Years later, Microsoft decided to protect us. As of April 1, 2022 (not April Fool's Day prank), Microsoft seems to have finally added the https protocol to downloads for updates, instead of the unencrypted http protocol.
For years Google & Co has been preparing for us that our communication with the sites should be done through the https protocol, for guaranteed communications through encryption from servers that use SSL certificates.
At Microsoft, however, for many years the download packages did not use an encrypted protocol. So it was time for the company to change the way they receive the update packages via the https protocol to increase security.
The information packages are of course provided with SHA keys and digital signatures and thus are protected from any falsification. However, most browsers had problems with http.
From April 1, 2022, all downloads of updates from the company's update servers and from the Microsoft Update Catalog are made via the https protocol. So the links from the Microsoft Update Catalog will have the following format:
https://catalog.s.download.windowsupdate.com/c/msdownload/update
instead:
http://download.windowsupdate.com/d/msdownload/update/
Apparently not only the https protocol has been enforced, but the download also starts from a subdomain (catalog.s), where s in the URL probably means secure.
Nothing changes for downloads from the Microsoft Update Catalog - except of course the links that will probably need to be customized.
The company could fix this issue very simply with one direction.
