Apparently, the revived printers first tried to complete a certain task that no one gave them.
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In the morning, thousands of engineers from all over the world flocked to their offices and were met with a complete debacle. While they were sleeping, 3D printers came to life, and in complete darkness and silence, they began to create games. The printer has not yet been able to explain what happened.
HE WENT CRAZY
According to eyewitnesses, the consequences of the night lifting of the machines looked terrible. Apparently, the revived printers first tried to complete a certain task that no one gave them, and they began to print something: some kind of wheels, then asterisks, whoever in what quantity.
At the very least, having coped with this, for some reason they began to print a second copy on top of the first, as a result of which some crazy designs arose. Some of the devices simply sprayed plastic around them, dirtying everything they could reach.
Finally, the end: for some reason the cars began to stall, whole knots blew up, as a result, the owners got good money.
The Bambu Lab machines went crazy. This is a large and reputable company, based in the United States, the printers are assembled there or in China. Trades all over the world – we check the trading floors and make sure that Bambu products are still sold in Russia. The flaw affected printers of two specific models: X1C and P1P. By the way, there was no news about the failure of Russia.
GUILTY CLOUD
Many users immediately guessed: something is wrong in the cloud. The fact is that Bambu products are connected to each other via the Internet through the cloud, that is, a common information storage for all devices. When a person asks the printer to do something and sends drawings, everything goes to the cloud. This is convenient: drawings can be very large, so why overload the printer’s memory with them? On the other hand, many companies have many locations around the world. Let’s say I sent a drawing to the US and my printers in India, Italy and Australia immediately received a job.
Users suggested that due to a failure in the cloud, the printers received jobs from other people, or their own, but distorted. All this was scrambled, the machines didn’t know what to do and were lascivious. Attempts to correct something on their own failed – the company’s products are closed-source, that is, the user cannot easily access the “brains”.
The company was quick to react, but didn’t really say anything. Yes, the cloud is the problem, she confirmed. Because of this, the jobs for the printers were “delayed” (whatever that means). Although the manufacturer has taken responsibility, warranty repair for owners, it seems, does not shine.
Perhaps Russia was not affected by the sanctions – our users may be disconnected from the cloud. But so far this is our assumption: at the moment we have no confirmation. It is reported that 3D printer owners around the world are switching to local mode, meaning they are also disconnected from the cloud.
MOST SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES
The incident sparked a new wave of discussion in the expert community: are clouds reliable? Should they be used in critical infrastructure?
We tend to think that critical systems like planes and trains are of course heavily protected from outside intrusions, everything is a hundred times redundant and reliable. In Russia this is true: since Soviet times, when there was a fashion for security, we have the world’s most reliable energy system, transportation system, etc. But in general, the world is not like that.
We looked at whether Americans themselves are using cloud services for critical infrastructure and were surprised that clouds are already being used almost everywhere. You can understand: Clouds save a ton of computing power, hence speed, efficiency, and security (if all works well). But this “if”…
A flaw in the Microsoft cloud once gave attackers access to the databases of several US government agencies. Google’s cloud issues in 2019 brought YouTube down for a long time, and it would be okay, well , you will not see the video, but many other things are linked to Google in the world.
The subtlety is that “transport”, “communications” and other important things that, as is logical to think, are protected by the State, are actually managed by private companies. 95% of the world’s top 500 companies are in the cloud. Among them are dedicated to health care, transportation, energy. The US Department of Defense and the local Ministry of Health, also there. For example, 35% of medical records in the US are already in the cloud.
It’s even worse if you remember that the clouds themselves do not belong to the state, but only three companies. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have 65% of the planetary market. If something happens to them, literally everything flies. The cascading accident was observed in 2021, when the Amazon cloud flew, then warehouses with goods rose, and then companies and services began to be closed, which did not even suspect that they were somehow connected with Amazon.
In Russia, everything is much better, but, of course, you should not relax. If discussions are just beginning in the West, and if they are carried away by the clouds, we have been working for a long time with two laws (“On personal data” and “On information protection”, and with them a bunch of all kinds of laws) , with which you will not spoil yourself. If the company’s work is in critical industries, it has to comply with a bunch of rules. In fact, the “clouds” that are used in some places in critical areas are not “clouds” in the western sense, but their own corporate data storage: outsiders, even the provider, cannot enter, access is limited even within the company, and so on.
In 2020, the authorities set a goal to move away from foreign clouds and software as soon as possible, and this has almost happened. Also, laws limited foreign software on especially important installations even before that.
Business, of course, chided the authorities for such strictness, but now everyone understands that this is how it should be. So, there can be all sorts of failures, but in our country a lifting of machines is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.
