When Windows Update attacks

April 30, 2016 6:12 PM

Weather reporter braves the affront [SLYT]
posted by maggieb (41 comments total)

Wickenburg... is a total loss.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:31 PM on April 30, 2016 [24 favorites]

My work computer spontaneously decided to upgrade to Windows 10 on Friday - I swear I did not touch anything except to close the popup, and came back to the desk and there it was, updating.

It didn't break anything obvious, so there's that at least.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 6:38 PM on April 30, 2016

You have to decline the scheduled upgrade every single day otherwise it will schedule a new date for you. I hope they get sued back to windows 3.11. Assholes.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 6:40 PM on April 30, 2016

The GWX Control Panel will keep the Win 10 Upgrade under control. I am still running W7 (it is just more stable for me) and GWX sidesteps the W10 issue pretty well.

Donation-Ware

ultimateoutsider.com/downloads
posted by lampshade at 6:47 PM on April 30, 2016 [14 favorites]

Seconding GWX Control Panel. I spent an entire morning going around our office running it on all our machines. It's not that 10 is horrible or anything; we have one machine whose owner upgraded it without asking before I got around to him, and we've bought several Win10 boxes since it became the new machine standard. But random upgrades are never a good idea on a working system, especially in business. And it's important to decline EVERYTHING when setting up Win10's features or your naked pix and moles will all get echoed back to Microsoft as you use the machine.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:52 PM on April 30, 2016

I use Windows 7 and I've never seen anything like that. Is this a common thing? I admit that I manually run Windows Update every Patch Tuesday and decline to install anything having to do with Windows 10, so I guess that explains it. But I figured it would be a one-time thing, not a continual nag. Jeez.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:54 PM on April 30, 2016

Rhomboid, your very unusual approach to Windows Update is what saved you from this. If you let it, WU installs stuff all over the place including a nag daemon that runs all the time to pop up "reminders." The reason GWX Control Panel is a program and not a registry patch is that the Win10 nag stuff really is salted all over your system and getting rid of it all manually is almost impossible.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:58 PM on April 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Windows 7 will do this if you put off updates too long. A year ago my friend borrowed a Win7 laptop from our department office, and apparently those don't get updated too often, because it rebooted without warning or confirmation to install updates--five minutes into his dissertation defense.
posted by egregious theorem at 6:58 PM on April 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

I have memorized certain Windows update KB numbers because they will not die. (KB2952664, I'm looking at you.) I can't hide them, they reappear. Every day. For that specific number above, twice, and installing them (by accident) does nothing. Microsoft really really really wants me to upgrade my work laptop to Windows 10, and I am a hate because of it.
posted by XtinaS at 7:00 PM on April 30, 2016

If you're spending this much time and effort avoiding upgrading, maybe it's time to switch from windows all together?
posted by dilaudid at 7:07 PM on April 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

I love public Blue Screens of Death, and this is an amazing hyper-evolved version of that. Thanks for posting it!
posted by ignignokt at 7:14 PM on April 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

it rebooted without warning or confirmation to install updates--five minutes into his dissertation defense.

Well I know what my nightmares are going to be about for the next few weeks
posted by pemberkins at 7:19 PM on April 30, 2016 [17 favorites]

XtinaS, you've got the nagware embedded in your system. GWX Control Panel will ferret out all the little places it's hidden autostart and reinstall triggers. Rhomboid was paranoid enough to nip it in the bud but once it's gotten its hooks into your system, trying to block or remove it manually is like swordfighting a hydra.
posted by Bringer Tom at 7:23 PM on April 30, 2016

If you're spending this much time and effort avoiding upgrading, maybe it's time to switch from windows all together?

Lot easier said than done when critical business software hasn't been tested against Windows 10 yet. Or in my case, when I can't be bothered to go through my Windows 7 gaming desktop that's been running rock solid since 2012, and don't really want to spend a whole weekend restoring from backup if it the Win10 upgrade breaks something. Windows 7 works. I don't have any reason to upgrade whatsoever, at least until Microsoft refuses to implement DirectX12 and developers start making games that I want to play that require it.

Sure, I'd love to have a viable OS to switch to that would run GTA V or Battle Born on launch day, but not copy everything I type directly to Microsoft by way of the NSA, but unfortunately we don't live in a world with any other alternative for certain PC users, both business and personal.
posted by T.D. Strange at 7:32 PM on April 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

Do you have a moment to talk about the gospel of our lord and savior Linus Torvolds.
posted by humanfont at 8:05 PM on April 30, 2016 [30 favorites]

How familiar are you with the Gear Wars exactly?
posted by Rhomboid at 8:25 PM on April 30, 2016

Funny, I was just at the fancy-schmancy Art Market show in San Francisco today and even took a photo of a gallery owners' giant touchscreen display, which he didn't realize now had the Win 10 nag box obscuring the expensive art he was trying to peddle to rich people. I kindly tapped the 'x' button to make the window safely go away, for now...
posted by twsf at 8:48 PM on April 30, 2016

CFAA hinges on "unauthorized" access, you gave up any claim to that the first time you clicked accept on "do you want to install Windows 3.1?"
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:41 PM on April 30, 2016

I completely empathize with the Windows 10 Update nagware. There are dozens of versions of Windows out in the wild, and most of them have very, very serious security issues. This is Microsoft's attempt to get everyone on to one platform that they can maintain properly, and save the internet from another twenty years of pwnded windows botnets.

