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Forbes Blasts Latests Windows 7 Patch as Malware
Forbes contributor Jason Evangelho has nothing good to say about a recent Windows 7 patch that's causing a range of trouble for some users. He writes:
If you have Windows 7 set to automatically update every Tuesday, it may be to permanently disable that feature. Microsoft has just confirmed that a recent update — specifically KB 3004394 — is causing a range of serious problems and recommends removing it.
The first issue that caught my attention, via AMD’s Robert Hallock, is that KB 3004394 blocks the installation or update of graphics drivers such as AMD’s new Catalyst Omega. Nvidia users are also reporting difficulty installing GeForce drivers, though I can’t confirm this personally as my machines are all Windows 8.1. Hallock recommended manually uninstalling the update, advice now echoed officially by Microsoft.
More troubles are detailed in the article; on the upside, Microsoft has released a fix.
Ah yes, one bad patch and we should all NEVER PATCH AGAIN BECAUSE THE SKY IS FALLING! Perhaps he will take personal responsibility the next time a patched vulnerability launches a new botnet? Nah, just write inflammatory rubbish, it's easier.
I thought it class Windows as malware, and my immediate thought was "about fucking time" but it's just another messed up patch. it happens.
http://chimpbox.us
Let's just stop installing these updates, they're clearly created by Microsoft with the express intent of committing acts of malice, not to improve their software.
According to my update history they automatically uninstalled it the next day (via a new update). So the auto updates worked - no drama.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
That way you can just trash it & reload a clone if something goes wrong.
10s of millions of mostly satisfied customers, hundreds of patchs
ONE patch doesn't work for some customers, and it is the headline
I wonder if any ONE of the critics has as good a track record as MS
I think calling something "Malware" implies malice, something that's not indicated here as I see it. This is probably a case of incompetence, releasing poorly thought out, poorly written, and/or poorly tested code. Maybe we need a term for that - "bugware". (Or, for the cynics in the audience, we already have a term - "software".)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
There was a similar problem two patch tuesdays agao.
Biggest go nowhere all drama anti windows article written this year. Brick a PC indeed... this person has no business working in the PC industry.
The door's right over there. If you go tbrough it quickly enough, it might not smack you in the ass as you exit the building.
The funny thing is the patch that killed me was KB 2553154. Broke my Excel spreadsheets. Surprised haven't read more about this breakage on-line.
I'm just wondering if Windows has become so complex that even MS's programmers can't keep all the gears and chains and indexers humming along w/99.9% uptime.
When are we as users going to insist on bullet proof OS's? It goes for all mainstream systems.
Seems like it time for a ground up rebuild of the OS. If not, why continue using a system with so many problems. Patch after patch after malware patch and it doesn't change.
What can you do against vendors who do that? At the very best it's a hassle to fix the problem caused resulting in wasted man-hours (bearing in mind that most of us are not tech-savvy). At the very worst, this can result in permanent damage for example iOS 8 bricking your iPhone. What do you do then? What are your consumer rights when a botch (insufficiently tested) OS update results in a damaged device? Who is to blame here?
With the recent problems being encountered by Windows users all across the country, people are begin to ask themselves if windows is a virus. In response to the high demand for an answer to that question a study was done and concluded the following.
1. Viruses replicate quickly.
Windows does this.
2. Viruses use up valuable system resources, slowing down the system as they do so.
Windows does this.
3. Viruses will, from time to time, trash your hard disk.
Windows does this.
4. Viruses are usually carried, unkown to the user, along with valuable programs and systems.
Windows does that too.
5. Viruses will occasionally make the user suspect their system is too slow (see 2) and the user will buy new hardware.
Same with Windows, yet again.
Maybe Windows really is a virus.
Nope! There is a difference!
Viruses are well supported by their authors, are frequently updated, and tend to become more sophisticated as they mature. So there! Windows is not a virus.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Several readers have pointed out that disabling automatic Windows Updates is bad advice, and while thatâ(TM)s a fair argument I have to disagree.
