Microsoft warns Windows 10 patch broke printing for some Microsoft's torrid time with patches is continuing after the company admitted that printing might once again be broken in Windows 10 for some users following the application of an update. At fault is the latest patch Tuesday emission, KB5015807, and its preview, KB5014666. Both updates affect Windows 10 and Windows Server 20H2 …
There was a joke "cartoon" in (I think) "Practical Computing" back in the 1980's which went something like this:
Man sees another guy approaching dragiging a "train" of trolleys (at least 5) loaded with stacks of fanfold paper.
He asks:
"What's that?"
Reply
"It's the documentation for our paperless office"
It is far simpler than that.
In Microshaft's view, customers ARE the test/software QC department....
And what EXACTLY is it that printing in Windows 10 does that means it won't work with versions of PCL < 6????
FFS!!!! Printing is basically putting marks on paper...
And I have worked for TWO global printer manufacturers and very little has changed.
The only real developments have been GDI (aka "brain dead") printers where your PC does all the work and .... that is it. Nothing else.
So WTF does Windows do that can't work with PCL5???
Unfortunately printing is an unfashionable side of computing. It was a vital component in the past and still languished through lack of care and attention, it's less vital for many now but when needed it still needs to work. Reliably.
Microsoft chose not to invest resources in printing and printer interfaces (the horrors of trying to write printing code made this lack of care from Microsoft incredibly obvious even at the API level), and instead implemented what should have been OS functions such as print preview into their Office applications. After all, if any application can do "print preview", it makes Microsoft Office feel less special. Printer capabilities increased of course and rather than work with this, Microsoft abandoned the printer manufacturers to implement everything in custom code - not helped that some of the printer manufacturers employed badly trained monkeys to mash keyboards until something vaguely compiled and called this a printer driver.
Because Microsoft didn't care for printing functions, the enhanced functions had to be implemented by third parties and it's no surprise that these were badly implemented and full of security holes.
Microsoft's fix for this mess that they managed? To block printer driver installation even from trusted sources and to introduce the generic v4 printer driver model which has even less features than a standard printer driver. Useless in other words.
<Shudder>
Reminds me of an English teacher I had at school. We were studying Chaucer "in the original", and he "helpfully" brought in a recording he had made by lowering a microphone into the horn of the wind-up record player he used.
It sounded exactly like the Swedish Chef. "As you can see, we are now at the bottom of page 67". Frantic turning of pages...
A real waste of my early life!
I'm tempted to make a flippant remark along the lines of "yes, and the 30,000 black hats worldwide who have root access to your PC really appreciate the availability of the printer too..." but I won't.
Because I'm better than that. And also I'm sure you're smart enough to keep the machine air-gapped or otherwise protected.
I have a windows 7 box that NEVAR goes on Teh Intarwebs that has printing enabled, because if I do NOT enable printing, QuickBooks stops working. Not like I need it for ACCOUNTING or anything...
But yeah if the only thing I do on that box is QB and the occasional "windows thing" (not Teh Intarwebs) what do I need UPDATES for, when it is behind my FreeBSD FIREWALL (filtering the HELL out of IPv6) ???
Exactly - happened to 2 computers on the network last week.
As Bugs Bunny said, "So what else is new??"
But note that, in my experience, printing problems only started after they started their mitigations on reported vulnerabilities. Before that, Win10 printing was rock-solid on all the computers I administer.
as my default printer has disappeared from printing dialogs this week.
Oddly, not in all applications, and it shows in the Printers and Devices - as the default - but, maddeningly, it's gone from the one application I wanted to use.
Perhaps after another patch Tuesday I'll get it back?
Man, it must be easy to write reports on el Reg...
Copy, paste, edit some KB numbers and... Voila!
Aren't updates delivered to users in "segments" or groups?
With 100s of millions users, updates could be pushed to 1000 users. Check for issues. Push to a million. Check for issues. etc. etc.
For the majority of users that could at least be considered being as some kind of QA?
Or is it MS's AI check of updates failing it's job? https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-14-microsoft-ai-windows-10-updates-smoother.html
So you push the usual bundle of features, bug fixes and security patches to a 1000 or a million users, and how long to you wait for problems to show up? A day, a week? In the mean time all those security patches are being reverse engineered by blackhats and exploits developed and deployed before those updates go off to the other 100s millions of users.
Treating users like guinea pigs is no substitute for QA.
Same. My iPhone is the most reliable way to print at home. I don’t have the time or the will to set up a print server at home and maintain all the family’s laptops, so when their printing inevitably fails I tell them to use their phones too. The kids like to play games so moving them all to MacBooks probably not an option (and not cheap)
It's not just the print system that has problems -- it's the complex, chatty, verbose 'automatic' network discovery of printers using ZeroConf, mDNS, DNS service discovery, and WTF all else.
That printer is gone, new one on the network is (1), No, that's gone, now we've got (2).
That system never worked properly in the first place, and because it's a network discovery protocol, as well as being newish and complex, it gets security updates -- which contain new bugs and breakages, because it's new, complex, and has to work with existing printers, each with their own idiosyncratic implementation.
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