About 20 years ago for me :)

So bored of these comments. We get it: some people hate w1Nd0Ze. These people don't have to keep saying it on every fecking article that mentions some way that Micros~1 has screwed up recently.

There's an obvious way form Microsoft to avoid such comments being made. Stop screwing up. Until they do Linux users will just keep pointing and laughing so put the blame for your pain where it belongs.

Meanwhile, Windows users will keep pointing at the tiny market share of Linux on the desktop and occasionally reminding them that [1]FOSS very [2]often manages to [3]screw things up , just in [4]different and [5]more interesting ways. It's just that it affects a fraction of the people when it does.

Don't get me wrong: I'm no big fan of Microsoft, and I do in fact much prefer working with Linux. I'm just saying that the endless auto-snark from Linux evangelists gets very boring.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/27/openssl_304_memory_corruption_bug/

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/terrapin_attack_ssh/

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/08/kernel_patch_borked_ubuntu_systems/

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/06/intel_linux_gpu_laptop_displays/

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/04/linux_looney_tunables_bug/

The root of the snark here is, in fact, the sub-head on TFA. It's patch-Tuesday week. Every patch-Tuesday week we'll have at least one article and possibly one or more follow-up articles on Microsoft's patches screwing up. It's so frequent it has to be regarded as SOP for Microsoft . So why pretend that it's something unusual and more typical of something else where it is, in fact unusual?

WTF? I have been using Linux for over 10 years now without a single fsck-up needing a command shell. Throughout three different distros and unknown number of updates, it has just worked all this time.

The real question is, why do Reg hacks keep imagining Linux is no better than it was 20 years ago? I know Windows isn't, but that's not the point...

In actual fact, the fix posted by MS does not work. It refuses to work with Bitlocker. Ironic for a security update to a Bitlocker vulnerability.

I agree, wait for MS to sort themselves out. For anyone interested my own fix, after their's screwed the machine up, was to remove Bitlocker, shrink the OS partition & then use their reagentc.exe instructions to remove the RE partition. The minimum space needed seems to be something like 600MB. A refresh reinstall with the latest download of the installation media then replaces the RE partition with a new one. ReBitlocker and run updates. The updates then installed correctly. A right rigmarole. No doubt someone can think of a simpler fix but this worked for me.

I got this on both my desktop and laptop – rebooting and retrying sorted one but not the other.

But fucking with my partitions because of their fuckup? Yea, fuck that shit in the fucking arse – like I haven't got enough technology-related pain in my life. I'll wait for them to fix it properly, thanks.

Does Windows come with a decent partioning tool now?

If I don't trust a user enough to give them admin permissions, why would I let them start to fiddle with scripts that'll nuke their partition setup? Yeaaa...no.

Someone needs to be sent to the bottom of the class. Or are they merely obsessed by recursion (as was our comp sci lecturer at uni)?

Something seems odd here because we can't find the update in our WSUS or SCCM servers and microsoft suggest it's not released via these channels, but it is released via windows update (but not the update catalogue website either) - what gives? Why the odd release pattern? Don't enterprise customers or small businesses deserve this update too (in theory)?

I've also noticed that it's not in WSUS,

Howver, if you log into a WSUS-managed W10 or Serevr 2022 machine, go to settings, update & security, and click 'Check online for updates from Microsoft Update' it then finds it, tries to install it, and fails. I've not encountered a single W10 or Server 2022 installation yet where it has actually worked, and I am not going fiddling around with the recovery partition size, especially on servers which are in use!

If you turn on "do not connect to any windows update internet locations" and "do not allow update deferral policies to cause scans against windows update" then that won't happen and your systems will just use WSUS

The exact same issue affects Server 2022 - the KB in this case is KB5034439

I've not tested on Server 2016 or 2019, but as they are based on Windows 10 they might also be affected.

That's a new one. I once had to code "This is not an error" in one of my libraries (the code was used as a flag internally) but I can honestly say that I've never had to code "This is not the error you are looking for".

