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Microsoft Delays February Patch Tuesday Indefinitely (sans.edu)

Posted by BeauHD on from the until-further-notice dept.

UnderAttack writes: Microsoft today announced that it had to delay its February Patch Tuesday due to issues with a particular patch. This was also supposed to be the first Patch Tuesday using a new format, which led some to believe that even Microsoft had issues understanding how the new format is exactly going to work with no more simple bulletin summary and patches being released as large monolithic updates. Ars Technica notes the importance of this Patch Tuesday as "there's an in-the-wild zero-day flaw in SMB, Microsoft's file sharing protocol, that at the very least allows systems to be crashed." They also elaborate on the way Microsoft is "continuing to tune the way updates are delivered to Windows 7, 8.1, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, and Server 2012 R2."

46 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Sigh by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've never been a big fan of the way Microsoft rolls out updates, or how the system handles it, but since Windows 10 they've made it just a fucking agony, with annoying pop up screens, unintended system reboots (with loss of data), and just general chaos. How can a company that has been making software for over thirty years have suddenly become so stunningly incompetent.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    1. Re:Sigh by Desler · · Score: 3, Funny

      Maybe ask the Slashdot coders? They've been incompetent since 1997 so would have plenty of insight.

    2. Re: Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      They fired their qa team.

    3. Re:Sigh by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Funny

      Wait... what did you mean by "suddenly"?

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    4. Re:Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Maybe all the competent programmers have recently retired? That would explain a lot.

    5. Re:Sigh by darkain · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Look at the CEOs over the various eras of Microsoft, it seriously explains everything. The current CEO is from their cloud devision, and in distributed computing, take a few nodes offline from time to time for patching is perfectly normal as other nodes are online for redundancy. Rolling updates are the norm in this area. This logic however absolutely FAILS on the desktop. Updates are scheduled to Microsoft's maintenance windows now, rather than when is the most opportune time for the consumer actively using the operating system. Now think of this not only in terms of Windows Update, but Microsoft as a whole. Gates was a business man, all of their primary software focused on productivity within a business environment. Ballmer was all about DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS, and as much as we all love to make fun of him for it, he was indeed quite good to them (Visual Studio had decent advancements during his time). Now we have Nadella, who's entire focus has been on automation, regardless of who all it effects. Again, this worked great in the datacenter, but he's entirely missed the mark when it comes to the end user perspective.

    6. Re:Sigh by lgw · · Score: 5, Informative

      They fired their QA guys, most of them gone about 2 years ago IIRC. You started seeing a dramatic decline in product quality thereafter. Did you know it's impossible to patch a fresh Win7 install via normal Windows Update? That broke less than a year after they dumped the QA teams.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    7. Re: Sigh by CrashNBrn · · Score: 2

      Wait, Slashdot had a QA Team?

    8. Re:Sigh by QuietLagoon · · Score: 1

      ...How can a company that has been making software for over thirty years have suddenly become so stunningly incompetent....

      Microsoft only seems to care about the desktop as a means of personal data collection.

    9. Re:Sigh by MoarSauce123 · · Score: 1

      They were always incompetent. The factor here is money, as long as people only bitch about Windows and keep buying it nothing will change. You think Microsoft makes bad product? Then stop buying it!

    10. Re: Sigh by dougdonovan · · Score: 1

      $ talks but we already knew that

    11. Re:Sigh by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Funny

      Did you know it's impossible to patch a fresh Win7 install via normal Windows Update?

      Yes. Luckily it's easy to download the updates manually at another computer.

      Ha! I lied, it isn't.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    12. Re:Sigh by Luckyo · · Score: 2

      Up until the release of 10, they have been an excellent example of how to do updates. Individually installable, commonly individually uninstallable updates with excellent documentation on what each update does. Ease of both choosing how to install, when to install, and what not to install at all.

      That is all gone now.

    13. Re:Sigh by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Go to YouTube and look up Banacles Nerdgasm's "I was fired" video if you want to know why MSFT's OS division has turned to shit, but the short of it is they fired the QA and tester teams in their entirety in one giant culling. Now YOU are the beta tester for the actual customers which Nutella has made clear is the ENTERPRISE users, not the Windows Home or Pro buyers. Basically Windows Home is now the alpha, Windows Pro the beta, and Enterprise is the finished product.

      Why do you think you can't turn off updates or all that telemetry shit even on Windows Pro, which as the name implied in the past was for professionals? Its because they need to see how badly the patches fuck your system up so they can fix or remove them before it gets to their actual customers, all those corps paying juicy endless rent to have Windows Enterprise licenses. So congrats all of you that took the windows 10 "free" upgrade or worse actually bought Win 10 Home or Pro, you gave your precious time and hardware to be a testbench for a product you don't even get in return.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    14. Re:Sigh by antdude · · Score: 1

      It's not just MS. Many companies. Companies need to know QA is important, but they care not. :(

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    15. Re: Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Guess who's one of the biggest H1B users in the US?

