Known Issue Rollback

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PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley Patches that fix themselves Every month we receive updates to keep us secure, but sometimes they cause other side effects
[See the full post at: Known Issue Rollback]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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MHCLV941, doriel, abbodi86, PlantMan, CyGuy

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From Newsletter article:

Ask someone who doesn’t like Windows 10 and refuses to run it, “What is the one thing you dislike the most?” Telemetry will be a likely reply.

Increasing rotund svhosts that affects system performance is also a primary valid excuse.
Let’s see what happens when Chromium Edge (aka ChrEdge) replaces Edge this month..

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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GoneToPlaid

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When the time comes to see the quantity, here’s a one-liner to know how many copy of some process is running:

tasklist | find /C “svchost.exe”

It’s can produce some fuzzy results, using “System” as input but works well.

 

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This is an interesting technology that might entice some of us privacy curmudgeons to reconsider – if / when it becomes a mature, broad-based technology for Window Update servicing.

I’m wondering what minimum services, tasks, Group Policies, and so on, are required for the current technology to work?

For telemetry, I only have the “basic” telemetry active. Is a higher level required? What about things like CEIP, Error Reporting (I assume this one is a “yes”), MSDT, Connected User Experiences & Telemetry, Diagnostics Hub Standard Collector Service, Inventory Collector, Consolidator, and other obscure things?  Knowing would allow us to weigh the trade-offs.

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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If I could be certain that (a) telemetry data absolutely never includes any personally identifying or sensitive information whatsoever, and (b) nobody except thoroughly-vetted and authorized Microsoft personnel could ever conceivably gain access to it, and then ONLY for the purpose of fixing bugs and improving the user experience, I wouldn’t worry about it.

But since we’re talking about human beings, and demanding investors, disgruntled employees, lax security practices and cyber criminals are all things that exist–no.  I don’t want gigabytes of stuff from my computer being transmitted and then sitting around in places where it didn’t actually need to be sent in order for me to conduct my own business.  If a slightly higher rate of crashes, reboots, rollbacks or other inconveniences is the consequence, so be it.  That’s what backups are for.

i7-10700k - ASROCK Z590 Pro4 - 1TB 970 EVO Plus M.2 - DDR4 3200 x 32GB - GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FTW - Windows 10 Pro

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Susan, respectfully, you committed the logical crime of false dilemma, taking the implicit form of “either you accept outsourced bad support or you accept telemetry”.

Maybe they wouldn’t have fired their testing people if they didn’t think telemetry would be better as in acceptable but cheaper. It doesn’t seem to be better as the worst bugs ever pushed on us came in this new era, like real corruption of data with Storage Spaces or the “disappearance” of user files for the layman after a Windows feature update.

Telemetry should be optional. There is no justifiable reason to force everyone that is not using Enterprise or Education versions users to use it. That is my main gripe with it. It is simply too invasive to grab data from your computer that is clearly not clearly defined and limited enough if someone doesn’t want to. It is not ok to take snapshots of my usage if I don’t want to or monitor my system if I don’t want to. And most of all, I would not be so adamant about the need to protect my privacy from Microsoft if they didn’t loose my trust over the past few years since Nadella became the CEO with their sleazy marketing tactics and total disrespect of user choice and privacy pretending this is not what they are doing. Just go read again how they justified removing the switch to delay updates that they had briefly introduced in the GUI. Why again removing the ability to not use web search with Windows search was a desirable feature? And playing hide and seek with Local accounts? Microsoft developed a great ability to make me angry.

And telemetry is far from being able to understand bugs that it hasn’t been told how to detect. It is not magic. Many bugs are surprises and by the number of minor issues I still have with Windows 10, I am sure telemetry isn’t even aware of them. Unless a bug is expected and verified, there is no way for telemetry to detect problems that it doesn’t know is a problem, so when Windows search doesn’t work right or when Explorer doesn’t refresh the display of files, I don’t think it necessarily knows it. I don’t see how it could know that Search didn’t display some results it should display if it doesn’t know what should be displayed. I don’t think it knows that my files are not in the right order in a folder after a copy until I press F5 to refresh.

And the result of all this Windows as a service nonsense and overconfidence on telemetry is a user experience made worse by the constant addition of new bugs related to new developments that offer dubious value vs the not as often changing Windows 7 or 8.1, in addition to inadequate features introduction. I think a lot of IT productivity is lost on Windows 10. My take is that constant development ends up with lazy development that is not thoroughly thought out in the first place and I am not just talking about code. They try new things here and there with no second thought and if it doesn’t work, they just remove it after or they change it completely, not realizing that this whole thing ruins the user experience over time. Do you like the Start Menu better after all these iterations than the one from Windows 7? In XP, I could quickly reach network cards, now it is WIN-R, ncpa.cpl, the fastest way.

To me, what Windows 10 brought the most is feature deprecation, the need to pay more to have the Pro version for controlling updates, the removal of Pro features or GPs to other more expensive versions (ReFS), ugly calculator and the replacement of Windows Photo Viewer by a photo editor that I didn’t want. I didn’t feel I got anything of much value in exchange. I don’t like to be forced to contribute to this paradigm by having mandatory telemetry, even if it helps them for some scenarios.

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doriel

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AlexEiffel wrote:

the worst bugs ever pushed on us came in this new era

Not so. SQL Slammer from 2003 was possibly the worst bug ever.

cheers, Paul

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Sure, ok, if you ran an open SQL server… Code Red… Nimbda… But from a home user perspective without the support of an IT team, maybe corruption of your data is worse because you probably don’t run an SQL server open on the web or even on your internal network and now people have little “firewall” routers they didn’t always have in the good ol’ days.

Yeah, ok not many run ReFS or had their special folders location changed to trigger the other bug, but still, as a power user that is careful with security, I see it as very disturbing to be potentially affected by this vs something that I should protect myself from with a proper firewall and healthy computer hygiene at home (no other infected device on the network).

I don’t think we had as many normal end users having computers not booting or unable to apply an update before Windows 10. That can be a major annoyance for a lambda user.

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Paul T wrote:

AlexEiffel wrote:

the worst bugs ever pushed on us came in this new era

Not so. SQL Slammer from 2003 was possibly the worst bug ever.

cheers, Paul

I vote to the latest Exchange security bugs.

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MHCLV941

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Susan Bradley wrote:

Patches that fix themselves

I doubt that I’m the only one who learned a lot from this article.

I had no idea that some updates could be rolled back automatically, let alone how it worked.  Neither had I known about the Windows Health Release Dashboard.

Thank you for a very informative article.

[Moderator edit] removed potentially divisive comment

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