Earlier today, Microsoft pushed a promotional message to early adopters of Windows 11. The promo intended to promote the upcoming operating system’s integration with Microsoft Teams. Instead, it caused Explorer (the Windows desktop shell) to stop responding and left users without a working Start menu and taskbar.
[…]Based on the Microsoft-provided workaround, I narrowed the problem down to a registry key that contained a serialized JSON blob. The blob contained an advertisement for Microsoft Teams. The messaging and imagery in the promotion were identical to the panel you get when you press the Windows key + C on a Windows account not already set up with Teams. It’s unclear if it’s this exact promotion, however.
Microsoft broke every single Windows 11 computer through an ad. Windows users – you can choose a better way.
Well, not every Win11, I didn’t notice any of this. Two things: i). always after every update scour through the whole system and disable everything “stupid”, and ii). if such a thing as the above happens (which it does, this is windows after all) then just do one of the oldest explorer restarts: ctrl+shft+esc the task manager and run explorer from the task manager’s file menu.
Oh, ads are bad 🙂 Kids, don’t do ads 🙂 And go ahead and fire whomever came up with the idea of putting json blobs in a reg key for whatever reason 😛
l3v1,
Spammy advertising has invaded every aspect of our lives, it was just a matter of time before it happened to our operating systems 🙁
This should apply to the whole registry, it’s been completely abused, haha. There needs to be a better way to associate settings with the applications that need them because it accumulates garbage over the years using more and more resources. It’s easier to just reinstall windows than to try and clean it out. Some programs even use it as a cache. Many things could be done better in hindsight, but old operating systems have stuck us with plenty of legacy baggage.
Anyways I wonder what the json blobs actually contain? Do windows ads contain code capable of running on user machines? If so, what security context do they run as? I expect windows ads would be vetted by microsoft, but I wonder about weakness that could potentially leave users vulnerable because of ads? Evidently they are already vulnerable to denial of service attacks today, but remote execution capability could make things worse.
There is, since Windows XP, applications manifests with xcopy installs, but not even Microsoft own teams read their own documentation for developers, so registry prevails.
Ah, it was nice in the days of the Atari ST when you basically had file associations and icon locations on the desktop saved in NEWDESK.INF and if you screwed that up, it was easy to load the OS that was in ROM and fix it. Or it wasn’t the end of the world if you nuked it either.
Of course these days there are just too many file associations being needed and one little mis-type to the registry and your whole system could collapse.
I do have a mantra established now, when something, anything, goes wrong, I just say “I Blame Teams”. Sounds like Microsoft can do the same now!
That’s why I rather generate ini files instead to mess with the reg, even though I can admit it solved many problems by having a way to access system wide settings. Making “portable” apps requires ini files anyway.
Like a low level portability layer things like INI files are part of removing dependencies. If someone absolutely insists on using the registry this should be wrapped by a higher level abstraction which facilitates portable mechanisms like INI files. If your average developer did this every single time they coded an application porting to other platforms would be as easy as changing build target. One click. Done.
None of these techniques is a mystery. None of them involve that much work. In many cases solid reference code is available only one #include away.
If more people did this it would keep the competing OS platforms on their toes instead of taking people for granted.
Blaming Bill Gates since the 90’s
Yeah, I was really hopeful that application manifests would dominants. They really should. Having said that I haven’t been a victim of a registry screw up in some time. I think thats a byproduct of not using many windows applications. So much is online these days.
I also didn’t have Windows 11 break today. The only issue I had today was with Bluetooth not auto pairing correctly. I doubt that was related to this.
Valve have made games run on-par if not better than Windows – (except VR)
There’s hardly any reason for the gaming community to even run Windows these days.
Not all game are there and the graphic card driver support is sur-par with Windows. Plus many professional applications are not on Linux, so no, you can still forget it for now.
I did choose a better way. That’s why I have a Macbook Pro.
MacOS11 with wine/CrossOver for Windows Apps is far more secure then running Windows these days and avoids the ads and telemetry.