    16. Re: Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Actually it is easy. Google "WSUS Offline".

    17. Re:Sigh by lgw · · Score: 1

      Manually download and install a "roll-up patch". The earliest one I could find (summer 2015 IIRC) worked for me. Then updates would work. My Win10 tablet OTOH simply won't update. I'm not sure I shouldn't just leave it that way.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    18. Re:Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's a common issue on the web, you need to install two KBs (order matters) (also you might need to kill the updater service for them to install)

      KB3020369
      KB3172605

      http://superuser.com/questions/951960/windows-7-sp1-windows-update-stuck-checking-for-updates

    19. Re:Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      yes, it is.

      http://download.wsusoffline.ne...

      only the actual security updates (and optional things like mse, runtimes, etc), no bullshit.

    20. Re:Sigh by Motherfucking+Shit · · Score: 2

      Manually download and install a "roll-up patch".

      Careful; on Windows 7, the cumulative roll-ups include the backported telemetry KBs.

      --
      "BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
    21. Re:Sigh by Ramze · · Score: 1

      Frankly, they got tired of being blamed for botnets caused by users not updating Windows, so now everyone gets updates whether they like it or not, and they get 'em within a reasonable time frame of their release.

      I'm not sayin' it's right, but I understand their reasoning... and botnets on windows have gone down (they've mostly shifted to routers and other IoT devices).

      Windows still has tools to set when updates should be installed -- it's just that no one bothers to do it. Just like no one bothered to keep their machines updated before and kept clicking to install/reboot later or turn the updates off completely.

      You have to remember MS Windows market share is huge. That means a lot of people are using Windows that have below-average technical skills that need a lot of hand-holding. In this case, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few... or the one. So, when you ask why we can't have nice things like a method to better schedule updates -- think of all the people out there that mismanaged their windows boxes for decades that forced MS's hand.

    22. Re:Sigh by npetrov · · Score: 1

      Some of these great cumulative patches break things like Bluetooth.... Not a big deal for work, but definitely a problem for personal use.

    23. Re:Sigh by lgw · · Score: 1

      Those are the new roll ups. This is the roll up from before MS pulled that shit. This is entirely different brain damage.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    24. Re:Sigh by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      People are bitching and I think that is exactly what caused the pull back in the latest, unknown compulsory software install. They were probably going for another big control over the user power grab and chickened out, forcing the compulsory software install to be redone. These are not patches, not bug fixes, they are literally compulsory software installs and the user is not informed of the contents not can they refuse, master to slave, obey. Likely they were pushing further into George Orwell 1984 territory and got cold feet just before forcing the big brother install.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    25. Re:Sigh by swb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Your description is apt, but the salient insight is that a desktop is being treated like a node in a cluster -- in other words, you can take a few down without taking the entire cluster of consumers being taken offline.

      This means that the purpose of the cluster isn't your individual productivity, the purpose of the cluster is your value as a consumer intelligence node. Just as in a clustered environment the specific workload of a physical server isn't important provided there are other nodes running to handle the cluster workload.

        The OS isn't about providing for your productivity, the OS is to provide Microsoft with consumer intelligence.

    26. Re: Sigh by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Tried it. Perhaps there's something else I can Google for that actually works rather than putting up a cryptic message and exiting?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Oh...Microsoft... by surfdaddy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You've always been there throughout my tech career, for some entertainment. I loved that shell that was Windows 3.1 I gloated over Windows ME. I was Tickled when the first Zune "Welcome to the social! effort to chase the iPod came along. I was amused when you laughed at the iPhone and then belatedly came out with Windows Phone, only to crash in the marketplace. Of course there was Longhorn which became Vista. And don't forget Metro and Windows 8! People bought media and counted on Plays for Sure---- but it no longer plays.... and then there was that unlimited OneDrive storage that less than a year later users were "abusing"(haha) and it was rescinded! You gave your word and then changed it! Top it off with the devious Windows 10 "FREE!!!!" upgrade that was tricked upon people including my mother of 83 years old... and then the advertising and the advertising ID in the OS followed...so now your UPDATES DON"T WORK? Microsoft, don't ever change your character, it is entertainment that will last forever...

    1. Re:Oh...Microsoft... by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      People bought media and counted on Plays for Sure

      As soon as it came out people started calling it "Fails For Sure", and whaddya know, they were right. It lasted, what, 3 years?

      Microsoft is the Shit Show that never stops and never fails to disappoint.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    2. Re: Oh...Microsoft... by dougdonovan · · Score: 1

      & this is why bill gates is, after 25 years, the so-called richest man on the planet.

    3. Re: Oh...Microsoft... by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      & this is why bill gates is, after 25 years, the so-called richest man on the planet.

      The group Kiss was one of the biggest selling bands on the planet for a while....and they still sucked monkey balls. Having huge sales isn't always an indicator of quality.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    4. Re:Oh...Microsoft... by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 1

      I was amused when you laughed at the iPhone and then belatedly came out with Windows Phone, only to crash in the marketplace.

      Although I agree with most of what you said you do realize that M$ had a Mobile OS which was used successfully on phones & PDA's a nearly decade before Apple brought out the IPhone.

