Recent and related: Microsoft terminated the account VeraCrypt used to sign Windows drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47686549 |
Recent and related: Microsoft terminated the account VeraCrypt used to sign Windows drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47686549 |
NT programming is a lot of fun, though this release was quite challenging, because of all of the toolchain updates. On the plus side, we got to remove pre-Win10 support -- https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2026-March/00954... . But did you know that Microsoft removed support for compiling x86 drivers in their latest driver SDK? So that was interesting to work around. There was also a fun change to the Go runtime included in this release: https://github.com/golang/go/commit/341b5e2c0261cc059b157f1c...
All and all, a fun release, and I'm happy to have the Windows release train cooking again.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/09/microsoft_dev_account...
This seems to increasingly be the norm with people who have had their accounts locked, deleted or restricted by automated systems. You have to hope that you can write a message and get it amplified via some sort of platform read by hundreds of thousands of people, and get people to reshare your message, in order to get any form of traction.
If you're not somebody well known, noteworthy or somehow significant in a community your likelihood of having your message successfully amplified is much lower.
Just curious how/if the version support might work out for ReactOS.
(I couldn't quickly find a "Previous Versions" list on their website)
That's great for you, and no offense, but what about developers who can't get buzz in a HN thread? Are they just doomed? Why is support only available to those who can raise a ruckus on social media?
What are individual developers of "lesser" (less important, less visible, less used) software with a Windows presence to do? Wait and pray for Goliath to make the first benevolent move, like all the folks who got locked out forever from their Google accounts on a whim? Ha!
The fact of the matter is, the code signing requirements on Windows are a serious threat to Free and Open Source Software on the platform. Code signing requirements are a threat to FOSS on all platforms that support this technique, and infinitely more so where it's effectively mandatory. I firmly believe that these days, THIS is the preferred angle/vector for Microsoft to kill the software variety their C-levels once publicly bad-mouthed as "cancer", and zx2c4 is one of the poor frogs being slowly boiled alive. Just not this time - yet.
But last time I checked, they are taking money from individuals. Or otherwise encouraging individuals to use their services.
So this lack of respect for individuals by specific large companies, is predicated on their encouraging users to trust them, and depend on them, without taking on any of the implied responsibility to not capriciously ruin someone's day or year. And then hard or soft stone wall them.
As someone who nearly lost everything due to the automated bureaucracy of a financial firm, I cannot stress: We are not safe. And we will not be safe until these companies are legally required to treat customer investment and dependency on their services, as valuable and necessarily recoverable, via prompt recourse and response, in cases where the automated bureaucratic systems fail.
Otherwise, this is going to keep getting worse.
When I hear how Microsoft helps someone who got attention, what I hear is that it takes extraordinary circumstances for Microsoft to care about the significant harm that there systems are causing many other people, today, who did not have the luck of this person.
And that they are very very aware of this.
I think we need to start using the word evil for this. Because it is. It is gross irresponsibility. Gross abuse of a power situation, of a strong dependency, that the company quite knowingly creates.
Microsoft would not have to automatically and 100% correctly reinstate the account. The goal would be to get high level cases like this one in front of a knowledgable human before the locked account posts angry owner posts complaints in public (If Joe Bloe's defragmentation utility noone has ever heard of and only having 10 installs goes bad, noone would care.)
Here, they don't have to be perfect - you just need to have enough signal-to-voice ratio that employing a very small number of people outweighs the cost to PR and execs to deal with these cases, and to not let accounts get hacked through recovery.
The response from Microsoft [1] is not great, or makes me hopeful.
``` Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's President of Windows and Devices, said both Idrassi and Donenfeld should have their accounts restored "soon."
"We've seen these reports and are actively working to resolve this as quickly as possible," Davuluri Xeeted. "We've reached out to VeraCrypt and have spoken to Jason at WireGuard, they should be back up and running soon."
He explained that both deactivations were executed as part of the Windows Hardware Program's account verification procedures.
The company published a blog in October, giving devs a two-week warning that if their accounts had not been verified since April 2024, Microsoft would issue mandatory account verification notifications.
"We worked hard to make sure partners understood this was coming, from emails, banners, reminders," said Davuluri.
"And we know that sometimes things still get missed. We're taking this as an opportunity to review how we communicate changes like this and make sure we're doing it better."
```
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/09/microsoft_dev_account...
I'm glad it was resolved quickly for WireGuard, but I'm concerned the results won't generalize.
Also, thanks for WireGuard!
There is no normal process. The error message clearly states "There are no appeals available, we have closed your application".
