Fortinet restart message

The other day, Fortinet decided that it wanted to restart my computer. Fortinet is a commercial-grade, Fortune-500-level VPN solution built by a company that writes “Global Leader of Cybersecurity Solutions and Services” right in the title of its web page. It’s on the S&P 500. Their VPN client is their flagship product. It is a product that huge, important companies use to ensure the security of their data and communications.

This is what its restart dialog box looks like:

Fortinet restart message

My goodness, what a train wreck.

• First off, the dialog should absolutely not look like a script kiddie’s idea of a UI. How are people supposed to even imagine that this came from their commercial-grade security software?
• The UI does not use standard Windows controls.
• The translated button captions don’t fit.
• My Windows uses English as the display language.
• The German title tells me that my computer will be restarted in -2,147,483,648 minutes, which is the exact value of Int32.Min, so it’s clear where the value came from, but unclear why Fortinet thinks it’s OK to tell me that my computer will be started almost 4,083 years ago.
• That’s OK, because in the first line of the detail, it further informs me in German that my organization will restart my computer on the 31st of December, 9999 at one second before midnight.
• It’s not even done yet, because at the end of the message, in a slightly smaller font, Fortinet tells me that, OK, all kidding aside, your computer will be automatically restarted in about 17.5 hours.

This is neat. Now, I don’t know which one to believe: will my machine restart in the past, ~4100 years before it was manufactured? Or will it restart in ~8,000 years, when humanity has expanded into the galaxy? Or will it restart in about ¾ of a day?

The answer was, as the clever among you have guessed, none of the above.

The computer rebooted itself less than 10 minutes later, out of the goddamned blue, without even the by-your-leave of the Windows Restart Dialog. Just booted right back to the BIOS immediately.

This is the level of professionalism and software quality we can expect from a well-established, Fortune-500, computer-security company.

This is the kind of thing that dampens my hopes considerably when people splutter to me about the grand future of software agents, servicing our every need, writing all of our code, and generating all of our prose for us.

The same culture and society that produced the people that built the Fortinet software is building the software agents[1]. It’s hard to build up realistic enthusiasm for it not totally sucking ass, like everything else.[2]