Author: steve

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Dear George!

So I’ve been waiting for this insane sort of a situation to happen for about 20 years now. That is, a major part / piece of international IT infrastructure failing. I’m of course talking about the recent crowdstrike failure.

With regards Cyber Security, large companies like to pay someone else to take care of the problem for them. It means they can avoid accountability and pass the buck to someone else. Strange how the crowdstrike stock price is tanking!

https://www.google.com/search?q=crowdstrike+stock+price

The crowdstrike issue was / is an example of humans loving the fact that they can pass the buck. It’s also about environments that lack diversity and this creates or leaves open a single point of failure. Many many machines are going to have to be physically restarted and modified to sort this problem, and the answer to all this is something IT tends to shy away from – that being an environment of variation can be a lot more robust.

What do I mean by this? The answer is a variety of operating systems (ie Mac, Linux, Bsd even Android or ChromeOS) both at the server and user level. Not to mention a variety of routers and switches all carefully constructed to operate together. It’s an interesting thought experiment that few people want to consider because, we are all about the bottom dollar! We want things to be as easy as possible!

The crowdstrike insanity is a huge home goal event, an embarrassing hiccup for a number of companies and even your humble author (I had to go and find cash to try to pay for my weekend vino! By the time I came back the store had closed, because even their cash draws no longer could function)!

It will be interesting to see if we learn anything from this large hiccup that took out about 8.5 million machines. Many of which were parts of important infrastructure including including airlines, banks and hospitals.

A few interesting observations. George Kurtz, the CEO of Crowdstrike has gone thru something similar before – In 2010 while he was working for McAffe a similar problem, that caused a global IT meltdown due to a faulty update. CTO at this time was George Kurtz! Who would have thought!

In a number of companies I have worked for we had a rule. Never, ever run out a major update on a Friday! Unless the client is willing to pay for out of hours weekend support. Guess George is still working on that lesson.

Now I want you to put your thinking caps on and go read about what notpetya did. Think about what you might do if we ever have total Cyber warfare!

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Crowdstrike possible work around

For all 3 of you who read this the fix may be this….
Apparently the way to fix this may be as followa

Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment
Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory
Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.
Boot the host normally.

Also reverting to a previous working setup may be of help

Amazing that the https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-au/ web site has not been updated!

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When AI can taste

Mushrooms on toastIt’s interesting as AI starts to encroach on the physical world via it’s incorporation with Robots. The information that’s involved in moving an object, identifying it and being able to discuss it, it’s importance and also place it say in a structure that is visually pleasing or technically correct. That’s an incredible amount of information and a number of concepts. AI is starting to juggle all of this.

This whole thing of digitising the physical environment. I think AI is about to teach us a lot – and that we have a lot to learn about not just physical space – but what about when an AI can taste? Has the ability to identify any wine and any vintage? The ability to de construct a flavour, a chemical ,a smell.

Hook an AI up to machines that can perform Raman Spectroscopy, Infrared Spectroscopy, fluorescent microscopy and polarized light microscopy and you have the ultimate machine for the verification of historic paintings.

Then hook an AI up to a quantum computer and something like the James Web telescope. Also may be it can also help with us finally sorting out Nuclear fusion. Humanity is really on the cusp of something, I just hope we can make sure it works well for as many of us as possible.

And of course this morning I ran the question thru chat GPT 4 which replied with.

AI in Chemical Analysis

  • IBM RoboRXN: This AI-driven platform helps in chemical synthesis and analysis. It uses natural language processing to interpret chemical procedures and executes them using automated lab equipment. Learn more about IBM RoboRXN here and here.
  • DeepChem: An open-source toolkit developed to apply deep learning to the field of chemistry. It is used for tasks such as molecular property prediction, quantum chemistry, and bioactivity prediction. Check out DeepChem on GitHub.
  • MoleculeNet: A benchmark suite for molecular machine learning, which provides various datasets for training AI models in chemical analysis. Explore MoleculeNet on its GitHub repository.

AI and Taste

  • Gastrobots: These are robots designed to taste and analyze food. Researchers have developed AI systems integrated with electronic tongues to evaluate flavors and ingredients in food products.
  • Project “Chefling” by IBM: This project uses AI to generate new recipes and analyze flavor profiles by understanding the chemistry of ingredients and their combinations. More about IBM’s AI initiatives can be found on their research blog.

AI and Smell

  • Digital Olfaction: Companies like Aryballe are developing digital olfactory systems that use AI to identify and classify different smells. These systems have applications in quality control, environmental monitoring, and even in the food and beverage industry. More about Aryballe’s work can be found on their website.
  • Google Brain’s Perfume Project: This initiative focuses on using machine learning to create new fragrances by understanding and predicting how different chemical combinations produce specific scents. More about Google’s AI research can be found on their AI blog.

AI in Pharmaceutical Chemistry

  • Insilico Medicine: This company uses AI for drug discovery and design. It employs deep learning algorithms to predict the effectiveness and potential side effects of new compounds, accelerating the drug development process. Visit their website for more information.
  • BenevolentAI: This project leverages AI to analyze vast amounts of biochemical data to identify new drug candidates and therapeutic targets. Learn more about their projects on their official site.
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Banging on about backup!

A sad story!
I knew this lovely young woman once who used to work at my local supermarket. We would chat and talk and then she disappeared for a while… she gone and had a child! Then about 6-7 months after this I went in one day and she was some what flat emotionally, I asked her if she was alright?

She said no someone had stolen her phone and it was not backed up. It also had the first 6 months of her child’s / family photographs on it.

A better story
A long time ago back when we had zip drives were a thing, and I did hardware work I had someone come in with a computer that had been used to write a thesis and it (and in-particular the thesis)  had never been backed up!

It took me 3 hours sitting with the client next to me to get the machine up and working again and then to back the thing up to a zip drive. We were both covered in sweat by the time we sorted this problem out but we did it! But it was a close run thing, that could have cost this person thousands of dollars not just the 300 odd dollars that we charged her.

But you can’t always get data off a failing device… and theft of a device that has not been backed up is just sad.

So I suppose this is another of my rants and pleads that you back up your data! Find a way! Do it now!