Serious flaw discovered in Windows Vista's Explorer


Recommended Posts

Instead of admitting that you blew it way out of proportion you choose to call everybody else fanboys? Comon, you could do better than that.

I've edited the original post. As far as the title, I posted this very late last night. Yes, I agree, the title could have been better worded, but the amount of disrespect is uncalled for. This isn't a personal attack on you, or anyone else, this is a general comment to the state of what has transpired. I don't want any more flaming to go on, it's a shame to see this happen on one of Microsoft's featured communities.

At this point, I'd like to ask a moderator to delete this thread.

I've edited the original post. As far as the title, I posted this very late last night. Yes, I agree, the title could have been better worded, but the amount of disrespect is uncalled for. This isn't a personal attack on you, or anyone else, this is a general comment to the state of what has transpired. I don't want any more flaming to go on, it's a shame to see this happen on one of Microsoft's featured communities.

At this point, I'd like to ask a moderator to delete this thread.

Why delete the thread if the information is accurate? Do you just prefer it gone for the flaming you are receiving? I personally don't see the seriousness of the flaw nor understand if using a NOT boolean argument in a search was such a common practice that it wasn't found until now. If explorer.exe terminates unexpectly and immediately reboots it's just like any other explorer.exe crash so where's the big issue? :blink:

Was that a joke? What's the big issue? Kristan is trying to make Windows better. You obviously could not care less for it. "what's the big issue" It is an explorer crash! I mean FFS! Are you going to claim to be part of the Windows Communitiy with a mindset like that? I would think one of the ohhh maybe top 3 resposibilites of a member of the Windows Community/ Windows enthusiast would be trying to make Windows better... It seems with you that you have given up on Windows and say "Hah Windows sucks, it crashes all the time."

As an experienced forum admin I would like to offer the following advice

@iCeFuSiOn....when posting on a forum where the average member age appears to be 14 and the average member iq appears to be 0, be careful how you word your posts.

@email flamers....if you have'nt got the guts to speak out publicly and instead resort to flaming in private, you need to reexamine your values.

It seems that you posted with a sensationalist headline in order to "rouse the community". It sounds like your intention was for Microsoft to receive negative attention - a small price to pay, no doubt, for raising awareness of the issue at hand - and found out the hard way that sensationalism is a double-edged sword.

Its unfortunate that you were the unwitting victim of your own devices here, but I think there was a lesson to learn, and it hasn't been picked up. How could the initial situation have been handled better?

You could very easily have written an objective post detailing the discovery of a bug in the usage of boolean operators which appears to lead to crashes of the shell under certain circumstances. Instead, you chose to flag this as a "serious flaw" and tried to spark off an emotional response in your readers to go yell at Microsoft for being a bunch of lazy *uckups. You've also wiped the original post, and source. Great job with the running away, but not an entirely laudable thing to do.

You could have followed up with more details of Microsoft's alleged irresponsibility in patching bugs commonly experienced by users of pre-SP1, and not addressed in SP1. But you choose not to take time to do that, and instead published with one bug example (which was contradicted by other users of SP1 RC shortly afterwards). Please understand that this weakened your point of how Microsoft will overlook user reported issues (and I agree, they do, and they need to reassess their user experience quality).

Now you've made some mistakes, drew fire on an obviously controversial topic (although you intended Microsoft to receive most of the flak from your article), and still you persist in non-objective responses, trying to arouse sympathy within the community. Well, I can be partially sympathetic, but really, you were the one playing with matches in a field of dry straw, and instead of burning down Neighbor Bill's farm, you burned down your own. But please don't try and erase your mistakes. You've acknowledged that you didn't handle things as well as you could have, and that's a great first step, but don't erase the dialogue that has been generated from all this. You've received childish responses. That's fine. Ignore them. When folks raise valid points, address them, and let them contribute to the dialogue. You're still raising awareness within the community when you're doing this, unlike when you just give up, wipe everything, and run away.

I've edited the original post. As far as the title, I posted this very late last night. Yes, I agree, the title could have been better worded, but the amount of disrespect is uncalled for. This isn't a personal attack on you, or anyone else, this is a general comment to the state of what has transpired. I don't want any more flaming to go on, it's a shame to see this happen on one of Microsoft's featured communities.

At this point, I'd like to ask a moderator to delete this thread.

I didn't see much problems as far as your original post goes, but I have to say I was indeed pretty frustrated that the title led me to believe there's actually a "serious flaw", and by that I (and I presume most people) assumed it was a security flaw.

As far as I could see all the angry posts were directed at your choice of title, not much (if any) were directed at you personally, so I'm not sure what you have to be so sensitive about.

And I'd think that it's not much of an expectation from the general public that these kinds of reports are accurate in both information and magnitude, what's to be surprised about when a gross exaggeration is met with negative attitudes?

It seems that you posted with a sensationalist headline in order to "rouse the community". It sounds like your intention was for Microsoft to receive negative attention - a small price to pay, no doubt, for raising awareness of the issue at hand - and found out the hard way that sensationalism is a double-edged sword.