If the company makes it impossible for you to communicate with them, the only recourse is to draw public attention to it in order to shame them. This only works if you can gather enough public support and kick up enough of a stink about it. All of the small developers still locked out of their accounts are screwed.
Legal action works too. You'd be surprised how effective a letter from an attorney can be.
Whats next?
Is that a pattern?
I think Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. are happy with the collateral damage caused by false positives and bad product decisions. And the way they implemented this was a bad product decision.
Think about it. If they "accidentally" destroy distribution for small projects that don't have the visibility to make waves, that's fewer possible startups that can eat their lunch. The cynic in me thinks that "at scale", "AI false positives", etc. are just an excuse for them to eliminate small developers.
They don't have to ban them all either. All they have to do is increase the risk to the point where rational people won't take the risk.
There were people that warned not to get into iOS development because it was impossible to guarantee distribution of an app. How do you build things like LoB apps under those circumstances? And who benefits when it's impossible to promise delivery of custom built apps? It favors big companies with the visibility to short circuit the system.
It's asymmetric rules; one set for big companies and another for small developers. I really hope the renewed interest in Linux takes off because it's the last chance we have at holding off big tech from taking over every little aspect of our lives.
But local models aside (which no matter the protests from HN, will only be available to the technically savvy few) all of these LLMs are a service, so, the company could degrade the service, they could charge more than you're willing or able to pay, they could ban you. They could disable your account with no meaningful way appeal or seek support. LLMs could look at lot more like the scenario in this thread than something like not knowing how to make your own shoes.
Tap the latest general knowledge for asking "could this be improved", but make the improvements with local systems and models. But then the obvious problem becomes finding new data to train the AIs. In my opinion, there's no way their plan doesn't involve stealing from everyone to keep training, so is it really going to be safe to use the cutting edge models at all?
This situation got fixed because of an HN thread. That's a terrible way to maintain software infrastructure. You shouldn't need to go viral to keep your project running on a major OS.
The underlying problem isn't going away unless there's either regulatory pressure or a credible community attestation model that bypasses the single-CA trust structure. Microsoft has no obvious incentive to build that themselves.
By the way, was it only for the Windows application, or was wireguard-go was also affected?
This project -- https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-nt/about/ -- is used by this app -- https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-windows/about/ . The former is what the signing situation was about. The latter is just signed using a normal boring (but very expensive!) EV code signing certificate from one of the CAs.
Microsoft did a (very!) bad job of communicating what was happening, but The Register has more information:
> He explained that both deactivations were executed as part of the Windows Hardware Program's account verification procedures.
> The company published a blog in October, giving devs a two-week warning that if their accounts had not been verified since April 2024, Microsoft would issue mandatory account verification notifications.
> "We worked hard to make sure partners understood this was coming, from emails, banners, reminders," said Davuluri.
Emails are useless given the volume of trivial crap that MS emails about. Banners don't help for systems on auto-pilot. Reminders how?
Break my workflow and let me un-break it when I notice.
it was a bit crazy how quickly people got conspiracy-minded about it.
microsoft fucked up, and as per typical big-tech, only fixed it when noise got made on social media. but not everything is a grand conspiracy orchestrated by microsoft or the government or whatever. incompetence is always more likely than malice.
any news from the veracrypt maintainers? i would imagine whatever microsoft employee got tasked with resolving this issue would have also seen that one.
---
edit: well, i certainly underestimated the response to this comment. my mistake for using a common saying rather than being extremely explicit when it comes to something as emotionally charged as microsoft. i dont think i have seen a comment of mine go up and down points so many times before.
what i intended to get across was: "this was not a deliberate, coordinated, purposeful attack on the wireguard project, at the behest of some microsoft executive, to accomplish some goal of making encrypted communication impossible or whatever. instead, this was the result of a stupid system, with a stupid resolution process (social media), that is still awful, but different in important ways from a deliberate attack. this is the typical scenario (stupid system, stupid resolution). the non-typical scenario would be a deliberate choice made and executed by microsoft employees to suddenly destroy a popular project".
i shortened the above paragraph to the common saying "incompetence is always more likely than malice". i shouldnt have. my bad.
How often do they ship new versions?
My understanding is that:
1. Windows drivers are Attested by Microsoft
2. Windows collects driver telemetry
Which means a really good question to ask is:
Why are they canceling driver signing accounts without looking at metrics?
Hopefully, this isn't just something Microsoft made them say as part of an agreement to get their account back.
I think the reason these things go viral is that a ton of people reading about them can see themselves in the same situation, minus the clout needed to get it resolved. A short term PR crisis is the best we can get, so everyone piles on.
