Does Windows Patch Without Permission?
`Microsoft’s relatively quick response to the WMF fiasco may have been a bit too quick. In the midst of a debate at Ars Technica over Microsoft’s personal-best performance in handling the WMF exploit, a few quiet voices popped up. Zakharov:
Is it me or was that patch distributed with some kind of hidden higher priority? I normally leave windows auto-update set to notify me when patches are downloaded for manual installation but the WMF patch took matters into its own hands and installed itself with a reboot. [..]
After Zakharov’s comment, one of our techs concurred. He noticed that one of our XP laptops that was set to simply download updates had restarted… And had the patch.
Meanwhile, astrashe, another Ars Technica member agreed with Zakharov:
I noticed the same thing. I got a message saying the patch had been installed, and that my machine had rebooted.’
