Thread: Here's the most fun & frivolous tech news today: Railway Operation Depot in the Chinese city Dalian just published an article on their harrowing journey racing to restore the old version of Flash after Adobe's ban, which collapsed their system and paralyzed the railway /1

The article was written a bureaucratic, propaganda, war diary style, with a detailed timeline down to minutes. "Jan 12, 8:16, Depot received malfunction report. The computer system stopped displaying pages...within 30 mins, computers in the entire depot had the same prob" /2
"After calls and online searches, we identified the source of the issue is American company Adobe's comprehensive ban of Flash content" /3
"8:41, IT department held an emergency meeting & took on four urgent measures: 1. informed supervisors and higher-ups 2. immediately started searching for alternatives to solve page inaccessible issue 3. founded a software task force 4. founded a hardware task force" /4
..."12:10 we temporarily maintained the stability of the depot"
..."13:00 a second crisis meeting was held to address three deeply rooted issues"
..."14:11 another crisis erupted. We are no longer able to print pages, again" /5
...
"20:20 A third wave of bugs was upon us. Flash we restored from Ghost system was disabled from all computers again...We held the third emergency meeting. The only goal: fix the Flash from (pirated) Ghost windows system" /6
..."Jan 13, 01:09 Wan Jia Ling stop is fixed!...we all gathered and confirmed. The room burst with cheers." /7
The article is so long and surprisingly entertaining, and it ends with "20+ hours of fight. No one complained. No one gave up. In solving the Flash problem, we turned the glimpse of hope into the fuel for advancement." link: https://t.co/2evuiGmkkT /8
Honestly, this is the Y2K content the world owes us for 20 years. /END
the article reads like dozens of parents coming together to overcome the insurmountable challenge of updating Flash. They then wrote a war diary on those 20 brutal hours. Not sure if my sense of humor is wicked, but this made my day.

More from Tech

"I really want to break into Product Management"

make products.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get a startup to notice me."

Make Products.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE PRODUCTS.

Courtesy of @edbrisson's wonderful thread on breaking into comics –
https://t.co/TgNblNSCBj – here is why the same applies to Product Management, too.


There is no better way of learning the craft of product, or proving your potential to employers, than just doing it.

You do not need anybody's permission. We don't have diplomas, nor doctorates. We can barely agree on a single standard of what a Product Manager is supposed to do.

But – there is at least one blindingly obvious industry consensus – a Product Manager makes Products.

And they don't need to be kept at the exact right temperature, given endless resource, or carefully protected in order to do this.

They find their own way.
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
So we had to develop technologies like this to barely manage control over limited areas in Iraq's few urban centers. Only ~8 in 100 Iraqi adults owns a personal vehicle. That rate is > 1 car/adult in America yet I have never seen any doctrine paper or work of fiction address this


We've seen and struggled in civil conflicts with instant, local, universal, distributed communications (cell phone era, basically every conflict since 2000). We've seen and struggled in conflicts with instant, global, universal distributed communications (everything since 2011).

The world's most overfunded military and glow in the dark agencies struggle and largely fail to contain conflicts where fhe vast, vast majority of people are locked into a ~5mi radius of their home.

How can they possibly contain a conflict in a nation with universal car ownership and the most developed road network in the world? The average car can travel over 400 miles on one tank of gas, how can you contain the potential of that kind of mobility?

I think that's partially why the system was so freaked out by 1/6. Yes, most of it is histrionics but you don't decide to indefinitely turn your capital into the Baghdad Green Zone with fortifications and 25k troops over histrionics alone.

You May Also Like