“About a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island were forced to stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms,” Svensson reports.
MacDailyNews Take: If vehicle-makers sold products as unreliable as Microsoft’s, they’d be sued into oblivion. Yet, with Microsoft products, total failure in critical situations is not only immediately absolved, it’s expected.
Svensson continues, “In Kentucky, state police were told to shut down the computers in their patrol cars as technicians tried to fix the problem. The National Science Foundation headquarters in Arlington, Va., also lost computer access.”
“Intel Corp. appeared to be among the victims, according to employee posts on Twitte,” Svensson reports. “Intel did not immediately return calls for comment.”
Full article here.
Declan McCullagh reports for CNET, “The University of Michigan’s medical school reported that 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed. Police in Lexington, Ky., resorted to hand-writing reports, and turned off their patrol car terminals as a precaution. Some jails cancelled visitation.”
“Early reports attributed the widespread problems to a routine McAfee update that caused computers with Microsoft’s Service Pack 3 installed to incorrectly identify a legitimate operating system component as containing a virus,” McCullagh reports. “A report at the Internet Storm Center said the McAfee update registered a false positive and flagged the Windows file svchost.exe as a virus.”
“McAfee has posted a Web page on a separate site with detailed instructions on how to fix XP computers that have been crashing because of Wednesday’s update. It recommends manually downloading and installing an ‘EXTRA.DAT’ file, and then restore files that have been incorrectly quarantined,” McCullagh reports. “But that option requires a least a modest amount of technical ability, and as of 1 p.m. PDT, the company had not offered a better way.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Life’s too short for such bullshit (especially if you were in a Rhode Island hospital today). If you make it out alive, Get a Mac.
After all, if Microsoft weren’t so inept, people wouldn’t still be using a nine year old operating system.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Bill” and “Wil” for the heads up.]
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!!!!!!!!!!
Holy crap… why the #*@*$%#$% do people put up with this?!?!?!?
I was all set to get a good chuckle out of this story, but the opening bit about hospitals froze me into incredulity. I sincerely hope nobody has to die before people realize that Windows is simply not reliable in life-or-death situations!
(Incidentally, didn’t Bill Gates once say something about how he wouldn’t hesitate to trust Windows to handle his medical care in critical situations? Wonder if he’d still come out and say that now…)
M$ has always been malware.
“About a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island were forced to stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms”
That is stupid. How can a PC breaking down stop people treating people?
It’ll all be OK when the hospital gets iPads…
When people bitch about a computer eff up and blame it on ‘computers’, I always correct them by saying:
THE Problem is NOT that’s it’s a computer- the problem is that it’s running WIndows.
Hahahahahahahaha!!
McAfee. Another tick on the carcass
In all fairness, it was McAfee that caused this meltdown. Thank God we don’t need no stinking virus software on our Macs!
Every Windows user needs some EXTRA.DAT.
I have 2 users visiting from over seas with bricked laptops because McAfee has hijacked svchost.exe. They are so locked out McAfee cannot even be updated to fix the problem. McAfee’s assertion that this is NOT rendering machines useless is completely false.
I know MDN is all good knockabout fun, but really they shouldn’t have taken this as an excuse to jeer at MS when it’s McAfee that’s to blame.
Apple users have been burned by McAfee before. Didn’t Apple withdraw their Virex product from doc mac because it was “problematic”?
http://www.tuaw.com/2005/06/20/apple-dropping-virex-support-on-mac/
If anyone wants a take-away line from this disaster it’s think very carefully before installing AV software on your Mac.
“… flagged the Windows file svchost.exe as a virus.”
What exactly does svchost.exe do?
Haha, I was on the phone with direct tv support, and she told me her computer was down, I joked must be using windozws, little
did I know
You can’t blame McAfee.
McAfee would not exist if it wasn’t for the problems with Windows. If Windows was a decent OS, McAfee A-V software would not be needed in the first place.
This is a mcafee problem, not Microsoft’s. They’re as bad as norton
cool down. It’s mcafee issue not xp. Affected machines w. 5958.dat have checkpoint restore dissabled even in safe mode and connection to Internet dissabled. So how to restore the deleted files is not clear. Good that pc have USB
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good job mcafee: your dat update is a perfect virus!
@Mark
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google it
I have Intego VirusBarrier on my Macs, and have never had any problem with it…it’s caught a few Java viruses my husband has accidentally picked up on his account. Written by Mac users only for Mac users, it’s good for those of us who’d rather be safe than sorry.
I really do like that captioned image. It should be on advertising hoardings the world over.
I was reading a lot of the posts over at Yahoo news. It seems everyone was blaming mcaffee, hardly a soul mentioned MS. Curious how they think.
Don’t forget to check your hosts file, install some random .dll, and open up RedEdit to go to some arcane V_Key to manually set a jumper from 1 to zero. Got that Grandma? Granny?
Come on folks, don’t you see the humor? It may have been McAfee that introduce the error, but it was the Microsoft update that triggered the problem. And McAfee’s anti-malware software identified a part of Windows as malware. That’s funny… How could MDN’s title for this article been any better?
I suppose it wasn’t so funny for the people infected… sorry, I meant affected.
EXTRA.DAT? FUNK DAT!
Problem 1: idiots
problem 2: windows
problem 3: mcaffee
you all get what u deserve!!
@Mark
svchost.exe is responsible for running many of the core services for Windows to function. Like RPC, AutoUpdate, DiskManager, DHCP, etc.
Without svchost Windows barley functions. The problem with this virus is that you have one of 2 problems both resulting in a nightmare for the end user. Either McAfee grabbed onto the file and Windows kept rebooting, or, the user clicks “delete” after a reboot when the alert pops up and the file is destroyed. Either way, it pooches the machine. The only way around it is to download the DAT file from McAfee’s site and install it manually in the 60 seconds you have, then reboot. (or in safemode) That will fix it. if you deleted the svchost file you then need to grab a copy from another windows machine and drop it in the System32 folder.
Have I mentioned how much I hate Windows?
@Jamie
“”About a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island were forced to stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms”
That is stupid. How can a PC breaking down stop people treating people?”
Apparently you have been blessed with good health.
My 82 year old father was recently stricken and had to be admitted to the hospital six times in four months. Doing better now thank you. In any event, while there, he didn’t crap without the nurse taken that laser scanner device and scanning some patient bar code! Okay, I’m being extreme, but really, nurse visitations for BP, temp checks typed into computer patient records, doctor prescriptions, barcode laser scanned the patient, the nurse giving and the medication itself.
Can actual health care be delivered without computers? You bet. However, those damn computers are so intertwined that without them I bet the nurses and doctors couldn’t walk straight and are all going in circles saying what do we do now? Heck I wonder if they even have a contingency plan to deal with mass computer failure. For instance, do they have pencil and paper to record all the stuff they do now with the ease and aid of the computer? I know from my flying days and visitation to the ATC center at my local airport that every flight has a manual flight strip with the information needed so that if computers go dow, they carry over to the flight strip and put in place protocols and practices of old just by using the radio pen and paper. It slows and gums up the works but it’s a necessary evil.
In fact, in honor of earth day, the whole earth should turn off their computers, personal, business, monitoring computers and see if the world will come to an end? We know it won’t, but everyone will have to resort to how their grandparents dealt with things… That would be interesting to see. Or as Steve puts it… “magical and revolutionary”!
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