June Windows Update To Be Biggest in a Year

Supersonic1425 writes "The BBC reports that this month's security update from Microsoft will be the one of the biggest this year. Nine of the patches are for Windows — one classed as critical — two are for Office and one for the Exchange e-mail server software." From the article: "At least one of the loopholes being patched is already being actively exploited by malicious hackers. ... Microsoft is not only tackling security problems but also the fallout of a legal case that the software giant lost."

How much in lost revenue ..

[Anonymous Coward]

How much in lost revenue is all this Microsoft Patching costing the real economy?

ActiveX

[Jaruzel]

The bigger problem here is that this update enforces the ActiveX patch that was released a while back, y'know the one that causes inline ActiveX controls to not fire up, but to display that 'Click Here to Active This Control' message instead.

Not a major problem out on the Internet, but many Corporates have internal web apps where this patch is going to screw things up royally.

-Jar.

Re:How much in lost revenue ..

[Trigun]

Ever patch a system and have some core services not work after?

The patches cause downtime as well.

Re:Clarification

[bheer]

Microsoft had to re-engineer Internet Explorer to stop a technology known as ActiveX automatically starting when users visit some websites.

Huh? Flash would be out of business then. What the post-Eolas IE actually does is prevents the user from interacting with the ActiveX control until 'activated' with a click. (The control's running fine meanwhile, which means it can also be a security risk.) Also, this applies to controls put on pages with an honest-to-gosh [object] tag. If you write your [object] tag dynamically, say via Javascript, users can interact with your object without activating it first.

Mo' money, mo' money...

[s31523]

With respect to:
"We strongly recommend that those of you who are still running these older versions of Windows upgrade to a newer, more secure version, such as Windows XP SP2, as soon as possible."
I think anyone who is still running windows 98 would be better off switching to Linux. I would have to beleive most software running under 98 could be run under Linux using Wine/Crossover Office, or alternatives found. More than likely, most 98 users just have some office type applications and never upgraded because they didn't need the fancy new OS. My old office still has 98 on many computers just because the people using them run basic apps that get by with what they have, and upgrades would be costly (relative of course, some small businesses would be hurt by 10K in computing upgrades). With so many security holes are known, and support is ending, AND newer Linux distros are pretty darn close to "it just works", we may see small pockets of Linux migration.

MS not supporting what they say they do!

[internewt]

From the article:

At the same time as information about the update was being released, Microsoft mentioned that it will not be able to patch Windows 98 and ME against a loophole discovered in April 2006.

Fixing this bug in the ageing software would require a major re-write of the Windows Explorer program used in these old copies of the operating system.

Microsoft is not prepared to undertake this work, given that all support for Windows 98 and ME ends on 11 July 2006.

So even though Microsoft have stated that they support 98 and ME until 11th July 2006, they will not support those two OSes today?

Yes, people are crazy if they rely on 9x in anyway, but when Gates says he'll support it until a date I'd expect support to be provided, even it means some changes to the shell. And we all know how much exageration is used when a job is being avoided... ("major re-write of the Windows Explorer").

Re:How much in lost revenue ..

[drinkypoo]

Just remember to count the majority of your application patches against the windows update time, too. With Linux, most of the applications I use are managed by the distribution and updated automatically for me, instead of having nine update managers running all the time when I'm running programs, or at each program start. (Adobe Reader, Sun Java, the Windows update system, Firefox does its own updates, Macromedia products all check for updates, et cetera.)