I don't think MS will fix it though. IMO, they're more likely to create a program for open source code signing. That way they can capture all the high visibility projects, get a bunch of goodwill for being philanthropic, and all the small projects that don't qualify are too small to cause a fuss, so they can continue to treat them poorly.
NEVER trust microsoft, NEVER trust any mechanism people dont 100% control themselves. having to rely on microsoft to sign stuff is an abomination and something nobody should do
Wink if there’s someone else in the room :)
I believe the transparency would be a huge plus.
This happened to Wireguard, Veracrypt, Windscribe, and possibly others. Certainly not isolated and very unnerving.
There are still many unanswered questions...
If that sounds Kafkaesque, it is. It’s a small miracle that getting a post to the top of HN can surmount such bureaucracy at all.
The best way to get an audience is to tell a compelling story. Make it interesting. There are ways of doing that for even the least known developers.
My point is to push back against the idea that it should be fair to everyone and that what’s morally right should prevail in every case. The hardware developer program doesn’t exist to treat every developer fairly. They exist to make money for Microsoft. pg puts it more eloquently here: https://paulgraham.com/judgement.html
Otherwise we’ll eventually all get lost in the kafkaesque technocracies.
Less for moral reading, but to keep from being squashed by the weight of tech.
In retrospect, I should have not spent 3 weeks trying to get their incompetent software to work and just gone straight to phone calls. And at least in my case, the support agents seemed broadly unfamiliar, but seemed to have access to higher-priority internal case submission which did finally get to someone who could fix my issue.
In my book (I started using computers during ther Windows 3.0 era), this clearly does not qualify as "working just fine on Windows as it always has", no matter how you spin it.
Big tech shouldn’t be allowed to control the platforms and the ability to distribute / blacklist software and sites. That needs to be legislated against and those companies need to be broken into a thousand pieces each.
The strong gatekeeping, the encouragement of vital dependency (i.e. treating user/customer data, email, content as if it were the company's, even to the point of cutting access without recourse), the dark pattern upsells, unpermissioned or dark permissioned surveillance, manipulation, the hosting of pervasive scam ads (even Apple News is full of scam ads), ...
None of this should be acceptable. All these ethical violations degrade the lives of countless individuals in the name of "freedom" for corporations.
Conflicts of interest and anticompetitiveness should not be "free" in either sense of the word.
Oh wow, good morning.
The parties which taught you the notion of "individual" (by defining you as such, and coercive-conditioning all other models out of you), all happen to be collectives: your family, your society, the institutions, the businesses' communication departments. They have the power of definition. An individual (by definition) does not.
It only gets worse from there.
For what purpose are you made "individual"? Collectives define you as "individual", in order to make you defenseless. Individuals have the useful property of being trapped within an infinite recursion of false "selves"; collectives, on the other hand, are neatly self-reifying. They do not have the organ of inhibition (pre-frontal cortex).
In the eyes of the state, corporations are something like artificial people, right? Alright, model them as legally constructed psychopaths out to get you - how to perform extralegal direct intervention upon 'em, same way they can do to us? It's only fair... wait no you can't! You'd only be hurting their constituent individuals. And you can't hurt them nearly as bad as whatever made them join the collective in the first place; it would not only be pointless but also cruel.
This notion of "individual" which lies at the center of Western individualism (and the related schools of thought which implicitly form your day-to-day behaviors in society, no reflection necessary) is an extremely fraught concept: look at it a little too intently and it begins to fall apart at the seams.
Making you see yourself as this thing called "individual", which is extensively studied with most rigorous methods, and somehow remains fundamentally inscrutable (hard problem of consciousness goes wheee!)... that's not very unlike a proprietary API or OS, is it? "Individual identity" is a useful (to whom?) abstraction over the incontrovertible, but by itself meaningless, physical being of a human organism. Unlike a collective, a body cannot be divided into constituent parts and remain itself; but Western civilization is nominally a world of minds over bodies, and minds are made out of ideas, and ideas can be taken apart and shared around just fine, within one body or among entire crowds.
So what we are observing is not evil; "evil" has meaning in the plane of independent individuals operating in mutually comprehensible moral framing. And that's always been a huge and harmful oversimplifiction.
It's much easier to view the behavior of transnational corporations as a whole as the AGI takeoff. But then one might want to consider when exactly it started - was it the LLMs that precipitated it (as many here seem to think), or is the concept of "artificial intelligence" itself a marketing smokescreen, and the NN/ML/LLM tech is just an inevitable performance optimization once the AGI has embedded itself deeply enough into human industry to direct resources towards the mass production of GPUs and other highly specialized accelerator cells.
