Dear Reader,

"Anything mechanical, give it a good bash." With these immortal words, Commander Colin Maud, in the classic WW2 movie The Longest Day, smacked a stalled tank with his cane, ushering in an unexpected restart that would allow the downed vehicle to putter away and resume its role in the D-Day invasion. I thought of Commander Maud when I heard Microsoft's cure for the catastrophic crash scenario that is, as I write this column, affecting Windows systems worldwide, grounding airline flights and shutting down retail, banking, and hospital systems.

If you can't log in to delete the file with the weird filename that needs to be deleted, the best solution is to reboot the system over and over again until the problem goes away. No one seems to know exactly how many reboots it takes, but reports are that it could be "up to 15" [1].

To be sure, rebooting the system 15 times is way less trouble than the complex "workarounds" that are often posted as short-term vendor remedies, but the empirical, low-tech nature of the cure caught my eye, especially given the high-tech path of mayhem the glitch has caused for the people of planet Earth.

According to reports, the problem was not actually caused by Windows but was due to a faulty update to the Windows version of CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor security system. This glitch apparently wasn't uncovered in the testing phase. As of tonight, some experts are already predicting that the snafu will be the "largest IT outage in history" [2].

Now is the time when I'm supposed to gloat that the problem didn't affect the Linux version of Falcon Sensor, which appears to be correct, but I don't actually know whether this immunity is due to superior design or is just a random thing. What I do know is that way too many people put way too much faith in Windows and its constellation of closed source software products running on critical systems that affect real lives – without enough diversity or redundancy to protect the public in case of an outage.

Like many readers of this page, I intentionally use Linux because I know that Windows is prone to these kinds of quirky disasters. It is always frustrating to remember that, no matter how far I go to avoid it, the Windows ecosystem is back there somewhere undergirding the fabric of my life.

I'm writing this from a conference in Orlando. I've already talked to several people who will have to stay an extra day because their flights are canceled. When I checked out of the hotel, I asked for a receipt, but they couldn't give it to me because the hotel's own computer had crashed. I ducked into a Starbucks to get some breakfast, but I couldn't use my credit card because the Starbucks credit card system was down. That's OK, I said. I'll just pay with cash. "No, you can't pay with cash either, sir," I was told. Apparently, some lonesome node in the cash register universe was also running Windows and had experienced an ill-timed blue screen of death.

For a moment I dreamed that Commander Maud was standing behind me in the Starbucks line and was about to fix the problem by striking the cash register 15 times with his cane, but a D-Day tank was a primitive thing – not like the dazzling and highly efficient tools that hold our world in balance today.

Joe Casad, Editor in Chief