We urgently need a beta

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erkinalp
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We urgently need a beta

Post by erkinalp »

Windows 10 update 1809 deletes user data and can no longer be considered stable from user standpoint. We need to accelerate the development and have more manpower. Windows is unusable* before its replacement got usable.
*It deletes user data while downloading the update. Even Microsoft staff do not know how to recover affected data. This update has been pulled.
Last edited by erkinalp on Sat Oct 06, 2018 9:40 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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gonzoMD
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by gonzoMD »

The same talk like it has been, when the win xp support ended...
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dizt3mp3r
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by dizt3mp3r »

Top tip No.1: Never place any important data within a Windows profile, complete data loss will result eventually. Profile corruption is the worst to be feared... Stick it on a folder outside the Windows o/s structure. Once burnt, your fingers will hesitate to enter the same place again.

Top tip No.2: Never raise a post stating that ReactOS needs to speed up development or it will...(replace with your own text) . Posts like this come regularly if not so often these days but are seldomly received well by the community nor the developers. It will also have little effect on the speed of development unless you yourself are prepared to pay for the developers.
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erkinalp
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by erkinalp »

Stick it on a folder outside the Windows o/s structure.
It unfortunately affects even if it is on a different drive this time. And it forcibly deletes. It is different from previous occasions in these regards.
This will actually be a good publicity for ReactOS, though; as ReactOS loses less data than Windows in similar circumstances.
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dizt3mp3r
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by dizt3mp3r »

No, it is not deleting data elsewhere. The bug is removing old profiles and the user's data within that structure. It does not affect your data if you place it elsewhere on your drive. Placing it in a the root and simply calling it c:\stuff is safer.

As I have always stated, never place your data within the Windows profile structure, sooner or later you will lose everything to the Demon God Microsoft.
Skillset: VMS,DOS,Windows Sysadmin from 1985, fault-tolerance, VaxCluster, Alpha,Sparc. DCL,QB,VBDOS- VB6,.NET, PHP,NODE.JS, Graphic Design, Project Manager, CMS, Quad Electronics. classic cars & m'bikes. Artist in water & oils. Historian.
Ancient
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by Ancient »

erkinalp wrote: Fri Oct 05, 2018 7:59 pm Windows 10 update 1809 deletes user data and can no longer be considered stable from user standpoint. We need to accelerate the development and have more manpower. Otherwise, Windows will be unusable before its replacement gets usable.
As long as Office and popular video games run on Windows, people will use it. Windows as a product has gone from stability issues to being essentially malware by design. We need alternatives. RoS can be an alternative, but it fails to garner sufficient support to complete it's beta on a timely basis.
erkinalp
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by erkinalp »

This is a result of not paying for a proprietary software. You become the product.
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Ancient
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by Ancient »

erkinalp wrote: Sat Oct 06, 2018 6:37 pm This is a result of not paying for a proprietary software. You become the product.
Consider this, which version the open source (not really due to binary blobs) Android operating system can be installed on a cell phone and does not spy on you for Google and friends? Heck most cell phones do not a a MMU in their GPU by design. This means no protection against reading and writing anything in RAM. Without an MMU, an application once installed can direct reads and writes to storage beyond itself without regards to security. So write small almost invisible pixel at a time pieces of code, and read them back to your application, determine what version of Android and what cell phone variant you are on, then write to operating system code to modify as desired. Without an MMU there is no enforced hardware check for privilege escalation or for reading and writing out of bounds memory. For AMD and Intel we have MMU's, but also a security system which is undocumented, proprietary, can modify even microcode, and is contained at least in a binary blob called the BIOS, but also Google has a binary blob or two in Chromium.

To avoid being the product, we need to know how security is implemented, and to be able to limit access to programs which can open back doors or modify instructions. Tests run trying to determine how many undocumented instructions exist on Intel and AMD systems indicate about 1/3 of the instruction set is not documented. At least one instruction was found by an MIT researcher which hard crashed systems 100% of the time and was executable from user state. We don't know what Intel and AMD do not document, the same is true of ARM.

Open source in a binary blob world with 1/3 of our instructions masked and security totally uncontrollable by end users isn't exactly a panacea. We may limit damage, and may limit spying, but we can't claim control of even basic hardware anymore.
andreas84
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by andreas84 »

There is the little problem that windows is not the deepest malware but intel does ship with an extra subsystem that can take control over the computer means that unless ros does actively disable this the computer would itself still be malware.

The question is of course if thats all, or if your hd manufacturer also has his own malware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
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Konata
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by Konata »

A massive corporation like Microsoft releases one little bug and you deem them incapable?

