Patch Tuesday update is causing some Windows 10 systems to blue screen Some users running Windows 10 who installed the KB5021233 cumulative update this month are seeing their operating system crash with the Blue Screen of Death, Microsoft is warning. In an entry over the weekend in its Windows Health Dashboard, the company wrote that the update might cause "a mismatch between the file versions of …
... the fine folks in Redmond don't properly test patches before rolling them out.
I'm absolutely astonished that the Corporate World keeps falling for it, year after year, decade after decade. You'd think they'd have learned by now.
I wonder how many tens of billions of dollars have been lost in man-hours alone due to Microsoft incompetence. And the Corporate Lawyers allow this crap in the building? Still? Mind boggling.
I think this year was worse than others, but that might just be me.
Thing is, you buy the software subscription from MS and this comes without any guarantee on their side that the stuff actually works. This means you are stuck. Sure, you can mope and moan, and being a valued customer you can open tickets and get some special support. Much good will this do.
That's by design. It's very public knowledge that they gutted their testing team back in 2014.
They don't care. They know everything can be patched quickly online these days, so testing isn't their focus.
Fact is, they could keep screwing up and nothing would change. It would take significant issues over an extended period of time to even get the needle to twitch. Companies aren't in a rush to move away from what they know.
you cannot test ALL 3rd party softtware and drivers ever made.
none of my windows systems have a "hidparse.sys" file directly under System32, they are under 'System32\drivers\'
If some systems have it there it probably was placed there by a third party software... (or that O.S. is so old that is missing a ton of updates?)
Noticed that too, that typo is in the original Windows advisory however it should be harmless, cmd.exe doesn't escape backslashes the same way as a Unix shell.
That said, I'm much more surprised by the fact that some people at Microsoft are writing file paths with forward slashes instead of backslashes... Spend too much time in WSL (hence icon) these days?
I suspect many people will have a greater interest in the opposite kind of hack.
Personally, I'm a fan of Hanlon's razor, and I suspect it applies here.
Yep, hard to forget the endless hours attempting to update Windows 7 SP1 with no luck, that happened just as Windows 10 was released.
It physically wasn't possible to update Windows 7 SP1 using the manual update method ("Check for Updates but let me choose when to download and install them") without having failed updates.
Using this method while attempting to avoid the dreaded Windows 10 reservation update KB3035583 a recurring update that kept getting modified, so it showed in the update list at least 8 times, even when it had been hidden multiple times.
Windows 7 was borked more than once, with endless checking for updates unless you had the correct servicing stack update manually installed. Pretty sure too (certainly felt like it), Microsoft prioritized downloads in terms of updates for Win10 Update Servers, over Win7 Update Servers, at the time - in terms of overall throughput.
Anyone would think it was deliberate. Get ready for the same with Windows 11.
'This is by no means the first time Microsoft has had to address an issue caused by a Patch Tuesday update"
Well, to be fair, it IS the first time THIS WEEK that Microsoft has had to address such an issue. Although the week is still young, so may not be the LAST time this week, either. Have a little faith...
i checked a few computers around me...
... ZERO of them have a file located at C:\Windows\System32\hidparse.sys
and all of them have the normal C:\Windows\System32\drivers\hidparse.sys
from what i can tell if you have a hidparse.sys directly under System32 that means it's an older version, likely planted there on purpose by a piece of malware so that they can exploit vulnerabilities present in those versions of the file / operating systems.
The steps indicated by Microsoft to xcopy the newest version from the drivers folder back to overwrite the old one in System32 mean the system remains functional but the attack/HID problem is most likely prevented from then on. (If you just delete the old one you risk getting blue screens)
This story about hidparse.sys starts to smell like NSA's EternalBlue + DoublePulsar all over again, especially since it involves HID parsing.
Maybe they were trying to hide USB keyboard/mouse/etc. interceptors/injectors disguised as extension cables or hubs?
/(black helicopter icon, because NSA, of course)
I quit MS Windows after many, many years of loyal subservience: BSOD-Updates. Why do they use us as beta testers?
Not often, but several times beta-updates caused me to lose tons of data while trying to fake a fix. And, so I appreciate Reg including the workaround in their article since I do have one Windows machine off in the corner running an offline app I can't duplicate with MacOS.
The OTHER reason I quit Windows was that it has become nothing more than a corporate/government mass surveillance tool. The TOS allows MS to literally capture every mouse stroke, every mistyped keystroke, anything, everything. Also, it really steamed me when they started ERASING the HOSTS file so as to give themselves better access. Even though I tried to block it, MS was connecting thousands of times every day to the machine for whatever purpose they see fit. And, still tries, offline.
That's bullshit. So are BSOD-updates.
Under the Microsoft Terms of Service for Windows 10, they detailed the capability of retrieving a file from your PC which had caused a fault in an application. It stated only specialised personnel had the authorisation for this.
Those Terms of Service have disappeared - they were there in 2015, but now gone. I did spot something similar for Server 20XX, but cannot find that now either.
Does anyone have the link on wayback machine for the old Terms of Service detailing the file transfer from your PC to their systems without your knowledge etc. ?
Thanks.
The best i could find is this one :
https://web.archive.org/web/20170713014014/https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/
If you expand all, then it is quite worrying on what they do with your data, but still could not find the terms for where they can retrieve a file from your PC.
How is it that an update for an ancillary part of the OS can crash the whole system?
Didn't there used to be some kind of "ring" system where functionality within the "high reliability" (inverted commas because we're talking Windows here) ring cannot be brought down by vulnerabilities in the outer rings?
I wondered about that too. MS puts too much into kernel space. Of course so does Linux, so don't tell me to switch my desktops and laptops over, not that fat kernels matter from most user perspectives. Things like cameras shouldn't impact system stability. Nor sound, which has kernel drivers.
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