Because of 360, velvet killed the computer desktop of win 10

I wonder how many of you are still using Win 10?

Two days ago, Win10 20H2's system update had an accident, and many friends ran to Zhihu and shouted after the update:

Where's my desktop???

Image courtesy of Zhihu @ Kite

After some fumbling with these friends who lost their desktops, they found that the explorer.exe program on their computers was missing.

For those who don't know, explain that before Win11, Explorer was a system program that managed the taskbar, desktop, start menu, and file manager in the computer.

When it's gone, the desktop is gone.

After some further investigation, everyone found that this system component was actually killed by the third-party antivirus software Velvet installed by themselves!

Okay, why did the velvet, who was supposed to be a security guard for the system, suddenly start attacking "his own people" in turn and delete the updated system components?

Curious, Shichao continued to scroll down to see if there was a big guy to analyze what was going on.

It doesn't matter if you don't look at the result, it's even more confusing when you look at it - in this whole oolong incident, not only does it involve the protagonists we just talked about, Windows and velvet, but there is also a 360 that doesn't seem to be able to beat the eight poles.

I don't know if you have noticed, starting from Win 10, there will be a search box in the bottom taskbar by default.

Obviously, Windows is not satisfied with the previous function of taskbar search, so it has added a lot of information and interest content.

360 also took a fancy to the taskbar, which is a "good location", and forcibly stuffed its own search bar into the taskbar.

The picture comes from Zhihu @大贤者初春令月

One mountain definitely can't accommodate two tigers, the taskbar is so big, it's hard for 360 to force a foot in without problems.

According to some friends, when these two functions are enabled, there will be a probability of crashing and crashing.

Windows naturally can't leave such a thing alone, but for some reason, it didn't hit 360 hard, but instead came out with a patch to avoid 360.

According to Zhihu user @Henryzhao analysis, this patch of Windows specifically made a function in the taskbar called "IsHijackingProcessRunning" to check the running status of the 360 process.

You can take a look at the detection function code in the screenshot.

The 360 Safe and ZhuDongFangYu scans are all classic processes of the 360 program.

If it detects that a 360 product is running, it will proactively stop Windows from working with its own taskbar information feature, which is SellFeedsCampain = 0 in the code.

Doing so avoids a situation where the 360 search bar and the Windows taskbar collide with each other.

But this piece of code for Windows is new in itself, and it implements such a sensitive action as detecting other processes, and the word "hijacking" in the name sounds very sensitive, so all the factors added up naturally caught the attention of Velvet.

The end result is that the antivirus software Velvet treats this patch behavior of Windows directly as a virus and kills it.

And then everyone's desktop is gone...

However, the action on the velvet side is also very fast, and an announcement was made soon, and the feature library was updated.

So you can now update the system with confidence.

Looking back, the whole thing is nothing more than 360 trying to forcibly post traffic in the system taskbar, and it ended up conflicting with Microsoft's own traffic opening.

Microsoft wanted to wipe the ass of the 360, but instead got hit by the velvet.

Coincidentally, this is not the first time that this kind of system wipes the app's butt.

The iPhone and WeChat, which we are all familiar with, have also had such a lot of fun.

Apple has previously discovered that WeChat's performance monitoring solution calls a system function API - stack_ logging _ enable _ logging .

This API was able to enable stack logging in previous iOS versions, but later Apple migrated this feature to other APIs, and the stack logging API didn't make any real sense.

However, WeChat's programmers did not adjust their code to the changes Apple made in the system, and still called stack _ logging in WeChat.

As a result, Apple's telemetry background will receive a large number of "invalid API calls" errors.

Although this error will not have any impact on the normal use of the app, it is estimated that more than 200 million iPhone users in China are "reporting errors" to Apple, leaving Apple's back-end engineers speechless, so in the later iOS update, this API was specially added as an "empty shell"...

This time, Apple engineers directly changed the comment of stack _ logging _ enable _ logging to: This string of APIs is useless, and the devil knows why WeChat is still calling it.

Then the file containing the API update was named "make tapi happy"

Obviously, this time Windows and 360 did not get a "happy" ending like Apple and WeChat, but instead rolled up the velvet and made a big joke.

There is a reason why the two families did not communicate well when they encountered conflicts.

Let's say Windows could tell 360 and stop it from doing so, instead of patching it up.

There probably wouldn't be such a joke.

Taking a step back, if Windows and 360 don't add psoriasis-like content such as search and information to the taskbar, will the problem be solved at the source?