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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Sometimes it isn't the right time for your machine to update. To emphasize, nobody was hurt due to this instance of Windows 10 upgrading. That is just a hypothetical scenario [theregister.co.uk]:

When you're stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord's Resistance Army, then life's pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades.

The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth, so the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically.

"If a forced upgrade happened and crashed our PCs while in the middle of coordinating rangers under fire from armed militarized poachers, blood could literally be on Microsoft's hands," said one member of the team.

[...] The Reg has been reporting a lot [theregister.co.uk] on the Windows 10 upgrade fiasco, and so decided to investigate, and the story checks out. A team member told us the Chinko Project team uses satellite communications for internet access and gets charged quite a lot for data, so the multi-gigabyte automatic upgrade was even more frustrating than for the rest of us. "We don't need to upgrade our internet, as the limited bandwidth we have is sufficient. But we just can't abide these forced upgrades & secret downloads," one member, who asked to remain anonymous, told El Reg. "We have donated laptops with Windows 7 & 8 all over the place that I'm trying to track down and fix."

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