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Comment by gldalmaso | Hacker News Reader

>> Sysadmins blocked the updates

There's something about this that really bothers me, maybe someone can better clarify.

Why are admins enforcing a policy that leaves the company target to just about every possible security hole that has been fixed in the past 20 years?

Is there a valid reason for this that I'm unaware of?

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There are quite a lot of companies that have applications that rely on IE6. I, personally, know of a few financial institutions that can't update. This might not be necessarily related to their systems not being able to work with a newer version, though. Some office drones are just incapable of doing there job if the color of a button changes. I kid you not.

Other companies have a long(!) cycle when evaluating new software releases. I have heard of an insurance provider that rolled out IE7 just this year.

Define valid. The reason in the giant organization that I work in is broken internal applications. The number of internally deployed web apps that were targetted for IE6 and nothing else is truly astonishing. And the speed with which they get updated is astonishing as well. We finally deployed IE8 this year after almost 2 years of remediation effort. Which just kills me. (And of course because of thinking about security harkens back to the 1960s, we are a full year into exploring the deployment of Chrome or Firefox as a supplemental browser, but at present it is too risky)

I work for a local-government IT department in the DC area. We're on IE7, but we have automatic updates turned off.

At first, a few years ago, it was because there was one specific update that broke our Oracle software, so everything got turned off. Now, we keep them off because of inertia. We started pushing out selected security updates in the last few months because the security folks insisted.

Oddly, it's our policy to install the full set of updates (except IE8) to all machines that have issues. We also update our images with all the latest stuff from Microsoft Updates.

Large corporations run lots of browser-based applications. To upgrade these applications, or even to regression test them - even in virtual environments - costs money. Any money they spend on IT comes out of their profits, or is added onto their prices. Would you pay an extra 5 bucks to buy your car insurance from a company that has ditched IE6?

Legacy applications. When you have invested on applications that sadly work only on IE6, then you have no choice but to block the updates. It would be great if windows can run different versions of IE on the same machine, or even at the same time.

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