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Microsoft: No More 'Patch Tuesday' For Windows 10 Home Users
citpyrc writes: According to the Register, Microsoft is making some changes to how it rolls out updates in Windows 10. Home users will receive updates as they come out, rather than queueing them all up on "patch Tuesday." Business users will have the option to set their own update cycle, so they can see if any of the patches accidentally break anything for home users before trying them out. There will also be an optional peer-to-peer updating mechanism for Windows 10. Microsoft announced a service called Advanced Threat Analytics, which employs various machine learning techniques to identify malware on a network. As a premium service, top-dollar customers can pay for Microsoft to monitor black-hat forums and alert the company if any of its employees' identities are stolen.
On all devices that like to auto update.
Especially Android, where the motto "change for change's sake" seems to be the MO of many devs ( Page, Brin, and Zuck boy, I'm looking at you).
It's interesting how this habit by Microsoft has become embedded in the IT operations of many companies.
It will be cool to see if what the effects are (ie. what breaks) with this change since it's "process" change much more than an a technical change. Often, that's where the biggest challenges are since dependencies and other factors are often invisible at first glance.
>> Home users will receive updates as they come out
Are you sure that option isn't already on? It seems that a couple of my older Windows boxes already spend most of their cycles on downloading, processing (scanning) and installing countless updates.
> Home users will receive updates as they come out, rather than queueing them all up on "patch Tuesday."
So random breakage, then, rather than breakage on a particular weekday. Sucks to be a home user.
> so they can see if any of the patches accidentally break anything for home users before trying them out.
"if"? It's inevitable.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Business users will have the option to set their own update cycle, so they can see if any of the patches accidentally break anything for home users before trying them out.
Looking at the The Register article, apparently Terry Myerson himself actually said the above. So home users are now officially crash test dummies for Microsoft's quality assurance? Cool, buckle me up.
Yeah. Welcome to the new update regime for Windows 10 Home Edition...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"Business users will have the option to set their own update cycle"
I've had that for a decade now. WSUS has been pretty easy to manage.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I, for one, eagerly await the day when I get to reboot my machine to install updates N times a month instead of once.
I was going to dissect the security service for not taking customer data importantly, but the linked articles have no mention of "Microsoft monitoring black-hat sites for employee credentials" at all. I don't know where the Slashdot article editor got that.
Advanced threat analytics is from Microsoft's acquision of Aorato last November, who's main product protected against internal threats by warning of non-typical login activity:
A compromised employee's mobile device exposes the organization, through Active Directory, to identity theft and information disclosure.
Monitoring and auditing solutions (such as tracking changes) of Active Directory cannot correlate information between entity behavior and information residing in Active Directory.
Will I be able to select what I want to update ? Because Microsoft pushing driver updates pretty much ruined my tablet, which uses modified drivers.
During the hayday people bought windows PCs for home because they were familiar with it at work. Now... not many are buying home PCs. With competition from iPad, iPhone and chromebooks crowding in, home PC might become a relic like the VCR or the CD player.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So can set updates to install a few weeks after they get rolled out to everyone else. That way next time there is an update that hoses people systems like last August's I can find out before I get burnt.
This change is for home users, and as far as I know, most home users already have automatic updates set on their machines. The only difference is that it won't be delayed to next Tuesday.
For those like me who manually check for updates every month or so, nothing will change. That is, as long as we can still decide which update to install.
How is releasing updated to be installed when they are ready different from how updates are sent out on Linux distributions?
I thought Patch Tuesday was to make WSUS more manageable for companies. Basically you want to deploy security updates right away, because as soon as the patch is in the wild people start reverse engineering it to figure out how it works and write exploits to attack the unpatched. Without Patch Tuesday, exploitable patches could come out on any day. With Patch Tuesday, you be ready to perform triage once a month: quickly test and deploy security patches, then slow down and test the non-security related patches and deploy those as you're satisified.
With the new system, security patches still come out any day, but it sounds like WUB (Windows Update for Business) will be removing the ability to selectively deploy patches; you can pause the stream or allow it to apply, but you can't apply A, D, F, and G while holding back B, C, E, and H. So now every day you'll have to be ready to sprint to test all of the patches released that day, because even if todays patches are all feature related and not security related, tomorrows patch might fix an important security issue warranting quick deployment and you can't apply it until todays patches are in place.
" so they can see if any of the patches accidentally break anything for home users before trying them out."
Is that some kind of ServicePack for Windows7? We haven't heard much from Redmond on the operating system front lately. Didn't they do something with phones for a while?
Just set update in windows to notify you of downloads, instead of auto download/install, you can wait as long as you want then, heck you could even do it on a Tuesday if you want.
