That’s just a one-time pad with extra steps.

Are we really so far down the “obligatory memetic envelope because apparently just stating opinions isn’t socially acceptable any more” slope that we’ve dropped past “can’t stop thinking about x lmao” and on to “i was talking to my sister and, get this, i said x”?

I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. As far as I know it’s an issue with a driver installed on the computers, not with anything trying to reach out to an external server. If that were the case you’d expect it to fail to boot any time you don’t have an Internet connection.

Windows is bad but it’s not that bad yet.

Looks like the laptops are able to be recovered with a bit of finagling, so fortunately they haven’t bricked everything.

And yeah staged updates or even just… some testing? Not sure how this one slipped through.