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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   38655 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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This isn't "cloud" in any meaningful sense.

Indeed, if these computers were in the cloud, they'd be fixed much faster.

Hmm centrally managed, by a third party, not on premises, critical security infrastructure with kernel access? There is definitely reading of cloud service that describes it.

The machines are on prem. That's the whole point.

If the machines were off prem they would be managed by some company with at least basic sysadmin competence and it would merely be a major annoyance to fix this. As it is, every mom and pop with a moron for an IT department is going to have to fix it themselves.

My company’s shiny new ERP system is hosted by our vendor, a large and growing company which sells to many industry verticals. The system is still down.

If our little SMB IT department had been running it on premises, we would never have installed endpoint protection on our servers. We may have had all kinds of other problems we couldn’t hedge against because of our scale, but we have the good sense to weigh the risks ourselves instead of complying with a customer’s backside-covering audit checklist.

You're right that I failed to consider that there are tiny cloud shops out there. When I was talking about cloud I was thinking about the big three.

Well, not cloud, but internet in general.

These machines all updated something, because they are connected to the internet and set up for automatic updates.

People learn pretty quickly that automatic updates are a terrible idea. Even if the update doesn't screw up your data or your workflow, e.g. by taking away some feature you were depending or crapping up the UI, it's likely the update process will kick in at an inconvenient time (like in the middle of a presentation). So they turned them off. Security people started crying about unpatched bugs, and got enough corporate power to get automatic updates considered a "best practice" (when it's not), and here we are.

The problem is that no automatic updates is also a terrible idea, as a majority of systems don't get patched, ever. The ideal is manual updates but responsible companies/admins testing before deployment, and sadly I don't think that's gonna happen. The second best is gradual/tiered deployments with the ability to opt out, which is more realistic but still require more effort than many companies are willing to provide.

I personally think that "no automatic updates" is better than the current hellscape of "lol we can break your device at any time", even with the problems it causes. I'd rather have hella security issues on the Internet than have my stuff randomly break (or just get worse) without my intervention.

Automatic updates are the worst thing . Everyone hates them yet companies do it.

Automatic Windows updates destroyed two of my work laptops at my last job.

I've had Windows 10 updates fuck up some of the older software I have running for my job.

And people wonder why I turn Windows 10 updates off.

Now I'm going to have to fight off a Windows 11 upgrade, so as to not fuck up said software. You'd think local IT would be more paranoid about just gleefully installing whatever it is Microsoft tells them too, but...

I can't speak for your IT department, but in the past we would always test updates across a cross section of the business before rolling them out to everyone. Maybe like 10% of the computers would get the test updates, and we would only deploy if we had no issues on the test PCs. That's really all you can do though, sometimes issues come up even with testing.

"Internet was a bad idea from the beginning" is certainly an interesting argument.

I can definitely agree that canary-less fast global rollouts were a bad idea from the very beginning though.

How long do you wager it'll be before a major car company [thinking of Tesla here but I'm pretty sure they all do this now] bricks a significant number of its electric cars by pushing a bad update (rendering the car unable to start)?

That seems best case. What if it bricks while driving?

Probably highly unlikely. I have worked on mission critical software. While it wasn't automotive it was in a similar field. The code I wrote took six months to reach production. At that company we wrote maybe 5% as many lines of code per work week compared to a normal company. There was also extensive testing.

There may be individual events that happen. Mass brickings are unlikely.

Considering the overall quality of automotive software is 100% garbage I'm not as certain a massive screw-up would be as unlikely.

More like, for all of its benefits the internet has always been, and will always be, a point of vulnerability.

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