Things may have improved, but you still have to reboot for far too many Windows updates for a daily update cycle to be anything other than frustrating as hell for most people. Microsoft used to be hated for that before "Patch Tuesday" was started. I guess they never learned their lesson, and are going to drag the public kicking and screaming back into the daily boot cycle.
What a shame they couldn't have learned their lesson and either started issuing patches that don't require reboots for the most trivial of changes, or stick with "Patch Tuesday" to minimize the pain for the user.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That's oh so nice of Microsoft to use the home users as beta test sites before the patches are released to businesses.
Oh joy. Now I get to reboot the computer a whole bunch of times a month.
I really wish Microsoft would figure out how to write an operating system that doesn't require a reboot for every insignificant update. I'm sure the Linux people would be happy to teach them.
The big problem with Patch Tuesday was that most exploits from the following Wednesday on wouldn't get fixed for a month. MS should get rid of that.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
More broken computers for me to fix!
Don't get rid of it as an office with 50-100 pc all downing updates from the internet at the same time can kill your bandwidth and in some places lead to big overage fees even at say 1GB mo per system is say 50-100GB is still quite a bit even with an 500GB-1TB cap.
It's entirely possible to send out updates that don't require reboots. Hell, even kernel updates can theoretically be done without reboot (and Linux has had this ability commercially via Ksplice (now owned by Oracle) and recently mainstream kernel implemented an alternative to Ksplice). Hopefully Windows 10 will at least keep the number of updates that require reboot to a minimum.
That Windows finally won't require a restart after EVERY update?
No?
Oh well. At least I don't have to ask users when they last rebooted.
So... they will have to reboot daily from this point onwards ?
And wait for extra 15 minutes before leaving work ?
Oh god. Bring back patch Tuesday.
Why doesn't MS overhaul their update mechanism completely? It should be quick, unobtrusive and painless (but in all seriousness, I think that would entail rewriting the entire codebase of Windows over again [including the kernel; possibly scrapping NT entirely] because unless there's a simple update for something such as Windows Defender, it almost always requires a restart or two to install and configure any given update due to the design of the NT architecture).
I dread having to update under Windows. It's always searching for updates--which takes about 15-20 minutes just finding them. Then, to download 500MB of updates will take an hour, and it's NOT due to the lack of bandwidth on my end. And to top it all off, it spends another 45 minutes to configure and install the updates (add another 15-30 minutes if the updates resume configuration when you restart the machine). I have experienced this with many Windows machines, including those that are administered by WSUS. There has to be a better way--most people will NOT put up with this cumbersome process, so ultimately, the updates will never get installed.
Under Ubuntu (and Linux in general), it's a quick and painless process. Downloading and installing 500MB of updates takes ten minutes max (usually five minutes for me). Unless there's a kernel-level update, it doesn't have to restart. When you do need to restart, it doesn't tie up the machine configuring updates for an eternity.
Take a fresh install of windows, update, restart, update, restart,....
On some machines it says "this update couldn't be installed", after a fresh windows installation.
For win 8 you have to turn to the shitty shop (or is it called market?) to install win 8.1
Windows Update is a horrible nightmare, to my disappointment they still don't kill it and make it better.
btw, has anybody tried updating a windows phone? What a f*ck. "downloading update", "preparing update", "updating", "restarting", "after update modifications", 30 minutes are gone. after rebooting, another update and so on.
Windows has the worst update mechanism of all major players and it isn't getting any better in win 10.
Windows 10. I have a, well, call him a friend, who works at Microsoft and has been forced to deal with the Windows 10 "beta" on his work machine for quite a while now. Apparently it's hard to keep productivity up when the damned thing keeps blue screening all the time. His opinion to me was that Windows 10 was the biggest piece of suckage Microsoft has produced to date. I bought some popcorn and am looking forward to release.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Looks like the Apple Watch is burning people, literally
According to the manual, you're supposed to apply thermal grease and a heat pipe to your wrist before wearing the watch.
Why do we still talk about about retards who still pay for stupid operating systems?
Stop paying for shitty defective software already, you fucking paytard losers!
But... but... it's the *latest and greatest" all new shitty defective software!! Version 10!!!
My IT shop waits at least a few weeks, if not months, before deploying updates. For critical security updates they usually wait about 2 weeks after the patch tuesday that it comes out on. For everything else, they eventually roll them out, but it can take a very, very long time.
I'm not sure exactly what kind of testing they're doing, or if they are just waiting for users to download the patch and see if it breaks things (resulting in a rollback from MSFT), but we never have the latest and greatest anyway.
