Microsoft pulls KB 2952664 and KB 2976978, likely in anticipation of today’s Patch Tuesday

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Günter Born has details on Borncity. Long and short of it, the two notorious Win7/8.1 snooping patches, KB 2952664 and KB 2976978, which were re-re-..
[See the full post at: Microsoft pulls KB 2952664 and KB 2976978, likely in anticipation of today’s Patch Tuesday]

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As I reported on one other Post, about these 2 KB’s(the last one I believe) for me they were pulled early Sunday evening MDT. Usually that does not occur until Monday, if at ll. I was going to install them on my Main W 8.1 Pro Partition as I do not cherry pick Updates, I just test them first. My Test partition had it installed all week. I’d guess if they are going to do this so early, I will need to get “WSUS Offline Update” going more. Bandwidth is not an issue for me so I have only played a bit with it.

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1. Tower Totals: 2xSSD ~512GB, 2xHHD 20 TB, Memory 32GB

SSDs: 6xOS Partitions, 2xW8.1 Main & Test, 2x10.0 Test, Pro, x64

CPU i7 2600 K, SandyBridge/CougarPoint, 4 cores, 8 Threads, 3.4 GHz
Graphics Radeon RX 580, RX 580 ONLY Over Clocked
More perishable

2xMonitors Asus DVI, Sony 55" UHD TV HDMI

1. NUC 5i7 2cores, 4 Thread, Memory 8GB, 3.1 GHz, M2SSD 140GB
1xOS W8.1 Pro, NAS Dependent, Same Sony above.

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Woody,
Great article. Thanks. IF, and I do mean IF these show up again in tomorrow mornings scan, they will get hidden again. And along with them I feel should follow the other 4 currently showing available for install. KB2992611, KB2973337, KB3042058, and KB3172605 appear to me to be unnecessary and unneeded. Please correct me it I am wrong.
Win7 x64 SP1
Dave

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I just wonder if we’ll actually get updates this month.

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March updates should be released today, the 14th, or 15th if you are on the other side of the date line.

Edited to correct dates – when you get old you forget what day it is sometimes.

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The reason I’m wondering is because there haven’t been any proper updates since January. Or December if you’re on Windows 8.1.

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Makes one wonder…

Do Microsoft marketeers watch the web and instruct their technical minions to pull the patches out of the list when they see more than a certain amount of people talking negatively about telemetry / snooping, etc?

Are they hoping for a month when few people notice or comment, then just leave the privacy invasion advancement stuff in there to try to snag more folks who are remaining on older systems?

Do they just leave them available for the times between “patch Tuesdays” when folks aren’t looking as closely at what Microsoft is shepherding into their systems via the back door?

And I have, from time to time, wondered why they don’t just roll the telemetry/snooping work into the cumulative updates for older systems. It’s almost as if they’re somehow legally bound not to do so.

In any case, the dance is interesting to watch.

-Noel

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For several years MS has been staging updates this way. It’s like what they call “Preview” now, only they didn’t use the word before.

Patches show up in the optional list as unchecked “optional” updates. They sit there until sometime the Mon before patch Tues or early Tues. MS changes them to “recommended” or “critical” and they show up as checked in the “important” list when updates are released Tues.

This has been going on for a long time. I think people are just now noticing it because MS started labeling the Preview as such and setting it as an unchecked optional until the next Patch Tues.

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abbodi86, Noel Carboni

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Optional, pull, recommnded, repeat

nothing require any attention or articles 😛

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abbodi86 wrote:

Optional, pull, recommnded, repeat

nothing require any attention or articles

I might differ in that one has to pay attention to make sure the updates they don’t want (*cough* *KB2976978* *cough*) aren’t installed.

Any insight why they’re not just rolled into the cumulative blobs? Or are they after a time?

I’m not terribly worried about privacy intrusion in that I’ve blocked the pathways they can use to snoop. That being said, I dislike it when Microsoft “enhances” the OS only for THEIR benefit, as it uses MY resources. I did actually pay money for my disk space, RAM, CPUs, etc., and I’d like them all to be as available as possible for MY usage.

Though I strive to keep my system’s run-time form trim, as a rule I don’t delete parts of the OS, so that it remains serviceable. I just did a Properties on C:Windows… Lo and behold, look at what’s accumulated:

Almost a quarter million files in forty thousand plus folders, taking up 46 GB?!?

🙂

-Noel

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abbodi86

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No patches as of 12:29PM EDT, March 14th, 2017.  I do, however, have a *new* version of the INTEL thing, labeled “INTEL – System – 8/19/2016 12:00:00 AM – 10.1.2.80” which was released on March 11th and marked optional.

I am hiding it as of this posting.

Fortran, C++, R, Python, Java, Matlab, HTML, CSS, etc.... coding is fun!
A weatherman that can code

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MS has released, traditionally, at noon US Central time. That makes 10:00am Pacific (Redmond) time.

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anonymous wrote:

Or December if you’re on Windows 8.1.

I thought of it as a nice opportunity to relax, and not worry about what Microsoft could break.

Here’s what I see available today:

And… Seen on the test system right after installation of the above during bootup, a pair of these:

Not to mention this:

I’m not sure the above mean anything’s specifically gone wrong because of the update, but they’re not typical. More testing is required.

-Noel

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FYI, my installation of the Sphinx Windows Firewall Control product did not start properly on the above reboot after update installation either. Perhaps that was related to the errors logged.

However, a second reboot seems to have worked around the anomalous event log entries and firewall software startup failure. Now the event log sequence appears normal and the firewall software is working again.

Recommendation for Win 8.1 users: Consider doing a second reboot right after installing the Win 8.1 updates.

-Noel

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On Win7-64 Pro SP1, Group B.  Just checked at 1:04PM EDT.  It’s back!!!  Optional and Recommended.  KB Article ID: 2952664 – Last Review: Mar 7, 2017 – Revision: 12.  WU shows published today.

I also got 3 security updates for Office 2010 (KB3178687), a Word, an Excel (KB 3178690), and an Office (KB3178688).   Also the MSRT, a Silverlight security patch, and the March rollup.

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SueW

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Seen here on my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 test system:

-Noel

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