ntauthority

for newer Windows versions, Microsoft also offers a PE-like customizable image for validation purposes explicitly: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

because this policy only applies for non-security bugfixes, and almost all patches these days claim to just be security fixes, including the one which introduced this bug

There's numerous feature flags that seem to just be 'MSRC_[id]' (for the Microsoft Security Response Center), and anecdotally looking through Windows 11 a lot of actual bugfixes (various ReFS driver crashes, for example, have feature flag checks around their fixes) are feature-flagged as per usual with both global (for the whole batch of fixes) and per-feature flags, so this is a bit of an incorrect assumption.

Things breaking downlevel is pretty common anyway, and the emoji picker has been in a pretty bad state since the original picker IME (introduced I believe in RS3, ~2017) was replaced with 'Expressive Input' which also allowed adding GIFs and a few other things but relied on a new UI framework that I suspect was tied to an unrelated internal effort culminating in the '10X' product which only got canceled.. right before Windows 11 development started, and therefore pretty much bitrotted.

Windows 10 was left on a fairly 'bad' release, the 'Iron' semester which was used as a baseline for Server 2022 was still like 10 from a UX perspective (10X was only canceled between that and 'Cobalt', where the Sun Valley work which led to the Windows 11 product happened) but had a fair few bugfixes that didn't get backported to 10 'version 2004' ('Vibranium', I believe, as otherwise the codename would've been 'Chromium' which is bad).

The reserved memory would show up as 'dedicated' memory. Shared is just the amount of host memory that can be assigned to graphics resources, which usually equals the system memory or some amount derived from it.

If the full amount of system memory isn't showing on Windows that's likely an unrelated issue you're experiencing (for example with UEFI/BIOS memory mapping mismatching whatever else) and it working on Linux implies that either Linux gets fed different memory layouts or it parses this broken case fine unlike Windows.

If applications aren't using all the memory, and it's also not showing up as cached, that's odd as Windows usually tends to target around 80% of physical memory usage (unless you're really not using that many apps or there's another driver issue going on). Different OSes account for memory usage differently, and there's rarely one single 'memory used' indicator in modern operating systems.

Notably so, I believe Trillian was a paid product and Meebo was actually treated like a real tech startup. Interesting, indeed, how much the sentiment has shifted over the course of 10-15 years...

Qualcomm actually started offering LTS (long-term support) BSP (board support packages) to device manufacturers for a fee. This is why some vendors like Samsung and Microsoft started providing updates for phones with older SoCs for longer than usual: they're paying the additional per-product license fee for being allowed to ship updated firmware.

Many fiber ISPs here in Europe seem to share the backend infrastructure between DSL and FTTH subscribers and that sadly also involves PPPoE encapsulation.

I actually switched away from a UDM after finding out that I could only hit 500 Mbit/s uplink (out of ~930) due to a PPPoE performance bug as there's no hardware offloading and the old Cortex-A57 cores (in a SoC from a vendor now owned by Amazon, so extremely end-of-life) just couldn't handle that.

Now I'm running a Turris Omnia with the bundled OpenWRT fork for router tasks and that seems to work fine.

FYI: OpenWRT is just Linux and will run fine on x86 hardware as well.

I don't have much choice - it's not like there would be five competing apps serving the same purpose (connecting to the people and communities on Facebook).

The same legislation that is requiring Apple to allow sideloading also requires other large players (like Meta) to open their communication platforms up to other service or application developers.

In this hypothetical case, there actually would be five competing apps, some even still distributed on the App Store.

It was introduced in Vista, deprecated for external use a bit later but the servicing system is still a heavy user of it.

Titanfall did work this way on the EA launcher. There was a tool that it'd run on first launch to decompress the compressed audio files.

Unless it supports the transactional filesystem API, Windows Update won't even work in the first place. ReFS boot in fact is affected by the same issue at this time.

