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Comment by developer2 | Hacker News Reader

Extended Support ended January 14, 2020, however Microsoft is offering Extended Security Updates (ESU) until January, 2023. It's a paid program to extend security patches, having to be paid once a year for each of the 3 years; so only truly desperate companies are paying for this privilege.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/extended-secu...

[2] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/y...

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But the Update Catalog shows updates that you can apparently download as usual for Windows 7 in this case. There is a specific rationale given on at least one of the reports[1] for why a patch is still being issued even though Windows 7 is out of support. So I'm not sure this time it has anything to do with ESU.

[1] https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/en-US/vulnerability/...

Last week I saw a friend using dot net software that scrapes the Catalog, automatically downloads all patches and applies them to the system. It's apparently common in enterprises without an ESU subscription... I was quite surprised and amused

Hahah, that's actually awesome. Of course someone out there put in the leg work to work around the licensing issue, and then shared it to the (minor?) masses.

If that software is available to the public it would be a great service to name or link it if you can find out what it is.

It's not public because of licensing. But it's a simple reimplementation of https://www.wsusoffline.net.

Source code here: https://gitlab.com/wsusoffline/wsusoffline

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