SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Just in case you or friends are seeing other groups disappearing from goodreads, see this thread for updates on the issue: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Wow! Had not heard of this before (probably because none of the groups I subscribe to have been affected). That's kind of unnerving - group disappears, members left in the dark, mods can't even access member list to send out an announcement.

I am an avid SF reader (and writer), and I have worked in Information Technology for the past 40+ years; but I keep wondering if maybe we aren't seeing warning signs that our technological infrastructure has gotten too complex, too interdependent, and is no longer sustainable. Stock Exchange and United Airlines were both down yesterday with unspecified tech issues.

I'm also an amateur astronomer, and I keep thinking that maybe someday the Sun is going to unleash a massive CME on us, and we will all suddenly be living "off the grid."

Hmmm... makings of a good SF book there. Already been done (or something like it) on TV, but could be better in a well-written novel (or maybe even a series of them).

Thanks for the link. I wondered what happened to the Graphic Novel group, which disappeared yesterday or the day before.

Seems like a lot of weird "backend technical issues" are happening this week. New York Stock Exchange halts trading, the White House goes out, Google connections in New England stop working, American Airlines has computer malfunctions, Comcast has issues... I'm not an alarmist, let alone a conspiracy theorist, but that's a lot of high-profile stuff breaking all at once.

Trike wrote: "I'm not an alarmist, let alone a conspiracy theorist, but that's a lot of high-profile stuff breaking all at once. "

Clearly Skynet has gained sentience, and it's hosted on AWS.

Maybe this is related, but another reading site I use, Free-Ebooks.net, has lost its system of star rating for the books it features, and this for a good four days now.

One guy says we shouldn't blame enemy action, but the reality might be even scarier. As the saying goes, "Never attribute to maliciousness what can be explained by stupidity."

Being lazy and cheap are a form of stupidity.

Thanks for letting everyone know, thankfully all my groups are still up.

Trike wrote: "One guy says we shouldn't blame enemy action, but the reality might be even scarier. As the saying goes, "Never attribute to maliciousness what can be explained by stupidity."

Being lazy and cheap..."

Thanks for posting this! The good news is data is often recoverable. I agree with John about complexity and sustainability, and with Trike's article about all the layers (the systems can't talk to each other/keep up with the changes), however, it's a matter of money and also I don't know at this stage if it is even possible. Interesting!

Data is often recoverable; I'm not happy with goodreads track record on data recovery, though.

They updated that thread today to say recovery process should begin Monday and take several days.

(I don't think it's related but they did change content handlers again fairly recently. I'm not convinced the migration to Amazon's cloudfront servers was ever very successful — cache times have been increasingly bad and some things, like no longer displaying your group bookshelves on book pages they now say we're done to improve speed [not what they said when first removed]).