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I work for a diesel truck repair facility and just locked up the doors after a 40 minute day :( . - lifts wont operate. - cant disarm the building alarms. (ha
by nimbius 2y ago
I work for a diesel truck repair facility and just locked up the doors after a 40 minute day :( .
- lifts wont operate.
- cant disarm the building alarms. (have been blaring
nonstop...)
- cranes are all locked in standby/return/err.
- laser aligners are all offline.
- lathe hardware runs but controllers are all down.
- cant email suppliers.
- phones are all down.
- HVAC is also down for some reason (its getting hot in
here.)
the police drove by and told us to close up for the day since we dont have 911 either.
alarms for the building are all offline/error so we chained things as best we could (might drive by a few times today.)
we dont know how many orders we have, we dont even know whos on schedule or if we will get paid.
- shoebham 2y agowow, why do lifts require an OS?
- warkdarrior 2y agoHow else are you going to update your grocery list while operating the lift?
- kulikalov 2y agothe question is - why lifts require windows?
- rudasn 2y agoWell, how else is the operator supposed to see outside?
- Bluestein 2y agoHeh ...
- Tempat 2y agoThe question is, why do lifts require Crowdstrike?
- nmz 2y agoI mean... the beginning of mission impossible 1 should tell you.
- freehorse 2y agoThe question is, why do lifts require internet connection on top of the rest.
- richev 2y agoIn my office, when we swipe our entry cards at the security gates, a screen at the gate tells us which lift to take based on the floor we work on, and sets the lift to go to that floor. It's all connected.
- _heimdall 2y agoIn the context of a diesel repair shop, he likely was referring to fork lifts or vehicle lifts rather than elevators.
- em3rgent0rdr 2y agoThis doesn't require an internet, just a LAN.
- Ekaros 2y agoRemote monitoring and maintenance. Predictive maintenance, monitor certain parameters of operation and get maintenance done before lift stops operating.
- Arch-TK 2y agoIt's a car lift. Not only would it be irresponsible to rely on a computer to tell you when you should maintain it, as some inspections can only be done visually, it seems totally pointless as most inspections need to be done manually. Get a reminder on your calendar to do a thorough inspection once a day/week (whatever is appropriate) and train your employees what to look for every time it's used. At the end of the day, a car lift on locks is not going to fail unless there's a weakness in the metal structure, no computer is going to tell you about this unless there's a really expensive sensor network and I highly doubt any of the car lifts in question have such a sensor network. Moreover, even if they did have such a sensor network, why are these machines able to call out to the internet?
- throwaway48476 2y agoThe same reason everyone just uses a microcontroller on everything. It's like a universal glue and you can develop in the same environment you ship. Makes it easy.
- thedrbrian 2y agoWhy do lathes , cranes and laser alignment systems need a new copy of windows?
- Kirth 2y agoand why do they run spyware?
- recursive 2y agoProbably because some fraction of lift manufacturer's customer base has a compliance checklist requiring it.
- olyjohn 2y agoLathes probably have PCs connected to them to control them, and do CNC stuff (he did say the controllers). Laser alignment machines all have PCs connected to them these days. The cranes and lifts though... I've never heard of them being networked or controlled by a computer. Usually it's a couple buttons connected to the motors and that's it. But maybe they have some monitoring systems in them?
- p_l 2y agoOff then top of my head, based on limited experience in industrial automation: - maintenance monitoring data shipping to centralised locations - computer based HMI system - there might be good old manual control but it might require unreasonable amounts of extra work per work order - Centralised control system - instead of using panel specific to lift, you might be controlling bunch of tools from common panel - integration with other tools, starting from things as simple as pulling up manufacturers' service manual to check for details to doing things like automatically raising the lift to position appropriate for work order involving other (possibly also automated) tools with adjustments based on the vehicle you're lifting There could be more.
- Prickle 2y agoVery likely they use a manufacturing execution system like Dassault's DELMIA or Siemens MES. These systems are intended to allow local control of a factory, or cloud based global control of manufacturing. They can connect to individual PLC(Programmable Logic Controller) which handles the actual equipment. They connect to a LAN network, or to the internet. So they naturally need some form of security. They could use Windows Server, Redhat Linux, etc. but they need some form of security. Which is how controller would be affected. Usually you can just set them to manual though...
- morning-coffee 2y agoI think the same question can be asked for why lots of equipment seemingly requires an OS. My take is that these products went through a phase of trying to differentiate themselves from competitors and so added convenience features that were easier to implement with a general purpose computer and some VB script rather than focusing on the simplest most reliable way to implement their required state machines. It's essentially convenience to the implementors at the expense of reliability of the end result.
