July 22, 2024 • 30 mins
On Friday July 19, millions of Windows PCs entered a doom-loop that rendered them non-functional thanks to an update sent by a little-known company called CrowdStrike - and in this emergency Better Offline dispatch, Ed Zitron walks you through exactly what happened, why it's so bad, and why both CrowdStrike and Microsoft executives should face criminal prosecution for such a catastrophic managerial failure. These are the dark consequences of the growth-at-all-costs movement.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A media Hello one, Welcome to a very special emergency
episode of Better Offline. I'm at Zeitron, I'm your host,
and I'm recording this from inside a closet in a
hotel in San Francisco. You're very important to me. On
(00:25):
Friday afternoon, I sat at my desk and just started
writing about any clear aim or objective other than a
desire to wrap my head around probably the most cataclystic
technological meltdown that I've seen in my career, And of
course I'm referring to the CrowdStrike situation. How was it
the piece of software, one that few people understood, made
by a company that people really didn't know was able
(00:47):
to shut down our banking system, mayor travel, TV logistics chains,
those weird screens that you see around and of course hospitals.
And as I wrote this script, I found myself returning
to some of the themes that I wrote about in
The Rock Economy, in the Shareholder Supremacy, and many other
pieces that speak to a larger problem in the tech industry,
a complete misalignment in the incentives of most major tech companies,
(01:10):
which has become less about building new technologies and maintaining
them and then selling them to people who would then
use them over time, and more about capturing monopolies and
gearing organizations to extract value from the things around them.
Every problem you see is a result of the tech industry,
from the people funding the earliest startups to the trillion
(01:31):
dollar juggernauts that dominate our lives, and the fact that
it's no longer focused on the creation of technology with
a purpose and organizations driven towards said purpose. Everything's about
expressing growth and about showing how you will dominate an
industry rather than serve it, and providing metrics that speak
to the paradoxical notion that you'll grow forever without any
(01:52):
consideration of how you'll actually live that long. Legacies are
now subordinate to monopolies, current customers are subordinate to new customers,
and products well, they're considered the means to introduce a
customer to a form of parasite designed to punish the
user for even thinking about moving to a competitor. The
(02:12):
key difference between what happened on Friday with CrowdStrike and
by the way, it's still being fixed, and as I'll
explain later, will really take some time to be fully resolved,
and my criticisms of other companies like Facebook and Google
is the sheer violent nature of this failure, the decline
of search and social tools we use in it is
kind of a gradual, incremental kind of rot. CrowdStrike, meanwhile,
(02:36):
was a demonstration of what happens when the rod fully
consumes the timber holding up the building. What's happened with
CrowdStrike is completely unprecedented. I'll get to why shortly, and
on the scale of the much feared why to Q
bug that threatened to ground the entirety of the world's
computer based infrastructure once the year two thousand began. You'll
(02:58):
note that I'm not saying that White was over hyapt
or dismissing the scale, because ydo K was a huge
society threatening calamity waiting to happen, and said calamity was
averted not through any kind of magical thinking, but through
a remarkable half trillion dollar industrial effort that took a
decade to manifest. Because the seriousness of such a significant
(03:19):
single point of failure would have likely crippled governments, banks,
and airlines, people laughed when nothing happened on January first,
two thousand, Assuming that all that money and time had
been wasted. All of the media was just being hysterical
rather than being grateful that an infrastructural weakness was identified
taken seriously, and that a single point of failure was
dealt with, and that the crisis was averted by investing
(03:41):
in stopping bad staff happening before it does. Crazy goddamn idea. Huh.
But as we speak, millions or even hundreds of millions
of different Windows based computers are now stuck in a
doom loop, repeatedly showing us as the fame blue screen
of death, thanks to a single point of failure in
a company called CrowdStrike, the developed of a globally adopted
cybersecurity product designed ironically to prevent the kinds of disruption
(04:05):
that we witnessed on Friday end. We're still witnessing today,
and for reasons we'll get into shortly, this nightmare is
going to drag on for several days, if not weeks
to come. The product called CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor is an
EDR system which stands for endpoint Detection and Response. If
you aren't a security professional and your eyes are glazing over,
(04:25):
I'll keep it brief an EDR system is designed to
identify hacking attempts, to remediate them prevent them. They're big,
sophisticated and complicated products, and they do a lot of
things that's quite hard to build with the standard tools
available to Windows developers. But as I'll get to later,
not Microsoft, and so to make Falcon sensor work, CrowdStrike
had to build its own internal kernel driver. Now, kernel
(04:48):
drivers operate at the lowest level in the computer. They
have the highest possible permissions, but they operate with the
fewest amount of guardrails because massive control and they're very
important to the system. Very technical people can to hear
that and be like, that's not the right way to
put it. Get out not your podcast. But if you've
ever built your own computer, or you remember what computers
were like in the dark days of Windows ninety eight,
(05:10):
you know that a single faulty kernel driver can wreak
havoc on the stability of your system. The problem here
is that CrowdStrike pushed out an evidently broken kernel driver
that locked whatever system that installed it in a permanent bootloop,
meaning that you just started Blue Screen of Death, restarted
kept doing him, the system would start loading Windows Encounter
a fatal error and reboot, and then reboot, and then
(05:32):
reboot again and again and again, in essence rendering the
machine useless. It's convenient to blame CrowdStrike here, and perhaps
that's fair, and I intend to do so several times.
This should not have happened on a basic level. Whenever
you write or update a kernel driver, you need to
know it's actually robust and won't shit the bed immediately. Regrettably,
(05:54):
CrowdStrike seemed to borrow Boeing's approach to quality control, except
instead of building plane where the doors fly off and
Boeing is the noise it makes when they fly off
at the most inopportune times, it released a piece of
software that blew up the transportation and banking sectors. The
name just a few. It created a global IT outage
that as grounded flights and broken banking services. It took
(06:16):
down the BBC's flagship TV channel for kids, infuriating parents
across the British isles, as well as Sky News, which,
when it was able to resume life broadcasts, was forced
to do so without graphics. In essence, it was forced
back to the nineteen fifties, giving an esthetic that matches
the politics of its founder and former owner, Rupert Murdoch.
By no means is this exhaustive list of those affected. Either.
