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Comment by nthcolumn | Hacker News Reader

A bit rich from Microsoft to talk about hoarding when the patches they released over the weekend were all signed back in February... i.e. they are hoarding fixes to their own shit for their $$$ extended support agreements.

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"The chaos surprised many security watchers because Microsoft issued an update in March that patched the underlying vulnerability in Windows 7 and most other supported versions of Windows. (Windows 10 was never vulnerable.)"

source: https://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2017/05/wcry-microsoft-is...

So I don't really know what you mean by 'hoarding the fix'. The patch was not initially released to some OS versions because they are NO LONGER supported.

I believe the "hoarding the fix" comment was in reference to the patches for Server 2003, XP, and Windows 8 that were released publicly for the first time over the weekend (but had been distributed previously to customers paying for custom support) [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14329914

I guess I don't see it that way. Extended support (which includes security patches) are only for paying customers.

The "$$$ extended support agreements" funded the development of those fixes. Why would anyone pay the agreements if Microsoft just developed and released those fixes for free? If organisations are stupid enough to lock themselves in to 16-year-old software and create more work for Microsoft I'd say they were well within their rights to charge.

maybe they were testing them?

For three months? That says a lot about the overall testability of their stuff.

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