Its unfortunate that you were the unwitting victim of your own devices here, but I think there was a lesson to learn, and it hasn't been picked up. How could the initial situation have been handled better?

You could very easily have written an objective post detailing the discovery of a bug in the usage of boolean operators which appears to lead to crashes of the shell under certain circumstances. Instead, you chose to flag this as a "serious flaw" and tried to spark off an emotional response in your readers to go yell at Microsoft for being a bunch of lazy *uckups. You've also wiped the original post, and source. Great job with the running away, but not an entirely laudable thing to do.

You could have followed up with more details of Microsoft's alleged irresponsibility in patching bugs commonly experienced by users of pre-SP1, and not addressed in SP1. But you choose not to take time to do that, and instead published with one bug example (which was contradicted by other users of SP1 RC shortly afterwards). Please understand that this weakened your point of how Microsoft will overlook user reported issues (and I agree, they do, and they need to reassess their user experience quality).

Now you've made some mistakes, drew fire on an obviously controversial topic (although you intended Microsoft to receive most of the flak from your article), and still you persist in non-objective responses, trying to arouse sympathy within the community. Well, I can be partially sympathetic, but really, you were the one playing with matches in a field of dry straw, and instead of burning down Neighbor Bill's farm, you burned down your own. But please don't try and erase your mistakes. You've acknowledged that you didn't handle things as well as you could have, and that's a great first step, but don't erase the dialogue that has been generated from all this. You've received childish responses. That's fine. Ignore them. When folks raise valid points, address them, and let them contribute to the dialogue. You're still raising awareness within the community when you're doing this, unlike when you just give up, wipe everything, and run away.

I was going to comment on this affair but this post said everything I wanted to say.

Fanboyism is nothing new, it has been part of the internet for years, and will always continue to be part of the internet. Without making this sound rude, a lot of sceners seem to be falling in on their own egos and believing their own self-hype, and the problem is that if you write sensationalist articles like this, you are bound to draw some criticism from people, that is what the internet is like, and it has to be something you are willing to accept if you are going to blog about these kind of matters. I would also like to point out that including your personal email address in any blog post is also inveterantly stupid, and is really just asking for trouble, because at the end of the day that is what comments are there for.

I value everyone's contributions from the scene, but if people can't take the heat of what they post then I personally have no sympathy for them, it is a simple fact that no matter what your opinion is someone IS gonna flame you for it because the internet is a wide bed of such diverse opinions.

actually serious flaw is $400 off the bank account due to an 'ultimate POS' that is full of flaws/bugs/annoyances and ultimately is obfuscated by its 6 years old predecessor... great pos.... we all should be wow'ed

edit: wow bold

Edited by Jock Horror

This is a fluke on certain people's systems. I've tried it on three different systems, two that don't have SP1 and one that does and it only happened once. I don't see why anyone would be trying to search for everything on their system that isn't a shortcut in the first place.

This thread is going no where and only serves the purpose for those who hate Vista to bash Vista and for those who love Vista to bash those who don't.