(06:39):
The scale and disruption caused by this incident is unlike
anything we've ever seen before. Previous instances like this, particularly
rival ransomware outbreaks like Wanna Craze, simply can't compare, especially
when we're looking at the disruption at the sheer scale
of this problem. Still, if your day has been ruined
by this outage, at least spare a thought for those
(07:00):
will have to actually fix it, because those machines affected
are now locked in this boot loop. It's not like
CrowdStrike and just release a new software patch and call
it a day on Doing this update requires some users
to have to individually go to each computer, loading up
safe mode or limited version of Windows with most non
essential software and drivers disabled, and manually remove the faulty code.
(07:21):
And if you have encrypted your computer, that process gets
a lot harder. Servers running on cloud services like Amazon
Web Services and Microsoft Azure, you know, the way that
most of the Internet's infrastructure works, requires an entirely different
and much more annoying, separate series of actions. If you're
on a small item team, and you're supporting hundreds of
(07:43):
workstations across several far flung locations, which really isn't unusual
these days, especially in sectors like retail and social care.
You're especially fucked. Say goodbye to your weekend, your evenings,
Say goodbye to your spouse, your kids. You won't be
seeing them for a while, and I'm really sorry. I'll
buy you a drink some time. Your life will be
driving from site to site, applying the figs and moving on.
(08:04):
Forget about sleeping in your own bed or eating a
meal that wasn't brought to you by door dash, Good luck, godspeed,
God bless. I do not envy you. I so gratefully
have a fake job. You know what do envy? I
was buying the products that follow this utterly seamless ad break,
which will likely echo my exact sentiments on literally every
(08:25):
issue ever. And we're back. The significance of this failure,
which isn't a breach, by the way, and in many respects,
is far worse, at least with destruction it courst is
not its damage to individual users, but to the amount
of technical infrastructure that runs on Windows, and that so
(08:47):
much of our global infrastructure relies on automated enterprise software
that when it goes wrong, breaks everything. It isn't about
the number of computers, but the amount of them that
underpin things like security checkpoints or systems that run airlines
or banks or hospitals, all running as much automated software
as possible so that the costs can be kept down.
(09:08):
Hey remember the raw economy. Jesus fucking The problem here
is systemic that there's a company that the majority of
people affected by the outage had no idea existed until
well a day or two ago, that Microsoft trusted to
the extent that they were able to push an update
that broke the back of a chunk of the world's
digital infrastructure. Microsoft a company, instead of building the kind
(09:30):
of rigorous security protocols that would say, I don't know,
rigorously tests something that connects to what seems to be
a huge portion of Windows computers, Well, they just chose
to do something else. They've just screwed the fuck up.
As pointed out by Whir, the company vets and cryptographically
signs all kernel drivers, which is sensible and good because
(09:50):
kernel drivers have an incredible amount of access and thus
can inflict serious harm. With this testing process, usually taking
several weeks. What happened Microsoft? How did this slip through
Microsoft's fingers? Well, for this to have happened, two companies
needed to screw up epically in boy, fucking howardy did they?
(10:11):
What we're seeing isn't just one major fuck up, but
the first of what will be many systemic failures, some small,
some potentially larger, that are the natural byproduct of the
growth of all costs ecosystem, where any attempt to save
money by outsourcing major systems is one that must simply
be taken to please the beautiful, sexy shareholder that they
all love so much. And this is a problem with
(10:33):
the digitization of society, or more specifically, the automation of
once manual tasks. It introduces a single point of failure,
or rather several of them, or clustered together like a
rat king or a Katamari. Our world, our lifestyle, and
our economy is dependent on automation and computerization, with these
systems in turn dependent on other systems to work, and
(10:56):
if one of those systems breaks, the effects rick shay
outwards like ripples mean you cast a rock in a
lake or throw a body in. For some listeners, Freddy's
CrowdStrike cockup is just the latest example of this, but
it isn't the only one. Some of you might remember
the Solar Winds hacked back in twenty twenty, where Russian
state link hackers gained access to an estimate eighteen thousand
(11:17):
companies in public sector organizations including NATO, the European Parliament,
the US Treasury Department, and the UK's National Health Service
by compromising just one service, Solar wins Oryan Remember when
Octa some of you might know Octa is a company
that makes software that handles authentication for a bunch of websites,
governments and businesses. Well, when they got hacked in twenty
twenty three, they then lied about the scale of the breach. Hey,
(11:40):
do you remember when those hackers leap frogged from Octa
to a bunch of other companies like cloud Flare. Yeah,
they provide the content delivery services and the services that
protect websites from being well brought down by a bunch
of bots. From much the entire Internet, everything feels like
it's being held up by like twigs and chewing gum.
You probably know the quote no man is an island,
(12:02):
and it's especially true when we're talking about tech, because
when you scratch beneath the surface, every system that looks
like it's independent is actually heavily, heavily dependent on services
and software provided by a very small number of companies,
many of whom are not particularly good. And this is
as much a cultural failing as it is a technological one,
the result of a management culture geared towards value extraction,
(12:23):
building systems that build monopolies by attaching themselves to other monopolies.
CrowdStrike went public in twenty nineteen and immediately popped on
its first day of trading thanks to wall streets appreciation
of them moving away from a focused approach to serving
large enterprise clients, building products now for small and medium
sized businesses by selling through channel partners, in effect outsourcing
(12:44):
both product sales and the relationship with the client that
would tailor a business a solution to said client. Especially
when something is so serious like this, I want you
to really think about this and think about this problem,
because the problem isn't so much selling to small businesses
or media businesses. It's the fact that CrowdStrike made its
money selling to the enterprise and specializing in that, and
(13:06):
that's the thing. When you broaden out, when you must
grow in all directions, at all times, in all ways
to please the horny beasts of Wall Street, you lose
your focus. But that isn't the only problem, because Crowdstrike's
culture appears to also fucking suck. A recent Glassloor entry
referred to CrowdStrike as great tech with terrible culture with
(13:28):
no work life balance, with leadership that does not care
about employee well being. Another from June twenty twenty four
claim that CrowdStrike was changing its culture for the street
with KPIs as in metrics related to your success at
the company, driving behavior more than building relationships, with a
serious lack of experience in the public sector in senior management.
(13:49):
So glad that this company is selling intellect government anyway.
