Microsoft Accidentally Leaks Internal Utility for Testing New Windows 11 Features (arstechnica.com) 40
An anonymous reader shares a report: When Microsoft releases new test builds of Windows, there are usually a handful of features that are announced but only actually enabled for a small subset of testers. Sometimes it's because the company is A/B testing a couple of different versions of the same thing or because Microsoft wants to roll out major changes to a few users before rolling them out to everyone. Users normally have little control over whether new features actually appear in their Windows beta installs, but Microsoft has internal software called StagingTool that its own developers can use to switch things on and off themselves.
And now StagingTool has leaked to the public, thanks to a "bug bash" the company is running this week to find and fix problems before the next big batch of new Windows features releases this fall. As reported by The Verge, some bug bash participants were sent on "quests" that explicitly mentioned using the StagingTool to turn on specific features. Those quests and the tool itself have since been removed from Microsoft's servers, but StagingTool is already being freely distributed among Windows enthusiasts who want more control over the features they see.
And now StagingTool has leaked to the public, thanks to a "bug bash" the company is running this week to find and fix problems before the next big batch of new Windows features releases this fall. As reported by The Verge, some bug bash participants were sent on "quests" that explicitly mentioned using the StagingTool to turn on specific features. Those quests and the tool itself have since been removed from Microsoft's servers, but StagingTool is already being freely distributed among Windows enthusiasts who want more control over the features they see.
More right wing conspiracy theories (Score:1)
And now StagingTool has leaked to the public, thanks to a "bug bash" the company is running this week to find and fix problems before the next big batch of new Windows features releases this fall.
I'm sure this was "leaked" just like the Hunter Biden laptop was leaked. Is there any chain of custody to prove this came from Microsoft. If not this is just another conspiracy.
--
Hunter Biden's laptop you're my only hope.
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Hello,
I haven't seen the file myself, but usually program files from Microsoft are digitally-signed by the company.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
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They would sign this tool (Score:2)
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logman.exe is digitally signed (Score:2)
Are you still 100% sure they did not digitally sign it?
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That's true for anything published, but almost certainly not for internal-only tools.
I sign uploads that I deploy from my build box to another machine under the same desk. As much as I doubt Microsoft's skill at locating their own nether regions with their full complement of appendages, digital signing is so trivial that even them might manage to do so.
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Maybe things have changed, but I doubt it. There's no profit in a change and a PM won't get a promo for that change.
Re: More right wing conspiracy theories (Score:1)
https://marcopolousa.org/ [marcopolousa.org]
cool but... (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, but where's the utility to strip out features so you only get the functionality you want?
Windows has been nigh unusable since the end of Windows 7. I don't personally know a single person above helpdesk who doesn't have abject disdain for it at this point. Businesses are asking, "How do we get off Microsoft?" and looking for an exit.
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BTW - anyone have a link to the tool?
Re:cool but... (Score:4, Funny)
/remove would be more useful.
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the venn diagram between people predicting the rise of the linux desktop and saying "windows' time as the OS for businesses is over!" is a circle and theyve been wrong now for what, 20 years now?
dont worry guys, in another 20 years when we are on windows v18 a 88 year old slashdotter will still be saying "microsoft has really done it this time, people are done with it now for sure!"
expand your friend group, millions of people use windows and are fine with it. comments like this make me have abject disdain
Re:cool but... (Score:4)
expand your friend group, millions of people use windows and are fine with it. comments like this make me have abject disdain, but just for you
If find everything after Windows 7 annoying.
But not nearly as annoying as Linux, which I find unusable for desktop purposes.
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What do you consider "desktop"? I see people staying Linux games native or wine feel better than on windows. Don't game myself, but without needing AV that makes sense.
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The real issue, as far as I can see it, is that Linux, (by its fractive nature as over a dozen distros that do things a little differently, but mostly are the same thing) does not hold your wee little hand, and then wrap it up in kitchen mittens and duct tape, like Windows and OSX do.
This means that the "User Experience" on linux is "Worse" for people that have small attention spans, or simply lack the time to learn to actually use a computer, or understand what something inside the OS actually does.
For peo
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For someone who doesn't game much like myself, Steam mostly just works fine with games that are non-Linux native.
As far as Intel/MS goes, that's a conflict of interest, just like AMD/MS since MS making the OS shift gets more sales with Intel/AMD. I don't see that relationship ever ending for desktop. As far as servers go, AMD/Intel are probably running much more Linux in that space, so graphics wasn't a concern. Perhaps they're more linux friendly now with GPU because GPU does compute in servers now?
HP are
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It's more that the linux drivers have a huge army of community programmers pounding away on it, backporting features that "could in theory" be provided on the older iGPUs, but that Intel did not feel was beneficial to their business model of "Selling new shit", combined with the expensive and onerous process of going through all the hoops and jumps of the HWQL submission, testing, and approval process.
For instance, you can get Vulkan 1.2 support on something as old as CherryTrail/Braswell with Linux, but no
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Your last paragraph aligns more with my ethics, I'd rather see a world where old hardware has life rather than throw away good components just because it no longer has software support.
Companies should really get some form of co2 offset-like credit for how long their components are in service, how do do that responsibly I don't know. Some modern components should be able to perform better than older, watt-for-watt.
