Strange things are going on in Cluj. Small shops are offering refunds, no questions asked after complaints. Food isn’t necessarily spoilt (they might be), but it is acting as if a fridge had been turned off at least overnight. We heard someone complain that Sana and Kefir are being set “like yoghurt.” This is not normal for food that isn’t past its sell-by date.
There might not have been anything the shops could have done or predicted about it. Fridges at a warehouse (or two or three) could have turned off in the distribution phase.
What matters is not what’s happening, but why it’s happening. This doesn’t normally happen here. Not all at once.
Now, all websites are down for a time, and over the past couple of years many websites stopped existing altogether. It seems that a lot of websites in Cluj took their content down, voluntarily, or simply stopped updating, after the Vexler law. (Some may also have been reacting to the invasion of Ukraine, October 7, and other events that made past postings insensitive.)
Do we know if we can still talk about Mircea Eliade, or Octavian Goga? References to Eliade have disappeared from many sites, even those in passing. (Eliade was alive at the same time as Henry Ford, and though he spent most of his life as an innocent researcher, he was briefly associated with the Zeitgeist of his times.) But it wasn’t just sites that cover Romanian history.
Websites that reference Palestine or Russia have also been down, but that is not so much of a surprise. Sites linked to the police is a bit more of a surprise, but maybe that was just scheduled maintenance..
What’s more of a surprise is websites that could not possibly have any controversial material are not available. And they all went down at the same time. I was researching “boring” subjects for my PhD thesis, like accounting, tourism, languages (and alphabets), educational games, the history of theatre, how symbols affect film viewing, color theory in art… Sorry, I won’t continue, I can hear you yawn from here. I promise you, when you get deep into a subject, passion for that subject can make anything interesting. But not interesting enough to attack a website because of it.
University websites in many European countries, including Romania, Sweden, Germany and elsewhere, went down “for maintenance” around the same time. It was much longer than any scheduled maintenance in the past. I couldn’t even imagine an American Socialist Democrat getting offended at the content of those websites.
Power went off in entire neighbourhoods, but there is a news blackout on the power cuts. Of course, yes, there are more interesting subjects to cover, but surely, some of the journalists must have lived in or had contacts in some of these neighbourhoods. And they covered less interesting subjects.
These don’t appear to be just infrastructure problems. Perhaps they are signs of infrastructure weaknesses, but they do look like someone took advantage, like they did with the fridges in French supermarkets.
I wouldn’t be surprised if small businesses in Cluj, or cash strapped universities, are using machines that have firmware which is past its deprication date. These “old” machines could be as new as five years old when firmware is no longer updated. The expense of replacing a fridge or server every five years is far beyond just buying new equipment, it includes installation and deinstallation, transportation, skip hire, disposal, new insurance fees, and often closing down.
Perhaps some of these outages are not attacks. Perhaps Universities have seen vulnerabilities, and are rushing to update or replace old equipment. Maybe the sites are offline to protect data until the systems can be properly updated. I hope that’s what it is.
I did hear some strange comments, however. It seems that it takes longer to get a police certificate if you are from the European Union than if you are from the United States. Surely, the EU is integrated enough that it would be easier for EU citizens to get their police certificates than outside citizens, right? Unless, something has happened to the data in certain EU countries that put their systems offline.
Maybe this is a coordinated update of systems, against future attacks. A kind of “tragedy of the commons” where everyone is doing the same thing at once. In any case, I would suggest that anyone with sensitive data be vigilant. If you work in a hospital, make sure there are printed copies of all recent reports. If you have a fridge connected to the internet, disconnect it from the internet. Just think about what data you cannot afford to lose, and make a printed copy of it.