There Needs To Be So Much More Legislation When It Comes To Advertising, Especially Mobile Adverts Which

there needs to be so much more legislation when it comes to advertising, especially mobile adverts which are 99% lies and often predatory.

no i don't want to use your ai assistant. no i don't want your ai search results. no i don't want your ai summary of reviews. no i don't want your ai feature in my social media search bar (???). no i don't want ai to do my work for me in adobe. no i don't want ai to write my paper. no i don't want ai to make my art. no i don't want ai to edit my pictures. no i don't want ai to learn my shopping habits. no i don't want ai to analyze my data. i don't want it i don't want it i don't want it i don't fucking want it i am going to go feral and eat my own teeth stop itttt

very great coverage of stalkerware use by government workers in australia, im very happy to have worked with crikey to make this reporting possible!

Crikey

'Can I log into my partner's device?’: Politicians, police, public servants spy on family's phones, leak suggests

Leaked data from stalkerware company mSpy shows how customers want to use the technology to surveil family violence victims and police suspe

No matter how you slice it, this whole incident today is going to cause some pretty significant changes in the tech world.

1) More people are now acutely aware of the dangers of monopolies and near-monopolies - Crowdstrike Falcon was not the ONLY security suite used on an enterprise level, but the fact that it had so much of the global market share...well, if it didn't, this certainly wouldn't have happened

2) Crowdstrike is fucking hosed. They may be able to restructure majorly and continue existing as a company, but this revealed MULTIPLE major flaws in their business structure; SEVERAL people are getting VERY fired just to start TRYING to save the whole operation:

Okay, sure, someone could write a bad update. That happens. People make typos in their code, they slip up and make fatal redundancies or miss spots, whatever. Shit happens. But...

That's what QA exists for. An error this severe and immediate? Now everyone can deduce with just the slightest bit of effort that Crowdstrike does not test their software updates before pushing them. Yikes.

And they didn't even stagger the update to make sure it worked as intended at scale - they sent it out to everyone, then packed up and left for the weekend. More understandable than NOT TESTING AT ALL - people who know business better than they know tech (i.e., most of the people paying the bill for this software) might very well demand they not have even an HOUR delay in getting the latest update because it's TOTALLY safer that way right? - but even if that is the reason, that's really something that should be pushed back on for exactly this reason

3) The number of critical things that ground to a screeching halt because people have decided we don't NEED low-tech backup protocols to keep shit from stores to HOSPITALS running anymore is uhhhh...terrifying. Look, I have been a tech nerd for as long as I've been alive, and if there is one thing that was drilled into me from a very young age, it is that anything that would be worse than severely inconvenient if it fucks up should have a computer failure protocol as robust and comprehensive as a Waffle House, and yet here we're seeing people locked out of healthcare work because someone misplaced their BitLocker key and no one can boot their computers to safe mode to delete a file? Yeah, terrifying.

It's absolutely wild to me how much of a Major Historic Event this one shitty software update has the potential to be. Let's try and get some positive changes done because of it.

Be the change