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Comment by tallanvor | Hacker News Reader

Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates.

I'm not a fan of the telemetry either, but they do have it all documented now, which is more than, for example, most phone manufacturers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-level....

And I'm not sure what Windows is supposed to force users into things they don't want. I haven't had an issue with turning off functionality and having it be switched back on during updates - I guess it must happen based on the complaints, but it's not something I've experienced.

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There's a middle ground somewhere around 'not re-downloading updates every time they fail' and 'not disguising Minecraft as a security update'. A lot of the annoyance at the updates is with how frustrating the implementation is.

Microsoft aren't the only company that need constant security updates: I've never seen any complaints about Chrome's.

Chrome's disabled using backspace as "back" button.

But really that's my only complaint!

> Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates.

When updates that only add telemetry (Windows 7), or that upgrade an installed Windows 7 / 8 to Windows 10 without even asking, among other garbage, are classified as "critical security updates" by Microsoft, it really should come as no surprise that people disable all automatic updates in response.

They didn't exactly help themselves, firing their QA team, and using their users as the test platform.

Nothing was done about Telemetry (maintain state after updates, better options to disabling PARTS of it, documenting it) till AFTER people discovered it and there was a public outcry. And they still didn't document it till it was becoming clear that GDPR would go through and they'd be legally liable for not doing so. And there's currently still no way to completely disable Telemetry's data collection. It's a simple on/off toggle and potentially a registry entry that determines if the startup scripts of the OS should start the Telemetry application at all. I'm sorry but at best that's pretty myopic for a company who claims (paraphrased) "trust is our most important resource", or (literal) "judge us by the actions of our recent past, our current actions and our future actions". And it certainly doesn't help to shake the notion that they have larger and more maligned plans for what they intend to do with their greater OSS influence, certainly not when you consider their history. But even if we're to take those statements at face value they still don't completely align with their actions.

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