2016/02/10

2016 February 09: a patch Tuesday without any change to Upgrade to Windows 10 program. Really ?

As you may expect, Win10wiwi team is very carefully monitoring all updates deployed by Microsoft through "Windows Update".
The important updates that have been deployed last Tuesday are almost all security updates and thus should not been related to "Upgrade to Windows 10". We monitor them all the same and so far, none of them have been involved in the upgrade program.



In the batch of updates deployed this week, only one update can be related to "Upgrade to Windows 10" program: kb3135449. This is an update to Windows Update client itself. Because Windows Update Client is the end-user component that is responsible for getting all the components involved in the so called updategate, changes to this client may have an impact or even been required for the upgrade process to work.
As usual, there are not much details on Microsoft web site regarding this update:

This is what we can read on microsoft web site: 
Windows Update Client for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2: February 2016
This article describes an update that contains some improvements to Windows Update Client in Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2. This update has a prerequisite.
About this update
This update contains some improvements to Windows Update Client in Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2.

Now, since this is an important update, and even if it has some potential incidence on the updategate program, it may also be required for other things such as deploying security patches etc.
Furthermore, this update alone, even if it embeds things that may be used for the updategate, is not enough to be a game changer. Windows Update client is just a vehicle, not the content itself. Disabling it would be like banning all cars because some of them are used to carry illegal or unwanted stuff or persons.

Something else that we found out is that this update is not available for Windows 7 nor has it any equivalent in the updates deployed to Windows 7 with this Patch Tuesday batch.

For these reasons, we have decided not to ban KB3135449 from the updates that Win10wiwi disables. Yet, we are still in the process of examining the changes that KB3135449 involves. This takes some time... If we find something strange or suspicious, we will do what we think is needed to increase the control Windows 7 and Windows 8 users have on their systems.

We studied the optional updates too and nothing in this patch Tuesday's batch optional update is related to the updategate.

Stay tuned !


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