WHEN THE CROWDSTRUCK

The consequences of the CrowdStrike anti-virus bug were 
interesting. Ususally Australia sleeps through these international 
tech disasters, but it seems CrowdStrike rolled out their 
self-sabotaging virus detection update during business hours here 
yesterday. Nevertheless my business tasks processing and sending 
orders were unaffected - post office, payment processing, banking, 
e-commerce platforms, and of course my own Linux-hosted website, 
worked without a hitch.

It wasn't until I _finished_ doing things using a computer that I 
found out about the IT chaos that had apparantly begun while I was 
working away. In the car to drive to the post office I turned on 
the analogue FM radio tuned to ABC Classic (used to be Classic FM, 
but apparantly my method of listening is old-hat), expecting the 
weekday 4PM news bulletin to begin shortly. It didn't, without 
explanation, but the announcer did, between rather glitchy playback 
of classical music tracks, welcome listeners of "ABC RN", another 
station broadcast by the state-owned media service. Their sudden 
conversion to the pleasures of classical music in place of 
under-funded talk radio shows being blamed on an IT outage 
affecting the ABC as well as various other institutions that I 
thankfully didn't need to associate myself with. "But here on ABC 
Classic the music goes on..." she said, except a few times it 
didn't, but that's not abnormal (My favouite was the time they 
started a classical track playing then accidentally switched back 
to the studio mic during a private chat discussing the programme 
and then the broadcast went silent shortly after the announcer said 
"shit" in conversation).

All fine at the post office, and for uploading parcel tracking 
numbers back home. Early in the evening though my tired-looking CFA 
pager, which I always wear to receive fire call-outs with the fire 
brigade, went off to advise that "An IT interruption is currently 
affecting many organisations across Australia, this includes some 
of the CFA partners but CFA emergency call taking and dispatch 
operations is not affected at this time. Updates will be provided 
as the situation develops". I guess the situation didn't "develop" 
since there were no more updates. Many members of the Country Fire 
Authority now use, often really poorly designed, smartphone apps 
that replace the CFA-issued pagers which are served by a dedicated 
radio network. I guess many may have been concerned that those apps 
could have failed due to the bug breaking their back-end servers, 
so nobody would turn out to fires (not that many were likely on 
that rainy day).

That night as usual I switched on the TV, broadcast TV of course 
since I don't 'stream'. All was normal until I switched over for 
the 7PM ABC TV news, seeing as I hadn't got my daily fix of 
headlines about presidential politics in the USA (admittedly far 
from disinteresting lately) from the radio earlier. Trump and Biden 
had been banished from the first third of the news report, along 
with the usual TV news studio, the entire country's state-based ABC 
news programmes having been taken off-air by the software bug and 
replaced by a "national edition" talking mainly about this IT 
disaster (as usual somehow without really saying anything).

No weather report at all either, which was rather disappointing. 
The weatherman who did the state and national weather reports 
retired recently and they seem to have been taking emphasis off it 
since, I suppose you're supposed to use the internet now.

Anyway after that it was back to normal for an evening's ad-free 
screening of the CGI-heavy (realism somewhat lighter) movie Gravity 
(2013), where the nation got to watch a hot but fluster-prone 
astronaut experience her own frustrations with technology. With 
more explosions though.

My take away from all this is how so much technology that's in 
principle nothing to do with the internet, and in the case of 
analogue radio not even computers, is still sensitive to these 
issues. With a few computers down an organisation like the ABC 
couldn't effectively work around the problem, even to record and 
distribute a radio programme to be broadcast. This even with a 
disruption so minor (the internet itself still worked fine) that I 
could do my own routine online tasks completely unaware that there 
was a problem. Inter-dependencies with computers have clearly 
become impenetrable in practice these days.

 - The Free Thinker