Since when they were partners to Micro$lop? First, it's thug like behavior taking the ability to run code on our own computers without their approval. Second it's even more evil justifying this behaviour by calling the developers "partners".
But I agree - in the moment, the impact is barely visible, so management would have to put up a fight to spend $$$ on a fix. The way of least resistance is to issue a press release as shown above.
https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/general/threa...
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/General_Inst...
"Incompetence" of this degree is malice. It is actively malicious to create a system that automatically locks people out of their accounts with absolutely no possibility for human review or recourse short of getting traction in the media. "No sir, I didn't grind those orphans up. It was this orphan grinding machine I made that did it, teehee!"
incompetence is always more likely than [intentional, directed] malice.
microsoft employees did not deliberately attack the wireguard project with a goal of taking it down for whatever grand scheme people's hatred cooks up. if you have evidence that microsoft did this deliberately to ruin the wireguard project, please forward it along to jason (the wireguard maintainer) and several news outlets.
Everything should be treat as suspicious moving forward and I am glad of the skepticism.
root programs are super specific about root cause analysis, what actions lead up to distrust, differentiating deliberate maliciousness from systemic incompetence, etc.
its like the exact opposite of "all this doesnt matter".
of course they still look at the outcome (danger to users, etc.), typically as a first step. but they take great care to determine exactly what lead up to a specific outcome.
Microsoft has entitled itself to decide what I can and cannot run on the computer and OS that I paid for, this earns them no additional revenue, so they don't care to do a good job.
This system will never work properly.
That's just the side effect of the Soross tracking chips hidden in vaccines activated by 5g towers
Conspiracy 2: Copilot all the things! Probably not too far off.
We can probably blame copilot for the email about new verification reqirements not going out to everyone. Maybe even for the reports of people who jumped through all the hoops and still got blocked as if they hadn't. But rolling out new verification reqirements, then not monitoring how many developers fulfill your new reqirements and following up is entirely on Microsoft employees. That's management failure and disregard for developers on their platform
But hardware vendors also want Windows licenses to include with their hardware, so it's pretty easy to say "do the hardware program certification if you want the discount" and that's exactly what they did in the early days, and it worked fine. Even the peripherals (which are increasingly rare now anyway) still want to be able to put the Windows logo on their product.
At which point we still have the same question: Why are they harassing the WireGuard developers, who have their own reputation for not being inept at software and therefore shouldn't need a Microsoft certification program to assure their users that their code is trustworthy to install?
We do need to recognise, a long history of "windows always bluescreens" was somewhat reigned in by this policy with a lot of crashes coming down to third party drivers.
Hmmm
Security and attribution is great, but the default assumption of everyone will sign up and do what we want doesn't work.
File Settings > This file come from another computer: Unblock
PowerShell > Unblock-File
Add your smb file share as trusted: Internet Properties > Security > Local Intranet > Sites
I hate it too that you need to sign software that you want to publish. Totally destroys the economics of little shareware type software.
For my specific problem/situation, the executable in question gets transferred to the target machine on a read-only UDF file system burnt onto a USB thumb drive. Other Golang executables from FOSS projects on the same filesystem execute just fine (I guess they have better "reputation", due to their hashes being registered with MSFT somewhere).
I'm surprised someone didn't reply saying this would affect the freedom of companies to do whatever they want, whenever they want.
Why a "bug".
Also because, at least on our side, the account was in an inconsistent state: we were correctly enrolled/validated, but could not access the signing interface.
I would guess this is just large organizations Seeing Like a State whereby they "seek to force administrative legibility on their subjects by homogenizing them".
Plausible candidates include "asset", "enemy", "homes", "mates", "moats", "money", "nasty", "state", "stunt".
(467 on macOS Sequoia it seems)
Consider being less cryptic, for the sake of those with English as a fourth language.
Wordplay are exactly the kind of stuff that LLMs excel at, so I asked Gemini flash, and I got
> snarky play on words by suggesting that the answer to AnthonyMouse's question is "Money."
