The perils of over-reliance on digital systems have been once again highlighted by the crashing of computer systems around the world due to an update to the Falcon antivirus and security product from CrowdStrike affecting its interaction with Windows operating systems.
The update has caused chaos for banking, retail, railways, airports, healthcare and for a wide range of other businesses and infrastructure where the Falcon software runs on Windows systems. Advice for bringing affected computers back into working order has been published but the exact mechanism by which the update caused “Blue Screen of Death” errors does not appear to have yet been reported.
It appears that in many cases, whilst the update was distributed automatically over the internet to systems, the workaround to fix the problem requires the machines to be rebooted in Windows’ safe mode, which usually requires physical access. The person at the keyboard then needs to know the password for the computer’s administrator account, and use this level of access to delete a file within a subdirectory of Windows’ System32. This process can be more complicated where Microsoft’s BitLocker encryption is in use. In many organisations the recovery keys for BitLocker have themselves been stored on a computer unable to start properly due to the CrowdStrike update. The quote “Men go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one”, originally from Charles Mackay in 1841, seems applicable now to computers too. They crash en masse, then require individual attention before they will work again.
It should be noted that while the perils of centralisation with a physical single point of failure are obvious to all but technocratic politicians and civil servants, this massive outage shows another way in which a “single point” of failure can occur.
The single point in this case is not a particular server in one building somewhere on the planet; but rather a change within a single piece of software, that change then being rolled out to many individual systems around the globe. These systems then entered a state euphemistically described as Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (acronym intentional) among the tech community. There was a reason that NASA put a fifth backup flight computer in the space shuttle, running software written entirely independently of the software on its primary four computers. A single point of failure where software is concerned doesn’t have to happen at only a single point in space.
There is a very clear lesson to be learned here.
Systems which can collapse at scale, even when they are not centralised in the physical sense, eventually will collapse in such a fashion.
Advocates of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and Digital ID systems should consider these lessons.
This update ‘only’ knocked out an estimated 8.5 million computers, belonging to over 24,000 organisations subscribed to CrowdStrike’s Falcon software.
A country reliant on a CBDC instead of cash would see an end to all transactions as a consequence of a similar failure affecting a component within whatever software stack was being used to operate CBDC infrastructure.
That could mean a fault within the software on physically centralised or partly centralised servers logging transactions and holding records; or a fault within the software running on masses of devices operating as payment terminals in a wide variety of locations.
In that dystopian CBDC-dependent nation, one would be looking at electric vehicles (already a bad idea simply on account of the abysmal energy density of batteries compared to chemical fuels) stranded at charging stations, unable to make payments to initiate the charging procedure.
Consider that the World Economic Forum once advertised with slogans on the theme of “what if extreme weather froze your bank account”, right at the time when Justin Trudeau was freezing bank accounts on account of his extreme intolerance for peaceful protest.
The reality is that in the centralised totalitarian model of society the WEF hungers for, this scenario becomes more probable, not less. That is to say, that as well as increasing the opportunities for censorship-obsessed elites to deliberately interfere in people’s lives, centralisation also increases the vulnerability of a society to accidental errors.
As an overall picture, centralisation makes it all too easy for governments and corporations to feed their addiction to exercising control. And the further their reach spreads, the closer to the state comes to being a black hole that sucks in the entirety of society and human experience, the more damage their anti-Midas touch causes.
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