Couldn’t Help But Notice (091707)
Stealth operating system updates, from Microsoft:
Microsoft caught doing stealth updates
files on both Windows XP and Windows Vista without displaying the usual notification or permission dialog box – even if the user had previously disabled automatic updates. Microsoft, however, calls it built-in behavior and no cause for alarm.
Scott Dunn of “Windows Secretsâ€, reports nine files in XP and Vista have been altered by Windows Update in what he calls a stealth move by Microsoft. The updates are upgrades to the Windows Update service itself, and are not harmful to the system. However, the tactics used by Microsoft to perform them are comparable to those used by spyware companies, thus raising some concerns among the privacy minded.
Look, in the real world, 99% of us don’t understand or care what Microsoft, Apple, or others are doing to our OS’s in their updates, as long as our routines aren’t disrupted. Most of us, for better or worse, probably wouldn’t object to automatic updates after being asked the first time if they’re okay. It’s the mixing of announced updates and stealthy ones that raises suspicions that either someone is trying to cover for previous mistakes or invading our privacy, and puts commentators like this one, who makes great points about network administration problems, into high dudgeon.
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At OpinionJournal.com, “Borking Ted Olson” reveals the laughable reason why the former Solicitor General will not get support from the current Senate majority:
“Ted Olson will not be confirmed,” declares Senate Majority Leader Reid. “He’s a partisan, and the last thing we need as an Attorney General is a partisan.” That standard could certainly stand some fleshing out. As “partisans” go, Mr. Olson doesn’t come close to Bobby Kennedy, the brother of JFK; or Griffin Bell, close friend of Jimmy Carter (and a fine AG); or for that matter Janet Reno’s Justice Department, which was run for years not by Ms. Reno but behind the scenes by close friend of Hillary Clinton and hyper-partisan Jamie Gorelick.
Mr. Olson remembers who killed his wife, and would likely not cut her killers’ fellow-traveling sympathizers, disrupters, and legal gameplayers any slack. THAT’s what they don’t like about him.
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Memo to Darryl “That’s Entertainment” Parks of WLW (700 on the AM dial in Cincinnati): This is NOT “entertainment.” Nor is this. This weekend, I endured the fateful podcast of September 7. The Bill Cunningham-Seg Dennison dust-up is contrived nonsense unworthy of what used to The Nation’s Station.
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In a column hyping Alan Greenspan’s “I should have done more” appearance Sunday on CBS’s 60 minutes, the Associated Press’s Jeannine Aversa asserts that “A meltdown in that (subprime mortgage) market has rocked Wall Street.”
The S&P 500 is less than 5% off its all-time high, and is up about 6% in the past 5 weeks while much of the hyperventilating over the “meltdown” has occurred.
If this is “rocked,” Jeannine, I say “rock” on.”
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Speaking of which, Ken Fisher has a response to the subprime situation at TCS Daily:
TCS: Let’s talk about the current status of the subprime mortgage market. Are you worried?
KEN FISHER: The only thing I fear about the subprime mortgage market is what politicians might do, because fundamentally everyone gets this backwards.
TCS: You don’t see major long-term economic consequences?
KEN FISHER: I think intuitively everybody knows that in the long term, this is not a big deal for the economy and the stock market. I don’t think it’s big enough to matter.
I’m not as sure as Mr. Fisher is. He mistakenly mixes in subprimes with all teaser-rate mortgages at the end (some teaser-rate mortgages were subprime, but most were not), the whole thing is still worth a read.
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I pray that the Army is wrong about the likelihood of Matt Maupin still being alive, but fear that they are not.
