You only thought you were in control of your computer

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=42337

The article says it all, really. Here's a link to the Windows Secrets article.

 

OK. So you initiate Windows Update to find out if there are any updates and Windows Update itself may be updated. OK.

 

Much ado about nothing. But, boy, is the "black helicopter" crowd going to have a field day.

Gary

 

The inquirer is trash.

 

Well I say its true see my thread about this -

http://forum.notebookreview.com/forumdisplay.php?f=15

 

That's why there's a second link, to the Windows Secrets article. Either way, I don't like having my computer updated in any way when I have specifically told it NOT to do so.

 

But in this case, you would have had to have specifically asked it to look for updates. If you don't ask it to look for updates, it won't try to update the updater. You can always go look for them manually yourself.

 

This is just further justification that the biggest spyware installed on PCs is Windows!

 

Then un-install Windows.

 

Microsoft could have been a tad more forthcoming and upfront about this, some would call it typical Microsoft arrogance; however, the reality of the technology is that any update process, whether Microsoft, Adobe, Norton, or any other, relies upon software on both sides that communicates in order to work and it is reasonable to expect that this software would also get updates. Updating the updater is a tricky proposition. If the user declines the update, subsequent updates may not be possible. Nevertheless, it was in poor form to distribute the update in stealth mode; it would have been much better to have been distributed as a required update.

 

http://www.computerworld.com/action...icleBasic&articleId=9036058&source=rss_news10

 

Are we going to see the same story every time another "source" reprints it? How tedious. Ho-hum.

 

New news, here.

Not altogether unexpected when all the lessons learned over the past several decades on how to update the updater are ignored.

 

Well regardless of how reliable Inquirer is, this story was posted on many different news sources. Not only that, they've found that this 'secret' update fails to register with Windows, so essentially it breaks Windows Update.

 

From what I've read, it doesn't update completely by itself. Only if you've set it to notify you of available updates.

If you disable Windows Update entirely, it won't do this check.

That said, Microsoft should probably have been a bit more open about what they're doing on your computer, and when.

 

The update is Windows Update.

The problem described in the latest articles regarding XP is the inability to use Windows Update after recovering and thereby regressing to an earlier version of Windows Update. Any programmer with more than a year of experience should know enough to build some sort of versioning into an update process so that it can detect mismatches at run time and self-correct them. Amateurs.