Newsletter Archives

• Saying no to patches

  Posted on January 20, 2025 at 02:45 CST by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 22.03 • 2025-01-20

  PATCH WATCH

  

  By Susan Bradley

  Both Apple and Microsoft are providing updates and options that are unnecessary.

  The good news for you Apple users is that the company is not taking a page out of Microsoft’s forced-change model and instead is letting us easily opt out of AI features. Clearly, it learned from its 2014 blunder — forcing the U2 album Songs of Innocence to iTunes on all iPhones.

  When you receive a pop-up on your Apple device that supports Apple Intelligence, you get a “Not now” option that allows you to easily dismiss the request. For now, Apple’s AI is still somewhat limited and covers only writing, email, and Siri. More AI capabilities are to come later, but it’s good to see that we can easily opt out.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (22.03.0, 2025-01-20).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Patch Watch 0x80070643, Apple Intelligence, BitLocker, Copilot, CVE-2025-21297, CVE-2025-21309, Device Encryption, Drive Encryption, KB5050411, Newsletters, Outlook (new), Patch Lady Posts

• Microsoft confirms bugs in this month’s Win10 1709 cumulative update

  Posted on December 21, 2017 at 01:02 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Update on these bugs and two more — an Excel 2016 security patch bug from last month, and an Exchange Server security patch bug from this month — Computerworld Woody on Windows.

  Of course, you’ve known about it all along.This month’s cumulative update for Win10 1709 is a mess.

  Besides, we’re still on MS-DEFCON 2, so you didn’t try to install this month’s patches – and you aren’t running Win10 Fall Creators Update, anyway, right?

  Right?

  MS just posted confirmation of what we’ve known for some time: KB 4054517 installation may freeze at 99%, and Windows Update History may throw a bogus Error 0x80070643

  There’s a manual fix for the former, and an apology for the latter. For those of you who lost hours (or in some cases days) trying to figure out why your machine didn’t get the latest build of the latest version working, well, here’s your Automatic Update lump of coal.

  MS says it will provide an update in an upcoming release.https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4054517/windows-10-update-kb4054517

  Windows Patches/Security 0x80070643, December 2017 Black Tuesday, KB 4054517