Nick @internic@qoto.org

Any CrowdStrike employees want to share some color about the mood over there right now, my signal's in my bio. Promise to keep your identity safe.

Last of all, our @CultureDesk shared this gorgeous @KnowableMag story, and we’re sharing it again. It’s about Jenny Graves, an evolutionary geneticist who got so fed up of singing about Biblical creation stories in her choir that she wrote an entire oratorio about the scientific origins of the universe. Read here about her long and amazing scientific career, as well as the genesis — pardon the pun — of “Origins of the Universe, of Life, of Species, of Humanity,” “I think science is very beautiful,” says Graves. “Just look at the James Webb telescope images: Beautiful science is right there. Look down at the microscope: beautiful science. The idea of expressing beautiful science and beautiful music always really appealed to me.”

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2024/jenny-graves-chromosomes-genes-evolution-origins

#Science #Music #ClassicalMusic #ChoralMusic #Newstodon #NewstodonFriday #FollowFriday

As if we needed some more reason to oppose Vance and worry if he is elected. Quoting Nixon saying "The professors are the enemy."
Seen over on the dead bird site.

We are "stuck in a digital monoculture, where decades of anti-competitive practices have created it so that just one system is responsible for so much of what we rely on from everything from airlines to hospitals to schools," EFF’s @falsemirror told Mashable. https://mashable.com/article/crowdstrike-update-fail-explained

How can we train people in the art of learning to read scholarly research like a scientist?

Fascinated by this project that studied how biologists read papers, from undergrads to faculty, and why undergrads get so lost on things that experienced researchers find fast/easy.

More experienced readers focused on the data. More junior ones focused on the narrative.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21548455.2022.2078010

Every so often some Linux guy replies to me saying ‘no critical infrastructure runs Windows’, so I just gotta say, today is education for you.

Maybe putting all the infrastructure of modern society online was a bad idea.

Batman *disables lights*

Me, an astronomer: Oh, you think darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark; I was born in it, molded by it.

#crowdstrike #HotTake from XKCD...

Seeing an alarming number of people post totally wrong claims about the CrowdStrike outage, such as the claim that the Las Vegas Sphere was affected.

Nope! Go check out one of the YouTube live streams. It's fine.

There's a ton of misinformation going around — to some extent as expected. Granted, wrong news about the Sphere is low stakes. But it goes to show how easy it is for more confusion to spread in what is already a confusing (and chaotic) situation.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/19/from-the-sphere-to-false-cyberattack-claims-misinformation-runs-rampant-amid-crowdstrike-outage/

I send an email once a month for work and include a corny joke to get people to actually open it. I saw this one @sundogplanets and thought of you:

--
As I was driving to work one day, I spotted a woman standing out in a large field next to a telescope. She wasn't using the scope, just standing next to it.

On my way home the same woman is there, just standing in a large field with a telescope.

This scene repeated itself for a few more days, every time I drove past this large field.

1/2

Southwest’s tech debt hurt it a few months ago but it seems to be doing it some favors today.

Windows 3.1 taketh away, but sometimes Windows 3.1 giveth.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/southwest-cloudstrike-windows-3-1/

It is very hot in central Europe. The warm air near the ground rises quickly: it's an unstable #atmosphere. Here you can see the #turbulent motion of that convective instability traced by #cauliflower-like #clouds. This is over the #Austrian #alps.

#physics #science

Make no mistake, if an outage similar to Crowdstrike would have been caused by OpenSource, there would be calls across the entire industry and at the government level to ban OpenSource from critical systems. But since it was caused by billion-dollar publicly-traded companies, nothing to see here, move-on.

#CrowdStrike #Linux #OpenSource #Outage #Microsoft

@corbet

Archive.org is up for helping...

The original URL shorteners thought about this, and archived their links with archive.org .

https://archive.org/details/301works?tab=about

I hope google joins now, and gives us the host domain so we can make them continue to work (redirect into the wayback machine that would archive the redirect).

please.

U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA has acknowledged that while the CrowdStrike outage is *not* a cyberattack, it has observed malicious actors "taking advantage" of the s(h)ituation for "phishing and other malicious activity" and warned organizations to "avoid clicking on phishing emails or suspicious links."

More: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2024/07/19/widespread-it-outage-due-crowdstrike-update

We think our project's journey from nearly dead to thriving is an awesome story with lessons for any OSS project. Watch @ryanleesipes tell that story in today's #GUADEC keynote at 21:45 UTC/ 15:45 Mountain. @gnome is streaming their talks (thank you!), and you can catch his talk here: https://youtube.com/live/jS7NzYqxH3o?feature=share

#Thunderbird #OpenSource #Community

Yes. There are two different lessons here. First, auto-installed patches can be a bad thing. Second, technology where patches are hard to install or uninstall is very dangerous, especially in production environments. (That latter was, as I recall, one of the issues with the Struts vulnerability that was used to hack Equifax some years ago.)
https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/112813420749045364

A faulty component in the latest CrowdStrike Falcon update is crashing Windows systems, impacting various organizations and services across the world, including airports, TV stations, and hospitals.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/crowdstrike-update-crashes-windows-systems-causes-outages-worldwide/

I find interesting that the current global internet outage (yes, I know Internet itself is working fine, but a lot of websites/services are down) is due to a company most of us never heard about before.
This is not the Cyberpunk dystopia I was promised!