[pdabbadabba]

I'm not sure all the outrage against MS is justified since we're just talking about a large download, not any change to the user's system, or sharing of information, etc. (Though I might feel differently if my bandwidth were metered.)

But I also can't fathom how so many on this thread are willing to conclude that users consented to this by enabling automatic updates. Because, of course, you don't just consent to have Windows download any old "thing" when you enable automatic updates. You only consent to have it download updates!

While the definition of "update" is surely ambiguous and not set in stone, it should surely be guided (I would think) by the sorts of things Microsoft has called "Windows Updates" in the past. And I don't think there is a good argument that this would include a 6 GB download of an entirely new version of the OS.

[pdkl95]

That download is costing people money, and if there is any justice left in the US, it will result in a class action lawsuit.

People in Redmond or Silicon Valley with good internet connections need to remember that a lot of people don't have that luxury. Extremely low bandwidth connections are still very common in the US, and metered connections are an unfortunate reality for many people around the world.

[johnward]

This. This is the thing that makes you question the justice system in the US? Maybe they should have a class action suit against ISPs for having shitty caps? I'm in rural Ohio and I don't have a 2gb cap per month. If I did I certainly wouldn't enable automatic updates for any software.

[pdkl95]

> This is the thing that makes you question the justice system in the US?

I never claimed this.

> I don't have a 2gb cap.

Good. That doesn't mean everybody else does. Stop projecting your situation onto everybody else.

> I certainly wouldn't enable automatic updates

As you're posting to HN, I can assume you are very familiar with computers and understand how to do that. Everybody else just wanted the small security patches that Windows Update provided for years, with minimal impact on data caps.

[DougMerritt]

> since we're just talking about a large download

Even just that can be a problem, since it is quite common these days for people to have a small SSD boot drive, and put everything else in a secondary hard drive.

The download could use all remaining space on the SSD, which could cause a variety of problems unless/until the user figured out the problem and deleted the 6 GB download.

[johnward]

A small SSD boot drive is like 250-500gb.

[DougMerritt]

Wildly incorrect, there are a vast number of 64 GB SSD's in use, and 500gb drives are NOT small in any case, they are still borderline too expensive for the average consumer.

But it hardly matters, since it's well known that storage needs always exceed available capacity, and 500gb is tiny compared with with today's needs, which may be represented by a reasonable hard disk capacity of 3TB or so.

So even a 500 GB drive won't fit all of the desired 3 TB in the first place, so it's already under pressure even before Microsoft randomly decides it's ok to use up over 1% of it.

And for the much more common 64 GB SSDs, this is 10% of their total capacity.

Which means that 6 GB can never just be assumed to be so trivially small that it won't have a really negative effect on anyone.

You picked a terribly contrafactual way to be a Microsoft apologist.