None of this is for you; it's for money. It's someone else's empire. Cybersecurity is a farce, and western culture would quickly recover from a complete collapse, and be better off for it.
And then others would emerge, and the cat mouse game of hackers and viruses in the 2000s would pick up again. We had a bit of a calm period when Anti virus programs in windows didnt do much anymore
Their capital isn't your body armour.
Anything it costs them has all the impact of an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff, when we could have a fence at the top.
> The collapse of the current Google/Microsoft security and management duopoly would be less impactful on the average computer user than the death of flash player.
Add Cisco (CVE-2026-20213), NGINX (CVE-2026-27654), the Linux kernel (CVE-2026-31554), ImageMagick (CVE-2026-33901), FreeRDP (CVE-2026-40033), OpenSSL (CVE-2026-45447), Suricata (CVE-2026-45751), FreeBSD (CVE-2026-4747), PostgreSQL (CVE-2026-6479), and Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird NSS library (CVE-2026-6772).
> None of this is for you; it's for money. It's someone else's empire. Cybersecurity is a farce, and western culture would quickly recover from a complete collapse, and be better off for it.
Cybersecurity is indeed a farce; one does not put out a dumpster fire by pouring on gasoline. Well, not unless it's a huge amount, and then you've got gasoline everywhere off-gassing and one spark from being much worse.
Due to tech being over-sold as a solution to everything, it has been so heavily integrated in our infrastructure that "a complete collapse" would be devastating.
We see small, limited, isolated incidents already, just from Ukraine blowing up Yandex servers and by extension knocking out random chunks of Russian economy, or unknown hackers switching French/Dutch/US fridges to defrost overnight spoiling the food, or messing with water control systems in (fortunately small) reservoirs, Revolut not working for a bit when one European DC went down, and some stupidity where a root signing certificate had a private key of "4" for 18 months without anyone noticing.
Do this everywhere all at once, and it's likely we get mass blackouts, banking in general stops, software updates and signing can't be trusted to undo the mess. It's anywhere from "really bad" to "civilisational crisis" if it dropped in unexpected and unprepared for.