Moving on, others complained of micromanagement, with one claiming that
management is the biggest issue, with managers asking way too
much of you and it doesn't matter if you do
what they ask since they're not even around to check
on you, and another saying that management is arrogant and
needed to stop lying to the market on product capability.
(14:11):
That's what I love to see, we all love to
see that. I'm very happy to read that, And while
I can't say for sure, I'd imagine an organization with
such powerful signs of growth at all costs thinking a
place where you and I quote have to get used
to the pressure, that's a clique that you're not in.
Likely isn't giving its quality assurance teams the time and
(14:32):
the space to make sure that there aren't any Kaiju
level security threats baked into an update. And that assumes
it actually has a significant QA team in house and
hasn't just this with many companies outsourced the work to
a body shop like Wypro or Emphasis or Tartar Consultancy.
But for a moment, I'm going to change gears a
little to try and explain what actually happened and why.
(14:54):
It suggests that the issue is likely the product of
cost cutting and institutional failure within CrowdStrike. In the aftermath
of Friday's incident, we've seen some analyses about what actually
went down with them first some throat clearing. I haven't
verified this stuff independently. From what I've read, though, and
from speaking to developers, this all seems relatively plausible, but
(15:15):
maybe worth googling this a little yourself. But I'm going
to give it a go. So the kernel driver at
fort was written with a programming language called C plus plus.
This language was developed in the nineteen eighties and it's
very good for writing high performance applications, anything where you're
concerned about speed, like the Interenno's operating system or a
video game. It's pretty popular for that, and it's so
(15:37):
pretty dangerous too, so dangerous in fact, that it's often
referred to as an unsafe language. Without getting two into
the weeds. C plus plus makes it incredibly easy to
shoot yourself and the foot, the ars, and the dick.
At the same time, it's big, complex and has few
safeguards while providing many opportunities for developers to screw up
very badly. Like the languages derived from C, it forces
(16:01):
developers to deal with a lot of low level stuff
like handling memory allocation that you don't really have to
deal with in many popular languages like Python, Java, Russ,
Swift or Sea sharp. And this matters because if you
screw this up, your code will break, or I don't know,
it might introduce some kind of potentially disastrous security vulnerability.
In twenty nineteen, Microsoft researchers said that seventy percent of
(16:24):
all security vulnerabilities were the result of memory management issues,
and I doubt that figure has changed much since then.
And earlier this year, the White House Office of the
National Cyber Director urged developers to stop using unsafe languages
like C and C plus plus and start using modern
and safer alternatives like Rust. With me so far, ah, So,
(16:44):
from what I've read, the CrowdStrike Falcon sensor kernel driver
crash because it had something called a null pointer error. Essentially,
the developer wrote some code that told the program to
look for a memory location that didn't exist, and didn't
write any safeguards to protect against them. When this happened,
the driver and so the operating system crashed. This is
a rookie mistake, and I've talked to multiple developers that
(17:06):
have backed this up. If you take an introductory C
plus plus programming class at university, they'll cover this in
the first year. Kind of boggles the mind how trivial
a mistake this is, and how it made it into
production code, which is the code that goes out into
the real world, and how it wasn't caught either by
CrowdStrike or by Microsoft, who are supposedly obligated to vet
this driver, and if the reports are true, someone really
(17:29):
really really screwed up, really badly. But if you don't
want to screw up, if you want to really do
well in life, I advise you to buy one of
the following products or services, which I of course fully understand,
know all about and won't be embarrassed by.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
And to be clear, I don't want you to think
that I'm letting Microsoft off the hook either, assuming the
kernel driver testing roles are still being done in house.
Do you think that these testers who have likely seen
their friends laid off at a time when Microsoft was
highly profitable and denied raises, when their welfared CEO probably
took home over one hundred million dollars in salary for
a job he's eminently bad at. Do you think these
(18:16):
people doing their best work? Do you think they go
into a jazz full of piss and vinegar ready to
save the world, or do you think they hate their
job and they're being forced to do too much and
they're miserable, And the people that knew what the fuck
was going on haven't been fired, and the people who
managed those people and the people that wrote the code
that they're edited. Do you think anyone knows what the
(18:38):
hell is going on? No, they don't, And this is
the culture that's poisoned almost the entirety of Silicon Valley.
What we're seeing now is the societal cost of moving
fast and breaking things of people like Mark Andresen considering
risk management the enemy of hiring and firing things. Thousands
(19:00):
of people, tens of thousands in some case, to please
Wall Street, are seeking as many new possible ways to
make as much money as possible, to show shareholders that
you'll grow, even if doing so means growing at a
pace that makes it impossible to sustain organizational and cultural stability.
When you aren't intentional on the people you hire and retain,
(19:21):
the people you fire, the things that you build, the
way that they are deployed, maintaining your systems, understanding how
and why things were written, the decisions that were made five, ten,
and fifteen years ago, you're going to lose the people
to understand the problems they're solving, and thus lack the
organizational ability to understand the ways the problems might be
solved in the future, or disasters might be averted. This
(19:45):
is dangerous, and it's also a dark warning for the future.
Do you think the Facebook or Microsoft or Google, all
of whom have laid off over ten thousand people in
the last year, have done so in a conscientious way,
in a knowledgeable way, a people focused a way, in organized,
zationally rigorous way that means that the people are left
who understand how their systems run and the inherent issues
(20:06):
built into them. Do you think the management types obsessed
with unsustainable AI bullshit are investing heavily in making sure
that their organizations are rigorously protected against, say, one bad
line of code or one dipshit error. Did they even
know who wrote the code of their current systems? Is
that person still there? Do they have their email and
their phone number? Is that person at least contracted to
(20:30):
make sure that something nuanced about the system in question
isn't mistakenly removed or changed or quote fixed. No, now
they're not, They're gone. They're not there anymore. Only a
few months ago, Google laid off two hundred employees in
the core of its organization, outsourcing their roles to Mexico
and India in a cost cutting measure. The quarter after
the company made twenty three billion dollars in profit I'm
(20:53):
jumping to Google because they're just probably next in one
of these horrible breaches or sorry, not breaches. Silicon Valley
in big tech writ large is not built to protect
against situations like the one we saw on Friday and
the damage we're going to get from CrowdStrike because the
culture's cancer. He values growth or costs with no respect
(21:14):
for the human capital that empowers organizations or the value
of building rigorous, quality focused products that are maintained over time.
