Vista, a Denial of Access Attack?

Logged onto the Visaster desktop at my office this morning. After a couple of minutes of reading email, I notice that the Windows Update icon is trying to get my attention. Open up the window and WOW! 508 MB in a bunch of updates, mostly MS Office 2007. Largest Windows Update download in one lump I can remember. Turns out it was MS Office SP2.

I sent an email to the IT director warning him about the bandwidth hit the office network was going to get. We have probably 100 desktops all running MS Office 2007 on them. After joking about my email to him about it, a few minutes later, the IT guy gets on his system. Same sort of scenario, but he gets 385 MB in updates listed and his update is Vista SP2. So I laugh right back at him. Visaster on my desktop is running SP1 so I expect to get the next Windows update dump on Monday.

The total download pending and otherwise is practically 900 MB, enough for a partial DVD image. Assuming that Microsoft shoved that entire update through the pipe to my desktop, the hundred other desktops in our office. The thousands, maybe the hundreds of thousands just in Houston alone. The millions of desktops in the US.

Then I think: “Imagine being at the end of a dial-up connection and having all that to download!” No way! Even a standard speed DSL connection would be maxed-out for quite a while.

Microsoft expects a lot of its customers.

Assume for a few seconds that you have an ISP account on high-speed DSL or cable that bills by the gigabyte-per-month or that you have an account that limits the amount of downloaded traffic. Downloading updates from Microsoft starts getting expensive. I wonder if anybody has done an analysis of the networking load on the entire Internet solely caused by Microsoft updates, especially on Patch Tuesdays? What do you call an Internet-wide Denial of Access? A IDOA?

If you're a Windows customer with what now seems like a fairly slow or restrictive ISP connection, are you going to WANT to download Windows Updates and either max out your download limit or your connection time?