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Are We Too Dependent on Microsoft?
(www.youtube.com)
Short answer: yes
Long answer: yeeeeeeeeees
Detailed answer: Yankee Echo Sierra
Repetitive answer:
yes
Answering the question with a counter question
Why do we ask a question whilst already knowing its answer?
Clicks (bait).
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My household is a Microsoft free environment. There is no place for the royal we in this conversation.
I can almost say the say thing, but I actually have a small Windows laptop dedicated to some software used for reprogramming the computer in my truck. I've never tried to run it under wine, so I might not need the laptop, but I very rarely use it anyway. Everything else in the house, from our android phones and tablets, to the entertainment system running from a raspberry pi, up to our laptops, desktops, and my stack of servers all run linux exclusively. Funny how they all run smoothly for years at a time.
Honestly, if your programming your ECU or something. I wouldn't risk potentially bricking your car. It is a tool after all, something like how I prefer mikita over Milwaukee but I'll use it to get the job done if needed.
Edit: ECU software can be a little finicky. Jayztwocents built a PC for his mechanic friend and the application refused to start because it wasn't an Intel CPU.
Yeah I think at the time it was a known issue that this software wouldn't run properly in wine and I just never tried again in the last 14 years. I'm not worried about bricking the ECU, I actually have a spare sitting on the shelf, and even if it did get bad enough that I couldn't fix it, I could probably take it to the dealer and have them re-flash it for me. Funny thing is, after going the rounds with their service guy trying to get the programming corrected from changing my gear ratio (I ended up giving them a VIN of another vehicle that came with those gears), they weren't able to change the programming to my own VIN but the truck still ran. No worries, because my software CAN change the VIN, so once I got that squared away it's been perfectly happy with all the new programming. I have to admit, there's a satisfaction in telling the dealer THIS is how you fix the problem, and when you're done with it I'll fix the rest of the stuff you can't do.
If it is a royal we, then you are excluded from the conversation and the amount of Microsoft in your household is irrelevant.
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No. If everyone were on Linux and there was a breaking change introduced by a third-party there would be similar problems.
The problem is that critical infrastructure isn't treated like critical infrastructure. If something you rely on can go down due to a single point of failure, maybe don't fucking use it?! Have backups, have systems that can replace those systems, have contingency! Slapping Windows on to a small machine and running some shitty Chromium app to work as a cash register is a fucking stupid idea when you consider that it is responsible for your whole income.
The problem was never Windows. It was companies that were too cheap to have contingency, because an event like this was considered extraordinary and not worth investing in.
I mean this is sort of like what the new NIS2 Regulations tries to achieve. Make critical infrastructure producers and maintainers aware and force them to treat their infrastructure accordingly.
Nope, that's not how it works on Linux, even if someone introduced the most heinous breaking change people would just not update until things were fixed, in fact the update is unlikely to do that because things are tested before being pushed. If someone were using latest of everything by having something like a Gentoo system with everything building from git maybe that person would be affected and he would have to rollback to an earlier version and keep going for a total downtime of 1h tops, and that is if someone was using the most stupid way possible in production.
The main reason why this will NEVER happen to a server running Linux is that updates are not automatic, i.e. they get triggered manually, so if there's an issue upstream you don't update, and if you encounter you rollback. The issue is not that Windows had a broken update, that can happen and it's fine, the issue is when the OS forcefully installs that update and breaks your system without you doing anything.
And yeah, I know what I'm talking about, I worked as a software architect for a large website for a few years and now I work as a software engineer for the servers of one of the largest online games.
Edit: re-reading your post, I would like to ask you how would you build this critical infrastructure with Windows? Because independently of how you answer it you would have been affected by this.
Windows updates don't happen automatically in an Enterprise environment. They are tested and pushed out once the version is determined to be stable.
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That is a wild assumption with two key flaws
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Windows in many workplaces has updates locked down too, except in circumstances where critical security or vulnerability patches are pushed through.
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The same is true for many servers that run Linux.
As someone that works on tier1 services for arguably the biggest tech company right now, that's how it works in most of FAANG. Updates are gated, sure, but like with many things there's a vetting process where some things that look super important and safe just slip through.
In regards to your edit, I guess most cases are different from others, but if your entire business requires you to be able to use a machine 100% of the time then you should have the means to either use a different machine to continue transactions (ideally one with a known state that won't change, or has been tested in the last few months). If you need to log transactions and process 24-48 hours later do that on something that's locked down hard, with printed/hard backups if necessary.
Ultimately, risk is always something you factor in. If you don't care about 48 hours of downtime over several years, it's not a huge concern. I'd probably argue that many companies lost more money during these days than they would have spent in both money and people-hours training them on a contingency system to use in case of downtime.
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The problem wasn't with an update Microsoft pushed out. It was due to an update by crowdstrike which iirc ignored all settings for staged rollout (or there were no settings at all for that)
It's not like anyone outside Crowdstrike chooses to have these updates installed. It happened automatically with no way of stopping it.
