When I was _forced_ into the windows 10 update, it went through the process and appeared to finish but didn't put my desktop back. No problem I figured, they put it somewhere.
So I did a file search, found the desktop in a folder, moved it back to the desktop.
A day later it self-restarted and _completed the update_, replacing the desktop with the now empty desktop folder.
I went to the Microsoft store to get them to do a file recovery and they had the _gall_ to tell me it would be $250 plus 7 days and they wouldn't guarantee recovery.
I moved to Mac this year after being exclusively on Windows since '98.
Unironically, I am in control of when and if any update happens on my Mac.
Also unironically, the described bug has not happened as a result of an upgrade, it was not forced on any user and definitely was not affecting the whole desktop.
From the articles you linked:
"The images get corrupted on copies to the USB attached external drive. "
"However, as Bombich notes, ordinary APFS volumes like SSD startup disks are not affected by the problem described above, so the vast majority of users won't be affected by it – the flaw is most applicable when making backups to network volumes. "
I am not sure you have read the original article and the two articles you linked, otherwise it would have been obvious that these are not the same by volume and severity.
> it would have been obvious that these are not the same by volume and severity.
If users don't have backups, any unintended data loss caused by an operating system bug is bad because it can be difficult or impossible to recover the affected data. Would you not agree?
You may not have been affected by the two bugs I described above, but some people would have been (more so with the image corruption bug).
> the described bug has not happened as a result of an upgrade, it was not forced on any user and definitely was not affecting the whole desktop.
If you go back further in time, there actually was a bug that resulted in data loss during an OS X upgrade.
Oxford Semiconductor has issued a statement with regard to the emerging Panther and FireWire data-loss debacle.
The company says: "Oxford Semiconductor has been investigating reports that some FireWire 800 drives have lost data after an upgrade to the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther operating system is installed (released late October).
"Currently we believe this issue relates to a change in the way Panther uses FireWire that affected version 1.02 of the OXUF922 driver software. A new version, 1.05 was issued by Oxford Semiconductor to the manufacturers of external drive products in early September."
As Macworld UK first reported yesterday, users installing Panther while having an external FireWire drive connected to their Mac have seen data loss; similarly, users with FireWire drives connected to their systems have seen data loss once they reboot Panther. At this stage, it appears that the problem is confined to FireWire 800 drives.
In 2001 there was also a bug in iTunes 2 that caused an entire hard drive partition to be deleted if the volume label was prefixed with a space.
Some Macintosh users who rushed to download the latest version of iTunes – Apple's popular digital-music player – were singing a song of woe on Friday. A bug in the installation procedure caused the application to completely delete their computers' hard drives.
The bug seems to have affected computers with a very specific configuration: people running Mac OS X who had "partitioned" big hard drives into several smaller ones, and who'd typed a space at the beginning of the drive name.
For example, if a Mac had a drive named " music" instead of "music," it might have been deleted by iTunes.
Tom Fisher, a computer repair technician who lost about 100 gigabytes of information during the installation, said that people often include a space in the drive name to ensure it shows up at the top of the list when they examine their drives.
According to Mac experts who examined the code of the buggy iTunes installer, the problem arose from a very tiny programming mistake – a forgotten quote mark.
Linux (specifically ubuntu in my case) also suffers from somewhat similar problems. Every time I update graphic drivers it's a diceroll on whether it will reboot into a black screen.
Sometimes it's recoverable from blindly pasting god-knows-what from stackoverflow. Most of the time I just have to do a complete reinstall.
(I guess it's not a complete brick on update because I have never suffered data loss, but it's similarly infuriating)
That seems like either a Ubuntu misconfiguration or buggy drivers when interacting with your hardware, but I certainly wouldn't say it's a "Linux" thing, may be a disto thing, Ubuntu's not known for caring much about the desktop these days. I have been using Linux successfully for more than a decade without such issues, which does not mean it didn't happen to you, but it does mean it's anecdotal. I am on a rolling-release disto, which updates much more frequently than Ubuntu does and yet, I've been able to continually upgrade a single install for the past 3 years without issue.
It's also nowhere near as bad as actually loosing data, as you mentioned.
I have also been using linux for over a decade and I still can't recommend it to any non-developers friends unless their hardware build is extremely common.
I am currently running two nvidia gtx 1080 SLI and multiple 4k monitors. Even for just installing the OS, I need to physically remove both graphic cards and use a smaller monitor first. This physically laborious workaround just to reinstall the damn thing is what amplified my rage when it decided to break on autoupdate.
> I moved to Mac this year after being exclusively on Windows since '98.
Funny, I use a Macbook pro at work, and windows at home. I'm not the kind of person that has strong preferences on tech, I use stuff until it stops working well and then I switch.
