North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Windows updates and dial up users

  • From: Richard Cox
  • Date: Mon Sep 22 07:45:15 2003

On 22 Sep 2003 10:45 "Stephen J. Wilcox" <[email protected]> wrote:
| What if MS included something in the Windows Update that gave the user
| the option of calling a toll-free number operated by MS for the purpose
| of downloading.. ?

Toll free - in many cases international - with 56k lines max for dialup
and many way below that, would - given the filesizes typically used in
WindowsUpdate - be a very costly call for Microsoft.  And there'd be
rather a lot of them, so you can be sure that M$ would be recovering
those $ from somebody.  Most probably (current and future) users.

WindowsUpdate would presumably refuse to update pirated copies of the
software, but pirate copies of the software will still be just as open
to the vulnerabilities that have been, and continue to be, discovered.

Oddly enough the biggest killer of all will not be any of this, but the
fact that most people will be unwilling for their single phone line to
be tied up and unusable for the length of time each update will take.
And then repeat that every month or so..

-- 
Richard