Just another long-time liberal Democrat, transformed into a liberal something else.
Richland, Washington
Joined August 2010
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#Colorblindness is the only rational way to live.
Justice has no color.
The cynical might call me naïve.
I say #Justice is blind.
I defend the principle of equal Justice under the Law, regardless of religion, ethnicity, and socio-economic status.
youtube.com/watch?v=QxB3b7fx…
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
For anyone confused about what’s happening with flights in America right now...
Basically every airport in the United States is frozen tonight, because at 3:54 p.m. Eastern on Friday the FAA’s command center put out an advisory titled “National Ground Stop,” ordering that departing flights stay on the ground until further notice “for reasons of safety,” and to understand how we got here you have to go back about 45 minutes earlier, when Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway suddenly got ground stops for what the FAA called an “equipment outage,” and air traffic control audio out of Chicago reportedly had controllers saying they were close to “ATC zero,” which is the term for when controllers literally cannot talk to or manage the planes, and Delta dispatch was apparently warning crews about frequency outages across the country, and then it spread, until Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted that the problem was hitting ALL of the Air Route Traffic Control Centers, which are the 22 big regional facilities that handle planes once they’re up above 18,000 feet cruising between cities, so the part of the system that talks to planes mid-flight basically went quiet, and the FAA’s official explanation right now is a “temporary telecommunications outage,” and they say every flight in the air has been accounted for, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says there’s no sign yet of anything “nefarious” but that they aren’t ruling anything out, and CNN reports law enforcement officials preliminarily say it wasn’t a cyberattack, but here’s the part that should bother everyone, this is only the THIRD nationwide ground stop in American history, the first was 9/11, and the second was January 2023, when one corrupted file took down the pilot alert system and it turned out the backup had the EXACT SAME bad file, and three years later we’re back here again with an aging system that Washington let rot through administration after administration while spending money on just about everything else, and yes, some people are already rushing to blame the FAA’s new AI congestion tool, but nobody has shown any connection, so maybe we wait for actual facts this time, and meanwhile the stop has reportedly been pushed out to 11:30 p.m. Eastern, FlightAware is showing thousands of delays, and travelers are stuck at gates on a Friday night with no idea when they’re leaving, so basically you have a Chicago glitch, 22 centers losing comms, a nationwide ground stop with no clear end, and a system everyone has been warning about for decades, which is roughly where American air travel is tonight.
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
Secretary of State Marco Rubio just delivered the most brutal indictment of Third World Mass Immigration and Open Borders I've ever heard.
“They tell us that we are compelled by a sacred legal obligation to give up our power, to surrender our sovereignty, to submit to the whims of our enemies, to allow our cities to descend into violent anarchy, to welcome in any foreigner from anywhere in the world who arrives at our doorstep without permission, to transform our towns into refugee camps for the entire planet.”
“And beyond our borders, too, they would have us believe that we must allow our rivals to act against us with impunity, that those who flood our country with drugs and crime and death should be met with little more than the occasional and polite complaint.”
“There is nothing, there is nothing in our history or the history of any other great nation that requires us to recognize the authority or legitimacy of any of these ridiculous ideas.”
So good 🔥
Send ICE to Harvard
If university administrators won't restore order on campus, dispatch ICE to disperse the foreigners disrupting undergraduate education
freebeacon.com/campus/send-i…
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Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
If you read far enough down the thread of Microsoft's explanations you get to this gem: "The servers we returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic".
Are you fucking kidding me? Did you just say, right out in front of Goddess and everybody, that it is unpredictable when your cloud servers will stop collapsing under load?
I think you did.
I understand what this means. It means your capacity planning sucks. It means your cloud services infra has been teetering on the point of collapse for a long time. There's no reserve capacity and no tested hotswap - some beancounter probably zeroed the maintenance budget so they'd look better on their quarterlies.
Thus do mighty empires fall.
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
Lots of hot takes on the Microsoft 365 outage. Here's an engineering one.
