[Skybird]

And here is some food for thought.

People so often think just because they have turned off some privacy options, they would be safe. What they do not realise is that software settings - thats what options are - and physical switches (physical interrurption of cables and the like), are not the same.

I just have checked my system a bit, as I use to do three or four times or so per year. In my windows update history, there should be no entry at all, since windows update service is switched off from all beginning on, since I installed this system two years ago. I had SP1 and patches done via DVD archive, not onöline updating, and the latter is what that history file is recording. Since no onöline upodatign ever took place, there should be no entry. And until spring, it was like this: no entry indeed.

Now there is one single entry, from May, several days after my last checkup. KB4012212, 15.05.2017.

It shouldn't be there. You hardly can seal off a system any more than I have done with mine. The update is related to the wannacry mess earlier this year, which was reported about. Somebody obviously decided it was so important that my isolated, sealed off, shut, closed and blocked system gets this update, that he nevertheless and without my knowledge squeezed it through the wire and onto my HD.

The thing is not whether or not wannacry justifies this or not, whether it saved me from worse evil or not. The point is - it was possible to do so. When they can do it with this one, they can do it with just any piece of code they want to enforce on people. And the history of the GWX campaign shows that they bypassed explicit defences against getting an enforced W10 update several tens if not hundreds of thousands of times. Not by misleading people (that too, but that counts separately), or mislabeled clicking pois, but simply against the techncial settings of users who said No.

This KB401221 update seems to be a defence against wannacry. Maybe it works for my best interest indeed, I don't know. But fact is I never gave consent to get it, I never was asked, I was not even aware of getting forced to get it, and I have deliberatly knocked down options of my system to get any updates by Microsoft at all. And I went far beyond the usual switches and option settings, but hacked some bit deeper into the registry to isolate my system from Microsoft's access.

KB4012212 should not be there, but now it is there. THAT, and only that is the point.

This weekend I will kill my W7 gaming system and reinstall all from new. And maybe I will leave out any game needing to be always online, and keep the internet wire unplugged after having registered W7. Surfing and emailing I already do via another (Linux) platform anyway.