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Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by timnetworks on Sunday July 21, 2024 @09:23PM (#41030039)
We all remember that Windows was a water-tight never-crash workhorse before the pesky EU stepped in and requested the APIs to be documented for once..
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by bongodongobob on Sunday July 21, 2024 @09:29PM (#41030061)
In an enterprise setting where you can prevent people from fucking with it, it pretty much is. M365/office is the vast majority of our help desk tickets.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by multimoon on Sunday July 21, 2024 @11:35PM (#41030711)
Even in an enterprise setting heavily controlled by group policy and an AD domain, watertight and never-crash aren’t terms I’d ever associate with any windows release.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by al_borland on Sunday July 21, 2024 @09:46PM (#41030148)
This comment might have gone over better if people didn't just spend their whole weekend recovering from what is likely the largest outage in history, which only impacted Windows.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by lmm on Sunday July 21, 2024 @09:54PM (#41030183)
An outage that was no fault of Windows itself, and entirely due to a faulty third-party component.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by ajkjk on Sunday July 21, 2024 @10:01PM (#41030223)
Well it's definitely their fault in that they could have prevented it by managing their components better.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by gjsman-1000 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @09:55PM (#41030189)
A third party component which used a kernel extension in Windows, but did not need a kernel extension on either the Mac (System Extension, which runs in user space) or the Linux (eBPF, much more resistant to crashes) versions.

Why would Cloudstrike need a kernel driver on Windows, and not their other platforms? Microsoft is responsible for that design and not moving past it at the pace alternative systems have.

Additionally, there are other things Microsoft could have done. For example - if your computer fails to boot 3 times in a row, with a third party driver, how about automatically disabling the driver? If the driver manufacturer doesn’t like that, tell them to suck it up and write a driver that doesn’t crash.

Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by pixel16 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @10:12PM (#41030304)
https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/21/crowdstrike_linux_cra...

You mean the same issues that Linux also faced?

Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by mirashii on Sunday July 21, 2024 @11:03PM (#41030548)
The primary one linked there is certainly not the same issue, it was a bug in the Linux kernel's ebpf handling. It happened to be triggered by Crowdstrike, but the bug is undeniably a Linux kernel bug which was subsequently patched, as ebpf programs should never be able to panic the kernel.

That's not to say that there haven't been other Crowdstrike fails on Linux, especially pre-eBPF module, but that's not one, and that class of failures has been eliminated in the move to the eBPF based module.

Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by 1over137 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @10:18PM (#41030335)
Are you sure "Microsoft is responsible for that design"? Do we know Cloudstrike didn't choose to do it in-kernel even though there was another way they could have done it in userspace?
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by ochronus on Sunday July 21, 2024 @11:56PM (#41030808)
Yes, as in: allowing (well, requiring?) drivers to run in kernel mode.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by bongodongobob on Monday July 22, 2024 @09:13PM (#41041566)
It's AV though, if it didn't, it'd be useless.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by ochronus on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @12:06AM (#41042407)
In the current architecture, yes. What I'm saying is that architecture is wrong.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by tomohawk on Monday July 22, 2024 @12:35PM (#41036381)
Isn't this is what MS's complaint about the EU is about?

Apple evicted these things from kernel access, resulting in better product.

MS is saying they wanted to do the exact same thing, but EU has mandated the access in order to allow multiple products to become rootkits.

Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by paulmd on Monday July 22, 2024 @02:33PM (#41037978)
wendell level1techs has been talking about how microsoft is specifically moving away from it in Windows on ARM (to some real short-term pain, in fact) so it seems self-serving to assert that they somehow cannot do it because of the EU. if that's the case, presumably their windows-on-arm efforts would have been dinged for it.

https://youtu.be/5KHCLBqRrnY?t=5849

like if apple is doing it, and microsoft is doing it in their ARM build... what is the EU doing or imposing, exactly, that is so problematic for the x86 branch of microsoft?

the more reasonable interpretation (ignoring microsoft's excuses) is that microsoft is more constrained by the legacy nature of their x86 product. they can't just sunset it, because it'll break a billion shitty applications that are very important to one specific factory customer running their thing with a kernel hook that is long-since EOL'd or whatever.

What they mean is they don't want to, and the EU is just a convenient scapegoat for some unfortunate business realities.

Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by throwaway4pp24 on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @06:19AM (#41044471)
Perhaps they are trying to do the same thing as Apple and are claiming Windows on Arm is a separate product that this doesn't apply to.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by paulmd on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @10:18PM (#41053059)
honestly quite probably, in a sense - they definitely seem to be trying to make a clean break in some ways. they don't really want "kernel-mode printer drivers, but with arm". and yeah they definitely seem to be viewing that as the Next Model, probably eventually they would roll out similar things to the basic-tier windows x86 pcs etc.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by CRConrad on Monday July 29, 2024 @05:11PM (#41103845)
> MS is saying they wanted to do the exact same thing, but EU has mandated the access in order to allow multiple products to become rootkits.

No. The EU only mandated that Microsoft give other vendors the same access they themselves use to do the same thing. This was the wake-up call to Microsoft to stop doing it that way, and in stead build a more secure API for themselves as well as others to use. But they preferred to sleep through it, for another fifteen years.

They didn't “want to do the exact same thing”; if they had wanted to, they could have done it.

Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by hulitu on Monday July 22, 2024 @03:15PM (#41038591)
> For example - if your computer fails to boot 3 times in a row, with a third party driver, how about automatically disabling the driver?

I don't think computers got to that level of refinement. Yes, we have AI, but this is mostly used to spread propaganda. Last i looked, you cannot fix Linux or Windows without human intervention.

Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by CRConrad on Monday July 29, 2024 @04:59PM (#41103726)
Entirely due to that faulty third-party component being able to run without limitations in the kernel, because Microsoft didn't want to build an API with those limitations.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by fulafel on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @05:51PM (#41051337)
.. caused by 3rd party software trying to reactively counter other malware that regularly finds its way onto enterprise windows hosts.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by antisthenes on Sunday July 21, 2024 @09:35PM (#41030091)
My work laptop windows crashed more times in a year than my Windows 7 install in the 10 years that I was using it (2009-2019).

Mostly due to Teams or Edge eating up all the memory, and the OS being unable to handle it gracefully.

Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by bongodongobob on Monday July 22, 2024 @01:47AM (#41031249)
You're going to have issues on any OS if you're short on RAM, graceful or not.
Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by CRConrad on Monday July 29, 2024 @05:30PM (#41103997)
Which makes RAM-eaters pretty much malware, doesn't it? And, as the GP says, the biggest RAM-eaters on most corporate Windows installs are... Microsoft corporate software, like Teams.

So I find it pretty hard to take whatever Microsoft says as the last word on anti-malware, even on Windows, when it's at the same time the biggest purveyor of malware.

Re:Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to l... by croes on Monday July 22, 2024 @03:39PM (#41038903)
Don't you forget all the withdrawn updates MS released?

MS isn't testing either.