The folly of closed source strikes again. Every computer running Crowdstrike Falcon crashed a few hours ago and is stuck in a boot loop that requires manual intervention by an expert to fix. This is a significant percentage of all the Windows machines in the world. Huge swathes of infrastructure are down - at airlines, hospitals, police stations, portions of the power grid, and that's only the beginning. I contrast this with the way a huge compromise of open-source infrastructure was headed off earlier this year when the xz trojan was discovered. Because all that code was open-source and could be audited, somebody caught it in time, before it could escape on to the net and do real damage. And all I can do is shake my head wearily and wonder: are you people just plain *stupid*? I and others have been trying to warn everyone for decades about the fragility of closed-source software and the proprietary distribution chain. Secrecy proliferates places for bugs to lurk. As our civilization depends more and more dependent on software to keep the wheels turning, the risk and deadliness of that secrecy is only rising. Take this day as a warning, because the next disaster of this kind will only be worse and could cost millions of lives. Get the hell out of closed source *now*, not just operating systems like Windows but applications too; the civilization you save could be your own.