Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnnyo | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how this is Microsoft’s fault or issue.

MS can’t prevent a software vendor from breaking the machine.

I'm going to follow the guidelines and not be snarky: Microsoft is not some weak company at the mercy of the market. They choose their vendors (they also actively throw their weight around with vendors) and MS on top of that is capable of doing anything in-house (or buying it to bring it in house).

The stance of "let's not hold companies accountable for cutting corners" is one reason everything is getting worse. It's because we collectively let it get worse.

I’m not following your line of reasoning, can you clarify?

Is the argument that it was MS responsibility to bake something like this in at the OS level? And if they did it would be more robust?

I’m not sure I agree. MS has already gotten in trouble for monopolistic practices before, so from a legal standpoint, I’m not sure that’s the best course of action.

Except that doing those things could be viewed as monopolistic or anti-competitive behaviour.

If Microsoft is responsible, then they need to also need greater control. If Microsoft isn't supposed to have that kind of power, they cannot be blamed.

Is it possible that you’re talking about a different incident? In the incident at hand, didn’t enterprises in question choose the EDR vendor, not Microsoft?

Is the implication that Microsoft should be compelled to develop its own EDR product at a level of sophistication comparable to what CrowdStrike offered, and compete with them on that basis?

It feels strange to me to hold Microsoft accountable for the poor design decisions of firms who just develop third-party software on their platform.

>>>It's because we collectively let it get worse

What would you suggest we do to make sure it doesn't get worse?

A large majority of the population probably has no idea the implications of this outage and what to do about it because most are tech deaf.

They could basically eliminate vendors and make everyone use a Microsoft tool. But I suspect many would object to that solution also.

The they'd get sued by the EU for bundling these tools into the OS and eliminating the market for third party vendors.

Exactly. If you are going to demand a ton of different companies build different parts of a product, integration issues are unavoidable.

Drivers have the right to crash the system in my books - software doesn't. They need to take a stronger stance on antiviruses and kernel based software in general and push defender as the defacto antivirus for Windows.

because the underlying os they provide allows kernel access. if they had windows fence of the kernel and maybe provide a security api ? then this whole thing wouldn't be an issue

WTF? Isn't that exactly the one of the main jobs of the OS, to not crash regardless of what user-space software is doing?

I think the idea is that CrowdStrike doesn’t run in user space.

If an Nvidia driver had bricked the machines, would that be MS fault or Nvidia fault?

Why not both? I am perfectly happy to blame multiple parties, not just one.

IME a graphics driver crash recovers just fine on Windows. The screen goes black for half a second and you're back in business without losing progress.

I've had NVidia drivers bluescreen Windows 10 and 11 machines within the past six months.

Endpoint protection is hardly user-space software. It gets deeply privileged access to the entire system.

it was a kernel mode driver.

It wasn't user space, it installs a kernel mode driver

There's also the argument that a business OS that you spend thousands or pay a monthly licensing fee for should be hardened enough already to not need software like Crowdstrike. But I'm also completely ignorant to what it actually does and how critical it is.

I used to be a Windows Engineer in webhosting (RAX, Hostgator, 2-3 others) I assume before this software existed and I had to hand-craft an insane amount of security services in posh and python. When I first got into Windows syseng stuff, I think IIS5 so win2k IIRC, IIS didn't have something as simple as URL Rewrite abilities. You had to buy a 3rd party package for EACH server at $25 or write one, I had thousands of servers. Zero thought about people actually using IIS for webhosting. I had to make my own brute force detection service that continuously monitored eventviewer for an RDP permission denied error code, then write that IP to the windows firewall. All this stuff is an apt-get away in lunix. Windows Server is so shockingly barebones and to be quite frank most Windows syseng people aren't the best engineers and wouldn't think to make almost any of this. On many of my teams I was the only one who could program.

We'd put servers up without a firewall and post their IPs on irc and see how long it took someone to pop one, if they didn't get popped before we got back to our NOC.

I dealt with that OS from sysadmin 1-3 over 10 years I am so goddamned happy everything is an ephemeral linux container now.

Apple

Does Apple have a better method for preventing something like that?

I love my Mac, but I've had crashes that I suspect were caused by an application.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/operating-system-in...

They have sunset third party kext files. That means if the kern crashes, it is Apple's fault.

I once did a little MacOS driver development and had a kext signing key. It was an unforgiving, poorly-documented environment. Good riddance.

Large corporations buy Windows _because_ they can have this level of control over their machines. The CTOs and auditors want to be able to say they've personally secured their systems using "top of the line" security software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com