First thing I thought after reading the headline was "another windows user complaining about updates" and i think that's just how it is after reading the whole article. The author shows up some problematic points of the development of handling updates. But if he spend the time thinking about these problems in actively doing something about it, there only would be a few things left to complain about.
I'm sure there are some services that are not replaceable and use update methods like mentioned in the article. But this doesn't happens by accident. If the developes of a service choose such update methods, either it's likely that you can see some other problematic decisions the developers made, or the old service you are trying to run is not safe to run and has to be updated before it's safe to run.
As i notice such problematic decisions, I avoid these services or search for alternatives before I would complain about it, and this never happend.
I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
141–150 of 206 posts
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#142Increases in complexity up the barrier of entry to any advanced system, but lately it seems like things are made with the intent to make that barrier impossible to overcome within the lifetime of the hardware. The right to repair and open hardware standards are something we need to organize and push for if we want to see improvements. After all it's been demonstrated time and time again that we can't trust black box…
I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything. If you use ebooks like Kindle you don't accumulate a book collection. Same for record collections. Devices become useless once the connected cloud service shuts down. Eventually we'll probably have cars that get obsoleted quickly. I bet the same will happen for household and other robots once they get more powerful. You will have to p…
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
Already happening. But everyone called RMS a kook. He looks funny. He talks funny. He's a socialist. He smells. And here we are. People are praising Apple--Apple--for letting people pay money for closed software that, at the very least, lives on their own device.
That's a low bar.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
The anger is still valid because at the end of the day, the software (that used to work) no longer works due to a choice made by the company that makes the software. To the end user there is no difference between "making a breaking API change on the server" and "pushing a native update that disables the app". This may be the current sucky reality of SaaS, but it could be fixed if the market demanded it.
> but it could be fixed if the market demanded it. Meaning, effectively, that it will not be fixed. I understand the frustration. I work on a mobile application that, like Uber, relies on a lot of server-side communication and deliberately stops working if the client is out of date. And I do know that this sucks. But the reality is, our API is non-public, and so there is no pressure from anyone to maintain backward c…
>of HN weirdos who care about this stuff
Ignoring the lame slur, it's not just people that care about computing freedom. It's also people with terrible connections and extremely limited data plans. Being forced to download a 40MB app update just to look at a few KB of data is a deal-breaker for many people.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. You should be able to get automated security updates and optional feature updates.
Which would mean exponentially growing testing requirements on the part of the company delivering the updates. "Should" in an ideal world doesn't equal "should" in a world with deadlines and limited resources. It's enough work to ensure that all the features work with ONE version of an app. If you had to also test every version of the app without this or that feature update installed, you just continually multiply th…
Your premise seems to ignore that maintaining several versions, even with numerous highly dependent variations, is something that was the norm in the software industry until relatively recently. Microsoft famously managed it with Windows for a long time until they lost the plot. I've run Debian systems for many years and never had unattended-updates break a box.
The trouble with today's highly connected world is that it has bred a culture of shipping software that isn't really production quality, on the basis that it can be fixed (or not) later and that's sufficient. This leads to arguments like your final paragraph: you (the developer) would obviously prefer to only maintain the latest and greatest of what you do, but stated without taking into account the consequences of that policy for your users/customers.
While I have a lot of sympathy for your desire, as a developer myself, I think you can only justify that sort of position if your previous releases are sufficiently good that they don't need maintenance. Otherwise, if you have customers paying for one thing, and that thing is defective, and you then want to use those defects as leverage to push your customers to something that is not what they paid for, then I think you're on very shaky ground. There are a lot of ethical, economic and legal issues raised by that sort of business strategy.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
This argument can be also made positive. Imagine a new update (to be on your example, the new brakes) made the car safer and the saved your life because an accident could be avoided entirely. Otherwise you would be dead. It's not only negative... Btw. when thinking of Tesla cars.. they auto update their software remotely ;)
> when thinking of Tesla cars.. they auto update their software remotely That is one reason I will never buy one.
