WARNING: Mass critical update!

Seven new critical updates have been released for Windows. Update now.

Windows Update:
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/

Technet:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tre...ty/current.asp

BBC Article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3196494.stm

Thanks and all for alerting people, but just as a reminder it is usually safer to wait and make sure these patches won't screw up parts of your system before blindly installing them.

I've heard horror stories of net admins intalling patches for entire corporate networks and finding out that the patches caused massive problems.

NOTE: Patches are usually quick ad-hoc code snippets that will fix one problem - but cause many more. Problem is that all of the departments that programmed Windows are not all collaborating on the patch. Thus if one dev team 'patches' their section, they have little to no idea what effect, if any, it will have on another section or another dev team's area.

Sometimes patches are a good thing, but given my experience with XP and the major slow-downs recent patches have caused, I think a little caution is in order.

There are so many release bugs in XP that I believe most of them will never be fixed - or ever found for that matter. Windows is just too doggone big.

here's an alternate theory to the multiple security bugs:

they're backdoors left by the programmers and were never meant to be found, but when they are, they would rather call it a security hole instead of telling people it was put there on purpose and patching it... either that or the programming teams didn't tell eachother where they put the backdoors so the others think it's a security hole...

idk... i don't necessarily believe that... just something i heard somewhere... but yeah, I usually wait for a while before installing patches...

Well, I got them yesterday and system seems AOK! Download ASAP.

A security hole patch normally means there has been a sample exploit out for a while ( or Microsoft wouldn't waste the resources creating a patch ). If it's still up their without complains 24h later, install it :)