On Windows, I can enumerate a directory that accidentally got millions of files perfectly fine without the system itself breaking and with results being returned incrementally.

On Linux/ext4, it takes an eternity for an enumeration to even start returning results and the entire OS gets stuck on IO while doing so.

Fun thing is that laptop OEMs exposing useful 'value-added functionality' (like custom fan control) via pre-defined WMI ACPI callouts is actually the sensible choice to make.

I've seen laptop OEMs that rely on a custom kernel driver for this, and then if you want to reimplement their pile of 'overly modular everything control suite' you're stuck loading a generic read/write-memory driver which is blocklisted by every antimalware and anticheat solution in existence.

(In addition, it seems some WMI/CIM/MOF ACPI stuff is supported on Linux fine, too, as long as OEMs try to stick to standard DMTF-spec stuff I guess... so one can also just do 'generic' user-space stuff there if lucky)

I was personally somewhat hoping the boot-time portion in this article somehow hijacked a UEFI runtime services[1] function called by the OS to draw to the frame buffer set up by the firmware, since this has some provisions for the OS being in charge of the MMU:

An OS may choose to execute in a virtual addressing mode and, as a result, may prefer to call firmware services provided by UEFI Runtime Drivers in a virtual addressing mode. A UEFI Runtime Driver must not make any assumptions about the type of operating system to be booted, so the driver must always be able to switch from using physical addresses to using virtual addresses if the operating system calls SetVirtualAddressMap().

Disappointingly, it's just a 'plain' case of SMM (which is also, funnily, the main target for ACPI callouts to more 'complex' methods, and on ARM has the very fun equivalent called 'SMC/HVC callouts to EL3/EL2 firmware' although that's supposedly a bit better-defined than Intel SMM) and nothing too clever either - an ACPI method hijacking something to then write to the framebuffer?

Other than that, the writing style here feels almost.. presumptuous and might've been written for the original audience on the site it's posted on, for example I was left wondering things like 'if the author or their friends have access to a machine with this software on it, why don't they dump the firmware flash storage and decompile the actual images, wherever they might be', though it may be they indeed didn't have access to any such hardware or firmware downloads and are just piecing random puzzle parts together, and the post eventually devolved into a general rant against OEM cleverness that I somewhat skipped.

(I'm also mildly torn between 'wow, clever hack' and 'oh lord this would be terrible to diagnose OS boot issues on as you really can't trust OEMs with side effects or long-term maintenance' in this regard)

[1] https://edk2-docs.gitbook.io/edk-ii-uefi-driver-writer-s-gui...

Quite a lot of recent console FPS games just let you plug in a USB mouse/keyboard and you get matched with PC players (or other console users who use the same input method) instead.

CoD has supported this since their 2019 release, for example.

talk to a driver (who usually acts annoyed on behalf of the whole bus that you are holding up)

It is still an interesting cultural observation that here in NL, even people who manually buy a ticket at the driver while struggling using the card terminal do not seem to get an annoyed response inherently even on a half-filled bus, whereas in Germany it seemed almost expected to get chewed out for not having exact change or taking more than 10 seconds to gather a pile of coins - in the pre-app era, of course.

Germany solved that issue by making owning any device capable of receiving internet broadcasts part of the eligibility criteria. By that point they could just as well make it part of general tax budgets...

But they'll have no control over what notifications from web pages you've put on your home screen show.

They own the browser. They can theoretically maintain a list of bad origins just as much as they can block an app from the App Store.

There's a lot of CVE submissions lately that seem badly sourced and derived from 'disagreements' at best.

Another recent example is https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2023-2405... which is for a purely theoretical exploit - not even a PoC - with the only 'sources' being Reddit/Twitter scaremongering, and 'support forum posts' that quote these exact same Twitter threads.

For me, running the iOS 16.3 developer beta seems to have been what made my iPhone 'unique' among the ones tested on that site.