You are not alone. I drive a car that is relatively old now, but well maintained and in good working order. I have no interest in buying anything in the current generation of half-baked "connected cars", where critical systems are now connected to systems that are remotely accessible, but assumptions from another time underlie the architecture and security is bolted on as an afterthought if you're lucky.
It's not as if the danger here is hypothetical. Leaving aside the immaturity of technologies like autonomous vehicles, I've seen way too many cars being compromised in more mundane ways, from theft because the remote unlocking mechanism was laughably easy to crack, right up to literally stranding a vehicle in the middle of a high speed road using a laptop that is somewhere else entirely. The consequences the first time someone compromises one of these remote systems and decides that every in the city should turn hard left or accelerate to 100mph or slam on the brakes are horrifying.
Get back to me when we have the same level of scrutiny of these modern vehicles as we see in air travel, and when not getting security right poses an existential threat to the manufacturer's business, and then we can talk...
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#146Auto Updates without user interaction is the biggest security benefit I can think of for a normal user. Yes you read that right. It's f*cking great that my parents can use an always up to date browser and OS and I don't need to worry if they have updated all their stuff. Update mechanisms like for Java and other stuff which pop-up and require user interaction are a thing most people will not get right. Actually I rea…
> Auto Updates without user interaction
Yes, but let's be clear about "without user interaction". That had better include "without user disruption".
Windows 10 is one of the worst abusers here: Updates are forced, and during updates, the computer is suddenly unusable. That is not okay.
Debian (derivatives, similar distros, etc.) has done it right for decades. Updates never block the user. Updates are consolidated, since every piece of software is a tracked package.
The reason your parents don't want to update Java is because they remember how much of a pain it was 10 years ago, and it doesn't really feel different.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just looking at that. I also learned that the Ubuntu OS is still community driven and has ports for several common phones, like the Nexus and OnePlus One phones. https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/devices https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices
Except the baseband is still a binary blob, rendering your phone just as closed and unsafe as it was before.
It's a relative scale. A binary blob isn't ideal from a security and privacy perspective, though given the nature of radio transmissions used with these devices, there are legitimate arguments in its favour as well. In any case, you're still much better off with a device where that is the only unknown factor than you are with a device where apps routinely spy on you and phone home etc.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#148I have an iPhone 4S running iOS 7 (jailbroken of course) and an original MBP retina running Mavericks. I don't update them because the risk of updating is higher than the risk of not updating. Right now everything is working, and everything is set up the way I like it. If I don't update, things might break some day, but there is also a greater-than-zero chance that everything will continue to work for quite a while.…
Aren't you afraid of being hacked? In my case, since I use the phone for 2FA access to bank accounts, I bite the bullet and keep up with the phone upgrade threadmill solely for security purposes.
> Aren't you afraid of being hacked
Sure, but most 2FA happens over SMS and that is already insecure. Updating your OS won't help if someone has hacked into the SS7 network.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#149>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it". I turned off auto-updates on my phone. So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it…
> and unfortunately it made the news on Slashdot.
God forbid other technology communities tolerate frank, accurate, and warranted cynicism.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#150I understand that powers have shifted, and the majority of the people prefer "free" email/chat/spreadsheets/storage, when "free" means "welcome to our own special walled corner of the internet, give us your personal data and watch these ads". But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay once for hardware or software, that puts the user first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at sca…
> But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay once for hardware or software, that puts the user first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at scale? Apple seems to follow that plan. For your "email/chat/spreadsheets/storage", they have iCloud mail, iMessage, Numbers and iCloud Drive. You pay once, and get software support quite a lot of years later. They don't seem to be selling or g…
With Google you trade your freedom for utility; with Apple you trade your money and your freedom for utility.
I'd like to be able to trade only my money for utility, and keep my freedom.