I wish people thought a bit more critically when invoking NSA conspiracies in these matters. If the NSA was the primary cause, wouldn't it be much easier to simply silently exclude those specific unwanted updates from an otherwise regular Patch Tuesday, instead of having Microsoft announce very publicly and vocally that something is 'off' in this patching round?
Not saying the NSA doesn't influence Microsoft or others to withhold patches, but seeing the invisible hand of the NSA everywhere is not helpful for determining and criticizing when they do influence things. People seem to be able to suspend their critical thinking too easily whenever the NSA can be invoked.
It did cross my mind as well. Considering the whole Russia drama right now, I wonder if the NSA just asked Microsoft to delay its patches for this month so it doesn't interrupt the agency's on-going operations against Russia.
I doesn't help that Microsoft has been moving in a direction where it provides less and less information about what its updates do these days, while sneaking through dozens of new root certificates at once every now and then.
