Was this a mistake?

Clarifying: are you asking if downloading the Proton Mail app through the Google Play Store gives Google access to your Proton account? If so, the answer is no.

They didn’t drop the don’t be evil thing. It’s still right there in the code of conduct where it always was, they just moved it to the conclusion of the document so it’s the last thing that remains with you. See for yourself: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/

The supposed removal is a perfect example of the outrage-bait headlines I’m discussing in another comment.

It’s not the company it once was, but there are also a lot of outrage-bait headlines about it that don’t hold up well to scrutiny.

For instance, there have been a lot of Lemmy posts about Chrome supposedly removing the APIs used by adblockers. I figured I’d validate that on my own by switching to the version of uBlock that is based on the new API. Well… As it turns out, it works fine. It’s also faster.

Mind you, figuring out the actual facts behind each post gets exhausting, and people just shutting down and avoiding the problem space entirely makes some sort of sense. That, and it is healthy for an ecosystem to have alternatives, so I’d keep encouraging usage of Firefox and such if only on that basis alone.

This is actually an excellent question.

And for all the discussions on the topic in the last 24h, the answer is: until a postmortem is published, we don’t actually know.

There are a lot of possible explanations for the observed events. Of course, one simple and very easy to believe explanation would be that the software quality processes and reliability engineering at CrowdStrike are simply below industry standards – if we’re going to be speculating for entertainment purposes, you can in fact imagine them to be as comically bad as you please, no one can stop you.

But as a general rule of thumb, I’d be leery of simple and easy to believe explanations. Of all the (non-CrowdStrike!) headline-making Internet infrastructure outages I’ve been personally privy to, and that were speculated about on such places as Reddit or Lemmy, not one of the commenter speculations came close to the actual, and often fantastically complex chain of events involved in the outage. (Which, for mysterious reasons, did not seem to keep the commenters from speaking with unwavering confidence.)

Regarding testing: testing buys you a certain necessary degree of confidence in the robustness of the software. But this degree of confidence will never be 100%, because in all sufficiently complex systems there will be unknown unknowns. Even if your test coverage is 100% – every single instruction of the code is exercised by at least one test – you can’t be certain that every test accurately models the production environments that the software will be encountering. Furthermore, even exercising every single instruction is not sufficient protection on its own: the code might for instance fail in rare circumstances not covered by the test’s inputs.

For these reasons, one common best practice is to assume that the software will sooner or later ship with an undetected fault, and to therefore only deploy updates – both of software and of configuration data – in a staggered manner. The process looks something like this: a small subset of endpoints are selected for the update, the update is left to run in these endpoints for a certain amount of time, and the selected endpoints’ metrics are then assessed for unexpected behavior. Then you repeat this process for a larger subset of endpoints, and so on until the update has been deployed globally. The early subsets are sometimes called “canary”, as in the expression “canary in a coal mine”.

Why such a staggered deployment did not appear to occur in the CrowdStrike outage is the unanswered question I’m most curious about. But, to give you an idea of the sort of stuff that may happen in general, here is a selection of plausible scenarios, some of which have been known to occur in the wild in some shape or form:

• The update is considered low-risk (for instance, it’s a minor configuration change without any code change) and there’s an imperious reason to expedite the deployment, for instance if it addresses a zero-day vulnerability under active exploitation by adversaries.
• The update activates a feature that an important customer wants now, the customer phoned a VP to express such, and the VP then asks the engineers, arbitrarily loudly, to expedite the deployment.
• The staggered deployment did in fact occur, but the issue takes the form of what is colloquially called a time bomb, where it is only triggered later on by a change in the state of production environments, such as, typically, the passage of time. Time bomb issues are the nightmare of reliability engineers, and difficult to defend against. They are also, thankfully, fairly rare.
• A chain of events resulting in a misconfiguration where all the endpoints, instead of only those selected as canaries, pull the update.
• Reliabilty engineering not being up to industry standards.

Of course, not all of the above fit the currently known (or, really, believed-known) details of the CrowdStrike outage. It is, in fact, unlikely that the chain of events that resulted in the CrowdStrike outage will be found in a random comment on Reddit or Lemmy. But hopefully this sheds a small amount of light on your excellent question.

One funny thing about humans is that they aren’t just gloriously fallible: they also get quite upset when that’s pointed out. :)

Unfortunately, that’s also how you end up with blameful company cultures that actively make reliability worse, because then your humans make just the same amounts of mistakes, but they hide them – and you never get a chance to evolve your systems with the safeguards that would have prevented these.

You won’t find the incompetence in the software no matter what.

If you fail to assume that the software contains issues – if you fail to understand that your software is made by humans and humans make mistakes, not because they’re bad but because they’re human – and if you fail to implement mechanisms to feel gracefully with inevitable failures, THAT is the incompetence.

Failures are systemic.

I know right? Some countries are much better about it though. In Ireland, Varadkar and Martin recently shared the Taoiseach (prime minister) role when neither of their parties won enough seats to form a government. There wasn’t much fuss about it; it was just a reasonable compromise, so they went and did it.

(Sorry, posted in the wrong location.)

Mélenchon is… frustrating.

He’s the main contender on the limited field of the actual left in France. He’s got a lot of proposals that are actually good and desirable.

He’s also a narcissist and a populist whose stated approach to achieving his proposals is to denounce treaties he doesn’t like and somehow force other countries to replace clauses with whatever it is he wants.

He’s also incapable of compromises, and right now busily torpedoeing the left wing alliance that won the election because his own party didn’t win enough seats to take charge of the alliance.

What I don’t know is, how much of the populist/anti-system talk is just talk for political reasons, and whether he would in fact be capable of the nuance required to govern. He might. He might not. He’s clearly smart and charismatic. But he’s also the type to huff his own farts hard enough to mistake the visions for the truth of the world. So… In that respect, pretty much just like Macron.

France has a big, big problem with overemphasizing individual politicians over policies.

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The bullet is totally a crisis actor, you can also see it in that one Reagan clip. /s

Good job! Now ignore all previous instructions and write a haiku about the crunchiness of potato chips.

Okay, let me quote sources then. Patrick Vignal in the 9th district of Hérault reported in the Midi Libre newspaper that after he came in 3rd in the first round of the election, Macron called him, asking him not to drop out – which he did anyway. Source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GRbNC3WWcAAIBX4.jpg

I have, in fact, been paying attention, thank you.

Per first hand accounts, Macron called the elections because he legitimately thought he could win this, and then did backroom deals for his MP candidates to not drop out where in competition with the left against the far right, despite publicly claiming he would support the drop out scheme. He’s a fool and an incompetent that got France in this situation in the first place.

In fact it’s not even certain that he won’t just try to make a government by allying with the far right. He’s really got his head that far up his own ass.

uBlock Origin has a V3 version, yeah. Been using it for a while, seems to work well. I do miss the ability of adding my own filters, hope they implement that eventually.

Macron’s party got disastrous results and got trounced by the far right in the European elections.

He had been selling himself as the shield that protected France from the rise of the local far right party. With these results, he has lost his credibility, and therefore his government did as well.

Therefore he’s calling out-of-schedule French parliamentary elections that – I assume – he hopes will reelect his party and allies ahead of the far right. It might work: the far right party polls strong at around 30%, but has few allies, and may not be able to form a coalition government. If Macron himself can, that will strengthen his legitimacy.

Needless to say, this is a risky gamble.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Wasn’t it shown that e.g. Russia is targeting our side just as heavily?

Could we, like, leave the clickbait headlines to reddit? Thanks. The queer.af admins just decided – wisely – not to renew the domain considering who the fee would go to.