It’s definitely not the latter. It’s a fancy antivirus known as an EDR - Endpoint Detection and Response. Purely security software for defending against cyber attacks

I want to clarify something that you hinted at in your post but I’ve seen in other posts too. This isn’t a cloud failure or remotely related to it, but a facet of a company’s security software suite causing crippling issues.

I apologize ahead of time, when I started typing this I didn’t think it would be this long. This is pretty important to me and I feel like this can help clarify a lot of misinformation about how IT and software works in an enterprise.

Crowdstrike is an EDR, or Endpoint Detection and Response software. Basically a fancy antivirus that isn’t file signature based but action monitoring based. Like all AVs, it receives regular definition updates around once an hour to anticipate possible threat actors using zero-day exploits. This is the part that failed, the hourly update channel pushed a bad update. Some computers escaped unscathed because they checked in either right before the bad update was pushed or right after it was pulled.
Another facet of AVs is how they work depends on monitoring every part of a computer. This requires specific drivers to integrate into the core OS, which were updated to accompany the definition update. Anything that integrates that closely can cause issues if it isn’t made right.

Before this incident, Crowdstrike was regarded as the best in its class of EDR software. This isn’t something companies would swap to willy nilly just because they feel like it. The scale of implementing a new security software for all systems in an org is a huge undertaking, one that I’ve been a part of several times. It sucks to not only rip out the old software but also integrate the new software and make sure it doesn’t mess up other parts of the server. Basically companies wouldn’t use CS unless they are too lazy to change away, or they think it’s really that good.
EDR software plays a huge role in securing a company’s systems. Companies need this tech for security but also because they risk failing critical audits or can’t qualify for cybersecurity insurance. Any similar software could have issues - Cylance, Palo Alto Cortex XDR, Trend Micro are all very strong players in the field too and are just as prone to having issues.
And it’s not just the EDR software that could cause issues, but lots of other tech. Anything that does regular definition or software updating can’t or shouldn’t be monitored because of the frequency or urgency of each update would be impractical to filter by an enterprise. Firewalls come to mind, but there could be a lot of systems at risk of failing due to a bad update. Of course, it should fall on the enterprise to provide the manpower to do this, but this is highly unlikely when most IT teams are already skeleton crews and subject to heavy budget cuts.

So with all that, you might ask “how is this mitigated?” It’s a very good question. The most obvious solution “don’t use one software on all systems” is more complicated and expensive than you think. Imagine bug testing your software for two separate web servers - one uses Crowdstrike, Tenable, Apache, Python, and Node.js, and the other uses TrendMicro, Qualys, nginx, PHP, and Rust. The amount of time wasted on replicating behavior would be astronomical, not to mention unlikely to have feature parity. At what point do you define the line of “having redundant tech stacks” to be too burdensome? That’s the risk a lot of companies take on when choosing a vendor.
On a more relatable scale, imagine you work at a company and desktop email clients are the most important part of your job. One half of the team uses Microsoft Office and the other half uses Mozilla Thunderbird. Neither software has feature parity with the other, and one will naturally be superior over the other. But because the org is afraid of everyone getting locked out of emails, you happen to be using “the bad” software. Not a very good experience for your team, even if it is overall more reliable.

A better solution is improved BCDR (business continuity disaster recovery) processes, most notably backup and restore testing. For my personal role in this incident, I only have a handful of servers affected by this crisis for which I am very grateful. I was able to recover 6 out of 7 affected servers, but the last is proving to be a little trickier. The best solution would be to restore this server to a former state and continue on, but in my haste to set up the env, I neglected to configure snapshotting and other backup processes. It won’t be the end of the world to recreate this server, but this could be even worse if this server had any critical software on it. I do plan on using this event to review all systems I have a hand in to assess redundancy in each facet - cloud, region, network, instance, and software level.
Laptops are trickier to fix because of how distributed they are by nature. However, they can still be improved by having regular backups taken of a user’s files and testing that Bitlocker is properly configured and curated.

All that said, I’m far from an expert on this, just an IT admin trying to do what I can with company resources. Here’s hoping Crowdstrike and other companies greatly improve their QA testing, and IT departments finally get the tooling approved to improve their backup and recovery strategies.

Guys, gals, and enby pals is pretty inclusive and rhymes

The original meme is the soldier protecting the kid from the knives - https://i.imgflip.com/2tzo2k.jpg?a477336
This version is implying that the soldier caption is doing nothing to protect the kid caption

Actually a great idea, considering how expensive rims and wheels can be

This is what I use for clips that I need to upload to friends. The Windows Xbox DVR saves the last 3 mins of gameplay, but I only need 15-30s of it.

