What a strange week...

Mid-week, you had Nvidia CEO Jason Huang involved in s honeypot scandal, where apparently he had an affair with a Chinese spy and was sharing secrets about his company with her.  He stepped down in something akin to disgrace.  And its too bad, because he was otherwise a decent guy and gave back to the community here and in his native Taiwan.

Then, on Thursday, there was a worldwide outage involving Microsoft access.  Outlook, Teams, and other products were unavailable for almost 20 hours.  Its unclear what, exactly, caused this event.  But they say it was "a technical glitch during an infrastructure upgrade,"  which suggests some rogue code was put into production that propagated through the network.

And then we had Friday.  A major disruption happened to air travel.  There was some kind of "communication issue" between ground control and aircraft, and so they shut the entire operation down, issuing a "ground stop."   Planes that were in the air were communicated to through backup means, and those flights landed at their destinations.  But no planes were allowed to takeoff, so air travel came to a stop for some hours, causing major disruptions to *everything*...

This situation was also due to an upgrade; reportedly a new AI routing system was installed and it caused older systems to crash.  The fact that these are older systems was the biggest issue.  The GAO had warned the FAA recently that installing upgrades was likely to cause issues and they needed to proceed cautiously, and test it more.  But they went ahead with it anyway.

And in general, this is what happens when you put a podcaster with NO RELEVANT experience, but who was friendly to the orange man, in charge of transportation.  

But the incompetence wasn't limited to him.  The homeland security guy (who likewise has NO RELEVANT experience) immediately commented that this was not a cyber attack, and this wasn't 9-11, and some other dumb things that would be the kinds of things idiots might say on their conspiracy podcasts.  BUT WHICH SHOULD NEVER BE SAID by a person communicating an official position.

Sigh.  Elect idiots, and expect a clown show.