> When did Windows turn into Linux?

Windows as a whole never did. But certainly the GUI experience regressed to such an extent since Windows XP that it is now on par with the Linux offerings.

A true race to the bottom!

"Windows as a whole never did. But certainly the GUI experience regressed to such an extent since Windows XP that it is now on par with the Linux offerings"

Tbh, I would take the plain and simple Mate desktop environment over that of the Win 11 clusterfuck any day.

"A true race to the bottom!"

It's a one horse race.

In addition to the non-installing updates, there's another one this month which appears to be faulty - KB5034129 for Server 2022, which in some cases completely breaks Edge (seems to only happen in a minority of cases, and I don't know what triggers it). When this happens Edge just gives a blank white screen, and the only solution I've found is to remove the patch.

"completely breaks Edge"

You say that as if it's some sort of problem.

I try as hard as I can to completely break Edge every time it sneaks back on to my machine.

Yes, it is a problem given that assorted parts of Windows and Office have hooks into Edge, so even if you don't use Edge as the browser it still causes problems.

I get that you don't like Edge (I don't either), but any major part of the OS (which Edge is now, in various non-obvious ways) stopping working is definitely a problem.

Dang it, I need a copy of that patch!

Microsoft being Microsoft I suppose if there are partitions belonging to non-Microsoft products these will be trampled on as part of the procedure.

"Unhelpful error codes, complex fixes ... When did Windows turn into Linux?"

Obviously it didn't. It just keeps on being Windows.

“ that allowed attackers to bypass BitLocker encryption by…”

This would indicate to me that the drive isn’t actually encrypted if you can bypass it using a boot disc. Is the patch just hiding the issue elsewhere?

Is it encrypting but hiding the keys - unsuccessfully - in the TPU?

Or hiding them in plain sight, say on the disc.

Given Windows log and storied history of updates borking the OS I am assuming (yea, I know that one too) this is sarcasm. The last time I had a Linux update bork itself was when I was trying out PCLinuxOS about 15 to 20 years ago. It used RPM and often had huge updates, sometimes over a hundred packages, that always had multiple dependency problems.These usually caused a complete failure to boot afterwards. After a couple of those I switched to Debian (and now Devuan and Linux Mint) and have had only a few dependency problems that prevented a package from updating but never stopped it from booting. The package dependency problems were easily fixed although it did usually require using the command line (OH, the humanity!) with the needed fix information displayed in the error message. And none of these packages were system critical. Live and learn, a quick check of PCLinuxOS to make sure I got the time line correct shows that they are now using APT and Synaptic like Devuan and Linux Mint.

In 2020 I did an update and when it updated elogind, it killed my X11 session & xterms, which killed the update. The elogind update also killed the console, and I couldn't ssh in, so I rebooted.

And got "kernel panic: can't find root filesystem" - it had installed a new kernel but hadn't gotten around to updating initrd yet.

Of course that's something GRUB could deal with, but it was still a pain in the ass. I did "dpkg --configure -a" and everything was happy.

So one screwup in about 15 years? Yeah, I can live with that.

I have a number of SSD's that I wanted to sort the over provisioning on, so to do that you need to allow said app do a strink (or manually). A new fresh install and for whatever reason, Windoze had put a file or two at the end of said partition. Shrink did not work as there was that file. Optimise does nothing as it is an SSD.

I at least had an old defrag that would move files on an SSD and was able to fix

(moral of the story for me, always create a far smaller windoze partition that you need and then extend once done)

Microsoft has now [1]published two "sample" PowerShell administrator-privileges scripts, which require that we first download from the Windows Update Catalog the particular Safe OS Dynamic Update (Compatibility Update) package for our version of W10 and pass the download's location to the script. The sighs of relief from home and SME users around the world are not yet audible.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb5034957-updating-the-winre-partition-on-deployed-devices-to-address-security-vulnerabilities-in-cve-2024-20666-0190331b-1ca3-42d8-8a55-7fc406910c10