Posted on 07/26/2024 1:38:25 PM PDT by george76
It is a testament to how utterly extraordinary the past couple weeks have been that the Microsoft-CrowdStrike computer catastrophe was not even the second most important story in the news cycle. On Friday, July 19th, the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike implemented a botched update that crashed Microsoft devices on which it was installed, ultimately inflicting the dreaded “blue screen of death” on over 8.5 million devices worldwide. Banks, businesses, hospitals, and airlines were hit particularly hard, and to this day, some of these institutions are having difficulty restoring functionality to their systems.
Video compilations such as the one below offer arresting images to give the reader a sense of just how globally catastrophic the Microsoft-CrowdStrike crash really was. It was a bit like what people imagined the Y2K scare would have been in the year 2000.
What kind of sense can we make of this? And who is at fault? Given that the botched update in question was implemented by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, a great deal of responsibility would seem to lie there. Readers might be familiar with Russiagate-stained CrowdStrike, as it was the cybersecurity firm the DNC hired to investigate the alleged “hack” of its servers leading to the exposure of highly incriminating and embarrassing emails during the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The recent CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage raises additional troubling questions in light of this history, which others have explored.
For now, we would like to turn the spotlight on Microsoft. As a simple matter of security, Microsoft holds a fair share of the blame for Friday’s catastrophe. Microsoft enables Crowdstrike’s software to exist within the most sensitive layer of its devices, and one would think a tech behemoth such as Microsoft would have stop-gaps and redundancies in place to prevent such global outages from occurring in their systems. A more troubling and important aspect the Crowd-Strike-Microsoft collapse draws attention to, however, is the utter ubiquitousness of Microsoft’s systems globally. A 2021 study revealed that Microsoft’s systems have achieved a whopping 85 percent of market share in public sector software, with an especially acute concentration in the Pentagon.
Elon Musk bemoaned the effect of the Microsoft-Crowdstrike crash on the global automotive supply chain and took to X to express his displeasure with Microsoft in characteristically suggestive and memetic fashion.
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Even Biden’s FTC Chair, Lina Khan, voiced concern about the vulnerabilities presented by Microsoft’s intense market concentration across systems.
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Indeed, it seems as though having a heavy concentration of Microsoft or any company’s IT products only exacerbates the problems related to our increasing inability to maintain complex systems—a dynamic that Revolver has explored extensively in relation to the airline industry.
Of course, any indictment of Microsoft would be remiss not to include its political leanings. As many of the tech world’s biggest CEOs and venture capitalists have embraced Trump, and even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently expressed admiration for Trump’s “badass” reaction to being shot, Microsoft remains steadfastly committed to the Democrat Party, and Kamala Harris in particular. Microsoft President Brad Smith was one of Kamala’s earliest donors in the 2020 primary, and Smith hosted a fundraiser for Kamala at his home as recently as last year.
With the previously notoriously censorious Twitter now under new management, it is perhaps not such a surprise that Microsoft has emerged as the tip of the spear when it comes to politically motivated censorship. One of the more troubling examples of this is Microsoft’s longstanding relationship with a service called NewsGuard, which Revolver News was one of the very first to expose as a ludicrous censorship scam. NewsGuard is a service that charges top dollar for their opinion on which websites are deserving of censorship, which it expresses by means of “nutrition” ratings. Let’s say you’re a web platform or company of some sort, and you pay money for NewsGuard’s expertise. This means that you can set your platform or service to censor or limit access to the websites NewsGuard has determined to be politically undesirable.
In other words, companies can outsource their judgment as to what is censorship-worthy on their systems by paying NewsGuard to make those determinations for them. As it so happens, NewsGuard was a PR firm that boasted Pfizer as one of its major clients, so naturally, NewsGuard was quick to designate any news outlets that questioned Covid orthodoxy as un-nutritious. When NewsGuard employees reached out to Revolver News to chastise us for our COVID reporting, we responded by publishing a highly embarrassing piece about NewsGuard’s conflicts of interest and various advisory board members. We encourage readers to revisit the entire piece, but just for the highlights, we should note that Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director who oversaw the government’s spying program on US citizens (exposed by Snowden) and who lied about it to Congress, was a member of NewsGuard’s advisory board. Rick Stengel, Obama’s self-described “chief propagandist,” has called for the abolition of the First Amendment in order to accommodate hate speech laws.
Imagine paying money to NewsGuard so that men like this can make censorship decisions on your behalf. Who on earth would do that? Here’s where Microsoft comes in: Microsoft has been in partnership with NewsGuard since its founding in 2018, even incorporating browser extensions informed by NewsGuard’s censorship recommendations.
Anyone complaining or criticizing the Blue Screen will now be called...... Yes...... Wait for it....... RACIST!!
Some are saying the Microsoft-Crowdstrike crash is part of the cabal’s Plan B after Plan A failed when President Trump shifted his head to the right on July 13th.
The thought is that the July 19 computer catastrophe was a sort of preparatory step for the ultimate catastrophe which will be perpetrated by the cabal sometime close to the election, to prevent another Trump Presidency. The ultimate goal of the cabal is commonly known.
But the cabal has nothing, because they never thought she would lose, and nothing can stop what is coming.
I cannot imagine any interruption in
Feasibility plan of action. Install a benign update with a bug that is easy to repair. A couple of days before the election Install a cancerous update to crash as much of the internet and supporting services as possible. Chaos during the counting, no one has “Real Information “ and all news or information is filtered through a hostile liberal media. Trump may win but cheating for house and senate democrats will be through the roof. Fog of War narrative and no way to know the truth on election day.
One of the wild cards is people do things and think they aren’t being watched.
That is so misleading.
CrowdStrike crashed Microsoft Internet Servers, most of them inside huge data centers.
CrowdStrike is not installed on any computers that simply use the Windows operating system or the MSFT Edge browser.
I did not want to start a new thread, I could use some blue screen help please. I have a laptop running windows 10. My every day laptop. This morning it would not boot up. Blue screen asking for a bootable disk (usb) in my case. I found a file on my desktop and downloaded it onto a portable hard drive. Did not work. Starting in safe mode does not work. Hitting F4 as I recall. I have some work in the garden to do but please any suggestions would be appreciated. I will check back later. Thanks
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