If Microsoft of all people can't squash 100% of bugs, you think anyone else is? Are you delusional? Even better, you think ReactOS slapping "beta" on itself is going to make it bug-free? Well, maybe it will with your guidance, you seem to be all-knowing and incapable of writing bugs, if you seem to think you're better than dozens of highly-trained engineers.
erkinalp
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by erkinalp »

The question is of course if thats all, or if your hd manufacturer also has his own malware
The solution is easy. You would also install the ReactOS as your HDD's OS. Turtles all the way down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments ... _firmware/
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andreas84
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by andreas84 »

erkinalp wrote: Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:45 pm
The question is of course if thats all, or if your hd manufacturer also has his own malware
The solution is easy. You would also install the ReactOS as your HDD's OS. Turtles all the way down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments ... _firmware/
Here the quote from wikipedia:
The Intel Management Engine (ME), also known as the Manageability Engine,[1][2] is an autonomous subsystem that has been incorporated in virtually all of Intel's processor chipsets since 2008.[3][4][1]
it continues to run even when the system is turned off.[6] Its exact workings[8] are largely undocumented[9] and its code is obfuscated using confidential huffman tables stored directly in hardware, so the firmware does not contain the information necessary to decode its contents.[10]
AMT (a subsystem) enables owners remote administration of their computer
Strictly speaking, none of the known methods disables the ME completely, since it is required for booting the main CPU.
The ME has its own MAC and IP address for the out-of-band interface, with direct access to the Ethernet controller; one portion of the Ethernet traffic is diverted to the ME even before reaching the host's operating system
Put in short intel has a internet accessible rootkit on every processor, which circumvents the os completely, no way to disable, no way to avoid with any os. I really do not care much about the hd.
Quim
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by Quim »

andreas84 wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 12:23 am
Put in short intel has a internet accessible rootkit on every processor, which circumvents the os completely, no way to disable, no way to avoid with any os. I really do not care much about the hd.
According to some info, in Europe there are some people that brings machines with Intel ME disabled by modifing the necesary components to just delete all possible components from Intel ME...
More info:

http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disa ... e.html?m=1

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... E-Cleaning

https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner

https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intelme

One is http://System76.com .

Another thing could be BIOS and UEFI update like 'LibreBoot' to replace default BIOS/UEFI.
Walt
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by Walt »

Never raise a post stating that ReactOS needs to speed up development or it will...(replace with your own text) . Posts like this come regularly if not so often these days but are seldomly received well by the community nor the developers. It will also have little effect on the speed of development unless you yourself are prepared to pay for the developers.
Probably many new folks here pick at that open wound; I believe I can claim to be the most recent one with a too-long sequence arguing as this poster does for a focus on clearing the mainstream of ROS use of enough bugs to allow limited day-to-day use. To the extent that there was a consensus answer it was (a) It's going as fast as it can go; (b) What you suggest is already being done; (c) Developers will do what they want to do; and, (d) You (Walt) should do more.

All inarguable because they're effectively definitions.

I am continuing a promised tiny effort. I have a laptop -- Dell Latitude D610 -- that's dedicated to ROS. Once a week I download and install the latest nightly build. The goal is to boot to a working desktop, with a working Ethernet connection; multiple attempts allowed, any success is scored as a success for that build. I haven't kept exact count but in six weeks it's maybe 50%? The failures look pretty much the same -- BSODs, hangs -- more or less at random. There are often signs of file damage. If I were a debugger I would look first for a glitch in the file system since damaged files will produce all the other symptoms including 'This seems to work okay' when the damage is in a place that's not used very often.

Six weeks is a very long time in the life of a single bug or weak place in code if anyone's working on it. I did that job for a couple decades (IBM 360/370 world) and most of them yielded in more like six hours. I conclude that whatever is (mostly) in the way of getting to a working desktop is not currently a priority.
Put in short intel has a internet accessible rootkit on every processor, which circumvents the os completely, no way to disable, no way to avoid with any os. I really do not care much about the hd.
A very large fraction of personal computers are bought/used by large organizations. Organizations need to be able to manage their computers -- diagnose, update, back up, etc. -- without sending people to every office. The Management Engine is the next step from an OS capability that surfaced (AFAIK) in Dell systems around 2005 as a Dell driver update to XP. I've just finished deleting all that -- there are 6-8 separate tasks running to implement it -- in a new XP install on another Dell laptop. Look for 'broadcom' and 'management' in the description of the update and/or 'broadcom' as the supplier of an autorun.

I can't argue with the organizational goal but of course the ME is also in the chipset/firmware for personal machines where its potential uses are far darker. Obviously that has no software solution; Quim's comment.
Put in short intel has a internet accessible rootkit on every processor, which circumvents the os completely, no way to disable, no way to avoid with any os. I really do not care much about the hd.
is noted. Older computers (earlier chipsets) are another answer.

And once again an opportunity for ReactOS as XP fades away.
ThFabba
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Re: We urgently need a beta

Post by ThFabba »

Walt wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 8:12 pm Six weeks is a very long time in the life of a single bug or weak place in code if anyone's working on it. I did that job for a couple decades (IBM 360/370 world) and most of them yielded in more like six hours. I conclude that whatever is (mostly) in the way of getting to a working desktop is not currently a priority.
It sounds like you're not accounting for the fact that we have zero full-time employees, and hundreds of such bugs.
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