Daily Archives: 2025-10-20

Microsoft breaks USB input in Windows Recovery Environment

Source: OSNews

Article note: If "Microsoft dogfoods their own AI tools, resulting in massive breakage of customer-facing code as AI slop poorly vetted by overworked engineers starts to pervade products" turns out to be true, my spite laugh might be so hard I risk suffocation. The tech industry is overdue for another decadence-related collapse, the leadership have been huffing their own farts for too long.

With official support for Windows 10 having officially ended a few days ago, let’s take a look and see how its successor, Windows 11, is doing.

Microsoft released the first Patch Tuesday update (KB5066835) for Windows 11 25H2 this past week and it is probably fair to say that it has been a rough start for the new feature update. Despite the announcement of a wide rollout wherein the new version is now available for download for everyone, the company has already confirmed large-scale issues.

First up, Microsoft was forced to issue an emergency workaround as the update broke localhost auth and following that the company today has confirmed another problem where recovery can become impossible if you happen to use a USB keyboard or mouse.

↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

Yes. This is a real thing. This latest round of patches makes it entirely impossible to navigate the Windows Recovery Environment with USB keyboards and mice. Since it’s 2025, USB is probably the protocol through which most people connect their keyboard and mice (although to be fair, some laptops probably still default to internal PS/2 for their touchpads). This means that if you run into a problem with Windows 11 that requires you to access the Windows Recovery Environment – perhaps OneDrive did too many lines of cocaine again – you can’t actually do anything inside of it.

There’s no fix yet, so you either remove the offending patches, hope your PC still has a PS/2 port and you still have PS/2 peripherals, or hope Windows 11 won’t fall over and die until Microsoft releases a fix for the issue. Of course, people still using Windows 10, people who aren’t installing every single Windows 11 update as they become available, and people using real operating systems have nothing to worry about.

You can’t help but wonder, though – with Microsoft pushing “AI” so hard, how many of these recent faceplants are the result of Microsoft engineers frantically trying to meet code quotas using Copilot?

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Today is when the Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Source: The Register

Article note: This seems like an appropriate take. The engineering org has become famously unpleasant, the best people left, the remaining employees are all stressed and overworked, and now we get to see what happens when the world's largest egg basket starts to become unstable. I suspect the answer will be "A lot of the cloud bullshit from the last decade slowly gets unwound." That will probably provide a lot of good work for a lot of decent sysadmins, and leave a lot of I-can-run-AWS-cookbooks "Devops" folks less employable, more or less as happens every few decades when the big central / small distributed pendulum reverses.

When your best engineers log off for good, don’t be surprised when the cloud forgets how DNS works

column  "It's always DNS" is a long-standing sysadmin saw, and with good reason: a disproportionate number of outages are at their heart DNS issues. And so today, as AWS is still repairing its downed cloud as this article goes to press, it becomes clear that the culprit is once again DNS. But if you or I know this, AWS certainly does.…

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