My several (over time) work macbooks have been really bad. OSX has so many bugs, many of them seem really serious potential security issues (graphical corruption across processes, login screen flickering to the desktop upon waking from sleep, ...). Lots of other bugs are just annoying and make things janky to use. It also does weird things that make me fear it is a fire hazard (e.g. battery draining within 24 hours while the lid is closed in my laptop bag).
On the other hand, a windows small form factor connected to my TV, and a surface pro have been basically hassle free. Obviously windows has bugs too, but none of the ones I've seen make me question security the way I do on OSX.
Wouldn’t it be a difference in the software you use for one context and the other ?
OSX has its share of dirty bugs but nothing out of the norm. You could entrust me your surface pro, and I’ll make it crash randomly with only legit pro software.
I have to say those screen issues sounds as if you have a dodgy GPU there, and the battery drain also sounds like a hardware fault. Have you had it checked out?
Sounds like you're the least lucky person on earth. I've had my MacBook Air for 5 years now, I've dropped it on concrete/tiles multiple times, it's dented as hell and the battery's wearing a bit, but it works just fine
I don't hope Microsoft dies, I just hope they realize how unreasonably stubborn they are being in forcefully shoving every new update of Windows down users' throats, and and that they then stop doing it.
We have 4 windows 10 machines here and a metered satellite internet connection for internet service. Didn't really think about it much until they pushed an update to all 4 machines the week after our monthly meter tripped on our service.
Next thing I knew I was on throttled internet for 3 weeks. Setting all the machines so that they don't update turned out to not be too hard, but was FAR harder than it needed to be. I'll decide when my equipment updates.
I did set everything to metered. That's how I finally stopped the updates. My point though was that MS doesn't consider very many non-mainstream cases.
One study says nearly 7% of all internet users in the US use a satellite connection. These are slow, and almost always metered. That is a lot of people getting surprise hammering of their connection.
While I’m not familiar with the equivalent features in Windows I believe MacOS can do this, you can have one machine share the updates to the others on your network. The feature is now even in the non-server version of the OS too.
You can cache iOS device updates with this mechanism as well. I’ve never bothered as I’m fortunate not to worry about metered bandwidth, but it seems like a nice feature if it works as advertised.
So, at best, that would have cut his data usage to 25%. I don't see how you assume this would've solved the issue when we're taking about such a massive update of an OS.
Did you mark the connection as metered in windows? Seems to be the only reliable way to prevent it from downloading updates automatically, if they "fixed" that, they have really lost their minds.
And thereby leaving millions of unpatched machines vulnerable. We just went through that with Android. No thanks. I think a more reasonable answer lies in Microsoft taking a better/different approach to Q/A.
It used to work fine pre-Win-10 where they gave you the updates and let you install them when the time was right for you. This stubborn obsession with the idea that no sane user could possibly have anything more critical in their life than installing whatever code comes out of your hands instantly is just nuts.
pre-Win-10, Windows was also considered the most bug-infested zombie-farm around.
idea that no sane user could possibly have anything more critical in their life than installing whatever code comes out
The problem is when you examine user behavior, they inexplicably seem to have something more critical than installing updates, 24/7/365. Which is how bot farms begin.
They need to give you the choice on whether to update or not. If you choose not to they should just maybe give you a warning on every launch and leave it at that.
Afaik you can still configure it this way in Pro and higher skews using the group policy editor. And it's not like they didn't try the "asking the user" thing before. It's just that many users will happily keep dismissing any kind of warning that doesn't immediatly make their computer stop working forever. That's just no longer something that's acceptable for a machine connected to the internet.
We're talking about herd immunity from viruses here. Imagine that there were a new deadly pandemic every few days. Should a human being, at that point, be allowed (by the social norms of their society, by law, whatever) to refuse to receive once-daily "vaccination updates"?
Here’s maybe a less-fraught analogy: say you have an autonomous car. Assume that the car’s autonomous-driving algorithms prevent it from hitting a person or another car no matter who’s driving, but don’t prevent it from, say, knocking down a telephone pole, or colliding with one of the support posts holding up a bridge.
Now, do you have the right to own and drive this autonomous car around on public roads, if you’ve modified the car to be an “open server” where anyone can anonymously connect to it from anywhere on the Internet and drive it around?
And, if not, then what’s the difference between that modification, and knowingly driving the car when it has an unpatched vulnerability allowing people to do the same?
And if you find that there is no difference, then what’s the difference between a vulnerable car that can DDoS physical infrastructure, and a vulnerable PC that can DDoS virtual infrastructure?
