Microsoft said a highly suspicious Windows update that was delivered to customers around the world was the result of a test that wasn’t correctly implemented.
“We incorrectly published a test update and are in the process of removing it,” a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to Ars. The message included no other information.
The explanation came more than 12 hours after people around the world began receiving the software bulletin through the official Windows Update, raising widespread speculation that Microsoft’s automatic patching mechanism was broken or, worse, had been compromised to attack end users. Fortunately, now that Microsoft has finally weighed in, that worst-case scenario can be ruled out.
I’d be terrified if I had seen this.
Windows is a mess…they should just scrap the whole thing and start over.
That’s kinda what they did. At the expense of privacy, user control, usability, and aesthetics. Bring back the old Windows.
Half the point of Windows is the backwards-compatibility.
No!
at least nine tenths of the point of Windows is backwards compatibility.
Still a horrible mess though.
.mil and .gov in those hashed links…hmm. Could be random filler text of course.
I understand that not everybody must love windows but some commenst are just overeacting. hey are doing good job at all and we can’t write about them and describe them as a “mess”. Many good projects still exists for example https://ax-dynamics.com/microsoft-dynamics-ax/“> .
On which planet is Microsoft doing a good job? It certainly isn’t this one!
They were moving in the right direction over the past few years under Nadella, however they’ve taken huge steps backwards with the privacy issues in Windows 10. It’s actually a great OS, with the potential to be the best version of Windows by far (if you can ignore the Google-like hoovering of personal info; I can’t), however their recent track record in privacy and security is bringing to mind the bumbling old Microsoft of the late ’80s through the 2000s.
I’ve been suspicious of all Microsoft updates since the Windows 10 advertisements were downloaded as an upgrade. And then, not me ’cause I turned it off, Microsoft was downloading 3-6 GB install files for Windows 10 to unsuspecting users.
Sometimes it’s nice to be using an “unsupported” OS (Windows XP). But I maintain several other computers as well that are Windows 7 (our company just upgraded to 7 last year) and therefore were susceptible to these spam ‘updates’.
I agree with you there. I have 3 PC’s still running Windows XP and they are running fine, the problem one is my Win 7 PC, although that was running fine until MS started with the telemetry updates and the rest of the shit. I have since had automatic updates turned off because who knows what shit MS will do next?
It seems the era is arriving where the only way to use your computer as YOU want is to unplug it from the network altogether!
My main Windows 7 computer is not connected to the internet. Funny how of all the installed software still works but without the nags, phony updates, viruses…
What do you use your main computer for?
I can see if you have nothing by Oracle, MS or Adobe, certainly no AV installed on the PC and you just use it as a word processor, video editor calculator or what ever, it should be fine, no internet, no nags no phony updates – but a main computer?
Seems a high price to pay just for the pleasure of Windows 7.
Some things are worth the price. Lets be realistic here, the internet isn’t what it once was and has turned into a corporate controlled entity that will screw you over at every chance.
What price freedom?
The big powerful Windows 7 computer is photo editing. Intel i7, RAID, external drives for backup, tons of RAM. Photoshop, Nikon software, On1 Photo Suite. It’s nice that the computer’s power can be devoted to actual computing tasks instead of AV software, firewalls, update checkers… And the photo files, until the occasional archiving process, are irreplaceable.
My everyday computer is Windows XP. It’s what I’m using right now. Internet, email, games, Office, mapping/GIS – all of this works great with just Core2 Duo processor.
Seems reasonable to me – your “main” computer is a machine for video editing and Windows, nothing more than a platform for running the specialist photo editing applications, rather than general purpose computing.You are using “main” to mean most powerful. Personally I would have described your everyday computer as your main computer and this Windows 7 machine as a specialist photo editing platform.