News Company offers unofficial security patches for Windows 10 until 2030 — free, $27 Pro, and $37 enterprise subscriptions

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
The amount of effort, time, money, that people continue to expend to stay on this platform never ceases to amaze me.

Looks like people will pay subscriptions for Windows after all. Just not to Microsoft.
 
  • Like
Reactions: KyaraM
ezst036 said:
The amount of effort, time, money, that people continue to expend to stay on this platform never ceases to amaze me.

Looks like people will pay subscriptions for Windows after all. Just not to Microsoft.
Click to expand...

If we are talking about gaming systems and casual PC usage, I could see your point, but that is not all that there is.

As a SOHO user, I have several machines of this vintage that houses engineering and CAD tools that are tied to those machines. If I update those machines, I loose the licenses and have to purchase a new license, or in many cases the vendor has gone to subscription only resulting in a phenomenal annual cost increase for no real improvement in feature set. I never go onto the Internet with those machines after EoL, on both the OS and browsers (Firefox usually).

We are talking over $12K in licenses on the CAD machine. The other machines are loading with legacy software with their licenses, with some no longer offered or defunct. One PC is set up to talk to the old scopes that I have, as well as other old equipment. These are on separate gapped networks with no outside visibility, but boy a maligned USB drive in a scope would wreak havoc. That equipment includes some 2001 1GHz scopes (and others), a 2016 power supply that puts out 140A, and even an Agilent spectrum analyzer. That equipment would cost part of a new house to replace, just to get new OSes on the PCs.

For the casual home user, it does make moving to a Linux platform look attractive. Except there is no easy support for the simple home user. My sister would have no idea how to fix apps not running on Ubuntu. So soon, I will have to move her to a W11 box and teach her all over again how to use it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: NinoPino, KyaraM, Starman80 and 3 others
As a user of both Win10 (at home) (also linux at home and office!) and Win11 (at the office), I will NEVER allow Win11 on any of my personal machines. It is absolutely hideous. Even explorer is broken. Download a file.... you have to manually refresh the window for it to show. Unzip a file? Oh, let's put the directory at the bottom of the hundreds of files and make you scroll down. And more. So much more. It is absolutely mind boggling that they get away with this garbage. Anyway, Mint with Cinammon isn't too bad once you get the sound to work... and the video... and the wifi to be stable. Then it's OK, as long as you don't play games... sigh...
 
  • Like
Reactions: Starman80
ezst036 said:
The amount of effort, time, money, that people continue to expend to stay on this platform never ceases to amaze me.

Looks like people will pay subscriptions for Windows after all. Just not to Microsoft.
Click to expand...

Most of the people will be business users whose non-transferrable license fees and new hardware costs greatly exceed the price of a subscription, so it makes sense for them to do it, especially since Windows 12 is likely to land before 2030 and they could jump in then for a much longer support term than Windows 11 will give.
 
  • Like
Reactions: NinoPino, KyaraM, Starman80 and 1 other person
Alvar Miles Udell said:
Most of the people will be business users whose non-transferrable license fees and new hardware costs greatly exceed the price of a subscription, so it makes sense for them to do it, especially since Windows 12 is likely to land before 2030 and they could jump in then for a much longer support term than Windows 11 will give.
Click to expand...
It does however mean IT support / sysadmin are outsourcing their security to a third party, to some degree. So it relies on a degree of trust on this supplier, if there's no open way to audit their patches.
 
  • Like
Reactions: KyaraM and Starman80
When users are considering spending money to not upgrade to W11, Microsoft needs to take this as a sign that their latest OS is not popular. They need to expedite W12, and it needs to offer something more useful than Co-Pilot.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jlake3
Alvar Miles Udell said:
Most of the people will be business users whose non-transferrable license fees and new hardware costs greatly exceed the price of a subscription, so it makes sense for them to do it, especially since Windows 12 is likely to land before 2030 and they could jump in then for a much longer support term than Windows 11 will give.
Click to expand...
A surprising number of home users may prefer to forgo Windows 11 as well--especially if their PC doesn't support an in-place upgrade to 11.
 