Working out how much embodied co2 is thrown out vs how much newer hardware saves would be diff
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What else do you call it, when the OS itself flagrantly makes choices for you, actively reverts choices you have gone through multiple hurdles and hoops to set, actively restricts your ability to make changes, and in general, tries everything possible to obfuscate what it is actually doing, and why--
Aside from fucking putting mittens on your wee little hands, and then putting duct tape on, good sir?
There are in fact, some of us out here that do in fact, know what computers actually do. We are not dickheads
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Since the software we use to run the company - and there's nothing else out there that can even begin to meet our needs - won't run on Linux, it is literally useless.
At home, I'm more interested in running programs than fussing with them to get them to run at all - if they can even be made to run under Linux.
Linux makes an excellent server OS. Running several servers on it right now, all command line stuff. But none of the desktops are usable for things I'm interested in doing on a desktop OS, so no thanks.
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You are welcome to that view, but really, it is quite easy to run windows software on linux these days.
Very few programs that are not doing things they shouldnt be (according to microsoft even), will not run these days.
About the only real complaint case are things that use bespoke hardware and drivers (like things that check for a USB dongle, or that use a bespoke PCI card that needs bespoke drivers, and use the win32API in ways microsoft says not to do to talk to it) are real showstoppers these days.
Academic (Score:2)
If find everything after Windows 7 annoying.
But not nearly as annoying as Linux, which I find unusable for desktop purposes.
Researcher in the academic world, here.
Our HPC run Linux and most of the software in the field (including our own) runs on Linux and other unices.
Therefore when you looking around, you mostly see a mix of laptops running Mac OS and Linux (mostly Ubuntu on Lenovos, here around).
There's almost no Windows desktop running on the laptop except for the professor and some admin people.
So it depends on you field of work. But in some places, *Windows* is the unuable one.
But of course if the use case you consider are
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If find everything after Windows 7 annoying.
But not nearly as annoying as Linux, which I find unusable for desktop purposes.
Researcher in the academic world, here.
Our HPC run Linux and most of the software in the field (including our own) runs on Linux and other unices.
We're not you. The software we run the company on, the only viable option for our business, runs on a Linux server with Windows clients. I could spend the rest of my life tinkering with WINE or whatever emulator you want, trying to get the client to run on Linux, and not accomplish my actual job in the meantime, and probably never succeed.
It is, literally, unusable, here at work. At home, I'm not interested in tinkering with getting programs to run at all. I'm far more interested in actually running them.
Mi
Mileage might vary (Score:2)
Mileage varies,
Yup, hence I said this:
as does smugness, like assuming that Word and Excel are the only possible reasons Windows is preferable.
Wait, what? Where do you see smugness, and what has smugness to do with Word and Excel?
Also, those are good example of type of work where people might heavily depend on the Microsoft ecosystem. What's wrong with point them out?
I just a simpler example for me because it's one I know first hand (well, second hand technically as I am not working my self in that team) because our admin people are using it.
Of course, I'm sure one could pick up some indust
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I'm an almost 30 year user of Linux, and am a 40 year user of Unix. I admired Apple until I actually had to use their products. Windows has been a necessary evil because some companies won't produce their product for Linux.
Linux is the only OS where I feel I have actual control and can take measures if things start going bad. My work currently requires MacOS and it's frustrating. Home/End only works in certain applications, kernel_task turns off the network at random times, even when the CPU load and te
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Clearly, you are not competent at admining Windows, and should avoid it.
Taking a long time to boot on archaic, un-updated hardware isn't Windows' fault, it's yours for not a) replacing outdated hardware, and b) not keeping updates current.
But there's very, very little you can control on Linux that I can't control on Windows, one way or another. Harder to find, yes, fussier to get tweaked just right, yes, and those get worse with each new version (as Microsoft tries to be more and more like Apple). But the c
Re: cool but... (Score:2)
Most Linux users are trying to get something done as quckly and efficiently as possible, most windows users are trying to look busy until it is time to clock off. It doesn't matter if it takes 10 times as long to finish a job in Windows than some other OS because you will still have to look busy until clocking off time.
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Businesses are asking, "How do we get off Microsoft?" and looking for an exit.
Remember Wehavethewayout.com?
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
They seem to be full of holes... (Score:2, Troll)
Was the story about their recently stolen cloud master key (with wayy too much power) even reported here?
Cut to the important question (Score:2)
Does the tool allow turning the new features off?
Leaked? Smells fishy (Score:2)
There's lots of incompetence at Microsoft so it might truly be a leak, but to me it smells more like a deliberate "testing the waters" ploy. Maybe Redmond wants to track how many people are sufficiently dissatisfied with their product to put serious effort into getting back some control.
Microsoft seems hell-bent on giving people what they don't want. Perhaps this "leak" is a Windows unpopularity contest, where they determine what users dislike the most so they can focus on delivering more of the same in fut
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There's lots of incompetence at Microsoft so it might truly be a leak, but to me it smells more like a deliberate "testing the waters" ploy. Maybe Redmond wants to track how many people are sufficiently dissatisfied with their product to put serious effort into getting back some control.
They get enough telemetry to not need this.
Microsoft seems hell-bent on giving people what they don't want. Perhaps this "leak" is a Windows unpopularity contest, where they determine what users dislike the most so they can focus on delivering more of the same in future updates and versions.
It is deliberately crap. There are known cases of releasing ms office with deliberately bad versions of PowerPoint et al just to create reasons to upgrade so the user thinks they're benefitting from the purchase.
StarOffice was great.