Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Forces Shutdown of Autopatcher
kaufmanmoore writes "Posts on Neowin and Autopatcher's site announce Microsoft has forced the closure of the Autopatcher download section. Details are scarce as to the exact reason for the take down after over 4 years of availability, but an official from Microsoft legal says that it has nothing to do with Windows Genuine Advantage. Goodbye to another useful tool that helped sysadmins apply Microsoft's numerous patches."
Do they even understand the concept of bad publicity any more, or did they just stop caring?
Fuckers hit close to home, this time; Autopatcher was great for keeping relatives on dialup up-to-date.
You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people. - notnAP, #26891325
"I asked the representative if Windows Genuine Advantage had anything to do with it and he categorically told me this was not the case, he added that Windows Update for pre-Vista versions of Windows can now be accessed using Firefox and that the concern at Microsoft had more to do with the possible malicious code that could be redistributed with certified Microsoft updates."
Sure. Whatever. We all know that there's never been a case of malicious code distributed with Autopatcher. So I'm calling it now. Watch M$ come up with their own tool that does the same thing as Autopatcher and watch them find a way to turn it into a revenue stream.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
They could have avoided a lot of trouble, if they had just signed up as a Microsoft Partner. It costs nothing and would have made them "a co-player" rather than a "security risk".
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
How does someone in your company talking to a random Microsoft employee make them legal? How does Microsoft knowing about them make them legal?
I am not a lawyer, but I think I know when one is needed. And I think if that is their claim on being legal they really need to talk to one.
I have no idea if they are legal or not. My point is just talking to someone in a company and having them say they know about you doesn't make what you are doing legal.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
We give them the vast majority of our IT budgets, we try to keep believeing in them and still they hate us......
I call Shenanigans!
Insert Generic Sig Here:
But why can't we make this even vaguely win-win? Provide a utility that will download ALL of these updates (whether the machine thought they were applied or not) directly from MS for use on removable media.
What alternatives are there for those on dial up (or other cases of no or intermittent network connection)? For those who have had malware make edits to their hosts file and/or browser security settings that make obtaining updates directly from MS on the computer they're updating difficult?
This service added a lot of value to MS customers. Tearing it down because they were better than their equivalent is destructive.
Doing things that make your products harder to use is bad business sense. It really shows how badly out of touch MS is with the industry.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's more like a tremendous savings in time and trouble.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So much for small business and residential users in rural areas. You know, this will hurt ONLY paying customers; not the "pirates" downloading slipstreamed ISOs off of IRC and torrent networks (or buying "pirated" CDs in the streets, etc). This also hurts small businesses on cable and DSL connections where there are "unspecified" download caps to their "unlimited" internet services.
Congratulations, Microsoft. You've shut down yet another tool useful for installing and deploying legitimate Windows, thereby increasing the value of "pirated" Windows offerings AND provided more reasons for users to choose alternatives such as Linux, OS X, and BSD. Good move there.
Why not actually, oh, I don't know, innovate some new features for Windows rather than harassing small third-party developers who offer FREE utilities to make YOUR piece of crap offering easier to manage? Like, say, I dunno, work on a better filesystem or something.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
So I guess now that they have retired the "Get the facts" campaign, Microsoft is actively increasing the total cost of ownership of Windows? After all, they are shutting down a free tool that presumably saved their clients thousands of man-hours.
They may claim that the shutdown is not about WGA, but I can't see what other reason they would have, other than that AutoPatcher competes with some as-yet-unreleased Microsoft product.
I'll fill in #5 for you:
..."? No, Microsoft should do whatever they can to make more money, and if that means screwing over all their customers, so be it. If the customers don't like that, they should find a new vendor or alternative. But customers haven't been doing that, and have shown that they're willing to put up with whatever Microsoft does.
5. Maintain a monopoly in operating systems and office software, and sit back and laugh as people continue to buy and use your products despite superior (but not fully compatible) alternatives because they're either afraid or apathetic, no matter how inconvenient you make your products.
People want to stick with the market leader, no matter how much better any alternative is. They also especially want to be "compatible" with everyone else, which is one of their reasons for sticking with the market leader. So the market leader has no incentive to improve; customers won't abandon them, no matter what.
So why do people here keep saying things like "Microsoft should
I for one applaud this move by MS. Anything they do to screw over their customers is a good thing in my book. I like to laugh as people complain about these actions, about how it just makes their jobs harder, etc. If someone keeps coming back for more abuse, they deserve that abuse.
Microsoft is within its rights, though obnoxious, with regard to Autopatcher, but since when is it their business what Neowin says about Autopatcher? Where does MS get off telling Neowin to take down their forums? Is MS just being a bully or is there some relationship between MS and Neowin that I don't know about?
That's great. And there is also a financial procedure called bankruptcy which allows you to defend yourself against your creditors just before you've expended all your assets on legal fees. You'll need it after you've battled Microsoft in court for a few years.
The purpose of Autopatcher was to reduce the VERY high maintenance costs of Windows XP. Windows often becomes corrupted and must be reloaded to clear away system files that have been infected with viruses and other malware.
Notice that Microsoft has not released a Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, even though it has been years since SP2 was released. The purpose of the delay is apparently to make Windows XP more expensive, in the hope that people will begin to adopt Windows Vista.
The Windows XP updates of just last Patch Tuesday were more than 20 Megabytes.
Windows Vista is not an option for many, since because of the hassles with Windows XP, many companies have a rule never to use a Windows version before the 2nd service pack is released, and the bugs in Windows Vista are reinforcing that rule.
Also, Windows Vista requires far more resources. Each new Windows version requires more resources, apparently to try to manipulate customers to buy new computers. That serves Microsoft's biggest customers, the computer builders.