- mihaaly 2y agoMy life went sideways when organizations I worked for all started to make products solely for selling and not for using those. If the product was useful for something, that was the side effect of being sellable. Not the goal.
- chongli 2y agoWorse is Better has eaten the world. The philosophy of building things properly with careful, bespoke, minimalist designs has been totally destroyed by a race to the bottom. Grab it off the shelf, duct tape together a barely-working MVP, and ship it. Now we are reaping what we sowed.
- pishpash 2y agoThat's what you get for outsourcing to some generic shop with no domain expertise who implements to a spec for the lowest dollar.
- freehorse 2y agoBecause we live deep into the internet of shit era.
- saganus 2y agoHow come lifts and cranes are affected by this? Are they somehow controlled remotely? or do they need to ping a central server to be able to operate? I can see how alarms, email and phones are affected but the heavy machinery? (Clearly not familiar with any of these things so I am genuinely curious)
- lima 2y agoLots and lots of heavy machinery uses Windows computers even for local control panels.
- mulmen 2y agoBut why does it need to be remotely updated? Have there been major innovations in lift technology recently? They still just go up and down, right? Once such a system is deployed why would it ever need to be updated?
- stevarino 2y agoSecurity patches, assuming it has some network access.
- mulmen 2y agoWhy would a lift have network access?
- gtirloni 2y agoDo you see a lot of people driving around applying software updates with diskettes like in the old days? Have we learned nothing from how the uranium enrichment machines were hacked in Iran? Or how attackers routinely move laterally across the network? Everything is connected these days. For really good reasons.
- seanthemon 2y ago
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoOh man, you work with some cool (and dangerous) stuff. Outage aside, do you feel safe using it while knowing that it accepts updates based on the whims of far away people that you don't know?
- NegativeK 2y agoI hate to be that person, but things have moved to automatic updates because security was even shittier when the user was expected to do it. I can't even imagine how much worse ransomware would be if, for example, Windows and browsers weren't updating themselves.
- Drygord 2y agoThis is for critical infrastructure though. You AT LEAST test it out first on some machines
- alexanderdmitri 2y agoI feel like this is the fake reason given to try to hide the obvious reason: automatic updates are a power move that allows companies to retain control of products they've sold.
- exolymph 2y agono reason why both can't be true — the security is overall better, and companies are happy to invest in advancing this paradigm because it gives them more control
- alexanderdmitri 2y agoincentive can and does undermine the stated goal. what if the government decided to take control of everyone's investment portfolio to prevent the market doing bad things? or an airplane manufacturer gets takes control of its own safety certification process because obviously its in their best interest that their planes are safe? imposed curfew, everyone has to be inside their homes while its dark outside because most violent crimes occur at night?
- araes 2y ago[flagged]
- xyst 2y agowhat are the brands of these systems?
- Saris 2y agoI'm just impressed that the lifts, alarms, cranes, phones, etc all run on Windows somehow.
- a10c 2y agoIn a lot of cases you find tangential dependencies on Windows in ways you don't expect. For example a deployment pipeline entirely linux-based deploying to linux-based systems that relies on Active Directory for authentication.
- akira2501 2y ago> Active Directory for authentication. In my experience that'd be 90% of the equipment. "Oh! It has LDAP integration! We can 'Single Sign On'."
- fransje26 2y agoI don't know if "impressed" is the right word.. "Appalled", "bewildered" and "horrified" and also comes to mind..
- delfinom 2y agoI'm more confused because I have never, ever encountered a lift that wasn't just some buttons or joysticks on a controller attached to the lift. There is zero need of more computing power than a 8-bit microcontroller from the 1980s. I don't know where I would even buy such a lift with a windows PC.
- jjk166 2y agoNo one sells 8 bit microcontrollers from the 1980s anymore. Just because you don't need the full power of modern computing hardware and software doesn't mean you are going to pay extra for custom, less capable options.
- moritzwarhier 2y ago> we dont have 911 either Holy cow... Who on earth requires a Windows-based backend (or whatever else had CrowdStrike, in the shop or outside) for regular (VoIP) phone calls. This should really lead to some learnings for anyone providing any kind of phone infrastructure.
- jajko 2y agoOr lathe, or cranes, or alarms, or hvac... what the actual fuck. Next move should be some artisanal as mechanical-as-possible quality products, or at least Linux(TM) certified product or similar (or Windows-free (TM)). The opportunity is here, everybody noticed this clusterfuck, and smart folks don't like ignoring threats that are in your face. But I suppose in 2 weeks some other bombastic news will roll over this and most will forget. But there is always some hope
- Filligree 2y agoThat’s not it. 911 itself was down.
- moritzwarhier 2y agoOh, great. I guess that counts as phone infrastructure.