NTBUGTRAQ Bashes Windows Update

BigBadBri writes "Russ Cooper, keeper of the NTBUGTRAQ list, has a few concerns (to put it mildly) with the trustworthiness of Microsoft's Windows Update."

Comments

Atleast, this much is clear..

[jkrise]

Bugtraq hasn't trashed Microsoft Windows - just the Microsoft Windows Update.

"has a few concerns (to put it mildly) with the trustworthiness of Microsoft's Windows Update."

Good.

Re:It seems ntbugtraq.com also runs on NT...

[caluml]

The site www.ntbugtraq.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000. p. So, close.

Re:I like Windows Update

[Alanus]

Just use "up2date -u" and you're done. Even better: Schedule it...

Re:I don't trust Microsoft...

[Coz]

I haven't experienced a single problem due to a Windows update.

I have. My Wife's XP system stopped booting after a Windows Update. It's a semi-random thing - 75% of the time, after POST (and the "Windows failed to start properly last time" screen) we get a blank screen, black, forever. Power down and try again. Another 10% of the time, we get a black screen with white bars across the bottom. Power down and try again. Maybe 15% of the time, XP boots cleanly.

Using the different boot options doesn't help, either - same results, if you're bringing up Windows and not a command prompt. Rolling back the system to two weeks prior to the behavior starting didn't fix it, either. Now, when she gets it to boot, she leaves it on (and hopes it doesn't crash and shut down when she changes users to let our daughter play Barbie games), and we fight through multiple attempts when we reboot.

Someday, she'll get upset enough to let me reimage it for her and reinstall XP (yes, she has to use MS-only software for her job). Until then - we try, try again....

Re:In case of slashdotting,

[NTBugtraq]

Actually, I have made suggestions as to how Windows Update could be better. The second link in my post pointed to an article I wrote last year to NTBugtraq with suggestions. That message was discussed widely within Microsoft according to people there I have spoken with, yet despite that, WU continues to suck.

Almost everything I said in this recent message is a suggestion. They need to be more informative about the activities of the application. What's the point of doing a scan and saying you need no patches if it failed in the process and recorded a message in an obscure log on your machine? The suggestion is it shouldn't do that, it should say on the web page that the scan failed, and, provide something more of an explanation than an 8-digit error message.

Read my message again with that mindset and I think you'll see many suggestions.

Cheers,
Russ - NTBugtraq Editor