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Microsoft: What's that? A patch for make-me-admin vuln? Sorry – can't hear you. Have a new jumper instead

Redmond fiddles with Paint while Windows burns

Users wondering if Microsoft is going to do anything about the holes in its flagship operating system will be relieved to note it has found time to fiddle with Paint dialogs and unleash another Christmas jumper.

Despite yet another make-me-admin vulnerability turning up in products last week, Microsoft has fiddled with its inbox stalwarts, smearing the poor things with the Windows 11 UI brush.

This time it was Microsoft Paint that got the treatment. The application had already received user interface changes, and Microsoft showed off changes to the colour picker and image resize and skew dialog for Windows 11 Dev Channel users (those lucky enough to receive the update – our M1 Mac running Windows still enjoys some delightfully retro designs).

We assume those engineers responsible could not detect the odour of burning from elsewhere aboard the good ship Windows.

The choice of Paint is interesting as it was the subject of last year's festive knitwear. It appears that Microsoft followed up the celebration of the old with an unasked-for update.

This year's jumper features the much-missed original Minesweeper, which turned up in Windows 3.1 before being meddled with in the reviled Windows Vista and eventually dropped from the inbox selection of Windows 8. A version can be picked up from the Microsoft Store, but it is festooned with adverts – as is the way with Microsoft's products these days.

We can only hope that a retro-Minesweeper theme might herald a return to simpler times, when Microsoft did not shove commercials down users' throats.

Knitwear aside, Windows 11 (and now Windows 10 21H2) has continued its assault on PCs, with AdDuplex reporting the rounded OS now squatting on 8.6 per cent of the 60,000 Windows 11 and 10 PCs included in the survey.

The figure is up from 4.8 per cent in October but, as boss Alan Mendelevič told The Register, "is highly skewed towards the consumer PCs." The just-released Windows 10 21H2 accounted for 3.7 per cent of PCs.

Enterprises are likely to stay well away from the new shiny for a good few months, or even years. ®

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