RichardtST said:
As a user of both Win10 (at home) (also linux at home and office!) and Win11 (at the office), I will NEVER allow Win11 on any of my personal machines. It is absolutely hideous. Even explorer is broken. Download a file.... you have to manually refresh the window for it to show. Unzip a file? Oh, let's put the directory at the bottom of the hundreds of files and make you scroll down. And more. So much more. It is absolutely mind boggling that they get away with this garbage. Anyway, Mint with Cinammon isn't too bad once you get the sound to work... and the video... and the wifi to be stable. Then it's OK, as long as you don't play games... sigh...
Click to expand...
Yes those are all valid points... Microsoft should be sued into providing indefinite security updates for Windows 10.
 
NedSmelly said:
It does however mean IT support / sysadmin are outsourcing their security to a third party, to some degree. So it relies on a degree of trust on this supplier, if there's no open way to audit their patches.
Click to expand...
No way that these "updates" will be in any way equivalent to the ones that MS Provides...
 
chaz_music said:
If we are talking about gaming systems and casual PC usage, I could see your point, but that is not all that there is.

As a SOHO user, I have several machines of this vintage that houses engineering and CAD tools that are tied to those machines. If I update those machines, I loose the licenses and have to purchase a new license, or in many cases the vendor has gone to subscription only resulting in a phenomenal annual cost increase for no real improvement in feature set. I never go onto the Internet with those machines after EoL, on both the OS and browsers (Firefox usually).

We are talking over $12K in licenses on the CAD machine. The other machines are loading with legacy software with their licenses, with some no longer offered or defunct. One PC is set up to talk to the old scopes that I have, as well as other old equipment. These are on separate gapped networks with no outside visibility, but boy a maligned USB drive in a scope would wreak havoc. That equipment includes some 2001 1GHz scopes (and others), a 2016 power supply that puts out 140A, and even an Agilent spectrum analyzer. That equipment would cost part of a new house to replace, just to get new OSes on the PCs.

For the casual home user, it does make moving to a Linux platform look attractive. Except there is no easy support for the simple home user. My sister would have no idea how to fix apps not running on Ubuntu. So soon, I will have to move her to a W11 box and teach her all over again how to use it.
Click to expand...
Yeah I agree that's absolutely not an option, and these self-centered corporate policies are making it worse for everyone. In my opinion the whole subscription thing should be outlawed (or at least the companies should be forced to offer customers the choice of subscription, or to buy outright.)
 
  • Like
Reactions: chaz_music and KyaraM
Starman80 said:
A surprising number of home users may prefer to forgo Windows 11 as well--especially if their PC doesn't support an in-place upgrade to 11.
Click to expand...
1. Most people neither know nor care what 'version' they have. They use whatever came with the PC they bought.

2. If the system is not natively Win 11 compatible, it will be 8, almost 9 years old by Oct 2025 when Win 10 falls off support. It would need to be 7th Gen Intel or similar AMD.
 
  • Like
Reactions: KyaraM
USAFRet said:
Really?

Why not the same for 7, XP, Win95?

Why not every company be forced to support every product, forever...
Click to expand...
Because those OSes are a bit of a lost cause now. Windows 10 in kinda unique in that so many of the users of it were in-place upgraded from either 7 or 8.1, so suing for an extension of support under Windows 10 would de-facto cover 7/8.1 :)
 
USAFRet said:
1. Most people neither know nor care what 'version' they have. They use whatever came with the PC they bought.

2. If the system is not natively Win 11 compatible, it will be 8, almost 9 years old by Oct 2025 when Win 10 falls off support. It would need to be 7th Gen Intel or similar AMD.
Click to expand...
They will care when it comes out of support, and they either have to replace their system or run insecure. Nowadays the numbers of years old a system is is less important, as hardware refresh cycles have increased. But even for those with Windows 11, many may miss the UI of operating systems Windows 7 or 10 and would prefer to downgrade if given the choice :)
 
COLGeek said:
What could possibly go wrong here?
Click to expand...
The question I asked myself was slightly different: "How can this even work a little bit?"
or
"How can this possibly come anywhere near to what people might expect this to do for them?"