To be clear: this is speculation. Microsoft hasn't confirmed a root cause. It's my read of their own updates, from 35 years of building and breaking systems.
What Microsoft has actually said:
• Traffic isn't up. Capacity is down. Servers are failing health checks and dropping out.
• A process that establishes secure connections gets overwhelmed, and servers stop processing requests.
• Servers they bring back fall over again as soon as traffic hits them.
• They're reverting a network config change that lines up with when it started. But changes aren't syncing, and some machines are stuck in a bad state.
• No indication of an attack.
My hypothesis: a metastable failure.
Whatever triggered it may be long gone. The outage is now keeping itself alive.
1. Reconnect storm. Every Outlook, Teams and mobile client on the planet is hammering for a fresh secure connection.
Full TLS handshakes are CPU-heavy, and a freshly rebooted server has a cold session cache.
A server comes up, eats a wall of handshakes, CPU pegs, it fails its health check and gets pulled, and its load lands on the next one. Dominoes.
2. The fix shares fate with the failure. If the rollback travels over the same secure channel that's melting, the cure can't reach the patient.
That's exactly what "changes aren't syncing" sounds like to me.
That's why they're throttling traffic types and rebuilding servers from an older config instead of flipping a switch.
You don't get out of this by finding the bug.
You get out by shedding load, restoring capacity in isolated cells, and letting traffic back in slowly.
Where AI fits (also speculation): not "an AI wrote the bad line". It's velocity. Microsoft flagged several recent config changes as suspects and took hours to find one that correlated.
When the volume of change outpaces the humans who understand each change, finding the culprit gets slow and rollbacks get messy. Automate the shipping faster than you automate the understanding, and this is the bill.
The takeaway for every business: your email, chat, files, identity and security tooling now share one failure domain. Today proved it. Have a way to talk to your team that doesn't live in the same tenant.
Happy to be proven wrong by the post-incident review. And I hope this post ages terribly.
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
You will not hear a single objection from the "buy banned books" crowd about how France is going to jail an acclaimed author for saying words
Michel Houellebecq and @renaudcamus in the NYT. A "theory," a "concept," "a racist concept," "a racist concept *by* the writer Renaud Camus," "White Christian Europeans"... It's all so tiresome.
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
My AOL email is back and working great. How's it going with Microsoft Outlook email users?
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
Whoa, the CIA is about to lose its operational arm! OSS under the SecWar puts the military in charge of clandestine kinetics operations. No more 'civilians' out of Langley running amok around the world... sorry Jack Ryan, you're in the Army now. @Republicans @WhiteHouse
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
It has now been more than 26 hours since the beginning of the Microsoft cloud services outage.
While a few people have reported on X that they have service again, Microsoft's cloud status page at status.cloud.microsoft is unchanged, still reporting O365 service degradation and unavailability.
We're well in to historic-event territory here, and not in a good way. I think of the Morris worm and Heartbleed; I wonder what the future will call this? The "Friday the 13th" outage? Maybe they'll shorten it to F13?
Yeah, I know it started on Thursday. Work with me here.
Axel Reitschin's analysis at
isolveproblems.substack.com/… does not say that the post-collapse Microsoft cloud is literally unfixable, but it suggests reasons an unbiased observer might think so.
I wouldn't bet on this being true yet, but everybody at the corporations now paralyzed by the outage needs to start thinking seriously about this possibility.
I'm not here to bash Microsoft today. I've had plenty of fun doing that in the past, but I think it's more important to focus on the kind of systems engineering failure Axel Rietschin describes. Its a perfect storm of overcomplexity, short-sightedness and mismatched incentives it could happen to anybody, and may well be happening at a FAANG near you right now.
It is at least possible that with the amount of hot-fixing and human manual patching they were doing, Microsoft's running cloud evolved into a dynamic code state that the organization is literally incapable of recreating from a post-crash start.
I'm thinking of the complexity-theory thought experiment about sandpile collapses here.
This is not a Microsoft-specific problem. I think it's going to happen in any software system of sufficient complexity if it's managed by people whose response to problems it's to hot-fix for the moment rather than take the slower path of rebuilding on sound architectural principles.
