back to article ISO.org outage hits day 3: Still in the dark as the important matter of bunk bed standards enters discussion

The great International Organization for Standardization outage is entering its third day as consultants find themselves bereft of technical documents with which to beat engineers. Problems first appeared as 26 January drew to a close and the organisation noted: "We are currently facing a technical outage impacting our …

  1. Steve K
    Coat

    Bunked off early for the weekend!

    Bunked off early for the weekend!

  2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    Maybe some ransomware operator has threatened to post the standards where they can be read for free, cutting off the ISO revenue stream. They'll be busy incrementing all the version numbers so as to invalidate the existing ones before restoring the site.

    1. b0llchit Silver badge
      Joke

      But the ransomware operator promised only to release encrypted standards when payed and suggested the ROT676 algorithm for added security. It was also suggested to upgrade to ROT17576 for a modest 10% additional fee.

    2. Joe W Silver badge
      Pint

      Well said!

      Have one - - - - >

      Yeah, I'm all for having standards and having people adhere to them. It gets complicated when you cannot know about said standard because you have to pay an arm and a leg and half of you firstborn's soul to actually read the damned thing.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I’ve found the Estonian standards body (eve.ee) a much cheaper place to buy copies of ISO standards.

        1. J.Teodor

          https://www.evs.ee/en is probably what you meant to link, as eve.ee seems to be a furniture store. On the other hand, maybe they have standardized bunk beds...

        2. EnviableOne

          the good old BSI confers a 50% discount on its members, which isn't as expensive as you think...

    3. Mike 137 Silver badge

      "Maybe some ransomware operator has threatened"

      More likely they've just over-complicated their IT so it's got fragile. Not too long ago they changed the portal used by contributors to standards. Before the change it worked perfectly well. After the change it only worked on very recent browsers and required an 'app' download of many megabytes just to present a page where one could click on a link to download a (typically sub-megabyte) document.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "Maybe some ransomware operator has threatened"

        "Lucky" for me I'm required to retrieve relevant standards from our internal web portal.

        Every time a relevant standard is updated, the portal emails me to tell me that I have an updated standard. Of course, it doesn't actually tell me which standard has updated. I also haven't deduced exactly how it determines which standards I really care about (there's no explicit "subscribe").

        It also lists standards in multiple languages, and filtering to English only is spotty (asking for English only seems to miss documents where English and German versions are in the same document). Final bonus is that some standards appear in the list, but they don't seem to have an actual documemt to view.

        Loads of fun when you're trying to build a wall of standards that can repel an auditor.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nothing to see here

    They identified the problem two days ago, but the solution has to be ratified by the working group before being passed to the 26 national committees to make sure the punctuation is all correct. Once the spreadsheet summarising the feedback has been correlated and passed around for comment, then the final draft will be published and reviewed, and all going well the website should be back up by about March. March 2023.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nothing to see here

      You forgot the step where the standard is buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

    2. eldakka

      Re: Nothing to see here

      After the appropriate fees have been paid by the techies to get access to the ratified fix.

  4. spold Silver badge

    Meh - I'm tired of ISO 9098

  5. runt row raggy

    I'm all for standards that promote interoperability any give folks a chance to innovate. but iso standards just seem like a way for those who cannot to judge those who can. like F1 regs.

    1. EnviableOne

      I think the F1 Managing Director of Motor Sports definitely can (the man who writes the rules) aka Ross Brawn.

      The problem is the new race director doesn't have the benefit of the experience that good old Charlie Whiting had, to allow him to interpret those regulations in a more nuanced fashion

  6. a_yank_lurker

    Ironic

    ISO is not following their own standards. Sounds about right.

    1. Tim99 Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Ironic

      Few conform to ISO 8601 with correspondence that they generate…

  7. Disk0
    Coat

    According to

    Gartner, a three day outage spells the end of your operations. Mine’s the one with the slide rule in the inside pocket.

  8. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    This is really serious...

    How can the average Brit be expected to make a decent cup of tea?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAsrsMPftOI

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