Windows 10 debuts Blue QR Code of Death – and why malware will love it Microsoft has added a QR code to its infamous Blue Screen of Death in Windows 10. As of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 14316, when the operating system falls over, you get not only the sad ASCII smiley but also a QR square that contains an encoded URL that leads you to a webpage about your problem. Scan it with a smartphone …
Since a QR code looks like one of the sides of the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser...cant they just make it so that Windows users get dragged to hell by Ballmer dressed as Pinhead followed by his other cenobites one with a lip piercing containing a Clippy where they have "such sights to show you" and an "eternity to know your flesh".
If that doesnt get people off Windows I dont know what will.
Ive always imagined Microsoft Hell (coming soon) to be coloured using the NT4 pallete and be plastered with progress bars stuck at 99%.
Teal....lots of teal.
Then you've got far more immediate and bigger problems. I suppose there is an outside chance that a customer / user in an org might take a picture, send it to tech support, they scan it, unwittingly follow a URL and just so happen to do it in a vulnerable browser. But it seems like a tenuous chain for an attack to succeed.
This is what happens when you fire the engineers and hire fuckwits.
I imagine a room full of twenty-somethings in blue shirts spitballing what the next "great" feature of Windows 10 will be in the usual atmosphere of texting and browsing on smartphones instead of "being there". Someone looks up from a cat video, aware that he must contribute something today, looks down again at the glass slab in his hand and says "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if ..."
"If MSFT had announced a cure for the common cold, El Reg hacks would think of 6 reaaons why that's BAAD"
Well, a proper dose of arsenic, ricin, or strychnine will permanently cure the common cold*.
The point is, I think it's less El Reg attacking the intent, than shaking its head at the implementation.
*Ask you doctor before using, if he agrees, get a different doctor. :)
If MSFT had announced a cure for the common cold, El Reg hacks would think of 6 reaaons why that's BAAD
That would depend on what they were proposing. For example, if they proposed that the best way to cure a headache, runny nose and sore throat was to cut your head off, I'm sure that somebody would object.
It's been so long since I've seen a BSOD on a Windows box that it took me a few seconds to remember what a BSOD is. The last time I had one was when I installed some defective "brand new" memory--around about 1999, or maybe 2000 (memtest confirmed the problem for me). After that happened, I kept a small spare machine around just for testing new hardware of any kind, or for testing older hardware that seemed to have failed.
The closest I've come to such a problem was a few months ago, after updating my video driver. A resizing operation inside of Photoshop suddenly starting failing, but at least I got a nice clear message that the problem was, in fact, in the video driver. Not really a crash, more of an inability to perform the operation. Rolled-back the driver and was fine.
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