Third Day of 1,000+ Cancelled Flights, Just in the US, After Crowdstrike Outage
More than 1,200 flights into, within or out of the United States were canceled by early Sunday afternoon, while more than 5,000 U.S. flights were delayed, according to the tracking website FlightAware.com… On Saturday, 2,136 US flights were canceled, and more than 21,300 flights were delayed…
USA Today notes that Friday several U.S. airlines issued ground stops (according to America’s Federal Aviation Administration) “which caused a domino effect into Sunday.”
They note that “most of the cancellations and delays Sunday are likely to be caused by airline crews and equipment being out of place.”
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US Prepares Jamming Devices Targeting Russia, China Satellites
And now, Bloomberg reports that the U.S. is about to deploy them:
The devices aren’t meant to protect U.S. satellites from Chinese or Russian jamming but “to responsibly counter adversary satellite communications capabilities that enable attacks,” the Space Force said in a statement to Bloomberg News. The Pentagon strives — on the rare occasions when it discusses such space capabilities — to distinguish its emerging satellite-jamming technology as purely defensive and narrowly focused. That’s as opposed to a nuclear weapon the U.S. says Russia is developing that could create high-altitude electromagnetic pulses that would take out satellites and disrupt entire communications networks.
The first 11 of 24 Remote Modular Terminal jammers will be deployed in several months, and all of them could be in place by Dec. 31 at undisclosed locations, according to the Space Force statement… The new terminals augment a much larger jamming weapon called the Counter Communications System that’s already deployed and a mid-sized one called Meadowlands “by providing the ability to have a proliferated, remotely controlled and relatively relocatable capability,” the Space Force said. The Meadowlands system has encountered technical challenges that have delayed its delivery until at least October, about two years later than planned.
China has “hundreds and hundreds of satellites on orbit designed to find, fix, track, target and yes, potentially engage, US and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific,” General Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command, said Wednesday at the annual Aspen Security Forum. “So we’ve got to understand that and know what it means for our forces.”
Bloomberg also got this comment from the chief director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation (which produces reports on counterspace weapons). The new U.S. Space Force jamming weapons are “reversible, temporary, non-escalatory and allow for plausible deniability in terms of who the instigator is.”
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One Nation Mostly Unaffected by the Crowdstrike Outage: China
The reason is actually quite simple: CrowdStrike is hardly used there. Very few organisations will buy software from an American firm that, in the past, has been vocal about the cyber-security threat posed by Beijing. Additionally, China is not as reliant on Microsoft as the rest of the world. Domestic companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei are the dominant cloud providers.
So reports of outages in China, when they did come, were mainly at foreign firms or organisations. On Chinese social media sites, for example, some users complained they were not able to check into international chain hotels such as Sheraton, Marriott and Hyatt in Chinese cities. Over recent years, government organisations, businesses and infrastructure operators have increasingly been replacing foreign IT systems with domestic ones. Some analysts like to call this parallel network the “splinternet”.
“It’s a testament to China’s strategic handling of foreign tech operations,” says Josh Kennedy White, a cybersecurity expert based in Singapore. “Microsoft operates in China through a local partner, 21Vianet, which manages its services independently of its global infrastructure. This setup insulates China’s essential services — like banking and aviation — from global disruptions.”
“Beijing sees avoiding reliance on foreign systems as a way of shoring up national security.”
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the article.
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Does the Crowdstrike Outage Prove the Dangers of a Cashless Society?
He’s part of those arguing “the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society,” writes the Observer:
Authorities in China and the US have fined businesses for not accepting cash. Delnevo said the U.K. should have a law requiring all businesses to take cash. Martin Quinn, campaign director for the PCA, said using cash allowed for anonymity. “I don’t want my data sold on, and I don’t want banks, credit card companies and even online retailers to know every facet of my life,” he said. Budgeting by using cash is also easier for some, he added.
The article includes some interesting statistics from a U.K. bank trade association. “The number of people who never use cash, or use it less than once a month, reached 23.1 million in 2021, but declined to 21.6m last year.”
The GMB [general trade] Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”. “When you take cash out of the system, people have nothing to fall back on, impacting on how they do the everyday basics.”
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CNN Investigates ‘Airbnb’s Hidden Camera Problem’
Nearly seven years later, CNN launched their own investigation of “Airbnb’s hidden camera problem”.
CNN: “Across North America, police have seized thousands of images from hidden cameras at Airbnb rentals, including people’s most intimate moments… It’s more than just a few reported cases. And Airbnb knows it’s a problem. In this deposition reviewed by CNN, an Airbnb rep said 35,000 customer support tickets about security cameras or recording devices had been documented over a decade. [The deposition estimates “about” 35,000 tickets “within the scope of the security camera and recording devices policy.”]
Airbnb told CNN a single complaint can involve multiple tickets.
CNN actually obtained the audio recording of an Airbnb host in Maine admitting to police that he’d photographed a couple having sex using a camera hidden in a clock — and also photographed other couples. And one Airbnb guest told CNN he’d only learned he’d been recorded “because police called him, months later, after another guest found the camera” — with police discovering cameras in every single room in the house, concealed inside smoke detectors. “Part of the challenge is that the technology has gotten so advanced, with these cameras so small that you can’t even see them,” CNN says.
But even though recording someone without consent is illegal in every state, CNN also found that in this case and others, Airbnb “does not contact law enforcement once hidden cameras are discovered — even if children are involved.” Their reporter argues that Airbnb “not only fails to protect its guests — it works to keep complaints out of the courts and away from the public.”
They spoke to two Florida attorneys who said trying to sue Airbnb if something goes wrong is extremely difficult — since its Terms of Service require users to assume every risk themselves. “The person going to rent the property agrees that if something happens while they’re staying at this accommodation, they’re actually prohibited from suing Airbnb,” says one of the attorneys. “They must go a different route, which is a binding arbitration.” (When CNN asked if this was about controlling publicity, the two lawyers answered “absolutely” and “100%”.) And when claims are settled, CNN adds, “Airbnb has required guests to sign confidentiality agreements — which CNN obtained — that keep some details of legal cases private.”
Responding to the story, Airbnb seemed to acknowledge guests have been secretly recorded by hosts, by calling such occurrences “exceptionally rare… When we do receive an allegation, we take appropriate, swift action, which can include removing hosts and listings that violate the policy.
“Airbnb’s trust and safety policies lead the vacation rental industry…”
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