Yes, this specific problem wasn't caused by Microsoft, but it was caused by the forced automatic update policy that crowdstrike has, which is the same behavior Windows has. So while this time it wasn't Microsoft, next time it could be. And while you can prevent this from happening on your Linux box by choosing software that doesn't do this, it's impossible to prevent it on a Windows box because the OS itself does it.
You absolutely can (and should) do staged rollout for windows updates.
Source: We do that at work. We have 3 different patch groups. 1 "bleeding edge", 1 delay by a day or two, and another one delayed by a bit more. This so so we can stop an update from rolling out to prod if dev breaks.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but others have told me that Microsoft reserves the right to push security upgrades that bypass any policy setup by the network administrator.
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It's nice that major news outlets are saying what we nerds have been screaming for the past two decades. Microsoft only shares a small portion of the blame for the recent outage (they could have built their OS better so software vendors don't feel the need to use kernel modules, but the rest is on CrowdStrike) but we are too depenent on them.
Not to change the subject, but your italicized "are" made me realize that Lemmy uses a different font for italic content (see the letter A). There's another message down below deleted by creator which has the same style. I know, it's a weird thing to notice, but there was a blog I saw this week mentioning that scammers are using websites with a (I think?) Cyrillic 'a' that looks just like the italic one here to fool people into thinking they're visiting a legitimate site, so that little discrepancy stood out to me today. At least now I know I'm paying attention! 😆
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Imho. We are too laissez faire about our dependence on computers.
Currently doing disaster planning for compliance. What I really want to put in the docs is “If power or internet goes down we are just fucked. No planning needed. “
I mean disaster planning is about finding ways to mitigate things like power or internet going down to minimize or eliminate their impact. That said, accepting the risk of downtime because alternatives are too expensive is a perfectly valid decision as long as it's an intentional one.
It depends on the industry. Some industries have very critical systems that can't go down period.
Yeah, in which case you wouldn't accept the downtime and would drop the cash on redundant systems.
The more nines you add the more exponential growth you see in cost. This is because you end with lots of idling hardware.
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Yes.
Entire companies and (worse) government depending on a single vendor knows for it's 30 year long history of attitudes like "we before our customers" and "well tell you anything to sell you, but well barely do the basics on our products" and"we'll make sure we're compatible with nothing, going as far as sabotage, so you can't escape our greedy claws" is a very bad idea (tm). Forcing customers and citizens to use that crap is even worse.
With Linux ( and the open source world) you have an open System that has been independently verified by millions, you have actually inter system compatibility oozing out of the wazoo. You have vendors selling software that you can actually rely on.
Even with Linux though, so much of it relies on Github (think Nix Flakes, the AUR, and just general random apps that live there etc.) which is owned by MS. Not that they would necessarily just nuke Github one day (because that would be an insane thing to do) but just the general idea that MS is in a position to disrupt so much of the Linux ecosystem if they really wanted to makes me uneasy.
I love nix but it's my main gripe with nixos. They really should switch to an alternative service.
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Wouldn’t it be wild if all government work was located in Microsoft’s M365 services? Like imagine all government data living on a SharePoint site on an E5 M365 tenant. Like if every single citizen processing service was a PowerApps application? Imagine what would happen if Microsoft had an outage or a hack?
How easy would it be for a foreign adversary to take out a country by only focusing its attacks on a single company? Gosh what a hellscape that would be.
Yea.
The only answer: y e s
Yes we need variety. Imagine if all cars were from the same brand ..
Nervous sweating from the Audi-Bentley-Ducati-Lamborghini-Seat-Skoda-Volkswagen-Porsche-Conglomerate known as "Volkswagen AG"
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I don't like the implied false dichotomy between opening up the kernel and better security. You can definitely have both. Otherwise it's a good report.
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"We", no. "Too many", yes. In general, hard dependencies on proprietary software or services are often overlooked or ignored as potential future problems. Recent examples of this are Microsoft and VMware. Once the vendor changes things so that you don't like anymore, or drives up prices like crazy, you'll quickly realize that you have a problem you can't solve other than switching, which you might not even be prepared to do short-term.
The Windows world now experiences this because Microsoft is no longer interested in maintaining a somewhat quality operating system, they are mostly interested in milking their user base for data, and don't hesitate to annoy or even disrupt their user base's workflows in a try to achieve that goal.
Many Windows users are currently looking at Linux because of this, but the more your whole workflow is based on dependencies to proprietary Windows-only software, the harder your time to switch will be. If you still use Windows today, you should at least start using more open source or cross platform software, which also will work on Linux, because you are on a sinking ship and there will probably be a time when you can't take MS' BS anymore and want to switch. Make it easier for you in the future by regarding Linux compatibility in the hard- and software you use today.
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Well, as long as you have prepared a backup system then you should be fine. Like dual booting into Linux
I deal with whole I.T support companies built on the Microsoft partnership platform. All their dev is c#, servers are windows, no concept of other os when it comes to support. It's a real basket of ms eggs situation.
Yes. All world uses the weird os that is incompatible to everything else. Which makes transition of propietary software even harder.
Yeah. I use ddg and still sometimes play Minecraft.
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
197 points (93.4% liked)
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