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Microsoft Windows Operating Systems Software Build Hardware Technology

Microsoft Accidentally Released Internal Windows 10 Development Builds (theverge.com) 76

Microsoft is apologizing for mistakenly releasing some confidential and internal Windows 10 builds to the public. "Builds from some of our internal branches were accidentally released for PC and Mobile," reveals Dona Sarkar, Microsoft's head of its Windows Insiders program. "This happened because an inadvertent deployment to the engineering system that controls which builds / which rings to push out to insiders." The Verge reports: Microsoft says it quickly reverted the issue and put blocks in place to ensure these development builds didn't reach more people, but a "small portion" of Windows 10 users still received them. Worryingly, the accidental mobile build even reached retail devices outside of Microsoft's Windows Insiders testing. If Windows 10 testers installed the mobile build it forced phones into a reboot loop and bricked the device. Testers will have to recover and wipe the device using the Windows Device Recovery Tool. Windows 10 testers that installed the PC build, an internal Edge branch, will have to wait for Microsoft to publish a newer build or roll back using the recovery option in Windows 10 settings.
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Microsoft Accidentally Released Internal Windows 10 Development Builds

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Microsoft is evil and does not care about the best interests of their customers. These updates are harmful but users don't have a choice other than Windows 10 because Microsoft is a monopoly. Odumba should have issued an executive order to break up Microsoft for violating antitrust laws.

    • I'm doing security consulting for a living. Many of our customers are currently evaluating a replacement for their aging Windows 7 systems. And quite a few of them are actually and seriously considering moving away from Windows rather than moving towards Win10, or at the very least putting some money behind evaluating whether such a move is feasible.

      Can you imagine just HOW much this spyware has to shake up CEOs that they would rather consider retraining thousands of workers to use a Linux based system than

  • I don't think it means what you think it means...
  • I'm sure Office 365 and Azure customers will be...heartened and encouraged...by this sort of expertise in operations and system management on the part of their cloud service provider.

    Users of their client software, by contrast, can think happy thoughts about how robust and well supervised the release process for Windows updates is.
  • Maybe a bug in source safe or whatever is called the new tool they are using.

    More seriously, I hear the new tool, I forgot the name, is much better than source safe.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Well, they are moving everything to something git-based, which is a _LOT_ of work. Especially because normal git can't handle something that massive, so it is actually a diffused, virtual networked git object storage, with every other CI and deployment tool needing to be migrated to this new backend.

      Someone likely screwed up on one of the provisioning tools, or a new tool was easy enough to misuse, and someone got confused (for real, or on purpose -- lots of people there are not really happy that they need

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday June 02, 2017 @05:20PM (#54538969)

    Gee, if you didn't tell us it wasn't intentional, we probably wouldn't have been able to distinguish it from any other update.

    • by Megane ( 129182 )
      But that was only the "mobile" build, so the damage was limited to the thirty or so actual users of Windows Phone.
  • by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Friday June 02, 2017 @05:33PM (#54539059) Journal

    I must have been using an accidentally released internal build all these years.

  • Proving that Microsoft is systemically incompetent.
  • Debug Symbols? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Friday June 02, 2017 @05:41PM (#54539117) Homepage Journal

    Did the builds have debug symbols? That would be a goldmine for reverse-engineers.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You can get Public symbols for most builds via http from Microsoft. These contain enough information to get you a stack trace but not local variables or source code file/line index information. Consult the Debugging Tools for Windows documentation if you want the nitty-gritty details.

    • If only. You need to download the debugging symbols to make any sense of BSOD crash reports. That's always fun trying to find out why a new machine is crashing. First step: Download several hundred MB for your build
      Step two: Install a few programs that really should be part of the windows installation in the first place.
      Step three: Follow some online guides and realise that your BSOD is nearly always caused by some dll with Mcafee in the publisher name.

  • ... were bricked?

    All three of them?

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of space and time. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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