Trump, Coronavirus, Disinfectants

OK, let's put this one to bed quickly... the challenge with viruses is not destroying them; that is easy.  It's how to target them within an infected host, without damaging the host.

I can understand the frustration that causes one to wish it were possible to call in an air-strike, but that only works if the enemy and your friends are not mixed.  So, general biocidal strategies are great outside the body, but useless within... unless they can be focused on the target.  That's ID-specific policing and sniping, not a carpet-bombing airstrike!

Internal intelligence

Humans have two intelligent systems, only one of which we experience as our consciousness; the one that stems from the animal strategy of physically moving around.

The other intelligence defends the self internally, and has deeper roots than multicellular animals.  This is the immune system, the highest level of which crafts particular-shaped proteins to bind specifically to stuff that isn't white-listed as part of the body's own organic chemicals.  It is this that is expected to give post-infection immunity, at least until the virus mutates beyond recognition (as RNS viruses like Influenza and Coronavirus tend to do), and this is is the basis for vaccination as a pre-infection defense.

Why not antmicrobial drugs?

 

Larger infective agents such as bacteria are easy to attack using simpler chemistry, because their core biological processes involve proteins sufficiently different to our own, so they can be specifically targeted without harming the host.

Viruses are different, because they are pure genetic information that use the host cell processes to reproduce.  So, all those biological processes you can uniquely attack in bacteria, are your own processes when it comes to how a virus "lives".

Viruses coat their genetic material in protein(s) coded within its genetic material.  This coating may both hide the genetic material from the host immune system, and bind the virus to the targeted cells of the host.  Aside from our internal immune systems figuring out how to target this protein and/or genetic material within, cruder chemistry could find ways to disrupt the process whereby the virus binds to host cells, and target that as a means of treatment.

I'm starting to write more about biology here, starting with how it works, and how the biosphere compares with the infosphere, etc.

Win10 Temp .evtx Flood Revisited

Executive summary of this bug: To curb rapid free space loss to %Windir%\Temp\*.evtx , do this:

• Regedit, HKLM\System\CCS\Services\AppXSvc, chrange Start from 3 to 4 (Disable)
• "Lifeboat" batch file to Del %WinDir%\Temp\*.evtx every 15 secs, loop forever
• "Run As Admin" desktop shortcut to batch file, for rapid emergency access

This is a workaround, not a cure; the cure must come from Microsoft as a meta-level bugfix of the Microsoft Store and App subsystem present in Windows 8.x and 10.  It's not enough to "step on ants" on a case-by-case basis via Feedback, Help or Support - and it's not a matter of fixing particular Apps that trigger the problem, as the bug lies not in what causes this error handling response, but in the error handling logic itself; endless, rapid, and uncotrolled retries and logging.

Why has this bug persisted for years?

Current Troubleshooters miss the issue entirely, making it harder to visualize the problem.  Storage Sense may launch appropriately, and show a massive Temporary Files footprint, but the bulk of this is not shown within the sub-categories that are offered to be cleared.

Space management utilities such as TreeSize or Windows Directory Statistics can't normally "see" into %WinDir%\Temp due to permissions issues that require "Run As Admin", making it harder for even tech-literate users to track down the problem.

Because the bug is in code that is infrequently invoked, there hasn't been a massive single outbreak of cases to attract the vendor attention we need.  As a "blind spot" to both vendor (not handled by Storage Sense) and user ("As Admin" blocks on inspecting %WinDir%\Temp), it's both under- and inadequately-reported; most threads run for pages before the .evtx files are seen, so that an accurate description of the bug is slower to surface As the usual end-point is "I dunno, just try re-installing Windows, maybe that will fix it", no "clean cure" emerges, so new victims may just give up.

However, when you do find threads on this problem, you see hundreds of "I have the same question" victims, so it's not so rare that we can forget about it.  As an unexpected bug in an exposed surface, it may be an exploitable vulnerability as well.

Metro, Modern, UWP...

When a vendor keeps shuffling the branding of a feature or product, it suggests attempts to re-launch it after initially being rejected in the marketplace.  We've seen that with MSN, and we're seeing that with "Metro", "Modern", "Universal Windows Platform" and evolving drifts from there.

UWP is a new subset platform added to Windows 8 to bridge the UI and platform divide between PCs and sub-PC mobile devices, so that programs could run both on large screens with keyboard and mouse, and tiny screens prodded by fat fingers.

The original form as added to Windows 8 was a grotesque throwback to Windows before 3.x, i.e. before there really was "windows".  Apps ran full-screen, with no visible UI to close them, and screen space was wasted on massive UI elements to work on tiny touch screens.  The first Apps didn't do anything better than properly-behaved Windows "desktop" programs, so there was nothing to attract PC users, and everything "called home" all the time, pushing you into losing anonymity and accepting the increased risks of being permanently logged into a Microsoft online Account.  Just why does a Calculator App need to access the Internet, anyway?

By Windows 10, Apps can at least be windowed, finally catching up with the Windows 3.yuk UI feature set, but UWP still feels like an unwanted blob stuck on what we'd rather use instead.

The UWP installer/updater subsystem 

The nature of UWP seems to be to run underfoot, similar to the way it's not UI-obvious on a smartphone as to what apps are still running in the background.

In particular, UWP appears to have a separate installer and updater subsystem, outside Windows Update and related user controls.  Compare installation and update activity as shown in Reliability, with what you see in Windows Update History, to see what I mean.

So in effect, Windows 10 has the Windows "desktop" .exe and .msi installation system, the UWP App system, and added to that by MS Office, "Click To Run".  The last two appear to be not only the least documented for our troubleshooting purposes, but the most invasive and buggiest as well.

