BigCloset TopShelf
TopShelf TG Fiction in the BigCloset!
The Hatbox
Checks can be made out & sent to:
Joyce Melton
1001 Third St.
Space 80
Calimesa, CA 92320
USA
Note: $6000 is the operating, maintenance and upgrade budget. Amounts received in excess of the $6000 will be applied to long term debt accrued over the last 19 years.
If you prefer, you can donate through Patreon:
Become a Patron!
Thank you!
Comments
It is NOT Microsoft's fault
(this time)
It is the fault of a thing called Crowdstrike. They released a faulty update.
There is a fairly decent explanation here.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/19/crowdstrike_falcon_se...
At the bottom, there is a workaround for the issue.
Samantha
the CEO
of the responsible company seemed surprised that 25% of the company's stock value was wiped over night, somehow think it'll not be all they lose!
Madeline Anafrid Bell
What is BSOD?
A few weeks ago, Win 11 was released prematurely, and nothing on the Internet worked for me. I thought it was just my old computer and I replaced it to the tune of $1000 American but the Internet was still dead to me. Gradually it has started to improve and then yesterday I started having issues with people demanding that I purchase their software updates. Today, 7/19/2024, I am still dealing with it. I've learned that if I go to certain sites, that is asking for trouble.
Correct me if I am wrong.
BSOD = Blue Screen Of Death
that Windows systems displayed when they had a fatal crash. There is a lot of history as to why it is blue that I won't go into but it is all out there on the internet.
MS released a buggy patch to W11. Nowt new there. They do very little testing at all. The quality of their software has always been very questionable which is why I stopped using Windows at home in 2009 even though my job was primarily developing software for Windows.
You can have a windows system operate without all the crap that OEM's load onto it before you buy the PC. A lot of those demands are for software that you don't need.
If I were in your place, I'd try to find someone locally who would look at your system and give it a good clean of all that OEM loaded crap that you don't need. The big Box store where you bought it is IMHO not the place to go for that advice.
Samantha
no issues
ive had win 11 since release im a hardcore gamer and have had no issues at all not even a glitch
Don't blindly install updates
I have not been infected.
For one thing, I use Windows 7. At work (before I retired) they switched all our computers to W 10, and I hated it.
But for another, I turn off all automatic updates. It's not easy, because the updaters manage to get themselves turned back on on a regular basis. FWIW, the place I used to work would not install software updates until they'd been tested in-house. I don't know if they still got bitten, because I don't know whether the Crowdstrike update was crashing right away or only upon some kind of trigger.
Automatic updates
Automatic updates are preferred because many malware attacks have succeeded because of unpatched systems where the vulnerability had been known and a patch made available for several months. Every unpatched system connected to the Internet is a danger to us all.
I have never, in my decades of computer support prior to my retirement in 2013, worked on a computer using CloudStrike. From the description, and Microsoft's analysis that only a very small percentage of Windows computers worldwide suffered from the problem, I conclude that is was mostly installed on servers rather than workstations or desktop computers. This makes sense, since the servers would contain the bulk of corporate or government data and would be the systems most in need of intrusion prevention.
My last employer also did not install updates until they had been tested. Unfortunately, the department tasked with the testing was under resourced and a year behind in testing updates and patches. They were also using an obsolete version of McAfee Antivirus. We went though a very disruptive period of virus and worm infestations because of this. It ended up costing the company a lot more in disruption than it would have cost to keep up to date on security patches. Most of their file servers ran a version of Linux, and ran server versions of Microsoft Windows only as virtual machines. I don't know if they ran CloudStrike on their file servers, because that was a different department of IT, one which they outsourced management of to IBM.
Single point of failure
The problem here is that so many essential (and not so essential) service are using the exact same version of the OS: MS W11 + Crowdstrike . So anything that affects that version will affect all of those services. In the language of systems reliability, this is a "single point of failure."
It's also like the problem of "monoculture" in agriculture and forestry -- if all the trees/crops/etc. are the same species or even clones of one another, one disease can wipe them all out. It's a lot safer to have a mix.
Linux doesn't have the problem mostly because there are so many versions ("flavors") of Linux, plus many different "distributions," each of which has its own mix of Linux fixes and versions of associated software.
Linux
Linux, and much of the software run under Linux, is open source, which means the entire computing community can examine the source code for errors, though it doesn't mean that they actually do so. Nevertheless, new versions of the Linux core are frequently released, free of charge to the Linux users, so there is no excuse to have an obsolete and probably error-prone Linux core. I don't know how often other components are updated, such as the GUI shells, C libraries, etc.