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What strange madness is this? Microsoft makes patch data RESTful

Redmond's new security bulletin feed aims to stop cut and paste data dredging

Microsoft's replaced its eyeball-friendly Security Bulletins page with a new Security Updates Guide that pipes out machine-readable bug data over a RESTful interface.

The old “Bulletin” listed the most Redmond's recent repairs as good old text that Microsoft says some users ingested with “methods like screen-scraping of security bulletin web pages to assemble working databases of necessary and actionable information.” Microsoft also publishes an RSS feed of new security bulletins.

With the RESTful API, you should be able to suck up lovely machine-readable data when Microsoft issues new patches.

The new Software Updates Guide is already up, but you have to dig down a level to find the ”Software Update Summary” offering eyeball-friendly bug lists if you choose not to ingest the bulletins automatically.

Ye Olde Security Bulletins aren't long for this world: the new arrangement was announced on OMG-what-did-America-just-do day Tuesday November 8th, but by path Tuesday in January 2017 you'll only get patch data from the new Updates Guide.

Time to remember how to bookmark sites then, Windows admins. And start wrangling the API, once documentation emerges. ®

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