The new Daylight Savings Time starting date, three weeks earlier than in past years, may have prompted Microsoft to skip issuing patches on the second Tuesday of the month as they normally do.
Something will be missing from the screens of millions of Windows users next Tuesday – the little yellow shield in the system tray signaling that the PC is in communication with the mothership in Redmond, and dutifully grabbing the latest fixes for Windows, Office, IE, or other Microsoft products.
It isn't as though Microsoft has all other problems solved. Word has had an extremely critical
vulnerability open for nearly a month. It's been the focus of what Microsoft called "very limited, targeted attacks."
There is one significant event taking place just before the customary Patch Tuesday date. On March 11, Daylight Savings Time will begin. This will be three weeks ahead of when it would normally take place.
The change is having an impact on Microsoft customers using some products that have dropped out of mainstream support, into the 'extended' category. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley
wrote that customers are running into confusing issues when it comes to applying DST-related patches to Microsoft products.
Even worse, companies that are still running products like Windows 2000, Exchange 2000, and the older Exchange 5.5 will have to
fork over $4,000 to get the hotfixes, according to Foley:
A Microsoft spokesman said that the $4,000 price represents a substantial discount.
"Originally, all the out-of-support patches were $40,000 each. However, we realized this hardship and lowered the price to $4,000 for ALL THE DST PATCHES for our customers best interest. The $4,000 is to just cover costs," he said.
Plenty of people have been running into delays when trying to contact Microsoft. Can it be that administrators everywhere who are maintaining older systems (thanks to the usual short-sighted management that equates IT with a cost sinkhole) would rather be dealing with the usual run of patches than the new DST changes?
That's just too bizarre to consider.
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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
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Comments
There's no link
There's no link between DST and security updates in March or lack there-of.
To the "...critical update open for a month..." - it takes more than a month to investigate, fix, and test an update (outside of a crisis response issue like an internet-wide worm).
There's a lot of complexity to updates, and as other reporters have correctly speculated, the only reason for none is that those which were slated were pulled owing to various testing issues.
re: There's no link
It's been probably a couple of years since Patch Tuesday arrived with no patches. There could be plenty of reasons for this now, so maybe it is just coincidence. It's still interesting timing.
Coincidence?
My comment is not speculation.
re: Coincidence?
How about emailing me some verification then? You'll pardon me for being a little dubious of anonymous claims. Reach me at dutter at webpronews dot com, in confidence of course.
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