It is really a BAD advice. The average PC user is not an ops person. If an update bricks his PC, he will notice and can get help. If his PC is insecure, he will notice nothing and help (if ever) will be asked for much too late.
His arguments amount to one thing: avoid changes. Any change is a risk. But so is crossing the street. In the long run, a change-averse strategy will lead to worse results than the occasional botched change (exceptions apply, but those are rare). And the only way for the average user to do changes is to automate them.
You could at least *try* to make the joke intelligent, instead of repeating a tired one...
You can have a bullet proof OS today if that's what you really want, if that's you top priority. That means you're willing to forego the cool new features in favor of stability. It means learning an environment different from Windows, because stability is not the #1 priority in Windows.
Some of the BSDs are far more stable than Windows and more stable than the most common Linux distributions. QNX is still more stable. So you can get as much stability as you want. You won't be playing the latest games on a super-stable system, but pick your priorities. In rough order of least to most stable:
Windows
Experimental Linux (Fedora, etc)
OSX
Enterprise Linux
stable BSDs
Corporate Unixes
QNX
A newer update (KB3024777) removes this patch referenced in this article.
Ah, another pathetic loser making up for the bullying he received at High School by being a pathetic loser online.
*Slow handclaps*
I'd mod you down if I still had mod points but they coincidentally ran out halfway through modding down all the pathetic fucking losers imparting their 'wisdom' on this story.
Seriously, all of you, just GROW THE FUCK UP. That or slit your fucking wrists - the latter's probably better all round.
Yeah, he could go to SoylentNews where none of the mods will mod down an anti-MS rant no matter how facile, and a post stating "lol slashdot was shite fuck dice! XD" will be +5 Insightful sooner than you can say shit.
He'd fit right in.
Ah yes, one bad patch and we should all NEVER PATCH AGAIN BECAUSE THE SKY IS FALLING!
Did he actually say that?
Or did he say turn off *automatic* patching?
It seems reasonable to always be 1 week behind in patching your systems - let someone else be the lightning rod for goofs and mistakes. I know some sysadmins patch "test" systems and try things out to see if the patches break their currently-running code. They don't seem to mind a certain time lag in patching.
While your steps work, you can also just focus on the desktop (by clicking the background, for example), then press ALT+F4. You will then be presented with the shutdown menu which includes the same options you cited, but without the need to log off first.
Yes, let's just stop updating Windows because some times a update conflicts with drivers, software or connectivity. Can you just imagine the shear number of drivers Microsoft would have to test against to verify no conflicts. We would never see updates if Microsoft had to verify no conflicts on every driver, software, application. How about pointing a finger at a third party for once? Even Apple has conflicts with updates and they develop, engineer, and oversea manufacturing, and create a lot of the applications and oversea third party apps. This is a very complex process and no OS even Chrome OS can guarantee no conflicts after a update of the OS.
After the patch my box started complaining endlessly that it was not genuine windows, but when I went to activate Windows page it said I was already activated and just told me all of the great benefits of having genuine Windows and that I should install MS Defender.
It non-activated dialog box wanted me to install some application to double activate it or something? I've had a tough time figuring out exactly what's up with it. The links all point to genuine microsoft.com websites, so it doesn't appear to be malware, but I'll be damned if it's not acting like malware.
I read the internet for the articles.
Or your post simply disappears if it doesn't jibe with their views.
hahaha
lol. you assume i still have an account.
Non-American here. Truth is that Germany was pummeled from both sides - East AND West. While the Normandy landings and invasions from there on, as well as the collapse of Mussolini in Italy put a strain on the Germans in the West, the Soviets steamrolled them from the East. Just because they captured Berlin doesn't make them the sole victors of that war
If you were modding in this thread, all those mods have reverted now that you decided to comment in this thread. Just sayin'...
lol. you assume i still have an account.
Slashdot does not delete accounts, they just mod you into oblivion.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I had to uninstall a patch last week to get Virtualbox to work. Can't remember which one it was.
