Part two of “Updated Windows Security”

Software needs updating. After lots of people start using it over a long period of time, they find problems that the authors missed. Things don’t work properly in some situations. Worst of all are the bugs the cause the program to “crash”. What do we actually mean by “crash”?

When a program is running, sometimes things go wrong. For example, It asks you for your height and you answer 75 meters, that doesn’t make sense. Programs trap that sort of thing. These are expected problems. Its the unexpected problems that are dangerous. For example, the program asks your height and you answer “gibberish, rubbish garbage, crap crap crap, yada yada go to hard disk, erase files, garbage gibberish” or something like that. The programmer had no idea you would ever do this and made no provision for it. We knew what to do when you put in 75 meters, that was clearly too big. But pages and pages of text - well what the photon?

There being no trap for this type of problem the program just goes on doing what it does. It takes this “height” figure you entered and tries to use it. Well imagine trying to divide that “height” by 2.54 to get inches. This just isn't going to work out is it? That is the sort of thing that causes a crash. The train is off the rails and ploughing across the paddock. What happens next is the program tries to come back on track and what it thinks is the next instruction turns out to be our “go to hard disk, erase files” bit we typed in. Bingo a hacker is in.

Hacking is based around causing a program to crash by doing something unexpected and in crashing, cause the program to accept instructions we inserted into it. Right now every serious hacker should read my mission statement and realise I am trying to explain an incredibly complex process to non-technical people. Hopefully they have stopped screaming at me.

So the point of all the rant above is to say programs will need patching. That a fact of life.

Microsoft’s process for patching is two fold. First the really urgent stuff is pushed out as ‘Windows Updates”. This happens on the second Tuesday of every month. (“Patch Tuesday”) Unless there is something super urgent in which case they push it sooner. Secondly, when there are lots of patches they make a Service Pack containing all the patches in one bundle. So it goes patch, patch...patch, Service Pack 1, patch, patch..patch, Service Pack 2... etc

Microsoft waited a long time after Service Pack 2. There were over a hundred individual patches you needed AFTER you installed SP2.

Then along came SP3. Its a monster upgrade. Really big. Regrettably it breaks a few things. If your computer has an AMD chip (instead of an Intel chip) there is a good chance (a real risk) that SP3 will break it such that it won’t boot. It’ll get stuck in a loop, rebooting, Blue Screen of Death, reboot...over and over. Luckily this is easy to fix.

Another thing SP3 changes is the Terminal Server client. The new one won’t work with really old terminal servers. Again easy to fix.

In short there are quite a few issues with SP3. But you really have to have it. If you don’t you could easily get hacked by something that has been know about for ages and fixed a long time ago.