Re: Microsoft's Early Xmas Present.

[Steve Stearns <sterno () bigbrother net>]

On Wed, 2002-01-02 at 09:16, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
> On 29/12/01 22:04 -0700, Ryan Russell wrote:
> <snip>
> > normal people to keep up on patches is.  I'm starting to think more and
> > more that a 3-month expiration date on Windows is a good idea.  If you
> > haven't patched in 3 months, then your machine will refuse to do anything
> > but download patches...
> I second that idea. I don't think it will be implemented however, unless
> the installer allows for that. Then again, I don't like my machines
> updating themselves without my permission. (Yeah, I'm the geek that
> knows what I'm doing and keeps stuff patched on my servers. Thankfully
> I'm not the LAN admin, but I usually get to fix infected machines before
> the LAN admins can get to figure out that they are infected by a worm
> that yesterdays antivirus patch won't fix).

Another issue to consider is those people who are on dialup accounts. 
If there's a number of patches that are going to take hours to download
and I need to get work done right now, that "feature" becomes a big
problem.  This creates user antipathy for security which is the last
thing you want.  

---Steve


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