Re: wsusoffline - win
Agreed. Fuck the cloud. It might be an option if you live and work in a nicely connected first-world country, but not when you live and work in a developing country, as I do now, where having no proper internet connection is kind of expected, and having one is a commodity. Maybe google's loon balloons will actually work here, but I wouldn't rely on any proper cloud services to run reliably through it. MS must think the entire world has access to decent connections.
And still. Now sitting in my MS update pending list (set not to download, nor install automatically), with some added notes from my searches:
kb2952664 Win10 nagware
KB2999226 is a nonsecurity patch for Windows 8.1 that, according to the KB article, sticks a new Universal C Runtime on Windows 8.1 machines. The new Universal C Runtime is needed when programmers use the new Windows 10 Software Development Kit to build Universal/Metro apps and you try to run them on Windows 8.1. It's a mammoth patch, first issued for both Win 7 and Win 8.1 on Sept. 15, then issued for Vista on Sept. 29. There's no indication that the patch has been modified in any other way.
KB3035583: Ed Bott posted a very thorough analysis of KB 3035583 in his ZDNet report, "Get Windows 10: Microsoft's hidden roadmap for the biggest software upgrade in history." Bott has a less-conspiratorial take on the evidence:
I have a hard time seeing this as adware. It is, instead, perfectly targeted advertising, offering a free upgrade to a product currently running on the system where the ad is being displayed. There are no hidden costs (aside from those incurred by the download itself) and the upgrade isn't going to be installed without your explicit consent. It can't, because there's at least one license agreement (and probably several) you're going to have to click through.
KB 3068708:
KB 3022345, since replaced by KB 3068708, says, "By applying this service, you can add benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet been upgraded." That looks like a lightning bolt to any tinfoil hat. Read further, though, and Microsoft says the patch "collects diagnostics about functional issues on Windows systems that participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program," which is a horse of a very different color.
KB 3075249, however, doesn't mention anything about CEIP. It's billed as an update that "adds telemetry points to the User Account Control (UAC) feature to collect information on elevations that come from low integrity levels
KB3080149, This package updates the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices. This service provides benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet upgraded. The update also supports applications that are subscribed to Visual Studio Application Insights.
kb3092627, update to fix an update kb3076895, fixing XML core service.
My private laptop runs Mint already (Win7 in VM). My work laptop, which unfortunately has to run applications that don't run in WINE, and a VPN, plus a couple of corporate sites that only run in IE (yeah, really), runs on Win7-pro. With Mint running in VM.
Fuck MS.
I'm kind of lucky still, with my MiFi box over LTE giving me 12Mbps peak where I roam around. Fixed internet at my workplace stops at 2Mbps if it is working at all.