Re: Rules are rules
Probably a lot of the down-voters were complaining about this policy, when Google pulled the same stupid, arrogant, counter-productive stunt last year.
If you say you are going to do something, then do it. There seem to be a lot of downvotes on here from people who disagree with that principle.
OK. I'm going to strangle a cute little puppy every hour, unless someone brings me beer. OK. I've said it now, I've got to stick to it. Does that magically make it moral?
MS have a monthly patch cycle. Which makes their life easier, but also their customers' lives easier. Which is the reason they did it, rather than just releasing updates as soon as they were done. They've been doing it this way for years now.
MS told Google when the fix would get deployed. It doesn't look like a serious enough bug to break their patch cycle, so for Google to release a couple of days before that patch is irresponsible, unreasonable, and a (minor) risk to the security of users.
It doesn't make me think worse of MS. They have improved their security massively in the last 10 years, though it's far from perfect - and all software has bugs. And they certainly earned their shocking reputation in the period before that.
It does make me think worse of Google though. Their arrogance and lack of restraint reminds me of Microsoft of a few years ago. Also their completely piss-poor attitude to Android security means they should be dealing with their own glass house, before chucking stones at other peoples'. They deliberately set that system up to be a security nightmare. Which was just about understandable when they were trying to grow marketshare, but they've had the dominant hand in their vendor relationships for years now, and while they've acted to defend/gain control of features and data from the vendors by shoving more and more of the gubbins into Google Play Services - they've done fuck-all to address the gaping security vulnerability they've created by leaving patching to the vendors (who they fully know won't do it). At least MS make a decent attempt to test against the more common of their vendors drivers and customers' software - and set their system up to patch everybody.