Friday Funnies: It's a Slippery Slope

All the world's a stage, and Enshittification continues to progress

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(Newsmax is now reporting that Biden has agreed to step down).

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“This is the biggest IT failure in world history”

Just in case you haven’t heard, Allegiant, American, Delta, United Airlines, and many more airlines have issued a "ground stop" for all of their flights - including international. No current updates as to when the ground stop will be lifted on most of these airlines.

The impact of the IT issues on media/internet and banks is unknown at this time. Both Microsoft and CrowdStrike have experienced "outages."

The MS Azure status page now says that the issues have been resolved.

Hospital systems in the USA are now reported disturbances and outages.

U.K.: the National Health Service's appointment system is disrupted, broadcaster Sky News went off air, and railway firms reported delays due to "widespread" technology issues, per the BBC. Clearly, this is a developing story.

Thousands of Windows machines are experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issue at boot today, impacting banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets, and many more businesses worldwide. A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is knocking affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot loop so machines can’t start properly. CrowdStrike is widely used by many businesses worldwide for managing the security of Windows PCs and servers.

Australian banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters first raised the alarm as thousands of machines started to go offline. The issues are now spreading, as businesses based in Europe are starting their working days. UK broadcaster Sky News was unable to broadcast its morning news bulletins for hours this morning, and was showing a message apologizing for “the interruption to this broadcast.” Ryanair, one of the biggest airlines in Europe, also says it’s experiencing a “third-party” IT issue, which is impacting flight departures.

On a personal level, we are supposed to fly from Athens to Chicago to Virginia tomorrow. I am not looking forward to long delays. Bleh

PsyWar: I believe that the weak link to modern communications and transport is the total reliance upon the Internet.

Supply chain issues will only increase as the enshittification of the entire web ecosystem continues unabated.

Who owns Crowdstrike

Based on the provided search results, CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. is a publicly traded company listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol CRWD. As a result, there is no single individual or entity that owns CrowdStrike. Instead, the company is owned by its shareholders, who collectively hold shares of its Class A common stock.

As of the latest available information, CrowdStrike has a diverse shareholder base, including institutional investors, individual investors, and employees of the company through equity compensation plans. The company’s largest shareholders include institutional investors such as The Vanguard Group, Inc., BlackRock, Inc., and State Street Corporation, as well as individual investors and executives.

The company’s executive team, led by CEO George Kurtz, also holds significant ownership stakes in CrowdStrike. According to the search results, George Kurtz is the CEO and founder of CrowdStrike, and he has been instrumental in driving the company’s growth and success.

Here is a summary of the key ownership information:

• CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. is a publicly traded company listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange (CRWD)

• No single individual or entity owns the company; instead, it is owned by its shareholders

• The company has a diverse shareholder base, including institutional investors, individual investors, and employees through equity compensation plans

• George Kurtz, CEO and founder, holds a significant ownership stake in the company

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Enshittification is a pattern where online services and products experience a decline in quality over time. It is observed as platforms transition through several stages: initially offering high-quality services to attract users, then shifting to favor business customers to increase profitability, and finally focusing on maximizing profits for shareholders at the expense of both users and business customers. This process results in a significant deterioration of the user experience. A variety of platforms have been described as examples of this, including Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Netflix, Bandcamp, YouTube, Reddit, Uber, and Unity.

The neologism "enshittification" was coined by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022 to describe this phenomenon. The American Dialect Society recognized the term's relevance and impact by selecting it as its 2023 Word of the Year. Doctorow has also referred to this concept as platform decay, emphasizing the inevitable decline in service quality due to these profit-driven changes.

According to Cory Doctorow:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

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Factchecked: True

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