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Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

>This is a company whose OS could not even be installed on a live network without getting rooted within a few minutes.

That was WIndows XP 20 years ago. Please bring arguments about modern Window 11 security which is the current up to date product they're selling and supporting not scenarios that haven't happened in 20 years.

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The company that let every db server have global admin creds and 0 logging on their cloud platform?

That didn't run their own enhanced visibility on their own cloud platform.

Vulnerabilities present in 2000 are showing up still in modern Windows versions.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/564499/3-leaked-nsa-exploi...

You have no idea the cruft and technical debt Windows has in order to maintain its backwards compatibility.

for a loooong history, you have to look in the past

Ah, well, if only things of the past were useful today, I'd still have hair, and probably millions made form right investments, but unfortunately, it's what's happening today that actually matters.

So you asked for proof of a long history and are now surprised that the examples are all from the past?

How does that impact the present? If it's no longer as vulnerable today, why would I care about the past? The point is learning from mistakes and fixing them so that doesn't happen again.

If it doesn’t matter to you, why did you ask? Are you just trying to win an argument or are you being intellectually honest? Because you asked for proof of the long history someone claimed. You could have just said “the long history doesn’t matter because I only care about the current state”. That’s fine and valid, but don’t ask questions and then shift the goalposts if you don’t like the answers.

A "loooong history" needs to have a timespan of many years.

So yes it would start in the past, but it then has to continue for a long time.

Pointing out that a company was bad 20 years ago isn't enough. You need to show they were also bad 15 years ago, and 10 years ago, and 5 and/or 25 years ago.

So complaining that the only evidence was so far in the past is valid. The original goalposts were not reached. (Well, someone in another part of the thread eventually listed every google result for a windows update making anything crash, but that doesn't really establish that microsoft is "botching" updates at a level significantly above background noise, which I think was the original intent.)

Well someone posted examples from XP and someone else posted 4 botched updates in 2023, do you need a list for every year inbetween?

Was my implication of "every 5 years" not clear? But I already mentioned those links, they're pretty weak. I'm not calling an update that for a few people makes a handful of games crash "botched", when the original implication was quite juicy botching.

Also, if we're actually getting into this, the XP gripe had nothing to do with updates. That's moving the goalposts half a mile in the other direction.

> why would I care about the past?

??? You specifically asked for it! What are you doing.

GP is absolutely correct. You can't ask for examples of a long history of something, then dismiss examples from, you know, history.

Fair enough, but if those examples are irelevant to modern times, what's the point of bringing them up? If we want to keep the discussion relevant to modern context then let's discuss modern history, not obsolete news from 20 years ago.

What is "modern history"?

A period of time where Microsoft has no mishaps, of course.

First thing that comes to mind is that Recall stuff from a month ago, they also release updates[0] that crash machines.

[0] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/windows-11-update-causing-blu...

Recall actually is a brilliant idea, and I dreamed of something like it for a long time, and so did plenty people here. It's just not something you can trust a third-party business with, whether it's a fly-by-night startup or an international megacorporation known to be openly promiscuous with advertisers.

This is basically "take a screenshot every 30 seconds and compile it into a timelapse", but on steroids, and the same appeal, and arguments wrt. who gets to run it on whose machines, all apply.

The functionality does seem intriguing, that doesn't change it's security profile which was poorly thought out and implemented.

If you keep your business and personal computing separate, Recall looks amazing.

Ignoring Windows Insider reports is bad. However, how many endpoints having issues (out of a billion+) is ‘acceptable’ after an update? We live in a news hype cycle so clearly even the one wrong failure will make it up somewhere.

However, without metrics that show BSoDs from patches (which MS will likely never share), it’s hard to see if things have improved or regressed. If they regressed, someone up in their leadership chain is hopefully following the constructive discussion here.

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