Microsoft officials are seeking to dispel rumors the company is performing stealth updates on Windows machines. They are also pledging to be more transparent in the future to prevent such misunderstandings from happening again.

A stealth firewall provides a way to gain access to filtering Internet traffic from a position of stealth. A bridge provides stealth because it does not use an IP Address to function but rather operates at the Layer 2 of the OSI model meaning that without an IP Address the firewall is inaccessible and hidden from all would be attackers.

My eWEEK Labs colleague Andrew Garcia has independently confirmed a report that will appear in tomorrow's Windows Secrets newsletter: Windows Update is fetching and installing some updates without end users' consent.

Microsoft has begun patching files on Windows XP and Vista without users' knowledge, even when the users have turned off auto-updates.

The introduction of KDE 4.0 was met with such an avalanche of outrage and criticism that Gnome developers can be forgiven for being a bit gun-shy. Gnome 2.28 appears to be almost a stealth introduction of Gnome 3.0; will anyone notice?

KDE KDE 4.6.5 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.6 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.6.4 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.

A recent report shows that users of Google Chrome are more likely to be up to date with all the updates than users of any other browser. The reason for this is that Google pushes out silent updates and installs them without even telling the user, even when Chrome is not running. The report concludes that this is a very safe and secure way of updating users.

“Look at the pace of the update releases!” Microsoft shills’ latest tune goes something like this: “but Linux is so much more insecure than Windows — just look, every day you see security updates released!”.

I finally experienced my first "phantom" update notification in Ubuntu 9.04. In previous versions of the system, a little icon on the upper panel would notify me that updates were available. I could either click the icon and open the Update Manager, then do the update. But in this new system (I've been running 9.04 about a week), the icon is gone.