      --

      Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.

    5. Re: Oh...Microsoft... by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Uh, no. When he started, there were all sorts of computer alternatives - Mac, Amiga, Unix, VMS and a whole host of others. On PCs, there was CP/M, and Gates provided DOS for the IBM PC. What made him rich was the PC clones made by other companies that needed an OS other than IBM's own PC DOS. Gates provided MS DOS and the rest was history

    6. Re:Oh...Microsoft... by WallyL · · Score: 1

      The gift that keeps on giving!

    7. Re: Oh...Microsoft... by david_thornley · · Score: 2

      When Gates started, well before the Mac and Amiga and when Unix and VMS were not available for reasonably priced desktop use, Microsoft was best known for their BASIC interpreters, which were good for the time on the available computers. The PCs of the time had 8-bit CPUs without hardware multiply and could address 64K of memory, except that 64K was pretty expensive at the time (I was happy to be able to pay only about $100 for 16K) and not all computers supported it. Most of the big commercial brands had their own proprietary OS, and CP/M was the dominant OS for the other computers. This went on, and Microsoft was a quite successful software company, but not a real standout.

      Then IBM decided to bring out a PC, and didn't want to do any more work than they had to, so they looked for an OS. Gates knew this from his mother's contacts in IBM, and bought exclusive rights to QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from the Seattle Computer Club. He repackaged it, sold a non-exclusive license to IBM, and it became known as PC-DOS once the PC came out. I read at the time that you could also get your PC with CP/M-86 or the UCSD p-system, but I never saw a PC with either.

      At this point, we can start saying Microsoft was succeeding because it was the only provider. With the exception of some computers that quickly became niches in the market, everybody ran PC-DOS. IBM was selling computers to businesses, because they were IBM. A computer from some place called Apple or Radio Shack was obviously not suited for real business work, but IBM! If you wanted a computer for serious use, and you didn't have a reason to get something else, you got an IBM PC (which was a pretty good computer at the time), and Microsoft got some of your money.

      Remember when I said IBM didn't want to do any more work than they had to? This means that the PC was made as much as possible out of off-the-shelf components, with a 16K BIOS that was nothing really special. Somebody produced a clean-room BIOS that was functionally equivalent, and from there it was easy to use off-the-shelf components to make a PC clone. These needed operating software to run, of course, and Microsoft was happy to supply a renamed version of PC-DOS. The clones would run all IBM PC software, no problem, and they were a lot cheaper (at one time I estimated that getting the IBM on the side of your computer cost about $500 a letter). More manufacturers sold more computers, each of which had to have PC/MS-DOS on it.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    8. Re:Oh...Microsoft... by surfdaddy · · Score: 1

      Yes but it kind of sucked as it looked like "little Windows". The iPhone was a revolutionary new paradigm.

  3. Won't fix by Doloresanto · · Score: 1

    What else is new? Considering the "great" track record that Microsoft has it's exactly what they can be hesitant about.

  4. End of their "Wimpy" strategy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    As in "I will gladly patch you Tuesday for a Zero Day Today"

  5. Microsoft by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

    Microsoft: "We couldn't figure out how to pour the piss out of this boot even with the instructions written on the heel!"

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  6. Re:MS Isn't the only one who sucks at updates by geekprime · · Score: 1

    not an opposing view as much as "look, it's worse over there!!!1!" which actually has nothing at all to do with the subject at hand.

  7. And diagnostic info by hackwrench · · Score: 1

    The diagnostic information, if any, is never informative. My Android phone was attempting to connect to my home network over and over again with absolutely zero information. All the devices and software I deal with are like that.

  8. Re:MS Isn't the only one who sucks at updates by Bert64 · · Score: 1

    Is windows any different? You have to install tons of third party apps to gain basic functionality that comes as standard on other platforms.

    --
    http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
  9. Exactly why the single large update is bad by simpz · · Score: 1

    Before they could have dropped the single patch causing the issue.

    The price *you* pay for MS to desperately force you to take their spyware in Windows.

  10. Good timing? by SphericalCrusher · · Score: 1

    Good timing, I guess? I was literally just about to build a Software Update Group in Config Manager for deployment of this month's updates. I will still check for available updates though. :)

    --
    "Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
  11. Re:MS Isn't the only one who sucks at updates by unixisc · · Score: 1

    I'll second this one. My TrueOS - I've not been able to apply the latest updates, and already, it's screwing up w/ Wells Fargo certificates on my Chromium browser. I'll wait a few months before I order a new DVD for $6 and then try updating then.

  12. Re:MS Isn't the only one who sucks at updates by david_thornley · · Score: 1

    There are people who simply disagree with me. They're wrong, of course, but that's no big deal. Some hold irrational beliefs (I never would, of course). Some sure seem to act like shills. When Slashdot ran articles on Russian armed aggression, there were several new accounts popping up that pushed bad pro-Russian propaganda, and they looked like shills to me. (You know, I never knew Putin cared about Slashdot.)

    --
    "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes