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Boeing Hit By WannaCry Virus, Fears It Could Cripple Some Jet Production (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Seattle Times: Boeing was hit Wednesday by the WannaCry computer virus, raising fears within the company that it could cripple some vital airplane production equipment. Mike VanderWel, chief engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplane production engineering, sent out an alarming memo calling for "All hands on deck." "It is metastasizing rapidly out of North Charleston and I just heard 777 (automated spar assembly tools) may have gone down," VanderWel wrote, adding that he's concerned the virus will hit equipment used in functional tests of airplanes ready to roll out and potentially "spread to airplane software." Indicating widespread alarm within the company at the potential impact, VanderWel said the attack required "a battery-like response," a reference to the 787 in-flight battery fires in 2013 that grounded the world's fleet of Dreamliners and led to an extraordinary three-month-long engineering effort to find a fix.
Until it becomes less profitable to outsource risk, don't expect much to change.
Still waiting for those equifax execs to be thrown in jail.
What if your install is fucked and won't boot?
After 3 failures to boot to the desktop windows will automatically trigger the startup repair program where among other options you can attempt to boot into various forms of safe mode.
If you for some reason can't get there (i.e. your computer boots to desktop and then somehow cleanly reboots preventing Windows from triggering the startup repair) you can do it manually from the recovery partition, USB or Windows 10 install media, or just go all out brute force and hit the reset button 3 times while the windows logo comes up to trigger 3 boot failures.
As to why they don't do it, that much is obvious. Windows no longer goes through a proper boot process anymore unless you either a) manually reboot using the start menu, or b) install a windows update. After all booting is a big waste of time in the eyes of MS, as is giving the user 3 seconds to hit F8. On my desktop those 3 seconds make up the vast majority of the boot time.
And no shutting down windows and then turning the power on is not a proper reboot anymore. That puts windows into some kind of half state which is how they dramatically cut down the boot time.