thread closed

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • Micron reveals AI companies are spending billions to lock up its memory years in advance by Karthik Mudaliar The demand for more memory is far from over, and Micron is turning the AI-driven memory shortage into a much more predictable business. The company has revealed that it has signed 16 strategic supply agreements backed by roughly $22 billion in customer deposits and other financial commitments. The contracts cover DRAM and NAND deliveries over several years, with some running through 2030. With the AI boom, demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has grown so quickly that large customers are now prepared to help finance future production in exchange for a guaranteed supply. According to Micron’s latest financial results, the company received commitments worth about $22 billion across its new agreements. Around $18 billion is expected to arrive as cash deposits, while the rest will come through other financial arrangements. Micron says the agreements could generate approximately $100 billion in future contracted obligations. They cover around 20% of its expected DRAM shipments and one-third of its NAND shipments during their respective terms. It should be noted that although AI infrastructure is the main force behind the current shortage, not all 16 agreements with Micron involve AI companies. Micron said the customers also include consumer electronics and automotive businesses, two sectors that increasingly compete with data centers for the same manufacturing capacity. HBM is consuming an increasing share of that supply. Unlike conventional desktop or server RAM, HBM stacks multiple memory dies vertically and places them close to an AI accelerator. This gives GPUs and other AI chips access to data at much higher speeds, but it also requires more complicated manufacturing and packaging. Micron says its 12-layer HBM4 memory is now shipping in high volume for a lead customer, with samples also supplied to other companies. The chipmaker has already generated more than $1 billion in HBM4 revenue and says the product is ramping twice as quickly as its earlier HBM3E generation. Samsung has similarly warned that the memory shortage could continue into 2027 and beyond. Consumer memory companies have also had to address sharp increases in DDR5 pricing, suggesting the effects are already reaching beyond the data center. For consumers, that could mean the AI memory crunch lasts longer than expected, even as manufacturers invest heavily in new production.
    • XnConvert 1.112 by Razvan Serea  XnConvert is a cross-platform batch image-converter and resizer with a powerful and ease of use experience. All common picture and graphics formats are supported (i.e. JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, Camera RAW, JPEG2000, WebP, OpenEXR) as well as supporting over 500 other image formats. Also available within the batch operations include rotating, adding of watermarks, adding of text along with many image-adjustment features such as brightness, shadows and more. Among the features included are: Batch adding of files and folders Support for drag and drop of files Batch rotating, cropping, resizing and more Adding of photo masks Preserving or removing image metadata in conversions Multipage image file support (i.e animated GIF, APNG, TIFF) Command line integration via NConvert Filters - such as 'Blur', 'Gaussian Blur', 'Emboss', "Sharpen' and much more Effects - such as 'Old camera' and much more Download: XnConvert 64-bit | Standalone | ~30.0 MB (Freeware) Download: XnConvert 32-bit | Standalone Links: XnConvert Website | Screenshot | Release Announcement Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
    • Microsoft updates Visual Studio Code with chat cost tracking and multi-agent chats by Paul Hill Microsoft has just launched Visual Studio Code 1.126, its latest weekly release. This time, the company has focused on letting you see the total cost of chat sessions to spot expensive conversations; enabling multiple chats per session that run side-by-side in one agent host Copilot session; and letting you browse new folders safely in restricted mode. We have now reached the stage where free AI in IDEs is coming to an end. To help you keep track of your costs, VS Code now lets you see the entire cost of a chat session, rather than just individual turns. This should give you more transparency about which sessions consume the most credits, so you can better manage your usage over time and spend less. For those of you using the Agents window, you know it is possible to run and manage multiple agent sessions at once. In this update, a Copilot session started from an agent host can hold several chats at once. Explaining how this feature works, Microsoft writes: Finally, from this update forward, Microsoft will remove the pop-up when opening an untrusted folder. When you open a new folder now, it will automatically open in Restricted Mode. You will see a banner that lets you manage the trust level of the folder. Microsoft has made this change so that it’s easier to start inspecting code without giving it trust right away. If you have VS Code, you can check for updates within the app now to get this new version. Otherwise, you can download it from the Visual Studio Code website.
    • Anthropic accuses Alibaba of using 25,000 fake accounts to copy Claude's capabilities by Karthik Mudaliar Anthropic has accused Alibaba of using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to extract capabilities from Claude on a huge scale. According to a report from Reuters, Anthropic told US lawmakers that operators linked to Alibaba and the company’s Qwen AI team generated 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April 22 and June 5, 2026. That is a lot of Claude conversations, but Anthropic says this was not ordinary chatbot use. The company believes the accounts were part of a coordinated effort to collect answers that could help train or improve rival AI systems. The alleged campaign reportedly focused on some of Claude’s most valuable skills, including software development, multi-step reasoning, and agentic tasks. In practical terms, that means getting an AI model to plan and complete work across several stages rather than simply answering a single question. This is called 'distillation,' where AI companies use outputs from a larger model to train a smaller and cheaper one. The smaller model learns to imitate useful parts of the more capable system without needing the same amount of computing power. The distillation process isn't automatically suspicious, but the problem comes when one company gathers another provider's outputs without permission and at an industrial scale. Also, this does not mean Alibaba obtained Claude’s source code, model weights, or original training data. Instead, Anthropic claims the accounts repeatedly asked Claude carefully designed questions and collected the answers. Those answers could then be used as training material for another model. Anthropic has made similar accusations against DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax earlier this year. As Neowin previously reported, Anthropic said those three companies collectively generated more than 16 million Claude exchanges through roughly 24,000 accounts. Anthropic says the new campaign produced almost twice as many exchanges in a matter of weeks. Anthropic reportedly told lawmakers that the campaign could help Chinese AI developers approach the capabilities of its Mythos Preview model. Mythos is focused on advanced cybersecurity work, including finding and exploiting complex software vulnerabilities. via Reuters | Photo via DepositPhotos.com
    • An Indian manufacturer that assembles roughly one-third of Apple's iPhones and supplies semiconductor components to Tesla confirmed Monday that attackers had stolen and publicly published a 630-gigabyte cache of confidential files — including engineering blueprints stamped "TRADE SECRET," a 52-page quality inspection document for iPhone circuit board components, and cryptographic certificates that security experts say could be weaponized in follow-on attacks. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319019/20260624/apple-tesla-supplier-tata-electronics-confirms-630-gb-data-theft-iphone-specs-dark-web.htm
  • Recent Achievements

    • Rookie
      krychek57 went up a rank
      Rookie
    • Grand Master
      Jaybonaut went up a rank
      Grand Master
    • One Year In
      Philsl earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Dedicated
      Scoobystu earned a badge
      Dedicated
    • First Post
      Tom Schmidt earned a badge
      First Post
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      441
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      176
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      133
    4. 4
      Michael Scrip
      79
    5. 5
      Xenon
      77
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!