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In shorter terms to what the other comment said, your website won’t work in networks that use DNS served by your DC. The website is fine on the Internet, but less so at home or at an office/on a VPN if you’re an enterprise.
“I can’t go to example.com on the VPN!” was a semi common ticket at my last company 🙃

Oh yes, I’m very glad that he did this video and attempted to make singles himself. My first sentence was a jab at how ungracefully he cooked the cheese haha

What happens when a chemist tries to cook.
Sodium citrate is pretty easy to find online and can go in all kinds of cheese sauces. You can even use it to make a stovetop mac and cheese with your favorite cheeses that won’t get goopy or oily. The other chemical Nile used isn’t really needed, it’s probably more so it holds together into the sheet shape for mimicking singles.
Another alternative to getting sodium citrate is to add American cheese to your cheese blends. Not singles, but deli counter/block cheese. It’s enough to smooth out sauces made from other cheeses.

Right, and the data in Texas contains your address and name attached to it. It’s all public, you can’t avoid it. I don’t know about other states but I assume it’s the same

If you’re paying property taxes, you’re going to be in a database. At least here in Texas, all addresses (home, business, empty land) are in the county’s appraisal and tax database that’s publicly searchable.

Firefox Mobile can open PDFs fine - https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/1c51814a-c761-4325-baa1-346e8ae2e7fb.png

It’s unlikely but if she wants Japanese riichi mahjong and not solitaire style, Kemono Mahjong is a really solid app. No ads or micro transactions (the only in app purchase is to optionally support the dev for $1/month), full feature, minimal to no tracking (email address for online game purposes). It’s not open source or free but it’s only $3 one time purchase.

I don’t have any suggestions for solitaire/tile matching mahjong, unfortunately. Microsoft’s app is not malware but will be datamine galore. It also has ads unless you pay per month. Anything else, id be leery of the security of the app and your data.

If you’re not getting anti caking agents in shredded cheese, then what do you expect the pre-shredded cheese to do?
Might as well get a block and shred it yourself.

Yes :3

Short answer, likely yes. It’s not definitive, you could still slip by after sending enough mail, but you are also very likely to get whacked because that VPS IP doesn’t have an email sending reputation.

Longer answer, email gateways like Google, Microsoft, and Proofpoint don’t really care who owns what IP. Well, they might, but they’re more concerned about the sending habits of an IP. While you might send good mail from that IP, there’s no reputation for it, so you could be whacked for having a neutral reputation (the ol’ credit score dilemma but for email).
In order to have a good reputation, you have to send a large volume of messages very gradually over several weeks to “warm” your IP as a reputable sender. I went over this slightly more in detail in another reply, but this article is pretty concise on how an enterprise accomplishes this with a dedicated IP at a provider like SendGrid: https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/sending-email/warming-up-an-ip-address

It’s about sample size. Mail gateways won’t designate an IP as a reputable sending IP until it assesses a large volume of mail sent over a long period of time. You can’t send the quantity it wants all at once or even in a short window because then you’ll be designated as a spammer. So you start small with a few a day and gradually ramp up sending over multiple weeks or months to eventually send several thousands of messages in that period.

Spammers and malicious actors too often spin up new IPs for sending mail, so gateway patterns already implicitly mandate that email should come from IPs it’s already judged reputable.

You as an individual can’t reasonably warm your own IP. This is why services like Amazon SES or Sendgrid exist because they have huge IP pools that are ready to go. Plus, those services are very concerned with reputation and have bounce/complaint metrics defined to warn customers that abuse or poorly configure their sending habits.

This next example is what I’m most familiar with, but I’m sure there are other services like this. If you’re a big enterprise and want your own dedicated sending IP because you’re concerned about using a shared pool, you could use something like Amazon Pinpoint which allocate IPs for your org to use in SES, but they have to be warmed before you switch your production workloads over to it full-time. It automates some of the gradual-ness of warming so you use a mix of SES plus your Pinpoint IPs to keep mail flowing for your product.

It looks like Sendgrid also does dedicated IP warming guard rails too. This article is pretty decent for understanding how it works - https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/sending-email/warming-up-an-ip-address The per-day warming limits give you an idea of what scale this kind of process is used for.

Technology Connections makes very specific, detailed videos on tech stuff, appliances, etc. My recent favorite of his is about incandescent vs LED Christmas lights and his unending rage about LED lights looking like “a computer threw up on your lawn”. The first I remember watching was about dishwasher tech and how great they are, but how terrible dish pods are.

It’s a discord reaction of the nerd emoji. Supposed to imply the snake is calling her a nerd for following what they heard