I remember old mainframe operators going misty eyed on how they managed to hot-patch around some vendor stupidity by simply stopping the machine from the front panel, and entering instructions and data manually via the front panel switches to jump around them and then having it resume without it.

So that's binary patching without vendor consent about 60 years ago.
On mainframes with perhaps 48K words of ferrite core RAM.

These patch service companies aren't going to get Microsoft or 3rd party source code. They can't proactively eliminate newly discovered vulnerability patterns across the entire OS code base. At the very best they can patch a vulnerability that has been exploited actively enough to come to wider attention, and your main hope would be that it wasn't you, as perhaps the most attractive and biggest target, which created that attention by going down big time.

They also won't get source code for the drivers and the many services and run-time libraries that get included into what today is called an OS, while the patching service might in fact be offered only on the kernel and perhaps one or two other services listed in an addendum you'd have to read very, very carefully to check if that covers a significant part of what you need.

Anyone contemplating this needs to be truly desperate. And thus in no proper mind to make sound decisions.
 
  • Like
Reactions: NinoPino
RichardtST said:
As a user of both Win10 (at home) (also linux at home and office!) and Win11 (at the office), I will NEVER allow Win11 on any of my personal machines. It is absolutely hideous. Even explorer is broken. Download a file.... you have to manually refresh the window for it to show. Unzip a file? Oh, let's put the directory at the bottom of the hundreds of files and make you scroll down. And more. So much more. It is absolutely mind boggling that they get away with this garbage. Anyway, Mint with Cinammon isn't too bad once you get the sound to work... and the video... and the wifi to be stable. Then it's OK, as long as you don't play games... sigh...
Click to expand...
LMAO. My work laptop is Windows 10 and it has the exact same thing with downloaded files not showing as you claim only 11 has. Don't give me that bs. And 10 also puts the unzipped file to the end of downloads of the day... just as 11 does. Maybe you need to prune your download folder if you have so many issues, or adjust how the download folder is shown or whatever, because for me, who never changed a thing in how it is shown, that is how it works on all my machines. I have 4 private with 11 and two work devices with 10.

Oh, btw, some bs only 10 does for me. When the thing with downloaded files happens, if I downloaded it to desktop, very often it will not be put at the end, but somewhere along the left edge of the monitor. So not only do I not immediately find it, it ALSO messes up my entire desktop order and I have to manually put it back in order. I had all the issues you described with 10, and none with 11. So much for the vastly better and superior Windows 10...
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • Like
Reactions: TechyIT223
There are appliances out there (esp. in the medical world) that are hideously expensive, run Windows at the core and are certified only in their exact shipping config. I've never really understood why the manufacturers of those things don't have upgrade packages (sometimes they do), but the prospect of replacing a $100k+ device just isn't an option sometimes. It can be cheaper to build SCADA like security around the networks those things are on. It why you still see so many installs of Win7 running in hospitals.
 
ezst036 said:
The amount of effort, time, money, that people continue to expend to stay on this platform never ceases to amaze me.

Looks like people will pay subscriptions for Windows after all. Just not to Microsoft.
Click to expand...
It's no different then the amount of time/money/effort we spend to try and make Win11 look and work like Win10.

I absolutely HATE Win 11, so does literally everyone I know! It's not the OS, it's the GUI. That Win10/11 market share statistic didn't happen by choice or chance, it was pure brute force! Win 11 would be damn lucky to hold even 10% market share if anyone was actually given the choice! If Linux "just worked" I would have switched years ago. So the 90% of the world like me has limited options with little choice. Microsoft refuses to make or support the OS we want.

So.......

Pay for the devil you know, pay for a demon to make the new devil work like the old devil, or jump off the cliff with Linux and pray you learn to fly while falling! Those are the options.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom