Windows 10 Updates To Be Delivered Via P2P

Rejoice! No longer will you have to justify that peer-to-peer file activity (P2P) on your account by talking about all those Linux ISOs you’ve been downloading. Microsoft, it seems, is keen to use P2P to deliver updates for its forthcoming Windows 10 release.

The traditional way that most of us got Windows updates was via the not-terribly-inventively-named Windows Update service, but it appears that Microsoft is shifting towards a more P2P-centric world. The latest leaked build of Windows 10 includes the options to enable “updates from more than one place” in order to access them more rapidly, which could point to a P2P style delivery method for future updates.

Then again, this is a leaked build from a pre-release version of the operating system, and not every feature in pre-release software makes it into the final version. We’ll have to wait and see until Windows 10 releases later this year.

Microsoft is hardly the first big company to use P2P for file distribution in a legitimate manner, although you’d want to hope that it has built in some very robust file checking before applying updates. Getting a malware-laden Windows Update from a dodgy source would be an absolute nightmare for both the compromised end-user and Microsoft itself.

Microsoft to deliver Windows 10 updates using peer-to-peer technology [The Verge]