For the last month or so, I keep hearing interesting cybersecurity news. Last week in France, the software running Danfoss refrigeration systems got hacked, the fridges went up to 50 degrees and a lot of food ended up in the trash.

Around the same weeks, Albert Heijn here in the Netherlands had something similar, although there’s no official explanation yet. Delivery, the app and the card discounts all stopped working, and since they couldn’t manage stock, I chased yogurt for a week.

Then there was the PHP crisis. As far as I understand, AI found a flaw that had been sitting there for ten years or more, and attacks started before the patches were out. Sites shut down and banks made statements one by one.

The gaming side is busy too. The PS5 is now openly jailbroken, with a 1,600-game pirate store, and a group called Cyber League leaked GTA 6 gameplay and maps and started making demands from Rockstar.

Also, AI makes reverse engineering much easier. Tell it it’s for a school project and it happily goes along, which is how we got Need for Speed Underground in a browser. So the people poking at systems from their bedrooms (instead of shooting videos like me) have far more powerful tools.

But why don’t companies act more proactively? To be honest, you wouldn’t believe how fragile these so-called big companies are. Banks are the exception, and I think banks in Turkey are the strongest on the IT side. Most of the rest are incredibly fragile.

My observation is that big companies see everything as money in and money out. Non-functional requirements, the stuff that makes a system safer and more stable, always lose to features with a direct commercial return. The reason is simple, greedy investors and bonus-chasing executives (let’s put our class resentment on the table).

Danfoss fits perfectly, because those systems are old and get no updates, so once someone is in, fixing anything gets really hard. Similarly, around ten years ago, if I’m not making this up, Turkish ATMs ran on something like COBOL, and banks kept one or two people around just to maintain it.

Naturally, people respond, mostly through activism, since companies keep chasing profit instead of fixing problems that hurt the public. I find that anger understandable. Even Cyber League, which also wants 30 million dollars, asks for no digital pre-orders, no DLC and cheaper offline single-player games.

That brings me to Gabe Newell, the fatherly figure behind Valve and Steam, and a line of his I love. Piracy is never a pricing problem, it’s a service problem. People are happy to pay, but when the service gets greedy and annoying, piracy simply becomes the better service.

Sure, some people pirate because of price. Still, Spotify killed Napster, and Netflix replaced how we used to watch things. Now streaming is greedy again, so piracy is getting easier again (don’t watch pirated stuff, I didn’t say that).

So in the end, I don’t know where this goes. The bill is paid by ordinary people, from thrown-away food in France to me going a week without yogurt, which is the most innocent example. Between bedroom activists and these terrible companies, regular citizens get hit, and I think we’ll see a lot more of it.