Tuesday, 4 September 2007

Microsoft Shuts Down AutoPatcher

Microsoft has asked the founder of AutoPatcher, a Microsoft update service to shut down its service. The site since then pulled out is download page...

Microsoft has asked the founder of AutoPatcher, a Microsoft update service to shut down its service. The site since then pulled out is download page.

AutoPatcher, founded by a 20-year-old Greek student, Antonis Kaladis was offering an alternative to all Microsoft Windows update by providing an assortment of security patches in a single file for Windows users. The benefit of this service was that it was saving time for all system administrators as they were updating machines from a single file obtained from the service instead of downloading everything for Windows Update.

The AutoPatcher website worked for almost four years, until Microsoft lawyers sent a legal notice to the company to shut down. "We received an e-mail from Microsoft, requesting the immediate take-down of the download page, which of course means that AutoPatcher is probably history. As much as we disagree, we can do very little, and although the download page is merely a collection of mirrors, we took the download page down," an AutoPatcher statement said. "We would like to thank you for your support. For the past four years, it has been a blast. Unfortunately, it seems like it's the end of AutoPatcher as we know it."