You know besides all the weird stuff you experience browsing with IE. I did a bunch of upgrades this past week (new AMD drivers, these MS patches) on my Win7 PC and I saw that the settings in IE kept getting reset. Security was cranked up so I couldn't download anything and it blew away my history by setting it to 0 days. I'd reset that stuff, reboot my PC and come back and see everything had been set back. I could only get rid of the problem by restoring my PC to last week. I thought I picked up a virus or that it was that Raptr junk in the AMD drivers but now I'm thinking it's this patch. (I know, I should use Chrome more. It's installed here and I do use it but I use IE as well.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Pretty much anything that needed elevated privileges would fail to run even if you were running on an admin account and gave UAC permission. Even my TV recordings failed while the update was applied and at first I thought it was my video driver update that I did just before manually allowing windows update to install the patch. Because I had manually installed it, I did not automatically get the removal patch and had no idea wtf was going on until I dug through several posts about driver installation problems (that I did not have) to finally find that it was wrecking far more than just driver installation.
Forbes faithfully parroted every Gartner study fully bought for by Microsoft, like the Total Cost of Ownership. It claimed Microsoft has reached a "utility" status and it should be considered a "widows-and-orphans" stock. It actively contributed to the culture of lazy CIOs choosing Microsoft because no one got fired for choosing Microsoft. It turned a blind eye to every illegal maneuver by Microsoft. Now, suddenly, it is blasting Microsoft? I think Microsoft is a lesser evil than Forbes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So there was an annoying bad update that was subsequently fixed.
Sure, it's annoying and shouldn't happen but the real problem with windows update is that it just decides when it's going to turn off your computer.
It gives you a couple of days warning, but maybe I don't want to turn off my computer for a couple of days.
Maybe I'm not babysitting my computer every day of the week, and I expect it to still be doing what it was doing when I last left it.
This is why I disable windows update.
The tide was turned by the Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad. The war was won at the Battle of Kursk,
By the time the Normandy landing took place, Belarus was already liberated, SSSR had restored its pre-war borders, and the Red Army was pushing into Poland. All Normandy accomplished was halting the Soviet advance at Berlin.
Remember that 90% of the Reich's forces were focused on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union won the war because it won the bloody war, no amount of revisionism changes that.
"... one may reasonably conjecture that MS is not exerting strong efforts on quality control."
One may reasonably conjecture that a Microsoft employee deliberately caused problems so that people will buy new computers, with another version of Windows. If that was done at the request of top management is not known.
Wow, brave soul.
The only time I pull that insecure piece of trash out is when I absolutely HAVE to use it because some dipshit coded the site with IE specific java or some crap. Other than that, it's retarded to use that insecure piece of shit for anything. Nothing tied into the core system like I.E. is will ever be 'secure' so just drop it.
No update needed.
Hitler deployed 200 out of his 300 armies for operation yellow - the campaign against USSR. 40 were helping Mussolini, 60 were left for the western operation of US, UK, Australia, Canada and others. Yet USSR reached Berlin before the western forces. Enough said.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I run plenty of alpha, beta and otherwise buggy Linux systems. But because I use snapshots in file systems, recovery from bad updates is trivial. Microsoft is stuck in the 20th century.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Back when I used Windows (I think it was 98), I turned off automatic updates after the first time it did the lets install updates thing when I wanted to shut down. After that I did updates manually a week or two after they first came out. Also, before each update I did a restore point just in case of problems. A restore point will not cure all problems, but it can help sometimes.
Now I run Linux. It has been so much more trouble-free than Windows ever was. I have a seperate drive partition where I store all personal data. That partition (and certain folders on other partitions) are backed up every week or two. I have 2 USB hard drives that I use for this purpose, one of which is kept off-site. Also, all of the data backed up is also copied to the data partition on my two laptop's hard drives. Much of the data (but not all) is also copied to my tablet (it has a 16Gb SSD, and a 32Gb SDHC card).
