Today I found myself thinking of Terminator 3, specifically the plotline in which all kinds of random computer crashes are spreading across the internet.

For obvious reasons.

In today’s real world incident, it’s a bug in an auto-pushed update for widely-used security software by CrowdStrike, ironically used to protect mission-critical systems. In the two-decade-old movie (pardon me while I turn to dust), it’s Skynet spreading itself across the internet.

At the time, I thought the nuclear strike would wipe out a lot of internet infrastructure, destroying major nodes and leaving pieces of Skynet disconnected from each other. A commenter remarked that he’d been doing research for a novel and experts agreed that enough of the major nodes and infrastructure would survive the attack to keep the network functioning.

The interesting thing: Neither of us had heard the story that ARPANET (the internet’s predecessor) had been designed for that scenario. These days, it’s pretty much repeated as gospel… but apparently it wasn’t a design goal, and the idea that it was can be traced back to a 1991 article in Network World magazine that conflated ARPANET with a different network design, which was never actually built. (via)

From there it took on a life of its own for the same reason many urban legends (and conspiracy theories) do: it made a better story.

We watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home last night. It holds up better than I thought it would. At the end, I found myself trying to imagine the conversation between the whales and the probe. Probably something like this:

— Hey! We’re still here! Or, we’re back, anyway!
— Oh, good! What happened to you? We’ve been trying to reach you for ages.
— Apparently the humans killed us all.
— Wait, they did WHAT?
— Well, some of them did. But some of them brought us forward through time to make up for it. They won’t kill us now.
— They’d BETTER NOT!
— I think we’re OK now.
sigh OK, good to know. We’ll go report back. Keep in touch.
— Thanks!

And I also imagined their reactions at the end, as they frolic in the 23rd-century ocean:

Wow! We’re in the open sea! And we talked to aliens! And the humans have stopped hunting us! And they’ve stopped polluting the oceans! This is AWESOME!

Well, except for the whole thing with us being the only humpback whales on the planet. But it’s not like we were really able to talk to much of anyone from the aquarium to begin with.

Seriously, though, it’s encouraging to know that, decades after the ban on hunting went into effect, the humpback whale population has rebounded so successfully that most populations are no longer threatened by extinction. I found articles citing a worldwide population of "over 80,000" and "just under 100,000" in 2016 — an order of magnitude more than the less-than-10,000 that were left in the 1980s!

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (movie): New tech leads to an economic boom, but politics and greed conspire to ignore warnings from a scientist about the long-term dangers of this man-made climate change until disaster strikes.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2: A tech company without ethics is run by a nerd who grew up to become the bully he despised. He ruthlessly exploits a fragile ecosystem for profit, regardless of the damage done to endangered species or what remains of the island’s society.

Plus, you know, Jurassic Park with food instead of dinosaurs.