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Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

“The Entire Culture Around So-Called ‘Software Engineering’ And Our Collective Failure to Build Strong Legal Institutions Around That Culture has serious questions to answer after the biggest IT outage in history”

there fixed it for you

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This is an odd take. My electrical power goes out more often than Windows crashes.

Maybe you're in the ERCOT service area? I manage IT for a global firm based in Minnesota and that is definitely not my experience. I think perhaps you unintentionally make the point that the electrical grid provides a demonstration of the value of regulation and the consequences of neglecting or dismantling it.

Nope, I just happen to live in a rural area with lots of trees and a few really strong storms a year. A tree going down on a power line or a car crashing into a pole is pretty inevitable, despite the company's best efforts to keep the lines clear, including regular cutting back growth.

I don't recall the last time I've had Windows itself crash on me... Two years maybe?

Ask my engineers...Dell and Lenovo laptops crashing due to thermal issues while using CAD...graphics driver updates causing crashes. I think we've worked those out but those are some recent examples. For vanilla office users I agree it's comparatively uncommon.

But we're not talking about isolated Windows crashes. We're talking about the impact of a single update to low-level software rolled out to thousands of critical systems as a security compliance checkbox-filling measure. No regulation, no oversight. I'm not calling for Joey Highschooler to need a government-issued license to hack on his SaaS, I'm saying that all components of critical infrastructure should be subject to engineering best practices, including software engineering and software management.

A tree going down on a power line is a solved problem in most of the civilized world: Just cut down trees that are too close to power lines. Having a few dozen meters of buffer or a sturdy railing between roads and power lines also prevents cars from crashing into them.

At a minimum, at a minimum, we should absolutely demand that Microsoft abandon requiring Microsoft Accounts to set up Windows. They have lost all rights to do that with a straight face.

Maybe that is relevant to home users but there's no relevance to today's outage. And if you're in a business setting I'm not sure why you wouldn't be using a domain controller and/or Entra ID and Intune to manage your Windows endpoints.

A third party s/w crashed because users failed to validate deployments. So from MS perspective users can't be trusted and need to be further locked down.

You can still use local users, you just have to work a little harder to do so.

for me that translates as opt-out friction, vs it just opts right in.

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