MS06-049 Causing Silent Data Corruption

Uncle Mike writes "It looks like there is a problem with the recently released MS06-049 / KB920958 patch. If you have compression activated on any folder, then the compressed data is at risk from corruption. New files that are close to a multiple of 4K in size will have their last 4,000 bytes or so overwritten with 0xDF. Although this problem has been reported to Microsoft, as yet there appears to have been no official announcement. "

Comments

interesting

[Intangion]

its interesting how when they make a patch that corrupts your data you dont hear anything from them.. but when someone makes a program to allow fair use by opening DRM on their movies they come up with a CRITICAL patch within ours to prevent it. i think that speaks to their priorities, protecting their drm IMPORTANT protecting your data hmm.. not so important

Re:How does something like this happen

[avalys]

If you really have been programming for a long time, you must only be writing very simple programs if you've never had something like this happen, and you think that being "extra careful" is all you need to do to avoid it. What type of programmer does this? Every type of programmer - it's unavoidable.

The programmer is not to blame here. The real question you should be asking is "What type of QA department fails to catch a bug like this?"

When you have a monopoly

[Colin Smith]

What're your customers going to do?

Re:When you have a monopoly

[Tackhead]

> When you have a monopoly
>
> What're your customers going to do?

The guy at the keyboard of a Windows Vista box, using Microsoft Office at work, and Windows Media Player at home is not the customer, he is the product. The customers are Dell, AOL, media licensing conglomerates, and so on.

Re:When you have a monopoly

[theCoder]

That may be accurate for televion broadcasts, but it isn't so for Microsoft. Customers are people who pay for services. AOL and the media companies aren't paying MS anything, other than licensing fees for the services they use from Microsoft (i.e., their Windows PCs). Microsoft is paid by the guy at the keyboard of the Windows box (or his employer).

Microsoft may be able to leverage all those customers into a product for another customer (such as advertising or licensing DRM solutions), just like the movie theater leverages their movie watching customers into a product for advertising. Until Windows is free (as in beer), the guy using Windows is a still a customer.

Re:How does something like this happen

[theshowmecanuck]

Made me think of Grannies Perls of Wisdom I read on Java Ranch (I first found it about 6 or 7 years ago...): "Testing can show the presence of bugs, but not their absence."

Re:If the RIAA et al subpoena you

[godefroi]

Hopefully that's a joke. Pretty much nobody would put music on a compressed drive, as nearly ALL of the music formats in common use today are compressed. Rather heavily. Those music formats that aren't don't compress very well anyway.

Additionally, the thought that MS would release a patch that intentionally corrupts data is unthinkable, for ANY corporation. The civil (and possibly criminal, who knows) liabilities would be ENORMOUS.

Re:How does something like this happen

[Rashkae]

Maybe you should ask Linus... I seem to remember a released stable kernel that neglected to sync file systems before shutting down.....

I love Linux, hate Windows, but point it, sh!t happens.