the establishment of Juneteenth as a national holiday, passed away at the age of 74 from Pancreatic Cancer. She fought for our future to her last breath, and argued her vision for our best path forward down to her last tweet.
The International Court of Justice has found that Israel is engaged in illegal ‘settlement’ of Palestinian territory. In response, Benjamin Netanyahu basically declared that the West Bank is part of Israel, implicitly annexing the Palestinian territory. This echoes the Israeli Knessett’s vote to reject Palestinian statehood altogether, denying a two-state solution and essentially killing the Oslo accords. This means that Israel is de-facto occupying all Palestinian lands against international law. At best, Palestinians *might* be integrated into a greater Israel, but it’s highly unlikely they will be made full citizens with the right to vote and other equality measures. Therefore, it’s clear that Israel is an Apartheid state that is also committing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansings in the West Bank that they’ve annexed. The United States must immediately suspend any and all aid to Israel. We already have enough blood on our hands with the Native American Genocides, the Enslavement of Africans, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and many other racist practices.
Numerous circumstances, including Ukrainian counter-attacks on Russian infrastructure, have plunged millions of Russians into a state of having no electricity. Maybe this will polarize some of them into working against Putin’s genocidal war which is causing this issue?
In some uplifting news, Boeing’s largest union is threatening a strike if its demands aren’t met. I look forward to it.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a former hyperlocal journalist and sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.