The missing part of your analogy is that in a safety-critical scenario like that, there's no way that the update to the car would be delivered alongside a change to make the UI go dark at night or a completely-rewritten version of the entertainment system. The second something went wrong with such a bundled update, the manufacturer would be annihilated by regulators around the world and/or by a collapse in consumer confidence.
MS could deliver security updates separately to feature changes but chooses not to.
The Tragedy of the Commons is that well-publicised incidents like this (and the trend of updates to consumer software, supposedly under the guise of enhancing security, to bring about significant changes in appearance and behaviour) make people less, not more, inclined to defer updates to all software with the result that developers feel the urge to strong-arm users into updating.
This is a completely disingenuous analogy. While both cases do involve a tragedy of the commons, in the autonomous vehicle example there is an additional immediate and severe risk of bodily injury or death to a human.
The only justifiable reason for updates to be forced in the example with the vehicle is the physical danger that could otherwise result, and that simply doesn't exist in the example with the home computer. To my mind, the line of thinking you are engaging in here is a perfect example of the rampant authoritarianism that seems to be so rife in the computer security community these days.
That's a ridiculous analogy. What if vaccines really did have a high probability of causing autism? Would you still argue that they should be mandatory?
How about if there not only was no FDA approval process for the vaccines, but the pharma company itself didn't bother testing them?
Because that's Windows Update in a nutshell. Every couple of months somebody breaks into my house in the middle of the night, even though I locked my doors and windows and posted a no-trespassing sign, and pokes me with a needle... and I'm supposed to just sit there and take it in the name of "security."
Two separate issues: if you first agree that herd immunity from an infinite stream of "zero-day pandemics" would require daily vaccinations, then you would turn around and demand that there be laws about what these vaccinations must be composed of, and how they be tested, to de-risk them as much as possible.
Imagine what the FDA already does, and then imagine that they were verifying a drug that would be given to every person in the country. There'd be a crazy strenuous verification system for that.
Imagine what the FDA already does, and then imagine that they were verifying a drug that would be given to every person in the country. There'd be a crazy strenuous verification system for that.
And that's a big part of the problem. Not only is there no 'FDA' to test these patches -- nor should there be -- but the manufacturer evidently doesn't test them either. They fired their QA personnel a few years ago, so that's now our (unpaid) job as users.
Even worse, there are some indications that this particular bug was discovered and reported by insider program members and actively ignored by the company.
Windows Update is apparently the team where Microsoft employs their B- and C-level players and managers. That's not OK. If you're going to insert yourself forcefully into everyone's critical path, you'd better know what you're doing.
I remember a memorable comment here that went something like "Windows updates are like vaccinations that have a high chance of making you blind, grow an extra ear, or turn your skin green."
Besides, if you look at what sorts of vulnerabilities they're actually patching, the majority of them require local access anyway; remotely-exploitable-by-default ones (fortunately) tend to be few and far between.
The point of herd immunity is to protect people that can't be vaccinated. Even if you would force people to be immunized, it wouldn't be necessary to apply the same to computers. Vulnerable computers can't rely on herd immunity, and you'll have botnets whether or not updates are mandatory.
I was alive and working in the dark ages where the majority of the world did not patch their OS, and we should not be clamoring to go back just because occassionally the the light hurts our eyes.
I'm much happier in a world where only those that put in the effort to research how to block updates and then go through the steps can do so. They are much more likely to encounter info on how they should really think about what they are doing, and whether there are alternatives or partial solutions that achieve most their needs without being as extreme.
Please don't ruin the little bit of herd immunity we've built up.
How does that solve the issue described in the comment you're replying to? Are you comfortable leaving potentially critical remote vulnerabilities exposed for a whole month?
While you can argue it might be nice to have the option to keep the older backup, it’s also kind of a handy feature that I can restore to latest OS and not have to spend time installing updates myself, my data conveniently seeded into the latest software.
At any rate, iCloud is not “backup” in the traditional sense, it’s really “cloud sync” for user data. In that context it’s not really surprising that connecting a new device to iCloud and restoring pulls the newer OS version, given you never really backed up the OS data at any point.
not to defend them, but my experience with that particular issue is normally they put all your old desktop folder / document folder stuff in c:/windows.old
When I was _forced_ into the windows 10 update, it went through the process and appeared to finish but didn't put my desktop back. No problem I figured, they put it somewhere.
So I did a file search, found the desktop in a folder, moved it back to the desktop.
A day later it self-restarted and _completed the update_, replacing the desktop with the now empty desktop folder.
I went to the Microsoft store to get them to do a file recovery and they had the _gall_ to tell me it would be $250 plus 7 days and they wouldn't guarantee recovery.
I moved to Mac this year after being exclusively on Windows since '98.
I hope Microsoft dies andisgraceful death.