It's "coding 101" to never fall into an endless loop, exhaust resources such as storage space, or lack situational awareness such as how often you are doing something, how long it takes to do, and whether it is worked.  The ".evtx flood bug" is such an embarrassing failure at so many of these points, undermining confidence in the UWP App system for developers, techs, and users.

Win10 Bug: .evtx Files Rapidly Fills C: Free Space

This very nasty Windows 10 bug has been around for over two years at least; crippling, often associated with "Feature Updates", i.e. new versions of Windows 10, and still there from at least as far back as 1803, to current 1909.

Note that each of those hyperlinked words in the previous paragraph, is a link to a forum thread on this issue, so while it not be common enough "all at once" to attract attention and get fixed, it's always around, and always eating systems - no magic bullets, typical advice is a shrug and "just re-install Windows" or equally-hi-impact brute-force "fixes".

I suspect it's a generic category of bug within the Microsoft Store and UWP Apps subsystem, regardless of which of these Apps is the "cause" of the problem on any particular system. Never use Apps, Microsoft Store, or UWP stuff?  Too bad, that "updater" or "installer" will still flood your drive with pointless error messages and make it impossible to use your PC.

What you will see

The bug presents as an inexplicable runaway filling of free space on the C: drive, no matter how much free space you had there before.  Disk Cleanup doesn't show the bulk that needs to be cleared; Settings, Storage Sense may pop up and show the material as in "Temporary Files", yet not in any of the checkbox sub-categories offered to be cleared.

Users will then turn to Windows Directory Statistics (WDS) and/or TreeView or similar, and may get side-tracked into arguing which is better, etc.  I use WDS, and it will show a massive "Unknown" accounting for the lost storage space.  If I right-click WDS and "Run As Admin", I will then see this bulk as thousands of small files (between 68k and 20M) within %WinDir%\Temp

Most of these will be .evtx files, as "opened" by Event Logger; the rest will be .txt files, and these will be date-stamped as being spawned several times a minute, if not every few seconds, until the free space is exhausted.  Deleting these doesn't help; they will immediately start flooding again.

What appears to be cause

AppXSvc is a Windows service that "deploys UWP Apps"; I found little documentation of the service, but finds this Fortnet zero-day alert, FWIW.  Looking at...

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\AppXSvc

...via Regedit, we see the following settings:

Start = 3, i.e. Manual
Type = 32 (0x20), i.e. can share address space with other services of the same type
ErrorControl = 1, i.e. warn but do not abort starting Windows

So, something else starts it all the time, as it's always running yet not set to start automatically.

Recovery actions, as seen via the Services UI (where everything is "greyed out"), appear reasonable...

1st failure: Restart the service
2nd failure: Restart the service
3rd and subsequent failures: Take no action

...so if this service repeatedly falls on its ass, it should stop running, limiting the impact to at most 2 sets of .evtx and related error logging files in %WinDir%\Temp.  So what's going wrong, here?

I suspect whatever is starting this wretched (and for most of us who only use "real" Windows preograms, totally useless) service isn't paying any attention to those Recovery actions, and is just endlessly banging away, restarting the service "Manually".  If each time the service considers itself to have been launched for the first time, it will always "Restart the service".

Also, in one of the two cases I've seen first-hand (manual Media Creation Tool upgrade to 1909 from inside Windows), I noticed odd behavior in the Services UI.  Specifically, the service Properties (as seen via Services UI) offered to Start the service, even though Ctl+Alt+Del Task Manager showed it to be still running.  If the service and/or managing code gets confused about whether it's running or not, that too may screw up the "FFS stop trying to start the &^$& thing, it's already failed 3 times" logic.

The other system I saw and managed via TeamViewer, was after an auto-upgrade to 1903.  On that system, setting the AppXSvc Start value to 4 (Disable) will hopefully kill the service, plus I wrote a brute-force batch file set to "Run As Admin" as follows:

@Echo Off
Set Secs=15
Set Mask=*.evtx
Echo.
Echo Deleting %WinDir%\Temp\%Mask% files every %Secs% seconds...
:LoopForever
    Echo.
    Del %WinDir%\Temp\%Mask%
    Echo.
    Timeout 15
GoTo LoopForever

None of this a proper fix, especially on an SSD where you don't want tends of thousands of pointless file writes every hour or few.  At the basic level, Microsoft needs to muzzle the UWP App subsystem so it doesn't stomp all over the system willy-nilly, and ensure that every logging process has a basic LIFO clue so as not to consume all available storage space.  A specific fix would be nice, too, but we also need a more respectful vendor-to-user relationship.

PS: What is it with HTML text editing (e.g. in Blogger) that messes up blank line spacing around subheadings, etc.?

Pharma As As Service

Covid-19 is the first of what I expect will be many "bio-pollution" crises du jour going forward.  Experience with Ebola and similar previous outbreaks has triggered an unprecedented global response, and brings to light some challenges familiar of software development, e.g.time-to-market, rapid scalability, etc.

The software industry has already changed with this in mind, though driven by vendor's self-interest.  How would Big Pharma look, if adopting the same strategies?  Think about how EUL"A" trump the common-law rights of users, how products are forever in "beta" i.e. unfit to be guaranteed safe for release, how systems are left open for vendor-pushed updates, etc.

Can we wait for formal FDA etc. approval of tests, vaccines, etc.?

What will happen if we don't?

I Live... Again...

Yep, back after a long gap, using extra time available during the Covid-19 LockDown.  Unlike WordPress, looks like Blogger doesn't have a new post editor.

Does anyone remember ye olde DOS game "Blood"?  I guess we're all pre-trained for Covid-19 by all those "zombie apocalypse" fillums  ;-)