this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

At least in the western world I think it's possible. A lot of people I know who don't know much of anything about computers before this now know of Crowdstrike, although they don't know any specifics.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I’m still not sure what they do, though. The first articles I read made me think it was anti-malware for endpoint computers but some later comments made it sound like corporate spyware to track employee productivity. Maybe both?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

It's definitely not the latter. It's a fancy antivirus known as an EDR - Endpoint Detection and Response. Purely security software for defending against cyber attacks

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 month ago

Yeah, more or less both

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Not sure, people outside IT world, at least in my country, still speak about the "Microsoft crash" and don't know at all about Crowdstrike. Now that make me think that MS will probably try to sue them for the "ravages" to their corporate image.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

All press is good press?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Cute, but no.

I thnk that you vastly over estimate just how many computers and people were affected.

Microsoft estimates that 8.5 million computers were hit.

The computers hit were in the vast majority enterprise computers and mostly in the "Western World".

In 2022, in millions, Lenovo shipped 68 million computers, HP 55.3, Dell 49.7, Apple 28.6, Asus 20.6, Acer 18.7, the rest around 70.1, that's 286.2 million new computers shipped in 2022 alone.

In case you think that includes phones, nope, Samsung alone shipped 260.9 million mobile devices.

There are over 8 billion people on Earth. Most of them have never heard of CrowdStrike and never will.

I'm an ICT professional with 40 years experience and I'd never heard of them and I'd be surprised if they continue to exist for very much longer, all but guaranteeing that the name will become a footnote in history.

Source: https://windowsreport.com/how-many-computers-are-in-the-world-2022/
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (2 children)

So like. Hear me out.

What if, even if you were not personally affected, you still heard about crowdstrike because of the coverage?

I'm an ICT professional with 40 years experience and I'd never heard of them

But you have heard of them now, right? Kind of like that

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

When my grandparents call me to ask about something, I consider it main stream.

They called me the day it happened asking wtf was up.

I definitely think that the amount of people who know about has shot up probably a couple thousand percentage points, and not for the better, but it definitely didn't flip.

The other guy needs to Google what "hyperbole" is though

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Let's say 99.99% of the World's population had not heard of them before this happened, and I think those numbers are very generous.

Does anyone seriously believe that after this event only 0.01% of the World didn't learn about them?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

You're taking showerthoughts way too literally. It's an exaggeration. The number didn't "reverse" but it definitely multiplied. Businesses were impacted and who works for businesses? People who probably never heard of cloudstrike until it shut them down. It grounded flights and every person in an airport since then have probably heard the name. Anyone with a news app on their phone probably got a notification and know the company now. The number has drastically increased and that's the point, not that it specifically "reversed."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Not only is this showerthoughts, as you pointed out, but the person posting never provided numbers for those that were previously aware of crowdstrike. Any attempt to do so by those responding takes the statement beyond it's intention.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The number didn't "reverse" but it definitely multiplied.

Maybe he should have put the thing that did happen as the title.

But that'd be kind of boring, wouldn't it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

It would and this is showerthoughts not truethingsonly

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Does anyone seriously believe

Yes. My assumption is of course that this shower thought is presenting a numerical fact, and that everyone upvoting believes it in a literal sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's a dumb take that's incredibly boring presented any other way. The only thing interesting here is how dumb it is when presented this way.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Must suck being one of the only people smart enough to be offended by it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

"Cute, but no." is accurate. You can calculate that in the shower. Showerthoughts isn't an excuse to be dumb.

Some of the people here are in the theme of "I didn't mean 'literally' when I said 'literally'".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

So the actual showerthought is what, "More people probably know about Crowdstrike now compared to last week?"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

But that wouldn't be worth posting. Might as well just make the title, "So... Crowdstrike, eh?"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Hmmm.

So, OP didn't qualify which population they were percenting, which is a fair cop. You're setting the sample as "the world", and for sure those isolated hunter-gatherer tribes in central America totally didn't hear about it!

However, "number of computers" isn't a good way to measure this. I guarantee that every traveler who was trying to fly over the past week heard about it, because when it took down the airport computers, it created a travel backlog they're still clearing out.

Further, a 2014 study showed that more Americans work at large firms than small ones, and these are the very institutions hit worst by CrowdStrike. When it hit my wife's company, it took IT until this week to restore everyone's computer. First they worked on critical infrastructure, then they worked to restore laptops that had been shut down; for several days, entire teams were unable to do anything. And you bet that even of you're a self-employed plumber, you'd have heard about it when your spouse had an unscheduled vacation for several days. My wife was lucky and hadn't restarted her computer, and was terrified to do so until she got the all-clear from corporate IT. This being Windows, that meant that every day her computer got slower and slower; I don't know what it is about Windows that requires a reboot every couple of days to keep it from turning into a Commodore 64. Anyway, that was about 100k people around the world, and their spouses. Oh, and since you chose to include "the world" population, their kids probably heard about it, too. We have to discount all the infants, though; that for sure brings the percentage down 🙄

I agree with OP: it would be interesting to know how many adults in developed countries were completely unaware of the event. Versus how many in developing countries, even. It wasn't a stupid question.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

You think people who knew about it suddenly forgot?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

That wouldn't be required for the person's statement to be true.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It needs to be renamed to CrowdStrife