You know me, I'm a nasty little bitch. What are
more on the nose? Example, George Kurtz, the CEO and
co founder of CrowdStrike, said in twenty twenty that not
one time has he regretted firing someone too fast, in
(21:34):
a conversation where he argued that tech executives were becoming
too obsessed with culture, and in a stunning act of foreshadowing,
when he was the chief technology officer at McAfee, best
known as the company that makes antivirus software that they
sell to your granddad and that they ship with computers
and you immediately uninstalled, while he oversaw an update that
treated in the central part of Windows XP as a
(21:55):
virus quarantining it and sending the computer into a boot loop.
It's almost a little too on the nose. They're calling
him the prabagar Ragavan of security. It's a very bad deal.
But dear listener, this is just the beginning. Big Tech is,
to quote trivium, in the throes of perdition, teetering over
the edge of the abyss, finally paying the harsh cost
of building systems as fast as possible. But let's be honest,
(22:18):
they're not paying the cost we are. This isn't simply
moving faster, breaking things, but doing so without any regard
for the speed at which you're doing so, and firing
the people that could fix them more might have broke them,
the people that know what's broken, possibly the people who
might have an idea to stop this happening in the future.
And it's not just tech Boeing, a company I've already
(22:41):
shat on plenty and one ll likely return to in
the future, largely because it exemplifies the short sightednus of
managerial fuckery, has over the past twenty years or so,
span off huge parts of the company. Parts of that
at one point we're vitally important probably still are into
multiple other separate companies laid off thousands of employees at
a time and outsource software development too nine dollars an hour.
(23:04):
Body shop engineers fucking how hollowed itself out until there
was nothing left and then the planes started breaking. And
tell me, knowing what you know about Boeing today, would
you rather get on the seven three seven max on
Airbus A three twenty neo. I guess it depends how
much of a Buddy Holly fan you are. Anyway, As
these organizations push their engineers harder and harder and have
(23:27):
less of them because they've been laying them off, said
engineers will need to find a way to write code quickly,
and perhaps they'll turn to AI generated code, which poisons
code bases with insecure and buggy writing. As companies shed
staff to keep up with wall streets demands in ways
that I'm not really sure people are capable of understanding yet,
when you have less engineers and bigger time constraints, and
(23:50):
by the way, Prabagar Ragavan at Google specifically told people
they'd be doing things faster with less people. It's so cool.
I love tech. When you have less people, more time constraints,
they're going to turn to whatever little tricks they can
and wouldn't you in that situation too, You have to
ship faster than this possible. Of course you're going to
(24:12):
do that. But the companies that run the critical parts
of our digital lives do not invest in maintenance, or
cultural unity or any kind of rigorous infrastructure. If I'm honest,
you need intentionality as well when building these things. You
need it. It's required to prevent the kinds of things
that happened on Friday with CrowdStrike, and the kind of
systemic failures that you're going to see in the future.
(24:33):
And they need you to be ready for this to
happen again. And all of this is the horrifying cost
of the rot economy. Systems used by billions of people,
held up by flimsy cultures and brittle infrastructure, maintain with
the diligence of an absentee parent. This is the cost
of arrogance, of rewarding managerial malpractice, of promoting speed over
(24:54):
safety and profit over people. Every single major organization should
see crowdstrike's failure as a wake up call, a time
to reevaluate the fundamental infrastructure behind every single tech stack.
What I fear is they won't that they'll see it
as someone else's problem, just like Microsoft did. And that's
(25:14):
exactly how we got there in the first place. And
this is going to keep happening. I'm going to make
a daring suggestion at the end of this one, based
on guest of the show they're on, Assamerglu, I believe
it's time to start bringing in criminal prosecution to executives.
If you, as the executive, are pushing the kind of
(25:35):
cultures where basic security practices are failing, where managers do
not exist, where checks and balances don't exist, you should
be held responsible. And I don't mean a fine, by
the way, A fine for a multi trillion dollar even
multi billion dollar company is just a fee with a
different hat on. No, I believe there should actually be
(25:57):
a criminal inquiry in to CrowdStrike, in to Microsoft, and
the people responsible are not necessarily the workers. No, the
people responsible are people like satch In the Della, the
CEO of Microsoft, and George Kurtz, the CEO of CrowdStrike,
both of whom should face criminal investigations. We do not
(26:19):
know at this time the significance of this event, but
we know it's more significant than almost any computer infrastructure
or failure in history and in affected hospitals. Do you
think people didn't die? Do you think that something didn't break?
Do you think that there's not a corpse on satch
(26:39):
in Adela and George Kurtz's goddamn hands. Yes, it would
be blood, but still we keep going. These people are
responsible and they're not afraid, and they should be. There
must be consequences for this level of fuck up. Microsoft
made over ten billion dollars of profit in the last quarter.
(27:00):
By the way, the market cab of CrowdStrike before this happens,
around eighty nine billion dollars. Microsoft could probably in a
space of years profits buy them in cash or build
their own goddamn system. But they chose not to save money,
and CrowdStrike in turn found other ways to save money,
and saving money will likely have ended lives and ruined them.
(27:21):
This is why I'm so pissed off everyone, This is
why I'm so frustrated. This is what I've been talking
about from the goddamn beginning of this goddamn show. This
is the consequence. This is what will happen, and will
happen again and again and again. This is the first
of many calamities that will happen as a direct result
(27:41):
of companies run by people that don't give a shit,
of a Silicon Valley culture built on exploitation and value extraction,
and of a business cartel run by people all agreeing
to do the same level of shitty job, of holding
no one accountable, of not calling out they're peers for
running shitty companies because everyone's in on the scam. And
(28:05):
it's a culture that is failing society, and the culture
that I will continue to eviscerate every goddamn week until
they well kick me out of this closet I'm in
reading to you. It's such a pleasure reading this stuff,
and I hope I've given you more clarity. If you
have any questions, you'll hear my email address after this.
But it's E. That's the letter Easy, the letter Z
(28:25):
at better offline dot com and a's EAZ at better
offline dot com for my wonderful British listeners. Thank you
for listening, and if this affected you, I'm so sorry,
and it likely did. Normal people, people in hospitals, banks, airports,
people traveling got their lives fucked up by this, and
I'm one hundred percent sure people have died. It's time
(28:46):
for criminal inquiries, and it's time for criminal prosecution. It's
time for real consequences for executives who don't give a shit.
You heard it here first, well, and I guess they're
on set it first. Be safe out there. Thank you
(29:07):
for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
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A media Hello one, Welcome to a very special emergency
episode of Better Offline. I'm at Zeitron, I'm your host,
and I'm recording this from inside a closet in a
hotel in San Francisco. You're very important to me. On
(00:25):
Friday afternoon, I sat at my desk and just started
writing about any clear aim or objective other than a
desire to wrap my head around probably the most cataclystic
technological meltdown that I've seen in my career, And of
course I'm referring to the CrowdStrike situation. How was it
the piece of software, one that few people understood, made
by a company that people really didn't know was able
(00:47):
to shut down our banking system, mayor travel, TV logistics chains,
those weird screens that you see around and of course hospitals.
And as I wrote this script, I found myself returning
to some of the themes that I wrote about in
The Rock Economy, in the Shareholder Supremacy, and many other
pieces that speak to a larger problem in the tech industry,
a complete misalignment in the incentives of most major tech companies,
(01:10):
which has become less about building new technologies and maintaining
them and then selling them to people who would then
use them over time, and more about capturing monopolies and
gearing organizations to extract value from the things around them.
Every problem you see is a result of the tech industry,
from the people funding the earliest startups to the trillion
(01:31):
dollar juggernauts that dominate our lives, and the fact that
it's no longer focused on the creation of technology with
a purpose and organizations driven towards said purpose. Everything's about
expressing growth and about showing how you will dominate an
industry rather than serve it, and providing metrics that speak
to the paradoxical notion that you'll grow forever without any
(01:52):
consideration of how you'll actually live that long. Legacies are
now subordinate to monopolies, current customers are subordinate to new customers,
and products well, they're considered the means to introduce a
customer to a form of parasite designed to punish the
user for even thinking about moving to a competitor. The
(02:12):
key difference between what happened on Friday with CrowdStrike and
by the way, it's still being fixed, and as I'll
explain later, will really take some time to be fully resolved,
and my criticisms of other companies like Facebook and Google
is the sheer violent nature of this failure, the decline
of search and social tools we use in it is
kind of a gradual, incremental kind of rot. CrowdStrike, meanwhile,
(02:36):
was a demonstration of what happens when the rod fully
consumes the timber holding up the building. What's happened with
CrowdStrike is completely unprecedented. I'll get to why shortly, and
on the scale of the much feared why to Q
bug that threatened to ground the entirety of the world's
computer based infrastructure once the year two thousand began. You'll
(02:58):
note that I'm not saying that White was over hyapt
or dismissing the scale, because ydo K was a huge
society threatening calamity waiting to happen, and said calamity was
averted not through any kind of magical thinking, but through
a remarkable half trillion dollar industrial effort that took a
decade to manifest. Because the seriousness of such a significant
(03:19):
single point of failure would have likely crippled governments, banks,
and airlines, people laughed when nothing happened on January first,
two thousand, Assuming that all that money and time had
been wasted. All of the media was just being hysterical
rather than being grateful that an infrastructural weakness was identified
taken seriously, and that a single point of failure was
dealt with, and that the crisis was averted by investing
(03:41):
in stopping bad staff happening before it does. Crazy goddamn idea. Huh.
But as we speak, millions or even hundreds of millions
of different Windows based computers are now stuck in a
doom loop, repeatedly showing us as the fame blue screen
of death, thanks to a single point of failure in
a company called CrowdStrike, the developed of a globally adopted
cybersecurity product designed ironically to prevent the kinds of disruption
(04:05):
that we witnessed on Friday end. We're still witnessing today,
and for reasons we'll get into shortly, this nightmare is
going to drag on for several days, if not weeks
to come. The product called CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor is an
EDR system which stands for endpoint Detection and Response. If
you aren't a security professional and your eyes are glazing over,
(04:25):
I'll keep it brief an EDR system is designed to
identify hacking attempts, to remediate them prevent them. They're big,
sophisticated and complicated products, and they do a lot of
things that's quite hard to build with the standard tools
available to Windows developers. But as I'll get to later,
not Microsoft, and so to make Falcon sensor work, CrowdStrike
had to build its own internal kernel driver. Now, kernel
(04:48):
drivers operate at the lowest level in the computer. They
have the highest possible permissions, but they operate with the
fewest amount of guardrails because massive control and they're very
important to the system. Very technical people can to hear
that and be like, that's not the right way to
put it. Get out not your podcast. But if you've
ever built your own computer, or you remember what computers
were like in the dark days of Windows ninety eight,
(05:10):
you know that a single faulty kernel driver can wreak
havoc on the stability of your system. The problem here
is that CrowdStrike pushed out an evidently broken kernel driver
that locked whatever system that installed it in a permanent bootloop,
meaning that you just started Blue Screen of Death, restarted
kept doing him, the system would start loading Windows Encounter
a fatal error and reboot, and then reboot, and then
(05:32):
reboot again and again and again, in essence rendering the
machine useless. It's convenient to blame CrowdStrike here, and perhaps
that's fair, and I intend to do so several times.
This should not have happened on a basic level. Whenever
you write or update a kernel driver, you need to
know it's actually robust and won't shit the bed immediately. Regrettably,
(05:54):
CrowdStrike seemed to borrow Boeing's approach to quality control, except
instead of building plane where the doors fly off and
Boeing is the noise it makes when they fly off
at the most inopportune times, it released a piece of
software that blew up the transportation and banking sectors. The
name just a few. It created a global IT outage
that as grounded flights and broken banking services. It took
(06:16):
down the BBC's flagship TV channel for kids, infuriating parents
across the British isles, as well as Sky News, which,
when it was able to resume life broadcasts, was forced
to do so without graphics. In essence, it was forced
back to the nineteen fifties, giving an esthetic that matches
the politics of its founder and former owner, Rupert Murdoch.
By no means is this exhaustive list of those affected. Either.
(06:39):
The scale and disruption caused by this incident is unlike
anything we've ever seen before. Previous instances like this, particularly
rival ransomware outbreaks like Wanna Craze, simply can't compare, especially
when we're looking at the disruption at the sheer scale
of this problem. Still, if your day has been ruined
by this outage, at least spare a thought for those
(07:00):
will have to actually fix it, because those machines affected
are now locked in this boot loop. It's not like
CrowdStrike and just release a new software patch and call
it a day on Doing this update requires some users
to have to individually go to each computer, loading up
safe mode or limited version of Windows with most non
essential software and drivers disabled, and manually remove the faulty code.
