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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

> But is there really a downside to taking this simple, free, prophylactic approach?

Yes there is: if you're a user who already uses two or more languages, cycling through them with language bar hotkeys, this will add an annoying extra one you don't use.

Maybe just the language (e.g. Ukrainian) can be installed without defining a keyboard, and that will still thwart the ransomware. But already you have no verifiable test case that the trick actually works with the keyboard; that's already being done on faith, so you're adding a wild-assed guess to faith.

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In the article there is a link to a script that just adds the registry keys that will trick the malware, without installing the actual language packs.

I tried those on Windows 7 and after rebooting couldn't log in anymore - it just kept saying my username or password was incorrect.

It took me quite a while to figure out that this was because I had set my keyboard for the logon screen to Cyrillic. I confirmed by overwriting sethc.exe with cmd.exe and enabling high contract - the text I typed in the command prompt window that opened was in Cyrillic. (Not my own trick, but a very useful one for recovering access to Windows without directly editing the registry files!)

That's quite a downside, I would say! Turns out all those Microsoft warnings that say "do not modify the registry unless you know what you are doing" had a point.

That stuff is flaky to begin with. I've seen a recent Windows 10 update bring back an unwanted Canadian keyboard, showing up in the language bar, and part of the Shift-Alt cycle.

I had deleted the keyboard and the Canadian English language, with the system set to to US English. Now this keyboard suddenly came back, with no way in the UI to delete it. I had to first install the Canadian language. Then I was able to remove the keyboard.

Is that how the cycling works? I would hope that, just like with Alt-Tab, pressing the language bar hotkey Windows-Spacebar once will toggle between the current and the most recently used one.

I believe it cycles through.

In earlier days of Windows 10, I had an ANSI keyboard for desktop and JP106 for laptop, so I had to have en_US and ja_JP on desktop while laptop had to have en_JP and ja_JP.

Each time Settings syncs it would subtly add missing one to the cycling but would not update the language list, so I had to keep adding and removing the other one from Settings for a while. Later they added toggles to stop syncing keyboards.

It cycles. Win+Spacebar or Alt+Shift. Same cycling.

Let me give an example to explain what I mean: I would hope that switching keyboard layouts would work the same as switching between windows of open applications with Alt-Tab. That is, open a web browser, then open a text editor, then open a file explorer. I expect that when I press Alt-Tab, it switches from the file explorer to the text editor, and if I then press Alt-Tab again, it switches back to the file explorer. This isn't exactly cycling - instead it's switching between the two most recently used options (keyboard layouts/application windows). Is there a way to make keyboard layout switching work the same way?

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