The point of all of this? Linux takes 15 minutes to install on my slowest computer. Another 45 minutes to copy my data back, and update the system, and a few minutes to adjust a few settings. So slightly over an hour to start completely over and have my system back up and running just like nothing ever happened. It takes longer than that to find, download, and install the drivers for the hardware for Windows!
So Microsoft starts laying off 18,000 employees in several waves starting in July this year. One of the first groups that was hit hard by layoffs was QA (mostly contract workers so they are easy to let go.) Within that, the QA department responsible for testing OS security patches was hit the hardest...
So now we are having a bunch of problems with botched updates that weren't tested sufficiently, go figure!
Forbes recently added a blog section that lets anybody say whatever crazy thing they want to say. This is no more Forbes saying something than Geocities or Blogspot saying something
The article is a blog hosted on Forbes. It's the opinion of one guy, not a statement by Forbes.
Nobody said it is a joke, mind you.
Mon 12/15/2014 8:49 am. The article refers to bricked PCs, but no statistics on the frequency -- a common journalist practice. I.e., "ICE CAUSES CANCER" -- it probably has at least once somewhere, but *how often*? Tell me percentage of bricked PCs or tell me another story....
Malware implies malicious intent. This patch is just unintentionally buggy. Not the same thing.
the implication that automation can entirely replace actual user testing is also just as false. Both are essential. Automated tests are really good for testing that numerous specific tasks produce the expected results across a wide variety of specific configurations, but can never account for users doing things the tests didn't account for. You need automated tests, internal QA testers, and preferably also external beta testers, and even then you will NOT catch everything (or even anywhere close to everything) before release, given the complexity of modern systems. With security patches it is an order of magnitude worse because you don't have the luxury of time. Large customers demand the fix NOW and not only does it have to be now it has to be perfect. Both expectations are unrealistic in many cases, yet those demands continue. Even open source can't escape such issue, as a recent example the first round of patches for Bash didn't fix even some fairly trivial variations of the original problems, and various past fixes for other issues have broken things with quite a bit of regularity.
Last week's Window's update stopped all of my Excel 2007 macros from working. Microsoft had no answers except to suggest my workbooks were corrupted (all of them? right after the update? really?) and I should buy a later version of Excel. Searching online I discovered that many others had the same problem and someone had discovered a solution. Amazing that MS didn't know about that solution.
And also, if running Windows 7, never, ever, ever, under any possible circumstance load KB971033. Don't load it manually, don't let it load automatically, don't let your friends load it, don't even think about it just avoid it at all costs. If you do (or in this case did) load it you're setting yourself up for potentially hours of fruitless troubleshooting regardless of whether you purchased Windows 7 off the shelf, bought an upgrade, got it OEM with a PC, or got it by any other means. When WGA breaks or any file or setting that it cares about ever gets corrupted for any reason (including hardware failures or bugs) it automatically decides it's YOUR fault and disables your activation with essentially no recourse unless you want to waste a ton of your (and likely other people's) time trying to clean up its mess. The very first thing I do when installing Windows 7 (and I always install it with "ask me later" or "never install updates" initially until AFTER I've done this) is to go into Windows Update, select KB971033, and "hide" it so nobody should even install that atrocity by accident.
If necessary, reinstall/refresh Windows to get rid of it, and then do the above.
"There is absolutely no way this patch should have been able to pass a competent Q/A test."
*If* all your systems actually ARE running invalid Windows licenses, that behavior would be correct, and expected, and would have passed any such testing. Multiple vendors/OS images doesn't guarantee that's not the case, though makes it less likely on average.
Also, if all of your systems had KB971033 it's partially your own fault for allowing that piece of crap on your systems. NEVER load that update or allow it to load, even if all of your systems are appropriately licensed and validated. Just hide it in Windows Update before it can do its damage.
The title is a bit misleading. It implies that this article is some type of official Forbes statement. Their "contributor" articles are solely the opinions of their authors, just as it says at the top of the article. Forbes.com essentially became a content farm quite a while ago. The articles found therein may or may not involve journalism, facts or any reasonable information.