Microsoft puts hand up, “our bad”. After the story broke about the stealth updates Microsoft has admitted that they goofed. The problem hit he support forums on Tuesday but, based on earlier analysis it appears that this problem may have turned up as early as last month.
From Computer World:
On the same day it tried to refute reports that enterprise customers’ PCs were being force-fed the Windows XP desktop search tool, Microsoft Corp. did a turnabout and admitted it had messed up.
Some system administrators, however, were still not convinced that the company is telling a straight story.
Late Thursday night, Bobbie Harder, a program manager on the WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) team, said the update for Windows Desktop Search (WDS) had, in fact, been installed on some machines without administrator approval, and offered an apology.
On Tuesday, Harder said in a post to a company blog, Microsoft revised and released a WDS update package aimed at machines running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 that did not have the desktop search tool installed. The update was supposed to be optional.
“Unfortunately, in revising this update, the decision to reuse the same update package had unintended consequences to our WSUS customers,” she said. “Many of you who had approved the initial update package for a limited number of machines, had Tuesdays’ WDS revision automatically install on all clients because of the expanded applicability scope and because, by default, WSUS is set to automatically approve update revisions.
“We sincerely regret the inconvenience this has caused and extend a sincere apology to all impacted customers,” Harder said.
Apologies at this point in the game are a hollow sentiment. This is not a new process and it is rather stunning that Microsoft had this problem arise at all.
[tags]WSUS Error, Stealth Updates, Microsoft Stealth Updates[/tags]