

The Errors of Our Ways: A brief history of error reports - mr_golyadkin
http://www.theawl.com/2015/06/the-errors-of-our-ways

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Animats
A big breakthrough at Microsoft was when they applied a classifier system to
sorting the error reports and automatically bringing similar ones together for
analysis. That happened early in the Windows 7 era.

The other big breakthrough in error handling at Microsoft was the Static
Driver Verifier.[1] This is a formal proof of correctness system which
analyzes kernel level driver source code to see if it does anything that can
crash the kernel. All signed drivers have passed the Static Driver Verifier.

Those two innovations made Windows 7 far more stable than previous releases.
The Driver Verifier eliminated almost all crashes caused by drivers breaking
the rest of the kernel. It also eliminated blaming third-party drivers for
crashes that were not their fault. The automatic classification of error
reports made it possible to deal with a huge volume of error reports without
ignoring most of them.

[1] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/hardware/ff...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/hardware/ff547247%28v=vs.85%29.aspx)

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gpvos
The December 2013 Spiegel article about the NSA intercepting Windows Error
reports to figure out how to break in to computers:
[http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-
power...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powerful-
toolbox-in-effort-to-spy-on-global-networks-a-940969.html) (page 2).

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chris_wot
Natalie Tran's error reporting video:
[http://youtu.be/nK0OWAXTSdM](http://youtu.be/nK0OWAXTSdM)

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reagency
Article should be title "The Ways of our Errors"