(07:21):
And if you have encrypted your computer, that process gets
a lot harder. Servers running on cloud services like Amazon
Web Services and Microsoft Azure, you know, the way that
most of the Internet's infrastructure works, requires an entirely different
and much more annoying, separate series of actions. If you're
on a small item team, and you're supporting hundreds of
(07:43):
workstations across several far flung locations, which really isn't unusual
these days, especially in sectors like retail and social care.
You're especially fucked. Say goodbye to your weekend, your evenings,
Say goodbye to your spouse, your kids. You won't be
seeing them for a while, and I'm really sorry. I'll
buy you a drink some time. Your life will be
driving from site to site, applying the figs and moving on.
(08:04):
Forget about sleeping in your own bed or eating a
meal that wasn't brought to you by door dash, Good luck, godspeed,
God bless. I do not envy you. I so gratefully
have a fake job. You know what do envy? I
was buying the products that follow this utterly seamless ad break,
which will likely echo my exact sentiments on literally every
(08:25):
issue ever. And we're back. The significance of this failure,
which isn't a breach, by the way, and in many respects,
is far worse, at least with destruction it courst is
not its damage to individual users, but to the amount
of technical infrastructure that runs on Windows, and that so
(08:47):
much of our global infrastructure relies on automated enterprise software
that when it goes wrong, breaks everything. It isn't about
the number of computers, but the amount of them that
underpin things like security checkpoints or systems that run airlines
or banks or hospitals, all running as much automated software
as possible so that the costs can be kept down.
(09:08):
Hey remember the raw economy. Jesus fucking The problem here
is systemic that there's a company that the majority of
people affected by the outage had no idea existed until
well a day or two ago, that Microsoft trusted to
the extent that they were able to push an update
that broke the back of a chunk of the world's
digital infrastructure. Microsoft a company, instead of building the kind
(09:30):
of rigorous security protocols that would say, I don't know,
rigorously tests something that connects to what seems to be
a huge portion of Windows computers, Well, they just chose
to do something else. They've just screwed the fuck up.
As pointed out by Whir, the company vets and cryptographically
signs all kernel drivers, which is sensible and good because
(09:50):
kernel drivers have an incredible amount of access and thus
can inflict serious harm. With this testing process, usually taking
several weeks. What happened Microsoft? How did this slip through
Microsoft's fingers? Well, for this to have happened, two companies
needed to screw up epically in boy, fucking howardy did they?
(10:11):
What we're seeing isn't just one major fuck up, but
the first of what will be many systemic failures, some small,
some potentially larger, that are the natural byproduct of the
growth of all costs ecosystem, where any attempt to save
money by outsourcing major systems is one that must simply
be taken to please the beautiful, sexy shareholder that they
all love so much. And this is a problem with
(10:33):
the digitization of society, or more specifically, the automation of
once manual tasks. It introduces a single point of failure,
or rather several of them, or clustered together like a
rat king or a Katamari. Our world, our lifestyle, and
our economy is dependent on automation and computerization, with these
systems in turn dependent on other systems to work, and
(10:56):
if one of those systems breaks, the effects rick shay
outwards like ripples mean you cast a rock in a
lake or throw a body in. For some listeners, Freddy's
CrowdStrike cockup is just the latest example of this, but
it isn't the only one. Some of you might remember
the Solar Winds hacked back in twenty twenty, where Russian
state link hackers gained access to an estimate eighteen thousand
(11:17):
companies in public sector organizations including NATO, the European Parliament,
the US Treasury Department, and the UK's National Health Service
by compromising just one service, Solar wins Oryan Remember when
Octa some of you might know Octa is a company
that makes software that handles authentication for a bunch of websites,
governments and businesses. Well, when they got hacked in twenty
twenty three, they then lied about the scale of the breach. Hey,
(11:40):
do you remember when those hackers leap frogged from Octa
to a bunch of other companies like cloud Flare. Yeah,
they provide the content delivery services and the services that
protect websites from being well brought down by a bunch
of bots. From much the entire Internet, everything feels like
it's being held up by like twigs and chewing gum.
You probably know the quote no man is an island,
(12:02):
and it's especially true when we're talking about tech, because
when you scratch beneath the surface, every system that looks
like it's independent is actually heavily, heavily dependent on services
and software provided by a very small number of companies,
many of whom are not particularly good. And this is
as much a cultural failing as it is a technological one,
the result of a management culture geared towards value extraction,
(12:23):
building systems that build monopolies by attaching themselves to other monopolies.
CrowdStrike went public in twenty nineteen and immediately popped on
its first day of trading thanks to wall streets appreciation
of them moving away from a focused approach to serving
large enterprise clients, building products now for small and medium
sized businesses by selling through channel partners, in effect outsourcing
(12:44):
both product sales and the relationship with the client that
would tailor a business a solution to said client. Especially
when something is so serious like this, I want you
to really think about this and think about this problem,
because the problem isn't so much selling to small businesses
or media businesses. It's the fact that CrowdStrike made its
money selling to the enterprise and specializing in that, and
(13:06):
that's the thing. When you broaden out, when you must
grow in all directions, at all times, in all ways
to please the horny beasts of Wall Street, you lose
your focus. But that isn't the only problem, because Crowdstrike's
culture appears to also fucking suck. A recent Glassloor entry
referred to CrowdStrike as great tech with terrible culture with
(13:28):
no work life balance, with leadership that does not care
about employee well being. Another from June twenty twenty four
claim that CrowdStrike was changing its culture for the street
with KPIs as in metrics related to your success at
the company, driving behavior more than building relationships, with a
serious lack of experience in the public sector in senior management.
(13:49):
So glad that this company is selling intellect government anyway.
Moving on, others complained of micromanagement, with one claiming that
management is the biggest issue, with managers asking way too
much of you and it doesn't matter if you do
what they ask since they're not even around to check
on you, and another saying that management is arrogant and
needed to stop lying to the market on product capability.
(14:11):
That's what I love to see, we all love to
see that. I'm very happy to read that, And while
I can't say for sure, I'd imagine an organization with
such powerful signs of growth at all costs thinking a
place where you and I quote have to get used
to the pressure, that's a clique that you're not in.
