On July 19th, 2024, the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike released an update for its Falcon Sensor software that brought down millions of Windows computers around the world. Some of these computers were involved in critical infrastructure like airlines, hospitals, and governments. Falcon Sensor, which hooks into the Windows kernel, was certified by Microsoft and cryptographically signed. The update triggered a classic (and common) bug reading past the end of an array. It not only crashed Windows, but didn't even allow it to complete its boot process. In this episode we explain what the bug was and why CrowdStrike did not catch it before it had the opportunity to bring down millions of machines.

• Classic Episode: What is an Operating System?
• CrowdStrike's Report on the Incident

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Approximately one in four consumers uses an ad blocker. But do they stop to consider whether that is actually a good thing for them? In this episode, we briefly touch on the technical aspects of ad blockers before having a larger discussion around the ethical and economic considerations of ad blocking technology.

• Episode 6: How Does the Web Work?
• Episode 82: What Are Cookies?
• Ad Blocking - academic article mentioned in episode

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Theme “Place on Fire” Copyright 2019 Creo, CC BY 4.0

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Machine Learning is a discipline within the broader field of Artificial Intelligence concerned with using insights from datasets to make predictions, classify new data points, and generate content. The algorithms used vary greatly in complexity and the real world applications that they are applicable to. Instead of concentrating on any particular algorithm, in this episode we aim to provide a broad understanding of machine learning and what it is used for. We also discuss bias in datasets and some common misconceptions.

You may want to listen to our prior episode on Artificial Intelligence before diving into this episode.

• Episode 13: Artificial Intelligence
• Episode 103: Expert Systems: A Forgotten Area of AI
• The Classic Computer Science Problems Book Series by David
• The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book by Andriy Burkov

Follow us on X @KopecExplains.

Theme “Place on Fire” Copyright 2019 Creo, CC BY 4.0

Find out more at http://kopec.live

Read transcript