Category: Bonwag

This category references the category referring to this site, containing this category. Woo – infinite loop.

The System Is Down

This is the first time in years I’ve experienced a ‘BSOD’ (Blue Screen of Death). I usually dismiss it as Something I Did, but I quickly realised how non-alone I was today. Much wailing, much gnashing of teeth. Dude. What.

Yep – this is one of the big ones.

So what does it all mean?

Today’s outage appears to have been caused by software from the company CrowdStrike, which many major organisations use to secure their fleets of Windows 10 (i.e. Microsoft) computers.

Security software usually needs incredibly special ‘low-level’ access to computer systems to properly protect them, so when the company issued a faulty update to the software, over the internet, automatically, it didn’t just break an application or two, it caused whole systems to crash and reboot. In some cases, the computers restarted, loaded the faulty update, and crashed again, which is why some systems are still down – it requires a human to intervene and stop the reboot loop.

It’s not an easy fix; when the humans are very distant from the physical boxes that need a swift kick. Big problems.

Is it a hack, cyber-attack or a global conspiracy?

Nah, it’s a glitch that happens all the time; but usually the effect is just an ‘unexpected error in line 10‘. Human error, without a nefarious purpose. (If it were a deliberate act, it would have been much more silent and deadly.)

Unfortunately, this is a software glitch that props up a lot of critical computers, so the real issue is the pervasive and critical nature of the software component which has broken – something called ‘csagent.sys’ is the culprit.

Obligatory xkcd link: https://www.xkcd.com/2347/
Substitute ‘Random Person’ with ‘Leading Security Company’

The chain of events makes it unclear whether Microsoft or CrowdStrike messed up. Microsoft was reporting issues in the morning (9:30am Aus Eastern) well before the CrowdStrike component started triggering system crashes in the afternoon (around 3pm Aus Eastern).

Observe the market’s response: the market will know – well before we will – where the blame lies.

Not Apple?

Nope. Not Apple.

Not Optus?

Nope, not Optus. Not Telstra either.

What can I do about it?

If your machine is still working, don’t worry, it’ll get sorted automatically, using the same automatic patching process that caused the problem in the first place.

If it’s not – don’t be tempted to try any of the fixes you see online or uninstalling the software; that might open you up to further problems down the track – opening windows that hackers can crawl into once the dust has settled. And don’t trust anyone jumping out of the shadows to offer you help; scammers LOVE the uncertainty created by upheavals like this and will try to confuse people into their traps.

Get in touch with your IT department or local expert, and expect a little wait.

Happy 29th Birthday, BONWAG

On this, the year that social media blew itself up (or more specifically, when Mr Musk decided to demonstrate the dangers of a centralised commercial share-space), I’m pleased to see the world snapping back to self-owned social – or POSSE, as it has been recently buzzworded.

This might be the year I get back to regular posting here. About Marketing, about Family, about Technology, about Dumb Stuff.

What were YOU doing at the age of 29?

This Internet Thing Might Be Catching On

Apparently, 10 years and 1 week ago today, my first Facebook post was “taking a break @ home”.

Still using both. (First tweet was 10 years and 2 weeks ago : https://twitter.com/bonwag/status/8121611)

Many services have come and gone (MySpace deserved to die, Google Wave didn’t ) and these two have become something very different from what they were, but I think this internet fad might stick around for a while longer.

Happy Birthday Bonwag

Here it is, the yearly post celebrating the 22nd anniversary of the first post on Bonwag! As always, it’s been superseded by Facebook (and Day One – a personal diary) in recent times, so has been lightly tended, but one day, Facebook will die, taking my posting history with it, and Bonwag will still stand!

Here’s to having survived another year.

Happy Birthday, BONWAG

Hey, it’s that time of year again, when we cut the virtual cake for BONWAG’s 18th birthday!I first started keeping tracks of Bits Of Net What Are Good back on November 5, 1994, and although Twitter and Facebook have taken the lion’s share of my attention in recent years, there’s still a place for opinionated rants and random thingery here.

Be sure that Facebook and Twitter will disappear, probably sooner than you’d think/like. I highly recommend establishing yourself with more open, more ownable properties like blogs, which were around before MySpace and Yahoo, and will be here long after the latest fad has passed.

And, as a special birthday treat, I’ve switched off the ads, permanently. How annoying were they?

BONWAG Turns 17

Another big BONWAG Birthday – it’s reached the age of consent for South Australia and Tasmania, but still has a year to go in Queensland.

To think that all those years ago there was no such thing as a ‘blogs’, ‘social networks’ or ‘web content management systems’ – BONWAG was ahead of its time as a web journal, lovingly crafted out of raw, grain-fed ASCII and free-range command line FTP and terminal sessions. It’s been many years since I needed to CHMOD 777 my CGI (as Geoff Petersen would say: is that code? Why, yes: yes it is.)

In the past year, I’ve probably shoveled more words into Twitter than this blog, but fear not – fairding.com will remain the one stop shop for all flavours of bonwaggery – from MySpace and Geocities to Unthink and Google Plus, and whatever comes next.

(BTW: why is is that even today, no-one ever gets the ‘fairding.com’ joke?)

For a dose of history; visit the first post, or visit the archive of the earliest known version of BONWAG.