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If you've been trying to keep Microsoft's forced updates and upgrades off your machine, your job just got harder. With KB 4056254, we now have a new Win10 Update Facilitation Service joining its comrade-in-arms Update Assistant V2 to ensure no patch gets blocked.
You can look at the new KB 4056254 Win10 Update Facilitation Service and the re-emergence of Win10 Update Assistant V2 from two different perspectives. On the one hand, you have those poor hapless Win10 users who accidentally munged Windows Update. On the other hand, you have folks with bazookas and flamethrowers who want to keep some semblance of control over updating their machines.
Both groups now face two different Microsoft initiatives to reset Windows Update.
[...] Seems, from April to June 2018, some savvy Win 10 users have found new ways to disable or block Windows Update. So, M$ has to come out with KB4056254 to "neutralize" their efforts. It's like a cat-and-mouse game.
Which seems to me like the core of the matter. It's not nice to mess with Mother Microsoft's patching schemes, so you're going to get a few new services running in the background to whop your system upside the head if you dare to block patches.
Sources:
Win10 Update Facilitation Service joins Update Assistant V2 to make sure you get patched | Computerworld
Watch out: Win10 Update Facilitation as a Service and a new push for the Update Assistant | AskWoody
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday June 24 2018, @05:36PM
I have only one Windows machine...my work laptop. Otherwise I use all Linux. Windows updates are punitive...and I'm saying that as someone who has to compile all my updates under Gentoo on this machine...a 14 year old x86 ;).
This. MS seems to keep adding new steps to the update process. What the fuck does "preparing to download updates" mean? Did it stop for a doughnut on the way? What told me everything you need to know about Windows shit design was many years ago when uninstalling some MS development software took an hour and a half.
My guess is that a huge part of this is Windows decision (I'm assuming it's a "feature" of NTFS) to disallow the write or delete of a file that's perceived to be "un use"...which in Windows land means almost anything and everything. That's typical MS mentality that even administrator processes can't overwrite a file when they want to regardless. I'm guessing that the important DLLs and everything else don't really get installedin their final locations until that reboot horseshit. Add all that to the book of shit Unix got right and Windows got wrong.
What's worse than the fact that updates don't work is that, for PR reasons, they keep the failures a fucking secret! You have to be savvy enough to recognize that an update didn't appear to work (based solely on the lack of the expected reboot etc) and to look in the update history for example. I had a recent feature update quietly fail repeatedly recently (with no sign other then "your system is up to date" nothing-to-worry-about-here BS) until I used this hack [kapilarya.com] because the Windows update database repair is a useless piece of shit.
Windows is a cancer on the tech world. It wouldn't bother me half as much if it's pervasiveness hadn't caused a generation of programmers that seem hellbent on repeating it's mistakes in the used-to-be-POSIX world and spreading that cancer to Linux with systemd and the like (none of that here or in my company thank you very much)...but that's another topic.