[LINK] Everything is broken

[David Boxall]

From: <https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1>

> Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of 
> computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and 
> started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get 
> total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and 
> ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four 
> hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and 
> discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After 
> nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the 
> files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive 
> into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to 
> go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told 
> anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug 
> get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t 
> extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security 
> scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse.
>
> It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely 
> works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by 
> the IT equivalent of baling wire.
>
> Computers, and computing, are broken.
...
> Software is so bad because it’s so complex, and because it’s trying to 
> talk to other programs on the same computer, or over connections to 
> other computers. Even your computer is kind of more than one computer, 
> boxes within boxes, and each one of those computers is full of little 
> programs trying to coordinate their actions and talk to each other. 
> Computers have gotten incredibly complex, while people have remained 
> the same gray mud with pretensions of godhood.
>
> Your average piece-of-shit Windows desktop is so complex that no one 
> person on Earth really knows what all of it is doing, or how.
>
...

Much more at the link.

-- 
David Boxall | "Cheer up" they said.
| "Things could be worse."
http://david.boxall.id.au | So I cheered up and,
| Sure enough, things got worse.
| --Murphy's musing