Likely isn't giving its quality assurance teams the time and
(14:32):
the space to make sure that there aren't any Kaiju
level security threats baked into an update. And that assumes
it actually has a significant QA team in house and
hasn't just this with many companies outsourced the work to
a body shop like Wypro or Emphasis or Tartar Consultancy.
But for a moment, I'm going to change gears a
little to try and explain what actually happened and why.
(14:54):
It suggests that the issue is likely the product of
cost cutting and institutional failure within CrowdStrike. In the aftermath
of Friday's incident, we've seen some analyses about what actually
went down with them first some throat clearing. I haven't
verified this stuff independently. From what I've read, though, and
from speaking to developers, this all seems relatively plausible, but
(15:15):
maybe worth googling this a little yourself. But I'm going
to give it a go. So the kernel driver at
fort was written with a programming language called C plus plus.
This language was developed in the nineteen eighties and it's
very good for writing high performance applications, anything where you're
concerned about speed, like the Interenno's operating system or a
video game. It's pretty popular for that, and it's so
(15:37):
pretty dangerous too, so dangerous in fact, that it's often
referred to as an unsafe language. Without getting two into
the weeds. C plus plus makes it incredibly easy to
shoot yourself and the foot, the ars, and the dick.
At the same time, it's big, complex and has few
safeguards while providing many opportunities for developers to screw up
very badly. Like the languages derived from C, it forces
(16:01):
developers to deal with a lot of low level stuff
like handling memory allocation that you don't really have to
deal with in many popular languages like Python, Java, Russ,
Swift or Sea sharp. And this matters because if you
screw this up, your code will break, or I don't know,
it might introduce some kind of potentially disastrous security vulnerability.
In twenty nineteen, Microsoft researchers said that seventy percent of
(16:24):
all security vulnerabilities were the result of memory management issues,
and I doubt that figure has changed much since then.
And earlier this year, the White House Office of the
National Cyber Director urged developers to stop using unsafe languages
like C and C plus plus and start using modern
and safer alternatives like Rust. With me so far, ah, So,
(16:44):
from what I've read, the CrowdStrike Falcon sensor kernel driver
crash because it had something called a null pointer error. Essentially,
the developer wrote some code that told the program to
look for a memory location that didn't exist, and didn't
write any safeguards to protect against them. When this happened,
the driver and so the operating system crashed. This is
a rookie mistake, and I've talked to multiple developers that
(17:06):
have backed this up. If you take an introductory C
plus plus programming class at university, they'll cover this in
the first year. Kind of boggles the mind how trivial
a mistake this is, and how it made it into
production code, which is the code that goes out into
the real world, and how it wasn't caught either by
CrowdStrike or by Microsoft, who are supposedly obligated to vet
this driver, and if the reports are true, someone really
(17:29):
really really screwed up, really badly. But if you don't
want to screw up, if you want to really do
well in life, I advise you to buy one of
the following products or services, which I of course fully understand,
know all about and won't be embarrassed by.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
And to be clear, I don't want you to think
that I'm letting Microsoft off the hook either, assuming the
kernel driver testing roles are still being done in house.
Do you think that these testers who have likely seen
their friends laid off at a time when Microsoft was
highly profitable and denied raises, when their welfared CEO probably
took home over one hundred million dollars in salary for
a job he's eminently bad at. Do you think these
(18:16):
people doing their best work? Do you think they go
into a jazz full of piss and vinegar ready to
save the world, or do you think they hate their
job and they're being forced to do too much and
they're miserable, And the people that knew what the fuck
was going on haven't been fired, and the people who
managed those people and the people that wrote the code
that they're edited. Do you think anyone knows what the
(18:38):
hell is going on? No, they don't, And this is
the culture that's poisoned almost the entirety of Silicon Valley.
What we're seeing now is the societal cost of moving
fast and breaking things of people like Mark Andresen considering
risk management the enemy of hiring and firing things. Thousands
(19:00):
of people, tens of thousands in some case, to please
Wall Street, are seeking as many new possible ways to
make as much money as possible, to show shareholders that
you'll grow, even if doing so means growing at a
pace that makes it impossible to sustain organizational and cultural stability.
When you aren't intentional on the people you hire and retain,
(19:21):
the people you fire, the things that you build, the
way that they are deployed, maintaining your systems, understanding how
and why things were written, the decisions that were made five, ten,
and fifteen years ago, you're going to lose the people
to understand the problems they're solving, and thus lack the
organizational ability to understand the ways the problems might be
solved in the future, or disasters might be averted. This
(19:45):
is dangerous, and it's also a dark warning for the future.
Do you think the Facebook or Microsoft or Google, all
of whom have laid off over ten thousand people in
the last year, have done so in a conscientious way,
in a knowledgeable way, a people focused a way, in organized,
zationally rigorous way that means that the people are left
who understand how their systems run and the inherent issues
(20:06):
built into them. Do you think the management types obsessed
with unsustainable AI bullshit are investing heavily in making sure
that their organizations are rigorously protected against, say, one bad
line of code or one dipshit error. Did they even
know who wrote the code of their current systems? Is
that person still there? Do they have their email and
their phone number? Is that person at least contracted to
(20:30):
make sure that something nuanced about the system in question
isn't mistakenly removed or changed or quote fixed. No, now
they're not, They're gone. They're not there anymore. Only a
few months ago, Google laid off two hundred employees in
the core of its organization, outsourcing their roles to Mexico
and India in a cost cutting measure. The quarter after
the company made twenty three billion dollars in profit I'm
(20:53):
jumping to Google because they're just probably next in one
of these horrible breaches or sorry, not breaches. Silicon Valley
in big tech writ large is not built to protect
against situations like the one we saw on Friday and
the damage we're going to get from CrowdStrike because the
culture's cancer. He values growth or costs with no respect
(21:14):
for the human capital that empowers organizations or the value
of building rigorous, quality focused products that are maintained over time.
You know me, I'm a nasty little bitch. What are
more on the nose? Example, George Kurtz, the CEO and
co founder of CrowdStrike, said in twenty twenty that not
one time has he regretted firing someone too fast, in
(21:34):
a conversation where he argued that tech executives were becoming
too obsessed with culture, and in a stunning act of foreshadowing,
when he was the chief technology officer at McAfee, best
known as the company that makes antivirus software that they
sell to your granddad and that they ship with computers
and you immediately uninstalled, while he oversaw an update that
treated in the central part of Windows XP as a
(21:55):
virus quarantining it and sending the computer into a boot loop.