Maybe I'm overreacting, and Microsoft's outage is not that kind of irreversible collapse yet. But we need to start thinking seriously about how to avoid this kind of failure mode, because there's a pretty obvious future scenario in which something like it could literally crash civilization.
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
🚨LONDON'S BIGGEST CHRISTMAS MARKET NAMED 'WINTER COMETOGETHER'
"STALL TRADERS TOLD THEY CAN'T SAY CHRISTMAS"
They must say 'Winter Market'
Why does multi-culturalism mean destroying our culture?
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
JUST IN: At least 12 people are unaccounted for after a tanker collided with a cruise ship on the Mississippi River in New Orleans.
129 passengers were aboard the American Heritage when the collision occurred.
American Cruise Lines says it is "deeply concerned" for everyone involved.
"We are in close coordination with the U.S. Coast Guard and local authorities. Guests and crew were evacuated, and we are deeply concerned for everyone involved."
At least 12 people are unaccounted for at this time, according to WDSU.
The American Heritage was reportedly T-boned by the tanker while docked in New Orleans.
Over a dozen have been taken to the hospital.
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
If we assume that some of the unusual events of the last few days are related:
1. China naval drill off Taiwan;
2. Iranian spy roundup in the UK;
3. Uptick in hacking of European targets, esp France;
4. Sinking of Russian warship in the Gulf of Finland;
5. Evacuation of US bases in the UK;
6. FAA nationwide grounding order;
7. Revelation of NVIDIA spying;
8. Microsoft outage
then we are possibly witnessing the results of unsustainable complexity or a grim clandestine fencing match that is being played down by officialdom. The challenge for the analyst is never to get ahead of the data, but not to fall behind it either.
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
A family discovered a bald eagle trapped in a tree on their property, still alive but unable to get free. To them, the eagle is a sacred animal, and finding it at this particular point in their lives felt like more than just a coincidence.
They knew they couldn't leave it there, so they did everything they could to get the eagle the help it needed and ensure it received proper care. ❤️🦅
I’ll Take “What is Malicious Compliance?” for $500, Alex: St. Patrick’s Day parade canceled in Florida thanks to state’s anti-DEI law
The city of Delray Beach also cancelled its annual Pride celebration after concluding that it, too, runs afoul of the new law championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
nbcnews.com/news/us-news/st-… via @nbcnews
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Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
The People’s choice award for Citizen Journalist of the Year goes to @DataRepublican!
Zayphar Is Colorblind retweeted
I'm about to propose a term for a dangerous failure mode that every software engineer should be thinking about today. And another for its consequences.
Hot-state dependency: A condition in which a system's ability to function depends on organizational relationships, accumulated state, or operational knowledge that exists only in its current running configuration and cannot be reliably reconstructed following interruption.
Yes, I'm thinking about the Microsoft cloud outage that's going on right now. It could be recoverable, still most likely is, but it could also be the harbinger of a new category of systemic disaster.
Heat death: What happens when a system with hot-state dependency crashes and can't be recovered.
The obvious next question is: how do you engineer systems so as not to have any hot-state dependencies?
I don't have a complete answer to this. But I can think of a necessary part of the answer that I don't think we're taking seriously enough: unitary, replayable modification logs analous to version-control change histories.
It should be impossible - it should be an invariant of your system design - to change the state of the system without leaving a sequenced record of the change that can be audited by human and replayed in a future restart sequence.
This doesn't solve the whole problem. In particular, in a cloud-service infrastructure you don't have the option of resetting all your physical wiring changes and hardware deployments to a zero state and then replaying them.
But I guarantee you that in any sufficiently large or complex software system, you will eventually develop a hot-state dependency purely on the software level if you don't have replayable logs. So that's the minimum you have to do. The absolute dead bare minimum.
We haven't known this before because it took some time for our systems to evolve into the complexity regime where heat death is a critical risk.
But we are here, and the time is now. Be appropriately warned.