> Here is the breakdown of how they arrived at that:
> The Username: AnthonyMouse
> The Letters: The word "Money" can be formed using the letters found in M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e
(Gemini's answer is actually longer, I just kept the interesting bit)
Amusingly, this answer exhibits a similar problem to the "how many r in raspberry" problem (it forgets how to spell correctly), since
AnthonyMouse != M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e
But it seems that it got to the correct answer (or an incorrect but plausible :) ) despite that
Let's save a tree and ask bash:
$ grep ^.....$ /usr/share/dict/words|grep -i ^[AnthonyMouse]*$
From the more than 300 possibilities we can then consider the context. We're talking about Microsoft here, and the problem suggests we're the sort of people who expect anagrams to have secret meaning, so we should prefer an answer implying some kind of conspiracy or kabbalistic nonsense. The obvious candidates are therefore mason and Satan. Between these, Satan would require reusing a letter the candidate set only has once, and one of the other words on the list was stone. We can form two five letter words if we're allowed to reuse letters and thereby get stone mason.
This is the most irrefutable possible proof that we're being pointed to a masonic conspiracy rather than Microsoft's usual popular association with the antichrist.
Useless reflection to ignore below (forewarned!)
I hesitated to post; in the end, the value of the comment was so low, I expected non-wordplay-fans to scroll past and lose nothing, so I left it in the hopes at least one person would find the answer themselves and be pleased about it.
thanks
I liked your comment, I guessed the word, and had fun pointing out ambiguities at play.
For example by creating working processes which never end up "accidentally" causing awful outcomes. This is sometimes more expensive, but we should ensure that the resulting lack of goodwill if you don't is unaffordable.
Worst case there is malice and you've now made it more difficult to hide the malice so you've at least made things easier for those who remain committed to looking for malice, including criminal prosecutors.
i am quoting the maintainer of the project. take it up with them if you think microsoft coordinated a directed attack on their project.
It's really easy to end up with procedural machinery that makes it unpleasant for other entities that you don't like.
It seems to get the things that you do like and value less often. Why? Because you think about the consequences to what you consider important and you're inclined to ignore potential consequences to those you oppose or are competing with.
The Vogons weren't necessarily overtly malicious when they obliterated Earth.
sure.
but this was not a deliberate attack by microsoft employees to shutdown wireguard. that is what i was trying to say and the essence of the quote in question.
A certain level of recklessness is automatically malice.
The saying implies that incompetence and malice are polar opposites. They're not.
it does not
my point was that it wasnt a deliberate conspiracy/attack to fuck over wireguard, which would be an absolutely crazy story if it were true.
This isn't a tee-hee accident, this is deliberate organizational design which removed any kind of bad consequences or even thought about what the software does to user from the engineers at Microsoft. They're happy about that. They now don't need to deal with that. And if you'll ask them, they will refuse a change that will make them responsible for abuse of their users.
So, to hell with them :)
i am in no way defending microsoft. just pointing out that the conspiracy-theorists suggesting that some exec at microsoft specifically targeted wireguard for whatever nefarious purpose was, well, a conspiracy.
It's kind of bizarre how y'all pretend that systematic bearocratic evil doesn't exist. After being brainwashed about its evils in USSR for your young live.
i get that everyone has a frothing-at-the-mouth extreme hatred to microsoft and its employees. but microsoft did not say "fuck jason, fuck wireguard, lets try and shut that down". that would be a way different story.
Can only be one root of all evil, I suppose :)
in that case, it certainly wouldnt be called a deliberate attack, right?
the edit in my original comment should hopefully clear up any confusion of my intended point. and, well... the comment you replied to should also make it clear that my entire point is centered around something being deliberate attack vs. ridiculous incompetence.
the deliberateness of it is the entirety of the reason i wrote my comment. choosing the phrase "malice vs. incompetence" was a poor choice on my part, when i should have been extremely explicit. it would have avoided all of this back-and-forth.
1. Microsoft have negligently and/or maliciously created a process which fucks people over
2. That maliciousness is not directed at Wireguard or VeraCrypt.
i think people are reading my comment as some sort of defense of microsoft. its not.
all i wanted to emphasize was that this incident, while obviously ridiculous, did not come about because a bunch of microsoft employees sat in a cigar-smoke filled room saying "lets destroy wireguard".
its, like, the only thing worth pointing out. if microsoft is deliberately targeting projects and literally attacking them, that would be huge fucking news. like crazy news. lawsuits galore.
Correct in cases like this we are discussing it as a meaningless distinction.
Regardless of what the maintainer says of their abuser after being abused, the point I think you are getting stuck on is this:
Creating a system which locks you out if you don't speak to a human isn't de-facto malicious.
Having support where you can't speak to a human isn't de-facto malicious, either.
Doing both at the same time, however, is de-facto malicious. Some executives likely got bonuses for doing it, too.
i interpreted that as you saying i am the hostage of microsoft, and have stockholm syndrome, therefor am speaking well of (defending) microsoft.
if i misinterpreted that, my bad. are you calling jason the hostage?