It's almost a little too on the nose. They're calling
him the prabagar Ragavan of security. It's a very bad deal.
But dear listener, this is just the beginning. Big Tech is,
to quote trivium, in the throes of perdition, teetering over
the edge of the abyss, finally paying the harsh cost
of building systems as fast as possible. But let's be honest,
(22:18):
they're not paying the cost we are. This isn't simply
moving faster, breaking things, but doing so without any regard
for the speed at which you're doing so, and firing
the people that could fix them more might have broke them,
the people that know what's broken, possibly the people who
might have an idea to stop this happening in the future.
And it's not just tech Boeing, a company I've already
(22:41):
shat on plenty and one ll likely return to in
the future, largely because it exemplifies the short sightednus of
managerial fuckery, has over the past twenty years or so,
span off huge parts of the company. Parts of that
at one point we're vitally important probably still are into
multiple other separate companies laid off thousands of employees at
a time and outsource software development too nine dollars an hour.
(23:04):
Body shop engineers fucking how hollowed itself out until there
was nothing left and then the planes started breaking. And
tell me, knowing what you know about Boeing today, would
you rather get on the seven three seven max on
Airbus A three twenty neo. I guess it depends how
much of a Buddy Holly fan you are. Anyway, As
these organizations push their engineers harder and harder and have
(23:27):
less of them because they've been laying them off, said
engineers will need to find a way to write code quickly,
and perhaps they'll turn to AI generated code, which poisons
code bases with insecure and buggy writing. As companies shed
staff to keep up with wall streets demands in ways
that I'm not really sure people are capable of understanding yet,
when you have less engineers and bigger time constraints, and
(23:50):
by the way, Prabagar Ragavan at Google specifically told people
they'd be doing things faster with less people. It's so cool.
I love tech. When you have less people, more time constraints,
they're going to turn to whatever little tricks they can
and wouldn't you in that situation too, You have to
ship faster than this possible. Of course you're going to
(24:12):
do that. But the companies that run the critical parts
of our digital lives do not invest in maintenance, or
cultural unity or any kind of rigorous infrastructure. If I'm honest,
you need intentionality as well when building these things. You
need it. It's required to prevent the kinds of things
that happened on Friday with CrowdStrike, and the kind of
systemic failures that you're going to see in the future.
(24:33):
And they need you to be ready for this to
happen again. And all of this is the horrifying cost
of the rot economy. Systems used by billions of people,
held up by flimsy cultures and brittle infrastructure, maintain with
the diligence of an absentee parent. This is the cost
of arrogance, of rewarding managerial malpractice, of promoting speed over
(24:54):
safety and profit over people. Every single major organization should
see crowdstrike's failure as a wake up call, a time
to reevaluate the fundamental infrastructure behind every single tech stack.
What I fear is they won't that they'll see it
as someone else's problem, just like Microsoft did. And that's
(25:14):
exactly how we got there in the first place. And
this is going to keep happening. I'm going to make
a daring suggestion at the end of this one, based
on guest of the show they're on, Assamerglu, I believe
it's time to start bringing in criminal prosecution to executives.
If you, as the executive, are pushing the kind of
(25:35):
cultures where basic security practices are failing, where managers do
not exist, where checks and balances don't exist, you should
be held responsible. And I don't mean a fine, by
the way, A fine for a multi trillion dollar even
multi billion dollar company is just a fee with a
different hat on. No, I believe there should actually be
(25:57):
a criminal inquiry in to CrowdStrike, in to Microsoft, and
the people responsible are not necessarily the workers. No, the
people responsible are people like satch In the Della, the
CEO of Microsoft, and George Kurtz, the CEO of CrowdStrike,
both of whom should face criminal investigations. We do not
(26:19):
know at this time the significance of this event, but
we know it's more significant than almost any computer infrastructure
or failure in history and in affected hospitals. Do you
think people didn't die? Do you think that something didn't break?
Do you think that there's not a corpse on satch
(26:39):
in Adela and George Kurtz's goddamn hands. Yes, it would
be blood, but still we keep going. These people are
responsible and they're not afraid, and they should be. There
must be consequences for this level of fuck up. Microsoft
made over ten billion dollars of profit in the last quarter.
(27:00):
By the way, the market cab of CrowdStrike before this happens,
around eighty nine billion dollars. Microsoft could probably in a
space of years profits buy them in cash or build
their own goddamn system. But they chose not to save money,
and CrowdStrike in turn found other ways to save money,
and saving money will likely have ended lives and ruined them.
(27:21):
This is why I'm so pissed off everyone, This is
why I'm so frustrated. This is what I've been talking
about from the goddamn beginning of this goddamn show. This
is the consequence. This is what will happen, and will
happen again and again and again. This is the first
of many calamities that will happen as a direct result
(27:41):
of companies run by people that don't give a shit,
of a Silicon Valley culture built on exploitation and value extraction,
and of a business cartel run by people all agreeing
to do the same level of shitty job, of holding
no one accountable, of not calling out they're peers for
running shitty companies because everyone's in on the scam. And
(28:05):
it's a culture that is failing society, and the culture
that I will continue to eviscerate every goddamn week until
they well kick me out of this closet I'm in
reading to you. It's such a pleasure reading this stuff,
and I hope I've given you more clarity. If you
have any questions, you'll hear my email address after this.
But it's E. That's the letter Easy, the letter Z
(28:25):
at better offline dot com and a's EAZ at better
offline dot com for my wonderful British listeners. Thank you
for listening, and if this affected you, I'm so sorry,
and it likely did. Normal people, people in hospitals, banks, airports,
people traveling got their lives fucked up by this, and
I'm one hundred percent sure people have died. It's time
(28:46):
for criminal inquiries, and it's time for criminal prosecution. It's
time for real consequences for executives who don't give a shit.
You heard it here first, well, and I guess they're
on set it first. Be safe out there. Thank you
(29:07):
for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
T O S O W s ki dot com. You
can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com
or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast
links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
(29:30):
you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot at to
visit the discord, and go to our slash.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so
much for listening.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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