Microsoft Patches & BlackBerry Updates

Everyone who has read my Blog knows I'm not a big fan of AutoUpdates. I consider all software updates to be a potential danger. In today's news there are more stories of updates gone bad.
I decided I would look at some of the definitions found on Dictionary.com to put things in perspective. Microsoft might want to reconsider the term "Patch" in the future.

PATCH:
12. to mend, cover, or strengthen with or as if with a patch or patches.
13. to repair or restore, esp. in a hasty or makeshift way (usually fol. by up).

UPDATE
2. Computers. to incorporate new or more accurate information in (a database, program, procedure, etc.).

The big news today comes from Research in Motion, who has 8 million subscribers using its BlackBerry device. This week the BlackBerry Email service suffered a rather large outage. Even the folks at the Whitehouse carried on without Email for 14 hours according to spokesman Tony Fratto. This time, they could actually blame their Email problems on someone else.

The massive outage was caused by a new software update. Oops!
According to Reuters...

A massive service outage of BlackBerry e-mail devices earlier this week resulted from a new storage feature that was not sufficiently tested

The company had introduced new software designed to make the use of temporary storage on the BlackBerry device more efficient.

But the procedure caused an unexpected problem that "triggered a compounding series of interaction errors between the system's operational database and cache," the company said.

Yesterday, Microsoft also acknowledged another problem caused by its April 3rd patch for Vulnerabilities in GDI Could Allow Remote Code Execution or what everyone called the ANI Zero-Day Vulnerability. If you experience a "Stop 0x0000007F error" when you try to print you can download a patch for the patch by clicking here.