Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update

Re:Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update by Silhouette on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:33AM (#14341395)

There is no coherent logic to simultaneously not trusting Microsoft, and running their code - any version of it.

Of course there is. Many of us found Windows 7 to be a useful OS and trusted Microsoft of that era to produce it. That doesn't necessarily mean we trust Microsoft of this era or more recent Microsoft products to be something we want to use. There is no logical incompatibility here. They've simply changed their strategy to one some of us don't like, after we bought some of their earlier products and before the support lifetime of those products ran out.

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Re:Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update by emodendroket on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:39AM (#14341441)

So what you're proposing is, in effect, running an OS outside of its support window.

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Re:Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update by Silhouette on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:43AM (#14341478)

Not at all. The support window for Windows 7 was advertised as going up to 2020. It should be possible to install important security updates without anything else changing as a side-effect until that time. It should also be possible to look up those updates and know what you're getting before choosing to install them, to make sure they really are security updates. That's not so much a matter of trust, it's a matter of Microsoft meeting the commitments it gave when people chose to buy its OS before, and verifying that this is happening without just taking their word for it.

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Re:Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update by emodendroket on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:44AM (#14341484)

But if you're installing and running the security updates then you're back to trusting Microsoft. How can you verify the patches are all exactly what they purport to be?

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Re:Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update by Silhouette on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:50AM (#14341542)

Trust isn't black and white. Of course you can't 100% verify any update without personally decompiling and analysing exactly what it contains, but you can take reasonable precautions before installing them. You might be willing to trust that a security patch described as fixing a specific vulnerability such as the one we're discussing here is at least trying to do what it says if no-one has reported otherwise after a while, without being willing to trust Microsoft as a whole to push only genuine security updates without supervision.

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