Adding my own n=1 anecdote here - a member contributing to an open source project I'm involved in, who had a few repositories on GH with extensions to that project but no other notable 'negative' activity, had gotten a permanent suspension from GitHub a few years ago for responding to a mildly abusive issue report on the main project with the well-known 'Navy SEALs copypasta'... the abuser then reported them and their account - including their helpful and invaluable extension repositories - was nuked, while the abuser then could continue to abuse under both the original account and various other aliases.

They left the community shortly after, likely in part fueled by the way an abuser got their GitHub account destroyed while the abuser pretty much remained unscathed.

This mentality is a common one I see when people comment on Windows: people setting an override that isn't actually the intended override to 'fix' an issue without root cause analysis by disabling a component, then complaining about the 'intended override' getting reverted with a system upgrade.

(and 'impossible using normal GUI/CLI tooling' seems unlikely, for one as regedit is still 'normal tooling' as well, and secondly because I've yet to come across a service that can't be disabled with the 'sc' command line utility, discounting Windows Defender though that is rather a special case due to the chance of malware itself disabling it, so it has a very specific series of steps to first disable the tamper protection in a trusted way and only then disable the service)

In this case it seems like an environment-specific issue, as if everyone would have this specific thing be broken, it'd probably long be noticed and fixed. In fact, one could probably easily find out what is wrong using a profiling session with WPR/WPA as the main symptom here is 'uses 100% of a CPU core', a methodology recently most famously spread by Google's Bruce Dawson.

(similarly, I wonder if these same people would 'complain' a Linux distro upgrade would affect their edits to /lib/systemd/system/*.service files - I would somewhat presume that to not be the case, in fact)

Using an issue reported (in a Linux compatibility layer, even!) with few to little root cause analysis as evidence a 'networking stack is bonkers' is a bit exaggerated - IPv6 in itself is also a bit wacky, and I've had similar issues exist in a variety of environments.

As an opposite example, here's a Wine bug report of a Windows application failing to work in some network environments, but only if it in any way touches the Linux networking stack (such as using VirtualBox's soft NAT, or if running under Wine): https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53346

I guess, in general, software (and networking) is 'bonkers'.

Ah, the Winamp approach to versioning.

but from what I read the ACPI tables are in bad shape/incomplete. "Good enough for Windows, ship it.".

It is a bit more nuanced than this. Qualcomm ships a giant custom (mandatory, most the platform will not even work without it!) driver stack on Windows and uses ACPI definitions more than most x86 platform vendors, to the extent that it even exposed a bug in the Windows ACPI implementation when an ACPI method return buffer would exceed 64 kB so since this generation of SoC a lot of the Windows drivers instead bundle their own 'subset' of certain ACPI buffers and the main DSDT is empty as a result.

Linux on ARM still doesn't really use ACPI except where forces more influential than Qualcomm managed (e.g. SBSA?) so even downstream Linux kernels for Qualcomm still use DT.

It does, under the accessibility options. 'Contrast themes' allow fairly fine-grained customization, still, and a lot of legacy values that have been there since Windows 95 are still supported otherwise to some extent albeit sometimes hidden.

This would be fine if not for even the canonical C/C++ compiler on GNU/Linux having issues building older versions of itself without patches, let alone other applications.

As with older Windows binaries on newer Windows versions, when it doesn't work outright, there's always fixes - but that's not the point this subthread tries to discuss.

A more interesting variant of your question would be 'how come Wine is better at running decades-old Windows software (on systems such as Linux) than Linux is at running decades-old Linux software on Linux?'

... perhaps Win32 is a more stable ABI/API by design.

(f) presents a risk to consumer safety or (financial) wellbeing

By some measures, PayPal itself does. Should PayPal ban itself?

(for example, anecdotally from an acquaintance in Germany a few years ago, there are some flows that can and will, without the appropriate checks, lead to a customer ending up in a debt to PayPal, and they have some of the worst debt collectors in this regard)