It probably won't work, but I empathize.
posted by phooky at 10:50 PM on April 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

That would make sense if they were doing it to XP users. Win7 is still fully supported with security fixes, and there's nothing at all insecure about a fully patched Win7 system. Win7 is supported until 2020. Hell you still have another six months before the cutoff date when you can no longer buy a machine with Win7 preinstalled (for the Pro version at least; the Home version date has passed.)

If they want to start aggressively nagging me in late 2019 when the end of life date is imminent, then I'll be sympathetic.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:12 PM on April 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

I don't really mind Windows 10, but, mind you, I had to get a completely new computer when it completely killed my old one as it tried upgrading. In my case, I believe it had something to do with the nvidia drivers, but still.

I still get experiences like thursday, where I come in to work and because it installed updates overnight, everything is broken until I reboot again.

Like I say, it's generally fairly solid from day-to-day, but I am eagerly awaiting "Service Pack 1" (ie, "we fixed all that shit we ignored so we could include unless shit which gave us (unisex) boners, but no one will ever use").
posted by maxwelton at 11:15 PM on April 30, 2016

(The related posts list, below, is very "Cortana, what other posts are about Windows 10?")
posted by maxwelton at 11:17 PM on April 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Not updating XP makes sense, because best will in the world I don't think they could do it.

Not updating Vista surprises me because my mental model is that everything after Vista is just Vista with a different UI. Like XP is Windows 2000.

Clearly my mental model is wrong, and I have a nerdy interest in wondering why!
posted by alasdair at 11:27 PM on April 30, 2016

The truly infuriating thing is that I have a Windows 10 machine, and yet the update to whatever Windows 10 it came installed with consistently busts its functionality (yes, I would actually like functional speakers; no, none of the suggested fixes for that bug work).
posted by thomas j wise at 3:18 AM on May 1, 2016

I've tried to update on a Windows 7 and two Windows 8s. The whole thing downloads, I click on it and then nothing happens. On the two older ones I even restored factory settings, ran all the updates, and then tried Windows 10 and it still didn't work. So I will be getting a Mac once I can come up with $1000 but that could be a very long time.
posted by betsybetsy at 5:08 AM on May 1, 2016

This is Microsoft's attempt to get everyone on to one platform that they can maintain properly

^ This.

But rather than 'maintain', I would suggest 'SUPPORT'. I cheered when MSFT said, "In January, we're only supporting IE11 on a current OS."

Which gave OUR company the freedom to say, "1. We officially support whatever MSFT does" and "2. if you're not running what msft supports, we'll give it our best effort, but see #1... "
posted by mikelieman at 5:33 AM on May 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Seriously, 4 browser versions ( 11, 10, 9, 8 ) and 3 O/Ss ( 7, 8, 10 ) was just too much damned work.
posted by mikelieman at 5:43 AM on May 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

(The related posts list, below, is very "Cortana, what other posts are about Windows 10?")

To be fair, Cortana, Win10's embedded privacy issues, and MS's attitude to upgrades are all not small issues.
posted by Mezentian at 6:19 AM on May 1, 2016

it rebooted without warning or confirmation to install updates--five minutes into his dissertation defense

Sadly, this would have been a huge fucking improvement over mine.

Not that I'm bitter. Drunk. I'm mostly drunk.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:58 AM on May 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Windows Update has always been a tedious exercise, slow enough to leave plenty of time to worry about what might go wrong, and to wonder about the astoundingly terse and opaque things it has to say about what exactly it's updating, and to question whether it's really still necessary to keep this one computer running Windows at all. It's all the more amusing now that the process includes going through the list and removing anything related to upgrading to Windows 10, which serves as a reminder that Windows 10 is said to be designed to take away user control over when updates get installed, which reinforces my resolve to never install Windows 10.
posted by sfenders at 10:14 AM on May 1, 2016

Y'all haven't installed the Never 10 utility yet?
posted by Rash at 10:16 AM on May 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

and don't really want to spend a whole weekend restoring from backup if it the Win10 upgrade breaks something.

Windows 10 includes a feature to revert to your previous OS state easily within a month of upgrading, so you wouldn't have to do it as you describe. I've never used that feature, so I can't comment on how fast it is or how good the results are, but it's there.

I'm not advocating upgrading or not upgrading, just sayin'.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 10:30 AM on May 1, 2016

FWIW, my old iMac (running the last rock-solid OS X release, Snow Leopard) regularly gets pop-ups from the mothership (probably via the App Store) nagging me to upgrade to El Cap. For any long-time Mac user, that is utterly egregious behavior. At this rate, I fully expect a non-reversible upgrade to happen sometime when I'm asleep.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:32 AM on May 1, 2016

Oh, also, W10 in my experience does a pretty good job of making sure your machine will have all the drivers it needs to work, but they may not be the best drivers for your devices, especially if you have anything finicky or specialized. On my machines I've had to go get the vendor's drivers directly for some things, which took a while but not too long.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 10:33 AM on May 1, 2016

You know what really bugs me as far as updates go? Java.

It's like, every other week, I get a "New security update for Java" notice, and I have to reboot everything. Seriously, man, I've installed Java, I'm secure! Hell, I installed three updates, so I'm three times as secure! So, no more: if they can't get their damn program secure on the first try, it's not worth getting any updates
posted by happyroach at 12:38 PM on May 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's like, every other week, I get a "New security update for Java" notice, and I have to reboot everything.

I think it's fair to say at this point that Oracle is the laughingstock of the software world when it comes to security practices and updates. But at the same time, the state of security testing and engineering in software seems to be quite poor.

I don't have a solution to that, though; people generally seem to enjoy that their computers gain functionality every couple of years (and every six months for smartphones) rather than the long and grueling process that better software QA would take.
posted by thegears at 1:23 PM on May 1, 2016

1. Future updates won't be optional. You can guess what will come from that.

I don't like non-optional updates either, but if you think Microsoft is going to take over the world, just say so rather than snarkily insinuating it.

2. Everything on your computer will be monitored and copied by Microsoft and god knows who else.

There are actual privacy issues with Windows 10. Making tinfoil-hat comments with little basis in fact that suggest that everything on a Windows 10 computer is automatically shared with everyone from the NSA to my aunt Sue is not actually helping the situation, and is making people who care about privacy look like nutters.
posted by thegears at 3:58 PM on May 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

1.
I don't think Franklin was implying that Microsoft was going to take over the world. I think he was implying that Microsoft would screw their users over even more once Microsoft has even more power over their users.

2.
Errr, but everything on a Win10 computer is shared with everyone? I mean, your data is shared with MS, and with marketers, and with security services. And if your aunt Sue works for any of those she would have access to your data if she needed it. Also, she would get any data gathered by the mics or cameras attached to your computer. Also, she would get any further data gathering that is enabled by future Windows updates that you can't decline.

Here's a short list of some of the current privacy issues:
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2015/07/29/wind-nos/


Win7 into Linux does seem like the right path. As a long term MS observer, it's always been clear that sooner or later Microsoft would start stinging to death the frog that is carrying them across the stream, and that technically/privacy minded people would need to abandon the frog for the penguin.
posted by Balna Watya at 6:10 PM on May 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Win7 into Linux does seem like the right path. As a long term MS observer, it's always been clear that sooner or later Microsoft would start stinging to death the frog that is carrying them across the stream, and that technically/privacy minded people would need to abandon the frog for the penguin.
posted by Balna Watya at 8:10 PM on May 1

I could not agree more with your sentiment. I just wish there were more opportunities out there to thoroughly explain to a windows user how to switch to Linux. I mean, I know the web is flooded with the stuff, but I can't find a comprehensive guide that explains Linux to me like I'm a five year old.

I've looked into joining a local Linux user's group, but they all seem to be defunct.

Maybe Khan Academy could do a nice series of step by step videos? Anybody know Sal? I think it would be a great idea to get him on this.

Just to reiterate my position, after Win7, I am done with MS. After that, I'm on Linux come hell or high water.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 8:30 PM on May 1, 2016

Just to reiterate my position, after Win7, I am done with MS. After that, I'm on Linux come hell or high water.

Join us, on the dark side.

Apparently we have games now.

I switched from XP to Ubuntu, and have been happy. I was a moderately good home user of Windows (better than most, truth be told, but very much an amatuer), so I picked up a book on Linux, and have never had any issues I wasn't able to overcome without googling the problem (aside from Unity, so I'm back on Ubuntu 12, and it's up to 16.4 now).

but I can't find a comprehensive guide that explains Linux to me like I'm a five year old.

I can give you a car analogy:
These days, it's like Windows, but isn't. The engine under the hood might run diesel instead of petrol, and a few components aren't where you think they might be (or called what you think they should be), but these days it's slick enough that you really don't even need to check the oil (fire up terminal to use the command line) if you don't want to.

If you've used Android, you're already technically a Linux user.

Mint/Cinnamon seems to be getting a lot of good press the past few years.
posted by Mezentian at 12:16 AM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Microsoft ... is planning to remove its Get Windows 10 app from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs after July 29th
posted by maggieb at 7:59 PM on May 7, 2016