Unheralded Microsoft Update triggers controversy

Stephen Withers
Friday, 14 September 2007 07:19

Business IT - Technology

A silent revision to Microsoft Update has caused a flurry of concern from users who thought they had an opportunity to approve all updates before they are installed.

There is some debate about what is actually happening. According to Scott Dunn at Windows Secrets wrote "The Automatic Updates dialog box in the Control Panel can be set to prevent updates from being installed automatically. However, with Microsoft's latest stealth move, updates to the WU executables seem to be installed regardless of the settings — without notifying users."

Nate Clinton, Windows Update program manager at Microsoft, disputes this: "WU does not automatically update itself when Automatic Updates is turned off, this only happens when the customer is using WU to automatically install upgrades or to be notified of updates," he wrote in the Microsoft Update Product Team Blog.

Yet Vista product manager Nick White wrote in the Windows Vista Blog "This self-updating is done regardless of whether the user has enabled automatic checking, download and/or installation of updates."

It seems that Dunn and White might have phrased their remarks too loosely, as apparently Clinton has got it right and if Windows Update is set to neither install nor notify it will not self-update. Furthermore, this is nothing new: Windows Update has updated itself several times previously.

Taking Microsoft's explanation - that Windows Update needs to keep itself updated so that it can handle subsequent updates - at face value, it still seems reasonable that users are notified before the update is applied, given the chance to decline it, and warned of the consequences if they do. Not everyone goes along with the idea of applying patches as soon as possible - some prefer to wait a day or two so that others can be the guinea pigs. If a latent flaw in a new version of Windows Update prevented subsequent self-updates, recovery could be time-consuming.

But in any case, shouldn't an old version of Windows Update still be able to detect any new updates for Windows and associated software, even if it could not download and install them until it had updated itself?