[Privoxy-devel] Privoxy blocking Win10 upgrades to Win11 (sad trombone)

[Sam Varshavchik]

So I have this Windows 10 VM that's been trying, with all its might, to  
update itself to Windows 11, for a few months now. The update would get to  
about 10%, and then bail out with a "Windows 11 is not yet ready for your  
device" message. Sad trombone.

I have read some write-ups, on an assortment of blogs, about Microsoft  
blocking Windows 11 upgrades, for various reasons, so initially I didn't pay  
much attention to this, but as time went by I got more and more curious, to  
the point that I decided to do some digging.

And I discovered that it was Privoxy that was causing this. Windows update  
was attempting, with all its might, to download the following URL

http://adl.windows.com/appraiseradl/2024_12_11_03_55_AMD64.cab

and it was getting squashed here:

In file: default.action View
{+block{Host matches generic block pattern.} }
ad*.

Cute. I disabled privoxy, and the update is now happily past this point.

Basically, this was a self-foot bullet by MSFT::

- Windows update was getting a 4xx, from Priboxy.

- the user-facing error message, that resulted from this, simply said,  
meekly: "Windows 11 is not yet ready for your device". This is how Windows  
Update chose to handle this error message

- buried deep in Windows update logs was a random hexadecimal code

- Googling that hexadecimal code led to a bunch of web pages yammering  
something about Windows Update having difficulty downloading whatever it  
wanted to download, and that was likely to be a problem with the Windows  
Update service itself, so just have patience, and wait it out

- Waiting accomplished absolutely nothing. Privoxy had infinite patience in  
4xx-ing that URL, every time.

- After putting two-and-two together I disabled privoxy, and that fixed  
everything.

Just mentioning this here. Perhaps a tweak to the default blocking rules  
might be in order?

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