The Lair of the SlowFox

alicit found this story on IT Wire which explains a little bit more about that .NET Assistant for Firefox that was included in Windows Update.

The bit that I was wondering about, given that some of you were reporting yourselves unaffected, is explained by the fact that the particular Update in question only kicked into play if you had the .NET 3.5 framework installed.

The .NET framework is a set of code that makes other programs work (a, uh, framework, if you will). Whilst most of you will have some level of .NET framework installed, you might not all be up to 3.5 yet. So this possibly explains why some of you didn't have the .NET Assistant 1.0 installed.

However. Do keep a periodic eye on the list of extensions to Firefox - once you do install .NET 3.5 (and at some point, unless you never download/install any new software on your machine, you'll have to), it may be that Windows Update will identify your machine as having this particular need, and sort you out accordingly.

Hopefully, by then they'll have learnt their lesson, and actually inform you of what they're doing...