Honestly, I can't really blame them. There have been countless "bad" updates out of Microsoft in recent years, that break certain programs or BSOD the system or even make it unbootable. However, I don't have a sense that the testing they're doing on these updates internally is adding any value. Probably best just to take a "wait and see" approach: if the update isn't pulled in 2-3 weeks after it lands, it's probably fine.
Back to the days of Windows 98? Or do they plan to stop requiring a reboot for every stupid little patch they release...
Four mentions of Windows and seven mentions of Microsoft on the main page :)
"Business users will have the option to set their own update cycle, so they can see if any of the patches accidentally break anything for home users before trying them out."
Stripping away the spin, updates will come out as soon as they're ready (which is probably a good thing on the whole), and business users will have to test and deploy them at that time, whenever it happens, rather than having a monthly scheduled day to do so.
That "option to set their own update cycle" spin is nonsense. If you do that, every single security fix Microsoft ever rolls out goes public days or weeks before you get it -- like what happens when a zero-day goes public and it takes Microsoft several days or weeks to get the fix out, but it'll be like that for you for every single security update ever. Yeah, no, that is not the way any reasonable large business is going to handle it.
This means effectively, if you are a large company, you will really need to have people on call or otherwise available every day in case an update comes out. But, in 2015, are there any large businesses left that *don't* already have IT people on the clock every day? I see this as Microsoft catching up with the reality that at this point large businesses *do* have IT people on staff full time -- they *have* to have them -- and everyone, including the large businesses, is put unnecessarily at risk when security updates that are ready to roll out are held back to wait for a certain day of the month. It does mean occasionally an IT department's going to have to reschedule a day full of department meetings and team-building exercises to test and deploy an update that just came out, but it's worth it.
So it's the right thing to do, but Microsoft's spin is so much nonsense.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Last week, I finally managed to install Windows 10 Preview on my new Winbook tablet - one that has 2GB/32GB of space.
A few of the things I found strange. For instance, in Windows 7 and 8.1, I could set My Documents to any drive I wanted - it didn't have to be locked on C:\ Which is particularly handy in this setup, where I have a mere 32GB, and Windows 10 requires that you have at least 16GB of free storage space in C:\ to be able to install in the first place. I had done that in Windows 8.1, and now migrated to 10.
Now, OneDrive too has the option of being shadowed on your computer. That too, I had set to D:\ in 8.1. However, here, in 10, OneDrive doesn't allow its backups to be on D:\, and insists on installing on C:\ Which is irritating, given my limited C:\. And I can't upgrade it, since it's a NAND flash in TSOP package soldered to the motherboard, so I'm stuck w/ it. Winbooks don't come w/ 64GB drives, and the other tablets are a lot more expensive (this one was $100). Microsoft ought to retain that capability, and since this is a new version of the OS, w/ even things like multiple desktops (similar to virtual desktops in BSD and Linux), one thing I wish they'd do is introduce the concept of logical volume manager and let one extend the C:\ to the SD card, so that one can upgrade to 96GB or above simply by inserting a card.
I don't exactly get the point of Microsoft Edge/Project Spartan, and I didn't like it automatically importing my IE links w/o asking me. I typically have multiple browsers on my computers, and have different sites on each. (In this case, I've avoided downloading FireFox or Chrome due to the space issue). Also, Spartan loses the feature IE had since 8 and FireFox has always had - being able to stage an RSS on one's taskbar. Not good.
I however don't get the difference b/w desktop and tablet mode in this preview edition. It would have made sense if in tablet mode, they went into a Metro like screen (or gave us the option to), while in desktop mode, retaining everything that we had in 7. Incidentally, even in desktop mode, one can't make it look like in 7: one can only bring all those buttons down to where the Windows button is. Strange. Also, the control panel is now hard to find, although one can go to settings. Like today, I had to go through quite a roundabout way to install a new font.
Other than that, I more or less like Windows 10. I found the ability to switch keyboard languages rather neat, and their providing localizations to different versions of a language e.g. English really nifty. Other things that would be nice to have - being able to download Windows Phone apps from the store - apps like Yelp!, Fandango, et al. Also, under Video, to have the ability to create playlists (in iPad, one can create playlists of either audio or video music, which one can then hear in the car w/o taking the eye of the road).
Also, in Windows 8.1, in the Metro mode (in the Start screen), one could customize the looks and color of that screen (not the same as the desktop background or themes). Again, in Windows 10, this is lost. For now at least, anyway.
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Fanbois downvoting, eh?
Have you ever bothered to read the notes on Windows 7 updates? You'd be disgusted to realize how many of them "may require a system restart". Over half. WAY over half.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.